Leading article: Transport is an essential service

In one particularly regrettable respect, this Christmas will be no different from the last one or the one the year before that. If you are planning to go somewhere and hope to use public transport of any kind, you will have to have reached your destination by mid-evening at the latest. Otherwise, you will not be going anywhere, except by private car or taxi. By late evening, pretty much the whole of Britain's transport network will have shut down.

We appreciate that transport workers are as deserving of a holiday break as everyone else. But this annual shutdown, which produces a rush to board overcrowded trains and buses in the run-up to Christmas Eve, paralyses the capital and other big cities across the holiday, and reduces the service to a Sunday minimum in many places until after the New Year, puts us in an immobile class of our own, not just in Europe but around the celebrating world.

Related articles

• Millions stranded in trains fiasco

Among the defences mounted by the transport managers this year is the claim that there is no demand. Well, there is no demand because the would-be travelling public has learnt through long and unhappy experience that complaints will fall on deaf ears. Inconveniently, expensively – and even dangerously, in the case of those tempted to drink and drive – people have made other arrangements.

Yet, as the increased number using all kinds of public transport shows, people willingly forsake their cars – to the benefit of their own sanity and the environment – when they judge the alternatives to be affordable and reliable. To be either, though, public transport has to be there, and – to our national shame – at this time of year, it is not.

Of course, most people rightly welcome an extended holiday at this time of year and regard Christmas Day itself as a rare day for the family. But vital services – including hospitals, fire-fighting, law enforcement and power stations – have to be kept running. A combination of bonuses, shift-working and calls for volunteers from among those who do not celebrate 25 December keeps a basic minimum in place. In an advanced economy, transport should be treated as one such essential service.