It has for several weeks seemed to me (that's Brian Micklethwait - hello there happy travellers) an omission that Transport Blog hasn't discussed the new Rolls-Royce Phantom. Trains, and busses, and trains, and regular cars, and trains, and congestion charges for regular cars, and trains, and trains - and did I mention trains? - are all very well, but transport also includes the Rolls Royce Phantom.

I liked Neil Lyndon's piece in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine yesterday (couldn't find it in electronic form):

It is an immense relief to report that – during its recent launch in California, when I was one of the first journalists in the world to drive the new Phantom – nothing went wrong. A fault-free Rolls-Royce is headline news. So shameful has been the build quality of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in recent decades that anyone who bought one at full price was committing a financial folly on the scale of blowing the family fortune on the Vegas crap tables. Those cars depreciated at such a vertiginously steep rate that, within a few years, they were with the reach of your neighbourhood scumbag crack dealer. If this new car, built at Goodwood, is going to succeed, it must offer its owners true value for their quarter of a million pounds. This means that those owners might never again have to think about buying a car because the Phantom will outlive them, and conceivably, their heirs. The car must be capable of covering 500,000 miles without needing much more than a few sets of new tyres. In other words, it must be like the cars Sir Henry began to build 100 years ago.

And I suspect it may be. …

Jason Barlow in motoring.telegraph.co.uk explains why this has happened:

"The best car in the world." How those six words have haunted the company through the years. To be fair, Rolls-Royce's decline has been more of a gentle slither into irrelevance rather than a vertiginous tumble, and the company curriculum vitae contains other notable highlights (as I'm sure many Daily Telegraph-reading R-R supplicants will be delighted to point out). Like most, I find the 1950s Silver Cloud fairly irresistible. And the Silver Shadow, which replaced it in 1966, still has a certain louche, rock star charm.

However, the most recent-but-one Roller, the Silver Seraph, wasn't much good at all. Even the company's legendary craftsmanship appeared to have gone AWOL. Large chunks of centre console aren't supposed to come away in your hand in any car, but in a Rolls-Royce? Heaven forfend. As I drove down the motorway waving a piece of errant hand-crafted walnut, it seemed that this particular Rolls-Royce had become just another bad British car.

The new Phantom, on the other hand, is an exceptionally good German one. There, I've said it. The G word. Big deal. BMW, official custodian of Rolls-Royce since January 1 this year, has delivered a car that is substantially better than anything the company would have managed had it been left to its own devices. This is not an opinion that will make me especially popular over at the RAC Club, I suspect, but sometimes the truth hurts. The new MINI turned out all right, didn't it?

But, as Jeremy Clarkson has pointed out, a car is still a car:

Obviously I was interested, but it’d be two hours there and two hours back and I just don’t have the time. So the PR man came up with a solution: “We’ll send a helicopter.”

Interesting. The new Phantom is supposed to be the last word in engineering excellence, a road-going private jet, a luxury yacht with a point, a car that separates and distances you from both the tedium and the discomfort of travel.

And yet if Rolls-Royce had offered to pick me up in one I would still have said no, because no matter how much soundproofing there is between the cabin and the road it would still have got stuck in traffic around Newbury. It would still have taken two hours.

What is the purpose of Transport Blog? I'll tell you. The purpose of Transport Blog is to explain to the universe not just how to make a metaphorical Rolls-Royce transport system which is as good as a literal Rolls-Royce car. We can't tell you anything special about Rolls-Royces. There are, you know, people, whom we can quote, who are doing that already. All we need do is nod in their general direction. But these people are not now telling us how to get a transport system as good as the best cars you can now buy to get stuck in a traffic jam in. On that subject they have given up. A Rolls-Royce stuck in a traffic jam about sums up the present state of our civilisation.

At present transport is hopelessly politicised. What's needed is to separate transport policy from poverty relief policy, and do both of them properly, i.e. as exercises is rampant free market capitalism (the stuff that enables people to afford to buy Rolls-Royce Phantoms). Poverty relief (socialism) should be replaced by poverty abolition (capitalism), and that would leave the way free for transport providers to charge whatever they want to charge to their customers, who would then be rich enough to be able to pay.

And the really good news is that the tickets wouldn't actually end up being that much more expensive. It's just that there wouldn't be these terrible queues everywhere. Transport queues have a dreadful tendency to take place on top of the product and thereby to lower the quality of the product, often to the point of destroying the product. So transport queues are especially bad, and getting rid of them would be especially good. Cars might eventually become as good as helicopters. Cars might become helicopters, like in The Fifth Element.

Interesting that one of Patrick's Constant Themes here, that Good Transport Systems are Systems that Never Go Wrong, is echoed in the Constant Theme in accordance with which Rolls-Royces are also now made, again.

God bless the Germans.