A study of transport policy in Britain includes the remark that: 'Perhaps because transport is "technical", long-associated with engineering achievements and quantified design standards, it is easy to forget that as a policy it is as ideological as social welfare provision or the reform of prisons.' (Glaister et al, 1998:45)

Britain and France have very similar sizes of population and levels of development, though with France covering twice the area of the UK, the demand for transport is higher (see http://bonjourlafrance.net/france-map/france-train-maps.htm, compared to www.projectmapping.co.uk/).  Until 1980 transport policies in the UK and France were fairly similar.  Buses and trains were in the hands of the state, whether central or local.  Road- and railway-building was commissioned and financed by the state.  Both countries had national transport plans which tried to predict and prepare for future growth in demand, and the state took the leading role in putting the plans into practice.  Both countries also had significant manufacturers of cars, lorries, and railway equipment.  Both had one nationalized vehicle producer (British Leyland and Renault respectively) which they wanted to see prosper; other manufacturers, even if foreign-owned, could expect generous subsidies if they hit hard times.  National transport policy in both countries was to a significant extent designed to support these manufacturers, and sometimes this led to highly dubious investments on behalf of the taxpayer (see details of one notorious example at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/delorean.shtml).

From 1980 the bases of the respective national transport policies began to diverge.  The Thatcher government introduced more market-oriented reforms into the transport sector, through privatization of bus services, which sometimes caused chaos as different firms competed on the same routes (for an example see www.tgwu.org.uk/Templates/News.asp?NodeID=92810&int1stParentNodeID=89397&int2ndParentNodeID=89397&Action=Display).  Thatcher's successor as Prime Minister, John Major, privatized the railways – despite the warnings of well-placed observers. The Conservative strategy was to concentrate on the potential savings from greater efficiencies within the supply of transport services, sacrificing industrial policies.  Gradually investment priorities shifted from rail to road, partly on the grounds that this offered greater choice to consumers.  But Thatcher herself had strong views on the subject, no doubt inspired by the linkage in her mind between car ownership and individualism. In 1986, for example, she declared that 'any man who finds himself on a bus at the age of 26 can account himself a failure'. She also referred with pride to Britain's 'great car economy'. One consequence of Thatcherite policy was that the number of cars per 1000 population in Britain rose, from 78 per cent of that of France in 1980 to 90 per cent in 1990, a figure which has remained fairly constant since then. The 2001 UK census found that there were more households with 2 or more cars (29.5 per cent) than those which did not own a car at all (26.8 per cent).

France, on the other hand, continued to support industrial policies to sustain the manufacture of transport equipment.  It also maintained a stronger commitment to public service in transport and to state planning of transport policy, buttressed by the veto power of French rail unions which the authorities were unwilling to challenge (Héritier and Knill, 2001: 283-5), until President Sarkozy came to office in 2007.  The consequence is that the French state currently spends roughly 2.3 per cent of GDP on transport whereas the British government spends about 1 per cent.  This can be seen particularly clearly in the expenditure on railways where for the last twenty years the French government has spent roughly twice as much as it has on roads.  This is despite the fact that France still has slightly more cars per 1000 of the population, and 76 per cent more lorries and goods vehicles, so one might have expected the pressure from road users to be greater.  By contrast in Britain expenditures on rail and road are now roughly equal (for details, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/842890.stm) after the early years of privatisation when much less was spent on rail.

Over the period since 1980 the British government has extracted efficiency gains from public expenditure on transport, and since privatization it has also attracted more private investment into transport infrastructure, often through public-private partnerships such as the controversial deal to finance the London Underground network (for a discussion see www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/apr/01/transport.transport).  This has reduced the burden on the state and freed resources for alternative uses.  But a major element of the railway privatization has been reversed, with the replacement of the infrastructure company Railtrack with the not-for-dividend company Network Rail (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2293167.stm), after several fatal accidents on the railways (see, for example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/10/99/london_train_crash/465503.stm).  Britain has also lost a great deal of the vehicle manufacturing plants that existed in 1980, though in partial compensation foreign producers like Nissan (see www.nissanpress.co.uk/) have come in to take their place.  But Britain has also lost most of its domestic train manufacturing capacity and now imports large amounts of equipment.  And New Labour's attempts at a 10-year integrated transport policy – the sort of thing that comes naturally in France – rapidly foundered. (Glaister et al, 2006)
 
Meanwhile French transport planning has moved on to 'multi-modal' integration of public transport, e.g. unified ticketing of passengers making a combined journey by rail and air. (Abord de Chatillon, 1994)  Questions remain about the optimality of state transport investments and of its scale of charges to the public. (Neiertz, 1999)  Nevertheless, France has retained a much greater industrial capacity to produce transport equipment.  Peugeot Citroën, and Renault are the sixth and ninth largest vehicle manufacturing corporations in the world.  And France's investment in high-speed rail networks (TGV: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV for details) is leading to large-scale exports of rail equipment, e.g. to the USA and South Korea.

For most of the twentieth century, an efficient system of public transport was regarded as essential for any nation with a claim to rank among civilized world powers. This viewpoint is neatly illustrated by the common observation that, whatever the shortcomings of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, at least 'he made the trains run on time'. However, towards the end of the century it became possible for policy-makers to give a lower priority to public transport, not least because this was less relevant to the ability of a country to wage war in a nuclear age. The same remarks apply to the survival of home-based production of motor-vehicles; a country which was prepared to abandon domestic producers of motor cars to unpredictable 'market forces' was obviously confident that the relevant technological skills would never be needed in war, as they had been in the UK between 1939 and 1945.

On one level, then, the contrast between the transport policies of a country like France and that of the UK can be explained by the fact that France wanted to retain a highly skilled workforce in case of a national emergency, whereas British governments after 1979 felt that this was no longer a priority. In their eyes, the fact that motor vehicle production tended to be heavily unionised was a good enough reason to let them go out of business if market forces turned against them. France, with fresh memories of enemy occupation during wartime, was more keen to prop up its domestic manufacturers of key strategic commodities, whatever market forces might dictate. On this score, only time will tell whether France or the UK has been vindicated.

However, it is already possible to draw the conclusion that successive French governments have been well-advised to maintain the subsidy of public transport at a high level. In Britain, it is commonly argued that individuals would give up their cars to protect the environment and ease congestion if only public transport was more reliable. The under-investment of the Thatcher years could have been remedied if Labour had made public transport a top priority; but it did not. Although British trains now stick more closely to the published timetables (the privatized firms are fined if they fail to meet targets), for most passengers the journeys are often very unpleasant; during peak hours, commuters sometimes have to stand, even though they have paid the same fare as the people who are lucky enough to find a seat. Meanwhile, luxurious first class compartments on British trains are usually less than half full. Thus, compared to their French counterparts, British travellers on public transport have many grounds for justified complaint; and although the providers of such transport are no longer under state control, successive governments are largely to blame.

Further reading:
Abord de Chatilion, Renaud, La Politique des transports en France, Paris: Eds Eska.
Glaister, Stephen, Jane Burnhham, Handley Stevens and Tony Travers, Transport Policy in Britain, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.
Glaister, Stephen, Jane Burnham, Handley Stevens and Tony Travers, Transport Policy in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2006.
Heritier, Adrienne, and Christoph Krill, 'Differential Responses to European Policies: A Comparison', in Adrienne Heritier, Dieter Kerwer, Christophil Krill, Dirk Lehmkuhl, Michael Teutsch and Anne-Cecile Douillet, Differential Europe: The European Union Impact on National Policy-Making, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Neiertz, Nicolas, La coordination des transports en France: de, 1918 a nos jours, Paris: Flammarion.