Tuscany, Schmuscany. On Sunday I got back from a week’s holiday in Whitby, the North Yorkshire fishing port whose craggy streets and cosy harbour give it the feel of a redoubt from the modern world. Among the best bits of our family trip was a day’s walking, book-ended by journeys on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, a lovingly maintained steam line that runs from Whitby to the market town of Pickering, and was used in the first Harry Potter film. It took us 45 minutes to travel less than 10 miles, but that was kind of the point: time slowed down, and the whole experience took on a beautifully dreamy quality.

The NYMR is a great thing, but it also points up one of postwar Britain’s greatest tragedies. The line on which the steam trains run was a victim of the Beeching axe, the great hacking-down of the UK rail network that resulted in the closure of over 2,000 stations and the loss of nearly 70,000 jobs. As of 1965, Beeching also ensured that Whitby lost its rail link to nearby Scarborough, and was left with only a snail’s-pace line to Middlesbrough. Fifty years on, with the town reinvented as a modern tourist destination, the lack of train services looks like an embodiment of the serial stupidities of transport policy, not least when you’ve been locked into long queues on the roads that ferry people there from the motorway.

The bus remains the most democratic form of transport (no first class here), and does things that trains simply cannot

And this part of England, along with countless others, now faces a new menace, focused on local public transport’s last line of defence: the bus. In the last year alone, Tory-run North Yorkshire council has axed around 90 bus services, and after serious funding cuts, has just finished consulting on another 25% reduction in subsidies. Among the proposed casualties will be services that, just like the old railway lines, run from Whitby to both Pickering and Scarborough, as well as an array of journeys spread across a whole swath of northern England.

Across the country, meanwhile, with George Osborne now planning November’s spending review and looking at cuts in departmental budgets of up to 40%, the money channelled from local councils to public transport looks especially vulnerable. Already, bus transport is in the midst of a huge crisis, just as it is needed more than ever. Buses are a vital requirement for young people and most Britons on limited incomes. Around 40% of people over 60 use a bus at least once a week; one of the many certainties that comes with an ageing population is an increased demand for public transport. Everyday reality, however, is headed in exactly the opposite direction.

The story of how this happened goes back to the Thatcher government’s disastrous devolution of buses, and takes you into a murky world of acronyms and arcana. But the basic outlines are simple enough. Around one in five bus journeys are publicly subsidised but, thanks to funding cuts, the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) reckons that about two thousand services and routes have been lost since 2010. In 2012 20% was cut from the bus service operators grant, which campaigners worry will be in Osborne’s sights in the build-up to November. If its annual £350m contribution were to go, transport experts reckon that up to 10% of services would be cut, and fares would once again increase: the UK’s record on ticket prices, needless to say, is already characterised by serial above-inflation hikes and a clear sense of private monopolies abusing their power.

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Why this carnage hardly intrudes on political debate is a very interesting question. The ubiquity and financial health of bus transport in London is part of the explanation: in the capital, bus travel is regulated to an exceptional extent and self-evidently thriving, so stories about problems elsewhere have precious little traction.

At the same time, the British fixation with the train does its work, reducing conversations about transport to the hoary old subject of rail renationalisation. Political theatre also takes some of the blame: as the CBT’s Martin Abrams puts it: “With transport policy, politicians like to mooch about in hard hats and hi-vis jackets. You can’t really do that on a bus.”

Perhaps not, but the bus remains the most democratic form of transport (no first class here), and does things that trains – and cars – simply cannot. It is embedded in the daily routine of millions of lives, and in popular culture – as evidenced by the Who’s Magic Bus, the Beatles’ A Day in the Life (“Found my coat and grabbed my hat/Made the bus in seconds flat”), and the evergreen children’s standard The Wheels on the Bus. The bus is so familiar that it barely merits comment – but at the same time, as it recedes from view, we barely seem to notice.

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Last week the IPPR thinktank published a report focused on bus travel that was full of sobering findings. In 2013-14, there were more bus passenger journeys in London than in the rest of England combined. Between 2009 and 2014 councils’ spending on local-transport services fell by 19.7%. In the past year Cumbria has cut its bus subsidies by 44%; in Herefordshire they have been reduced by 39%; and in Dorset by 24%. As the cuts bite a story of disappearing services is blurring out of rural areas into the suburbs, as evidenced by growing controversy in built-up areas of Hampshire and Surrey.

The recent Queen’s speech contained a barely-noticed buses bill, tied to Osborne’s deregulation drive. Superficially it held out the prospect of deregulation finally being avenged, and directly elected mayors being given the power to follow London’s example, bring bus companies to heel, and integrate local transport. But as with so much the government does, it skirted round the most basic issues of all: money, and the woefully familiar spectacle of one of the richest countries in the world allowing basic public services to go to the wall.

For people in Whitehall and Westminster, though, the handling of the story could not be easier. It happens well away from London, and involves not the high drama of the Beeching axe, but slow and stealthy decline as timetables shrink, bus shelters slowly crumble, and in far too many places buses simply disappear. One hesitates to use a word like “lunacy”, but it surely fits.