Fairy Nuff then. Personally I suspect that riding down a minor road at 2am on an electric bicycle will cost 10p per mile, and prices will increase from that level up to driving a 4.2l Jaguar along the Victoria Embankment at 9am, which will cost the tax-payer £88 per mile when John Prescott does it every morning.

Not really, there's a motorway half a mile away that I use regularly, and if motorways are taxed on a blanket-basis i.e. all the same, then I could be hit quite hard.

Those of us who work for a living often need a car. I, personally, couldn't physically do my job without a drivers license and I wouldn't be able to do extra stuff (Like drop by schools on the way home) without my own transport.

 

And fuck being out the house by 7:00 and home at 5:15 - I couldn't keep that up. Maybe it's different if you haven't had/got a car - but I simply couldn't live the life I do without one. And most of the people I know who can't/won't drive spend half their time getting lifts from those who can.

Where's John!? Filthy bastard!

I know I'll be keeping an eye out for a suspicious looking brum in a VW van outside school now :|

with early hippy hair and an eye for the laydeees

Short hair currently, actually.

How can the public transport be "perfectly good" if people still feel that driving slowly on congested roads is "more convenient"? I've lived and worked all over the country and I've never encountered perfectly good public transport. It's all unreliable, over-priced and extremely inconvenient.

Out of interest, did any non-drivers sign the petition?

I'm a bit on the fence about this stuff. I drive because I have a free car, mainly. But it's so so much more convenient than a train that takes much longer, is frequently delayed, is not pleasant to be in. And costs at least £40 a week, almost twice the petrol costs of doing it by car. Even if I was having to pay road tax and stuff, that doesn't seem very competitive.

It's not perfectly good then, is it?

I don't use it because public transport for me means a bus into my town centre, another bus back out again which then stops at every small village on the way and which takes about 45 minutes to get me to work and which drops me off a good 10 minute walk from where I work. And overall the journey to and from work would cost me about £8. So with waiting and the first bus and all the rest of it, you're looking at about 1 hour and 15 minutes in total from leaving my house to arriving at work.

 

Whereas driving involves a 15 minute drive along a dual carriageway (it's about 12 miles to where I work), I don't have to go anywhere near Darlington town centre and I get free parking in a big car park which is a 30 second walk from my office. Plus I can get about 350 miles out of my car for £30 of fuel, which means that a trip to and from work costs me about £2.

 

So yes. Public transport is /really/ viable for me then. 5 times slower and 4 times more expensive. Woo!

That's what I'm struggling with here. Yes it's a little bit selfish but when the time/price is so far out, fuck it I'll be selfish. If we were going to be unselfish about everything there's not much we would do in this country anymore anyhow. Against that, I believe in the 'everyone doing a little' concept of making change through what small actions you can do. But nah, public transport for my daily commute is not one I can go for, so I'll stick to recyling a lot more than the average person, having lots of energy-efficient appliances etc etc.

Right, here's an example of why public transport shit: I'm moving soon, to a small town in Hampshire. There are fast trains which take 40 minutes to get to Clapham Junction, from where I could get another train which would take 5 minutes to get to Wimbledon, where I work. But because Clapham Junction is in Zone 2, it would cost me an extra £75 a month to get a season ticket which is valid for that route, even though my final destination is in Zone 3. Instead, I would either have to get a train to Woking, then change and get a stopping train to Wimbledon, which will take an hour and a quarter, or a similar palaver involving Surbiton which takes five minutes longer. And, of course, the same thing in the other direction. It's not as though I ever want to leave the station at Clapham Junction, I only want to cross from one platform to another. But the petty-mindedness of National Rail or South-West Trains (or more likely both) means I either lose an hour a day or £900 a year. Fuck that, and in fact fuck giving them any of my money if they're going to be cunts about it.

Think about how much more time you could spend furiously masturbating if you didn't have to spend so much time travelling.

 

[My own experience is that since I work in the centre of Glasgow and live 2 minutes from a train station and the train journey takes 20 minutes {or I can walk another 10 minutes to the other station where the trains take 10 minutes}, public transport suits me fine if I'm working in the office. If I'm anywhere else, the car wins.]