Posted: Sat 22 September, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: 1BEM, Driving, Public Transport, Thoughts, Travel |
While I’m no hater of public transport in general (with the exception of Virgin Trains, but that’s a different matter) I find that at the moment I’m a bit bemused by the apparent craze in cities for “Guided Busways” at the moment.
When I was in Norfolk/Suffolk and working around Cambridge, they had the Cambridge Guided Busway (also known as “The Busway“) being constructed, and now I’m working near Luton, I see the same construction going on for the Luton-Dunstable Busway.
I do understand the thoughts of getting buses out of the main roadways, freeing them up to run punctually and not affect (or be affected by) other traffic. That makes sense. But as far as I understand it, the perceived negatives far outweigh those positives.
As I see it currently…
- Guided busways reduce the number of available stops, and easy-on/easy-off of ‘normal’ bus routes
- The investment required is massive
- The construction takes a long time, and so
- The disruption involved is equally massive
- In short, it appears to be a total pain in the arse.
I wonder what the real motivations for these things are – I assume there are a whole load of incentives, grants and funding whatevers for this kind of boondoggle.
Posted: Sat 25 August, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Commuting, Driving, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel, Work-related |
Looking back over the D4D™ archives, I realised that I’ve now been driving for just over seven years – since 11th August 2005, to be precise.
And that means I’ve had the car for 5½ years, too – since March 2007 in fact. In that time I’ve done 121,000 miles, a surprisingly round average of 22,000 miles a year. I’ve had really two years which have exploded that average – the year I was commuting Norfolk->Cambridge on a daily basis, and the last twelve months with the daily Suffolk->London round trips, followed by Suffolk->Luton round trips. With things being a bit more stable (and nowhere near as distant) I’m hoping the next 12 months will have a much lower average. After all, my current commute works out as sub-10,000 miles for the year, which is pretty novel by itself.
Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?
Posted: Wed 22 August, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Driving, Travel, Work-related |
Yesterday was another long day on the road – leave home at 6, pick up a colleague, drive down to the Devon office, four hours of meetings, and then back home for just before 5pm. 460 miles all told, just under seven hours of driving time.
It was worth it – the people we needed to see were much happier for doing things face to face, and things seem more sorted and organised.
But dear Lord, it makes for a long day.
Posted: Thu 9 February, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Commuting, Domestic, Driving, Travel, Work-related | Tags: 100000, 160000, mileage, mondeo |
Nuts, I thought I’d posted on here when my car’s mileage went over the 100,000 mark. However, I can’t see it. It’s somewhere around April/May 2009 though, from the look of it.
Anyway, today, with my daft mileage kicking up all the time, my car’s clicked over the 160,000 mile mark.
Looking back, I got it in March 2007 when it had a mileage of 56,000.
So in just under five years, I’ve added 100,000 miles to it. Which isn’t a bad average, considering the stupid mileage I’m doing at the moment. I’m quite surprised, actually, that the average is that low. There must’ve been some times where I did a lot less than 20,000 miles a year – although off-hand I can’t quite think when that would’ve been.
Ah well.
Posted: Wed 8 February, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Commuting, Driving, People, Travel, Work-related |
As regular readers know, I’m pretty renowned for doing stupid commutes. Last year I worked in London for six months, commuting daily, which we worked out (from mileage claims etc.) to have resulted in 19,000 miles of travel ’til the end of 2011, purely for work.
The London run was a 70 mile drive one-way, so a 140-mile round-trip, plus the 10ish miles on the Tube each way. Amusingly, it took an hour to do the drive, and an hour to do the time on the Tube.
Since then I’ve taken on a new contract, this time working in Luton. The driving time is a bit less – about 2 hours in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening – for a few more miles, about 80 each way all told.
Everybody else insists I must be slightly mad to do the driving I do, but I really don’t mind it. It’s a longer distance sure, but it regularly used to take the same time to travel by bus from home to Oldham when I worked there. It used to take even longer when I was commuting by train between London and Bath, or London and Manchester. (And yeah, those runs were seriously insane)
In general I’m less stressed when it comes to commuting by car than when I’m reliant on public transport – people piss me off too much for me to want to travel with them now when I can avoid them.
I probably still am stupid for driving/commuting as much as I do, but it suits me, so I’m happy with it.
Posted: Mon 6 February, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Travel, Work-related |
Over the weekend, as many have already noticed and experienced, we got Snow again.
We’re now living in a little village, and none of the roads that access the village have been gritted/salted. All three roads really only go to the village and that’s it. It’s a cut-through route to other villages, but none of them are apparently important enough to justify gritting even one of the roads. Thanks, local authority.
So travelling in and out of the village is a bit more interesting than usual. Normally you’ve got to deal with mud on the roads, but now it’s snow and ice.
I’ll admit, snowy/icy roads are about the only road conditions that make me a bit nervous. I had my first (and still only) accident on snowy roads, and I’m just not a great fan of driving in those conditions. I still do drive in those conditions, it’s just probably my least favourite situation.
So I’m a) hoping it all fades away pretty soon, and b) thankful that 99% of my current stupid daily commute is on major roads that aren’t going to be a concern on that score.
Posted: Wed 11 January, 2012 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Driving, Politics, Travel, Work-related |
Yesterday, the UK Government approved the HS2 high-speed train route from London to Birmingham, and potentially then on to Leeds and Manchester.
Personally, I don’t understand the need for HS2 between London and Birmingham. There’s already several ways to do that journey.
To my mind, what’s *really* needed is a cross-country route, rather than another up/down-country route. For example, at the moment I’m travelling between Bury St Edmunds and Bedford on a daily basis. It takes about 65-75 minutes door-to-door, which is OK. However, if I were going by train, I would have to go Bury St Edmunds -> Cambridge -> London -> Bedford – around five hours of travelling time. And that’s ridiculous.
We simply don’t (to my understanding) need another ‘length of the country’ high-speed route. We do need one that goes across the country – from Cambridge across to Oxford and on to Bath/Bristol. That would have allowed for far more useful routes and better links, and would probably be better used.