If I was the transport minister

It can take about 2 and a half hours.

It all depends on how close the place I'm visiting is to London Euston.

I can guarantee I'd be sweaty, uncomfortable, tired from standing the whole journey and a lot poorer from an expensive ticket.

Luckily I can avoid the hell-hole.

 

I would lower taxes, by taking the wheels off.

 

i hate london - if you have a bit of a tan and are carrying your laptop round in a backpack you don't half get some funny looks.

 

I lived in London for 4 long years and was amazed at how degrading and expensive any form of public transport was. The pricing structure for train tickets was really quite a work of art. I seem to recall getting prices well in excess of £100 for a return train ticket to manchester for christ's sake.

I thought this was all Thatchers fault anyway. Didn't she and her cronnies seriously consider tearing up all the railways and using the empty rail "corridors" for new motorways. If she was thinking that way, what was actually being spent on their upgrade/maintenance. The transport system seems to be in such a state of decay that it's too big a job for anyone to handle.

I always thought it was just inherent that transport in a country as overpopulated as England would be expensive and chaotic. But then there's the example of Japan?

Anyway, I live in Nth Ireland now and it's bliss. The Transport Minister should quit and come over here.

 

julian

Was that walking down old compton street Julian?

London is a fine city and anyone who says different secretly wishes they lived there.

 

Nope its just that like most drivers I think cyclists are self absorbed twats who think the world owes them a living.

 

The railways were knackered before Maggie got near them. The basic problem now is that the trains too popular and are carrying far more people than they can cope with (on certain routes). The answer is to get rid of the need to commute but that's not going to happen.

 

Every day when I walk home from the office, through some very pleasant parts of London for walking (Little Venice, Hyde Park/Green Park), I nearly get flattened by cyclists, often using mobile phones as they ride, who seem to think neither the rules of the road nor the rules of the pavement apply to them. They never seem to get stopped by the police either. Of course, not all cyclists are like this, but plenty are.

-- Ian

 

you're more deluded than I thought...

 

john,
no st pancras / euston and berwick st areas.
i used to live in london and never, ever want to repeat those 6 months of my life. i hate the place with a passion and if i could get by with never visiting the noisy, smelly, dangerous, dirty, unfriendly place ever again i would be a happy man.
ian
i must say that most walkers don;t realise what the rules are either - they think that they are entitled to drift around in some sort of random brownian state rather than keep to the right (facing oncomming 'traffic') that way they can see a cyclist approaching, the cyclist can see them and take avoiding action. unfortunatley the prelediction for walking the wrong way whilst wearing an i-**** means that you can ring a bell, shout yourself hoarse or whatever and they'll still think the cyclist is in the wrong when they jump 9 feet sideways cos they weren;t aware of the rules or their surroundings. most cyclists have had to cope with this for years and now thanks to apathy on both sides of the fence just get where they are going as quick as possible and damn the rest of them - not nice but understandable.

i used to say the same as bob there about cyclists but now after a year of dog's, their ****, their ****ty owners, ramblers, horse riders etc. thinking i'm some sort of 2nd class road user and motorists, frankly trying to kill me (how is it my fault if they nearly pull out into me from a side road when i'm on the main road? yet i get the abuse), i am now of the attitude - i'll slow down around children and animals and ride defensively at junctions and danger spots but i'm buggered if i'm going to stop and if i have to and you are in the wrong you are getting a comment.

 

Hmm...nothing like a well informed argument. Infact the three points you make there sound like the ramblings of a madman.

 

When I'm walking through a pedestrian route in Hyde Park (one that has a clearly marked cycle path on the edge), the rules are simple: if you're a cyclist, stay in your lane. But they don't. I see this nearly every day, at least half a dozen times.

-- Ian

 

One of the good things about London is a large proportion of the population of that city choose to stay there, only occasionally exposing the rest of us to their high volume when a bank holiday means they can afford the time to drive their ars out of there.

 

London is not that bad

I usualy pay no more than £30 for Manc to London return, I have a rail card and book in advanced. The probloem is the cheap tickets seem to allocated at random so you never know if you're going to get them.

 

I've had plenty of 'near misses' from cyclists thinking they could ignore zebra crossings, traffic lights etc. Fortunately I'm fairly chunky, so the cycle would be likely to come off worse in any collision.

 

Yes, you can get some very cheap prices if you are flexible with times.

I am talking about when a client says come up to Manchester for a meeting the next morning. Booking a train travelling during peaks times could cost a fortune. I even remember once booking a hire car and driving because it all worked out cheaper and I avoided those smelly toilets, soggy sandwiches and mysterious "overhead line" failures (f**k I was sick of hearing that announcement by some depressed as hell train driver).

 

I think maybe this thread has highlighted the fact that everyone hates each other!

Motorists hate bikes, bikes hate motorists, pedestrians hate bikes and motorists, everyone hates dog owners, dog owners hate everyone who hates them, everyone hates ipod and mobile phone users but everyone is an ipod user and mobile phone user etc etc. The fact is that if everyone did things responsibly everyone would be happy. If people only used mobile phones when its safe to do so, drivers and cyclists obeying all the rules and using facilities as they are supposed to....its an impossible dream unfortunately! We've just got to get on with it. But luckily for some of us the effects are not ratcheted up by the fact that we live in a dense city with millions of other people!

 

Not really. There are idiots on four wheels, idiots on two wheels, and idiots on two legs. Any transport system should be designed to prevent said idiots from killing/seriously injuring/inconveniencing those who are forced to encounter them on the road or on the pavement.

 

On a more positive note, how has Branson's Virgin been doing since I left in 2001. I know they were a laughing stock but I always felt alot of it was not justified as he was dealing with "inherited" problems, i.e. old trains and crappy infrastructure.

I got the impression Virgin were actually starting to do OK in terms of getting their trains in order. I expect they are still wrestling with the decaying network

He seemed to be showing what is possible with a positive attitude though.

 

I travelled by Virgin Trains up and down to Glasgow recently. To my amazement, we arrived on time on both the outward and return journeys, which is unusual on that route to say the least. The air conditioning broke down in one carriage, but fortunately not the one I was sitting in.