To live outside London and not drive a car is an exercise in resilience and stoicism. In the north-west of England, where I live, public transport exists mainly to drive people bonkers. If you’ve lived in London or the south-east, as I did for many years, the effects of extreme regional inequality are plain to see as soon as you step on to a bus or train.

Distances that took half an hour to cover in London can take three times as long and cost twice as much. I’m lucky: I can afford £2.40 for a single bus fare (as opposed to £1.50 in London). Yet everyday journeys on public transport are blighted by car-oriented planning, deregulation and a lack of investment, none of which apply in the capital. If that doesn’t illustrate how underinvestment reduces productivity and destroys quality of life, I don’t know what can.

To drive from the centre of Liverpool to the centre of Manchester using the M62 at 8am, you would need to allow two hours to travel 35 miles, such is the level of traffic congestion. If you go by train, it’s about 45 minutes – with one significant caveat: the trains have to be running, which can’t be guaranteed, with 30-year-old Thameslink castoffs and third-hand diesel engines forming the bulk of Northern Rail’s rolling stock. Last May’s timetabling fiasco, in which Northern Rail cancelled hundreds of daily services for weeks due to a lack of trains and staff, proved the extent to which the railway can’t be relied upon. Commuters would rather set out early and brave the jams than not arrive at work at all.

By contrast, if I want to travel to Skelmersdale, a mere 20 miles from my home, it’s a 25-minute drive or an eye-watering hour and 55 minutes by public transport.

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In both instances, you’re stuffed: whether by the unreliability of a knackered, unelectrified, privatised rail service, or by a deregulated, expensive bus network.

For others, driving becomes a necessity even when they can’t really afford it. Research conducted by the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds University, found that around 9% of UK households are in debt as a direct result of owning and running a car.

In the north-east, it’s even worse. The Tyne and Wear Metro was developed in the late 1970s after Barbara Castle, Labour’s visionary transport minister, created passenger transport executives to oversee transport needs in the large conurbations. For a brief, glorious period between the Metro’s launch in 1980 and the disastrous deregulation of buses outside London in 1986, the north-east had a fully integrated public transport system, with bus interchanges at every Metro station and feeder services from outlying towns meeting the trains.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘To drive from Liverpool to Manchester at 8am, you’d need to allow two hours to travel 35 miles.’ Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

According to Tobyn Hughes, who runs Nexus – the current name for the north-east’s transport executive – car use is growing again, four decades after the Metro was built partly to ease congestion on either side of the Tyne. He told me last year: “We’ve got some of the lowest incomes in the country, we’ve got the lowest level of car ownership in the entire country and we have the highest usage of buses outside central London.”

And yet, because Nexus has not been allowed to take control of its bus services in the same way that Transport for London controls the capital’s buses, people are resorting to cars and taxis – because deregulation has led to higher prices and council cuts have caused essential routes to be axed. The integrated system of 35 years ago has been killed off, and people are poorer in every way as a result.

In the words of the town planner and writer Adrian Jones, transport in the north is “hopelessly inadequate and fragmented”. Jones notes: “Crossrail alone will receive nine times more government funding than all the rail projects in the north combined.” While Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool should be banging down doors to get their own metro systems, metro mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram are still banging on about the need for HS2, like records that were scratched when Gordon Brown was prime minister.

The net result is that, for now, the car has won. And I hate it. Parked cars block the pavement on our street, meaning I have to push the buggy down the middle of the road. Even the journeys that would be easy on public transport are still made by car. People respond with pity, suspicion and confusion when they find out we have two children and don’t drive, as if we’ve condemned our kids to a lifetime indoors.

In 15 years of living in London, that never happened once, for the obvious reason that in the capital there are far faster, cheaper and more convenient ways to get around than by car. The north is decades behind and will never catch up while London’s transport system is treated by government as the only one in the country worth subsidising, regulating and investing in. Try spending the Crossrail and HS2 billions on the north, then we’ll see what a powerhouse really looks like.

• Lynsey Hanley is author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide