George has missed the point again

It will not come as a great surprise that George Monbiot has managed to miss the point again. Here he is on transport and cars:

The primary aim has become snarled up with other, implicit objectives: the sense of autonomy, the desire for self-expression through the configuration of metal and plastic you drive, and the demand for profit by car manufacturers and fossil fuel producers whose lobbying keeps us on the road rather than moving along it.

Step back from this mess and ask yourself this. If you controlled the billions that are spent every year – privately and publicly – on the transport system, and your aim was to smooth the passage of those who use it, is this what you would do? Only if your imagination had been surgically excised.

The point being that a free society does not have some rational planner determining what everyone should be doing. Rather, we allow the system to be emergent from what the people actually want to be doing. And as it turns out absolutely every society where people have been able to afford cars has had people flooding to have cars. Simply because that appears to be what people want.

Whatever the purported rational planner says about it.

There is this though:

Let’s reopen old rail lines closed in the mistaken belief that train travel was on the way out (it has grown 74% since 1995) and build new lines to bridge the gaps. Let’s bring train services under public control and use the money now spent on road-building to make tickets affordable for everyone.

Privatisation has led to a 74% increase in rail use. Therefore let's reverse privatisation in order to increase rail use.

That is better than just missing the point, isn't it?