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Well, my job varies from developer to telephone support to on-site work. I work from home when there is no on-site work going on, but for the on-site work the best I can manage is to travel at off peak hours, which usually means travelling down the night before. I'm not reducing the distance (if anything it increases slightly due to the need to go to a hotel) but the time and fuel consumption are drastically reduced due to removing myself from the busy periods of the day which has to be good for everyone, apart from the works accountant who pays the hotel bills

I tried doing my job using public transport once, now I'm sure that when you know your local route PT is a lot more pleasant than my experience but due to the nature of my work I will regularly be taking trips to areas that I am unfamiliar with, and no-one has invented a working PT satnav yet.

So the job comes in, and I phone Arriva Trains Wales and inform that I'd like to travel from my local station to Edinburgh Haymarket, getting there some time between 8PM and 10PM. I am advised that I need to travel from a certain station that's a 15 minute drive from where I live with no bus service to it, and get there for around 2:15, from there I need to travel to Cardiff which will take an hour, from Cardiff to Birmingham New Street and from there to Edinburgh, cool. I book a hotel that's close to the train station. Oh and I can collect my tickets from the station in question. I am billed £137 of my own money for the return journey.

I am a little unhappy at leaving my car in an unsecured car park for 2 nights, but fortunately my GF was working locally at the time, she agrees to pick me up in her lunch break and take me to the station.

I get there and the ticket office is closed. WTF I need my tickets. I ring Arriva Trains Wales, am on hold for 30 minutes during which my train comes and goes so we decide that driving to Cardiff would be a good idea. Eventually they explain that the ticket office at that station shuts at 12PM and I should have arrived early. I ask if it would be ok to drive to Cardiff and get my tickets there, but I cannot, I can only pick them up at the original station and I'm too late anyway because the last train to Birmingham just left.

Pissed off we grab some quick lunch and I am taken to home. I have to explain this cock up to my boss who insists that I fly up, so I book a flight, pay £50 for a taxi to Cardiff airport and £70 for the flight, my customer is kind enough to pick me up from the airport and at the end of the day I'm put on a bus to my hotel.

At some point during the day a problem had arisen with my health which NHS Direct decided needed hospital attention, so that's another 17 quid in taxi fares because I didn't have a car available and had no idea if you could get a bus to the hospital in Edinburgh at that time of night. I also had to get hold of the train company and sort out my ride home. There was no way to get the tickets for the return leg of the journey I had to buy brand new ones which cost me £110.

The return journey was relatively uneventful, apart from the fact that despite getting the first train of the morning the carriage already contained a guy in rugby gear passed out on the floor surrounded by beer cans and mumbling incoherently in a Merseyside accent. He was completely harmless and had apparently meant to change trains at Crewe last night .

Eventually I get home and am picked up by my GF in her lunch break again. I send an SMS to by boss telling him that I'm having the rest of the afternoon off and go to bed.

Total cost of trip: £384 plus hotels and food and whatnot.

Next time I'm taking the car or flying.

Which begs the question that reducing car use is per se a desirable objective.

And if I analyse my own pattern of car use, a large majority of it comprises commuting and a weekly trip to visit my parents, neither of which could realistically be accomplished by any other means.

Also I make no apology for both enjoying driving and being interested in roads, so I make some journeys that are not by a narrow definition "necessary" but in my view represent the pursuit of a legitimate leisure activity - and are virtually never undertaken at congested times.

Cutting out the occasional trip to the newsagents and the chippy is not really going to make any difference to overall congestion levels.

Well, my job varies from developer to telephone support to on-site work. I work from home when there is no on-site work going on, but for the on-site work the best I can manage is to travel at off peak hours, which usually means travelling down the night before. I'm not reducing the distance (if anything it increases slightly due to the need to go to a hotel) but the time and fuel consumption are drastically reduced due to removing myself from the busy periods of the day which has to be good for everyone, apart from the works accountant who pays the hotel bills

I tried doing my job using public transport once, now I'm sure that when you know your local route PT is a lot more pleasant than my experience but due to the nature of my work I will regularly be taking trips to areas that I am unfamiliar with, and no-one has invented a working PT satnav yet.

So the job comes in, and I phone Arriva Trains Wales and inform that I'd like to travel from my local station to Edinburgh Haymarket, getting there some time between 8PM and 10PM. I am advised that I need to travel from a certain station that's a 15 minute drive from where I live with no bus service to it, and get there for around 2:15, from there I need to travel to Cardiff which will take an hour, from Cardiff to Birmingham New Street and from there to Edinburgh, cool. I book a hotel that's close to the train station. Oh and I can collect my tickets from the station in question. I am billed £137 of my own money for the return journey.

I am a little unhappy at leaving my car in an unsecured car park for 2 nights, but fortunately my GF was working locally at the time, she agrees to pick me up in her lunch break and take me to the station.

I get there and the ticket office is closed. WTF I need my tickets. I ring Arriva Trains Wales, am on hold for 30 minutes during which my train comes and goes so we decide that driving to Cardiff would be a good idea. Eventually they explain that the ticket office at that station shuts at 12PM and I should have arrived early. I ask if it would be ok to drive to Cardiff and get my tickets there, but I cannot, I can only pick them up at the original station and I'm too late anyway because the last train to Birmingham just left.

Pissed off we grab some quick lunch and I am taken to home. I have to explain this cock up to my boss who insists that I fly up, so I book a flight, pay £50 for a taxi to Cardiff airport and £70 for the flight, my customer is kind enough to pick me up from the airport and at the end of the day I'm put on a bus to my hotel.

At some point during the day a problem had arisen with my health which NHS Direct decided needed hospital attention, so that's another 17 quid in taxi fares because I didn't have a car available and had no idea if you could get a bus to the hospital in Edinburgh at that time of night. I also had to get hold of the train company and sort out my ride home. There was no way to get the tickets for the return leg of the journey I had to buy brand new ones which cost me £110.

The return journey was relatively uneventful, apart from the fact that despite getting the first train of the morning the carriage already contained a guy in rugby gear passed out on the floor surrounded by beer cans and mumbling incoherently in a Merseyside accent. He was completely harmless and had apparently meant to change trains at Crewe last night .

Eventually I get home and am picked up by my GF in her lunch break again. I send an SMS to by boss telling him that I'm having the rest of the afternoon off and go to bed.

Total cost of trip: £384 plus hotels and food and whatnot.

Next time I'm taking the car or flying.

I recently went to Birmingham to see a friend(I go quite often)

Booked tickets on the interweb, turned up next day in the post. Walked 20 minutes to my local station so I didn't have to leave a car anywere. Turned up for an on-time train to Preston, and onward connection to Birmingham. Read paper in comfort and strolled to onboard "shop" for a hot chocolate. Alighted in Birmigham New Street, met up with my friend and enjoyed a cold beer.

Cost of ticket? £20.
Cost of parking: Nothing
Cost of relaxing with a paper instead of the hassle of the M6: Priceless

I'm sorry you had a bad expierence, but it's not always as bad as that, sometimes it's quite pleasant not to drive.

I would say reducing congestion and reducing waste(of fuel) and the indirect benefit of becoming fitter were desirable just as much for the individual as to society as a whole.


It's not just that though, there are many journies that can be combined to cut the overall milage. The supermarket run was one, and getting to work could be another if you consider the walk or bike to either the destination or a train station as an alternative to going to the gym.

There's a few key differences there though.

1) You had this planned in advance, you wern't responding to a callout, wheras I'll tend to get callouts at 16:59 from customers that have next day support in their contract.

2) You were going to Birmingham which is really easy to get to by train from anywhere in the country. London is the other place where I'd still consider trains though usually I tend to just drive into Zone 4, find somewhere free to park (yes I know a few places, I'm not sharing them lest Ken find out and shut them down) and then get a travel card. I find the underground works fairly well so long as I don't mind suffering from a cold for the next few days, but people still moan about that regularly.

I think you've rather missed the point of my post there.

And surely one of the benefits of a prosperous society is that people are able to travel more and also have access to a wider range of goods.

It doesn't take a genius to cut congestion by creating economic recession - you don't tend to find many queues in depressed areas, but you do in thriving ones.

The only difference is it would have cost more, there were plenty of seats available. However I take the point that last minute journies at peak times(with no seat reservation) will not be quite as relaxing!

Just a tip though, I would never use call centres for jouney information if you can possibly avoid it, just use http://www.nationalrail.co.uk unless you were on the go and not near a computer.

Your job probably isn't suitable for using PT, fair enough, not a problem. Neither is mine, simply due to the time I start in the morning. I supect though that because you prefer to travel by car, any disruption with PT is likely to flag up more prominantly than similar disruption on the roads. There is nothing wrong with that, I think it's just the way the mind works.

When something bad happens on the railways, the solutions is almost always rail replacement busses. Fortunately I haven't had one of these since I was a teenager coming home from London...everyone was kicked off the train at Crewe, it was supposed to be the express train with only stops at Runcorn and Liverpool to go, we were bundled onto a bus and had to wait for the next train to arrive, the stop at every stop train, and then go on a magical mystery tour of Cheshire before everyone got off at Runcorn leaving me on my own with a driver who had no idea how to get to Liverpool from Runcorn. Being the teenage little shit that I was I directed him down the M56, onto the M53, got him to drop me off at Junction 4 which was 5 minutes from my mums (the nearest station was 15 minutes away) and then told him to keep going to the end of the motorway, through the tunnel and then follow signs for Lime Street.

I've used that site from time to time, though admittedly not for a while. Does it work in Firefox yet as I don't have IE on my home PC.

Ahh the old rail replacement bus.... however this is nearly always pre-planned so you should be aware of the disruption in advance. It's quite rare for them to be used on an emergency basis as unless the line is pysically impassable there are normally ways and means of running trains. So to say the answer is "nearly always" buses is inaccurate.

However the increase in using buses due to engineering work can be attributed in a large part to privatisation because in the past they would have tried where possible to use 1 line(out of a pair) in both directions. However this requires co-operation from the TOCs to thin out the service and it would cost Network Rail more to pay the delays to services this way than to pay compensation to stop all trains.

But there is hope, the chief exec of NR has said they are going to be trialling new engineering methods of pre-fabricating things in the factory so they can be "dropped in" much quicker. It also means points etc can be tested in controlled conditions in a factory rather than out on site where weather conditions can be horrendous. He estimates a weekend possession wil be able to be done in a night.

I've not had problems with it. Last time I used it was on Firefox on a Mac.

The data isn't always perfect though, the last time the reported delay for the train I was watching was about 25 minutes, but it ended up being about 35 minutes late. And the time before the train was abandoned due to being delayed for so long, but that information never made it on to the system.

But there was at least one time when it was right, and that was very useful.

This was a long time ago (well, 1998), in fact it was the first time I'd ever gone on a long trip entirely on my own with no parental planning or assistance involved. Hell it was before I'd even passed my driving test! No-one advised me that such a thing was going on when I booked the tickets, though they did advise me that it would be more cost effective to buy a Young Person's Railcard* and call back even if I never used the thing again! The trip down on the Friday had no problems with the line (just an overcrowded train that resulted me sitting in the luggage compartment for 4 hours! it was the trip back on Sunday where there were problems, but my real complaint is the driver didn't know how to get from Runcorn to Liverpool! even I knew that and I didn't drive. Sure I was able to use the situation to my own advantage but that's not really the point.

*I find the existence of these things interesting as well, after you hit 25 you can't get them any more, this is the same age that car insurance becomes less extortionate for most people, so what is the purpose of them? It would appear designed so that once people hit 25 they are pushed off the trains and into cars. I doubt it's actually cheaper to carry young people on the trail (most likely more expensive due to vandalism) so what's the point, why not make the railcard available to everybody, since once you've bought the thing you may be encouraged to use the train more often.

...encourage young people to use the train. The theory is if they become familiar with them travelling to uni etc, they are likely to use them more often later in life.

Hi Rigpig
I suppose it was a little confrontational, but it was in response to a breathtakingly disingenous and irrelevant slur on immigrants

Sufficient roads and parking should be provided to allow people to use their chosen mode of transport. I don't want to leave my car at home; I want to drive it when I want, unencumbered by nannying people telling me what they think is best for me.

For the record, I accept that a car is (in concept at least) a useful thing, and that each use of the car offers tangible benefits which are not necessarily to be sneered at. In return perhaps you will acknowledge that it also results in actual and often measurable social harms, and that as a society we are entitled to debate what level of car use is desirable. I also recognise that motorists are just ordinary people going about their business, and are not, as a rule, hell-bent on the destruction of each other and everyone else, so let’s have less hysteria every time anyone articulates a non-motoring position. I also ask you to acknowledge that I have not advocated banning anything, and your characterisation of me as some kind of authoritarian is wildly inaccurate. All I have done is suggest that reducing car use is possible, argue in favour of it, and point out that it will reduce congestion.

PS As for magic words – I don’t believe in magic. Do you find that patronising as well?

So basically, you don't like cars so I can't have one? I don't suppose I'm allowed to fly off on holidays either, or put the heating on?

Wouldn't it make more sense to stop those countries that can't support their own populations from breeding rather than have them here?

As for other road users - how many roads do you think there would be without motorists? Who's going to pay the 60B in taxes taken from motorists?

As for public transport - well when it's as pleasant and convenient as getting in my own car, then I'll think about it. Incidently did you know that passenger for passenger, buses give off 4 times as much CO2 than cars?

So - you complain about the "nanny state" but support the enforced sterilization of entire populations. I can't think of anything to say to such a morally repugnant suggestion, except that it is quite clear which of us is the extremist.

Well, now I look like a fan of Hitler and a nut so I'd better go have a pint...