Today, to try out my organsation's alleged green travel policy they keep pushing on us, I made a rare bus trip form my office and back to get to a meeting and couldn't wait to get back in my car for the journey home. The times were inconvenient, both ways the driver drove erratically uncomfortably (for example grinding the bottom of the bus on speed humps) and to top it all the fare was more expensive compared to parking locally - lesson learned methinks!
DB
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Don't tell qxman though. I travel by bus rarely but every time I'm shocked into wondering why any sane person would want to do it.
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PU without his Mod Hard Hat on !
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qxman's post promoted mine!
DB
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Qxman is particularly fortunate and yet..........
I commute daily to London (chancery lane) from a Northampton dormitory village, driving as far as the railway station. TBH its only selfishness/convenience and v.occasional need to work late that lead me to keep the second car and pay the parking cost of £180 per quarter.
Reasonably reliable buses connect with most trains, but add around 10 minutes each way to a 90/120 minute journey. Quite sure that carrying the eponymous fold up bike aboard would be no problem. Could even bike to station in 30 mins (15/20 by car, 20 by bus) but realisticaly that is pushing beyond the boundaries of biking in work clothes.
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I travel by bus rarely but every time I'm shocked into wondering why any sane person would want to do it.
After I retired I used (at my last abode) to take the bus into town if I didn't want to buy something heavy. I found it very relaxing to be able to just sit there and let the driver take the stress of driving, and the fare was less than I would have had to pay to park my car. I just wish I had the same option at my current abode.
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L\'escargot.
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I did some numbers the other day in response to a question on another forum, and discovered that if I take the cost of running my car for a year (all taxes, tests and bills included) it's still cheaper than getting the bus to and from work every day, not to mention the convenience of not having to wait, not getting soaked, not sitting in other people's rubbish, not having to avoid gangs of chavs...
Better still, as this calculation takes care of the costs involved in owning my car, any private used on top is effectively paid for bar petrol :)
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Looks like this is the issue for our new prime minister to make his big theme: Transportation, transportation, transportation! Is it possible that in 10 years Gordon Brown will have given Britain buses that PU will be delighted to travel on?
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I've never had any problems using the Arriva and other companies' bus services in my area.
On top of that, Stagecoach has already introduced some of the 15 Enviro400 buses, costing £55m, it is using on longer distance routes in Lancashire and Merseyside; all will be in operation by August.
Some people may have already travelled on this type of buses in the London area:
www.metroline.co.uk/news/20060117.html
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Well, I can only speak from my own (very limited) experience. I live in a rural area about 15 miles from the city centre where I work. The fare is £3.80 day return or £12 for a 7-day pass. that's only £2.50 per working day for about 30 miles of travel. You would need a very economical car to beat that on petrol cost alone.
There are 6 busses per hour. 3 Stagecoach and 3 Arriva, '08, 18, 28 minutes etc past each hour. The Arriva ones are OK, the Stagecoach ones are brand new and have lots of leg room (I am tall), they are also quiet and smooth. They are rarely more than half full so I normally get a double seat to myself. Stops are close enough to home and work (3 minutes walk from home, less than 10 minutes from work).
By car at rush hour the journey takes me 35-40 minutes. Its about 40-45 minutes by bus. The bus has to make stops, but once its 4 miles from town the bus lane begins and so it just drives straight pass the queing traffic.
My main concern is that not enough people use the service, so the frequency might be reduced, which would be a real blow.
I do admit there are some dreadful bus services. Some of the services that go around urban estates are slow and uncomfortable. Buses also work out very expensive for very short journeys of a mile or two.
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Buses also work out very expensive for very short journeys of a mile or two.
Maybe so: it's £1 or £1.20 each way for me to travel to work by bus, depending on the company. This has risen massively in percentage terms in the past two or three years. However, city centre car parks vary in cost between £4 and £10+ per day, depending on how conveniently situated they are. In terms of time there's very little in it: I can probably get away with setting off about ten minutes later if I drive.
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>>Buses also work out very expensive for very short journeys of a mile or two.>>
Fortunately I have a free bus, train and ferry bus pass (Merseyside has had the concession since the early 1990s), but in the town where I live short bus journey costs are such that if there are two or more of you a taxi not only works out cheaper, but is door to door.
The longer the bus journey the cheaper per mile it costs.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Buses also work out very expensive for very short journeys of a mile or two.
Not if you compare it with the true cost of running a car ~ see What Car? magazine for the running costs of new cars.
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L\'escargot.
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Travelling by bus to get to work - chance would be a fine thing.
When I lived in London (South Ealing) I used nothing but PT to get to South Kensington.
Now, where I live, the bus service does not begin early enough to get me to work by 9am reliably. The problem is that I need to get a bus into Rugby town centre and another back out to the train station. To get to the station by car takes 10 minutes. Using the bus takes well over an hour. There is no point in making part of the journey by car as I would still need a car.
My 30 mile car journey to work takes 35 minutes. The minimum time by PT takes almost two hours.
I would love to be able to travel to work by PT, but I would never see my children during the week!
On top of it all, there used to be a Railway station in the town where I live, but some twit called Beeching saw to that.
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Here in Dresden all public transport trains ,trams,buses run 24 hours aday seven days a week 365 days a year they are warm in winter cool in summer quick clean reliable are reasonable priced,the uk will never get a system as good not even in one city in a hundred years the only time I have used public transport in the uk recently was from Bradford to Huddersfield it confirmed to me it would have been better to walk I felt genuinely sorry for people who had no alternative but to use it everyday.
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I remember reading "if you're 30 and still travelling by bus, then you have n't made it". Sadly. I'm pushing 50 and still travel by bus (park'n'ride). Sigh!.
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Its a great way to travel when it works.
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Currently in Dresden & since no one flies direct from UK we (3 of us) went Heathrow - Prague then onto Dresden the next day by train. Fantastic journey, although not quick & only £30 each, each way 1st class.
I frequently use the train in the UK & the cost is horrific. Chatham-Wrexham was £336, Chatham-Liverpool was £217, even the ticket seller was embarrassed.
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Not if you compare it with the true cost of running a car ~ see What Car? magazine for the running costs of new cars. --
The trouble with this argument is that it only works if you do not have a car anyway. Otherwise, once you've paid for the car and inurance tax depreciation etc you might as well use it.
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Got bus to high street with wife and kids = £5.50
Got taxi home (after 11pm!!!) = £4
Nuff said.
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A major difficulty with using public transport is that our 'lifestyle' has changed quite dramatically from, say, thirty years ago.
Many people now either elect - or are obliged - to commute distances to work which would have seemed ludicrous not that long ago. Similarly, we have turned into a nation of children's chauffeurs.....
Public transport has traditionally served nuclear communities for local working/shopping requirements, interconnected by longer-haul routes.
Perhaps a sea-change in working and/or leisure patterns is required before public transport becomes the preferred mode of transport.
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a major help with travelling on a bus would be having a conductor, so we're not all left to our own devices allowing the lowest common denominator to initiate mob rule
and a train journey needs a toilet on it, which increasingly nowdays they don't seem to have..oh and a guard that walks up and down the thing
not rocket science is it
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I think we can learn a lot about public transport from our continental neighbours.
They had the unplesant advantage that most of their citys had a clean sheet planning start about 60 years ago.
As our busses are subsidised we pay for them whether we use them or not.
Having exceeded the grand old age of 60 myself and living in Scotland, I get free bus travel throughout Scotland and greatly reduced rail fares, but still use my car most of the time.
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German public transport, while good, is not the utopia some people think it is.
I currently stay in a small village about ten miles outside Cologne.
Time to work by motorbike 15 mins., by car about 20 mins., by public transport 1hr 15mins. 1 bus, two trams.
Yes, the buses and trams interconnect and are nearly always on time or within 2 mins. of the published times but 4 to 5 times slower.
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Things wrong with buses
not reliable enough to the timetable
too expensive unless you buy a day return and make use of it
not enough of them
dont go where you want them to
driven by budding formula one drivers (extra points for hitting kerbs i believe?)
Things wrong with passengers
they smell
they put their feet on seats
they try to take two seats up
they are ignorant of basic human skills
they smell (did i mention that one?)
they talk on the mobile
you can hear tinny noises from tinny £12.99 mp3 players
travelling by bus used to be enjoyable and allowed you to look in peoples gardens, house windows ,etc without ever having to know the person,unfortunatelly we have now gone so far backwards in the species that i will now only use buses as a last resort
shame like
ps if you used the bus this morning wear a tie and had a bath then i apologise
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Living in a country area, I cannot imagine being able to live any sort of meaningful life (& that includes my family & their transport needs too) without recourse to a car. My main objections are: (in no particular order, simply as they came to mind)
- buses/trains & most operators are horrible.
- you're shafted if you want transport something bigger than a shopping bag
- the timetabling & routes seem designed for the convenience of the operators.
- the cost for shortish journeys is prohibitive.
- you can't take the family for a nice Sunday afternoon drive or visit en-masse anywhere viably or comfortably
- you tend (especially in city/urban areas) to come across people who are mad, bad & dangerous to know
(I feel genuinely sorry for those vulnerable/old and/or disadvantaged people who have little choice here)
- you're limited to how early/late you can get to & from a location.
- there seems to be very little integration or journey-overlapping(?) between different types of PT (let's call it joined-up PT planning)
- you can't smoke on the blasted things.
- you're often in danger of being prosecuted (esp. on trains) for inadvertently contravening some 'ticketing' regulation by failing to understand labyrinthine,Kafka-esque, obtuse & confusing booking conditions.
- Bus & train operators & staff you feel, regard you with barely suppressed hostility & almost resent your presence.
- the emphasis in life, if relying on PT is not 'Where shall we go, what shall we do ?' but, 'Where does does the bus/train go?'
- PT is usually uncomfortable, noisy , slow, (even some trains!) dirty & smelly.
- Cost: the rather limited like-for-like comparisons on PT vs. Car are hedged around by the implied caveats that exceptions & emergencies would never happen. For example, if a medical or other genuine emergency arose that required quick, direct & immediate transport on pain of death or grave misfortune - where is that potential cost/benefit accounted for?
My main objections are: (in no particular order, simply as they came to mind)..' of course.
Yours, (snugly & happily ensconced in the car for the foreseeable future)
woodbines.
{ wodbines' typo corrected for him - PU }
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Passed a local bus earlier - driver was chatting away merrily on a mobile phone.
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Hmm. I think some of the above 'problems' are a bit exaggerated to say the least. I don't often use busses, but on the odd occasion that I do they are not as bad as made out. Some of the Park & Ride services are excellent and save money and a lot of hassle. A lot depends where you live. Rough area = rough people and rough bus service IME.
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I live in a small town ( or large village ) and the bus service is diabolical. To use it for work I'd need to catch a bus to the next large town and then another out to work - a 20 minute car journey or 1hour 45 minutes with a 10 minute walk at each end by bus. Where I live is fairly respectable IMHO but the bus service goes through rough areas so you cannot avoid sitting next to rough people. My daughter missed the 5:10 bus home from the large town last Saturday - the next one was two hours later, so I had to go and collect her. As for trying to do a weekly grocery shop for a family by bus it doesn't bear thinking about! An hour's bus ride there and an hour back but with bags of shopping too! No way! I know plenty of people have no option and they have my every sympathy - except the 'rough' ones :)
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In many ways we are in a no win situation with public transport in the UK. We have gone too far down the path of configuring our cities and lives around private car transport to be able to retrofit viable public transport back in.
The fundamental issue is lack of density in residential and commercial development and a lack of clustering of origins and destinations. The UK has relatively low density development even in major cities and the majority of the population lives in suburbs built at less than 30 dwellings a hectare often as slow as 10-15 or less. At this level public transport is not viable as routes are not "thick" enough and journeys around cul de sac housing estates become long winded and off putting. Alongside low density residential development jobs and commercial activity is decentralising too. Many more people now work in edge of town locations or suburban business parks that can never be served efficiently by public transport.
Also car use is now deeply engrained in our phsyche - cars use is strongly related to levels of wealth/social status/key lifestage events/attitudes to success/aspirational wants. Not having a car or using one confines those to a second class status in a car orientated economy.
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Back in the early fifties when not many people had a car myself and another lad were apprentices to this old chap in town who had worked for himself all his life. We were his only employees.
We didn?t have a van and old Billy couldn?t drive anyway. For jobs in the small town we lived in all tools and materials were carried by big two wheel carts. (Not sure what they were called but we used to drag then through the streets).
Out of town it was the bus. At the back of the old double deckers there used to be a storage area under the stairs where we would pile bags of tools and even feed tanks..
Mainly the conductor apart from the odd one wouldn?t object apart from a few choice words. However believe it or not Billy would send us to Derby for materials from the Merchants including 18ft lengths of copper tube.
We would tie it into a bundle and thread it down the bus when the conductor and driver were having their brew.
Passengers would get on the bus in the meantime and stumble over our tube but people were so much more tolerant then. The clippie would come out, jump on the back and ring the bell and off we would go.
It wouldn?t take many minutes before she was tripping over it and telling us what little beggars (or similar) we were for using her bus as a van.
But no problems, she never made us get off but we had stay on the bus until it reached its final destination in our town, and all the passengers had disembarked and we where able to unload.
I imagine today the H&S would be on the case and TV adverts for ?Have you ever fell over tradesmans tools or materials on a bus and injured yourself?..if so please ring us.
wemyss
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Wemyss, that definitely wouldn't be allowed today. Locally an oap was told he couldn't get on a bus with a sealed, brand new tin of undercoat as it was too much of a spillage risk. Poor old duffer had to walk 2 and a half miles home, as he didn't have enough money for a taxi.
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>>Locally an oap was told he couldn't geton a bus with a sealed brand new tin of undercoat
I've heard that tale a few times, going back a few years too! Why didn't the alleged OAP put it in a bag, the driver would have been none the wiser.
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The fundamental issue is lack of density in residential and commercial development and a lack of clustering of origins and destinations.
On holiday in the Bahamas a few years ago, I was very impressed with the way the Jitneys worked there, zipping about all over the place for $1 (for tourists anyway) a journey.
I reckon the same sort of thing could work well in most UK lowish density areas.
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Public Transport is for those who have failed in life ( or not succeeded) - true or false?
At least for those who do not mind severe discomfort?
( I tried one a few weeks ago)
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Public Transport is for those who have failed in life ( or not succeeded) - true or false?
They are many people, especially in rural areas, who don't have access to public transport. My current aim is to move to somewhere which does have public transport. I'm very aware that eventually I may be not, for whatever reason, be able to drive.
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L\'escargot.
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>>I was very impressed with the way the Jitneys worked there>>
Even cheaper in Malta. In fact I was puzzled as to how the bus owners made any sort of profit (apart from trying to fiddle you on the change).
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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In a previous occupation (Selling (trying to) light rail vehicles) I dealt with one of LRT#s project managers. He had visited a bus company in the states and had asked the general manager why there were so many cars in the car [park and why didn't he encourage his employees to use the bus?
The reply was something along the lines of "only deadbeats and no-hopers use the bus - I would not employ any of them"
We are approaching that situation everwhere except London and Edinburgh - apparantly the only cities where it is seen as acceptable for a person of social classes A or B to use a bus!
From my point of view they are too infrequent, too expensive and too unreliable to commute. And I work on a business park with many thousands of staff and the bus service is very infrequent 7-18:00 and non-existent outside those hours.
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Can only speak for our bus services on the outskirts of London/N. Kent. Brand new buses every few years, service every 10-12 minutes, the kids travel free - all in all, far less hassle and cheaper than driving and trying to park in town. We walk locally and reserve the car for big shopping trips and longer journeys.
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I think the only thing we can conclude from this thread is that bus services vary a lot. Some are very good and convenient, especially if you commute into a town centre. If you live out in the sticks or work on a business park then its no good. But I kind of knew this anyway.
If ever I have a business meeting in a city centre I (a) see if there is a suitable train, and if not then (b) see if there is a park and ride. I occasionally have to visit a company in central Cambridge that has no parking and its a complete nightmare by car - so I have used both train and park-and-ride and both were less hassle. I occasionally visit a company in Leicester, which also has a good park and ride from its south side (not too far from M1) and the cost of a return trip is about £2.50, which is less than I can park the car for in the city centre and it takes no longer than driving in (bus every 10 mins).
I always go into central London by train.
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Just to throw my £2 in (inflation you see, used to be 2p I think...)
I live in a city that has been given government funding to investigate the use of congestion charging to encourage the use of PT.
Currently it would cost the wife and me £8 per day for bus travel, so maybe £35 a week if you get a pass. There is one bus in the morning, one late afternoon. Before I would even consider using this service it would have to be cheaper and run more frequently. Therefore before any congestion charge is brought in there must be a viable alternative. Unfortunately the local council is saying that money raised from the congestion charge will go to improve public transport.
NO, NO, NO!
Improve public trasnport first. Ye gods is it that difficult to work out?
Maybe for one day we all should do our weekly shopping by bus. Can you imagine the chaos!
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