On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:23:22 +0000, Gropius Riftwynde wrote:
Here where the nearest national brand supermarket is 10 miles away it
costs 6 quid roughly to make the trip..

we have three healthy village stores withing 4 miles..

We have a Tescos in town, 6 miles away, and it is 11p a mile in petrol
cost terms: £1.32 for a round trip. Are you running at 30p per mile?
What have you got, a tank?

Well I suppose other wear and tear adds to that, though - although 6 quid
seems a bit high, unless that includes parking costs.

We also have a well stocked village shop, and a post office (which you
can use as a bank for paying in and withdrawals).

The post office case I find interesting - the thinking at the moment seems
to be to take functionality away from post offices because they're not
doing well, rather than giving more services to post offices so that they
*can* do well. In other words, the trend is toward more centralisation
(and associated travel / vehicle wear and tear / emissions) rather than
less.

It all depends on the
relative costs for what we want to buy, and the quantity. For routine
stuff like milk and newspapers, I actually walk! I suppose I drive into
town about once a fornight.

Yes, me too. But as TNP says, we could recreate a society where every
village (or suburb) has its own post office, hairdressers, grocers,
newsagents, hardware store, garage, and engineering place. All within
walking distance for those who can, and I don't see why PT can't play a
part too for those who didn't want to walk.

I wouldn't want to ban cars either - they're useful for the occasional
longer trip which would be needed (to visit relatives in other towns, or
the odd holiday etc.). There'd just be no reason to use them for the
majority of cases though, unlike now.

Transport infrastructure to serve a localised society is still a bit of a
headache - but I suspect that handling of food and some manufacturing on a
much more local scale, and making items more repairable (and encouraging
local businesses that can do so), would go a long way toward cutting down
the need to shift so many items around the country / planet.

It's possible to do, I think - but not without the Government playing a
part as otherwise the big multi-nationals (and nationals) are going to
continue providing goods from large centralised locations because that's
what maximises their profit. At the moment Government seem more
concerned with going after the little guy though, which can only do so
much toward dealing with the problems of consumption, over-population (in
some regions), and emissions. It's a narrow-minded way of dealing with
things which has a rather limited shelf-life and as a civilisation buys us
a bit of time but nothing more.

cheers

Jules

On 2 Nov 2006 01:59:33 -0800, "Chris"
wrote:


magwitch wrote:
Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.

Public transport is useless.

Getting to work :- By car 20-30mins - £3/4 Petrol. Public transport
- 1 Hour £8
Visiting my parents (there and back) :- By car 5-6hrs £40 Petrol.
Public transort 9 Hours £111

Both journeys involve a train and a bus and are "on a good day" and I
live across the road from a train station. Obviously there are other
costs associated with owning a car but at present I have to own a car
so I have to pay them whether I use it or not.

Even if travelling by car was more expensive I'd still think twice just
because of the sheer inconvenience. Especially the journey to and from
work.

There are two things to consider here, before getting excited about
relative transport costs. The first it that the Government could make
car transport even more expensive per journey, and secondly, the train
companies coud also make the equivalent journeys more expensive.
Current comparisons are probably misleading. At present I can travel
to Cambridge more cheaply by train as an individual , and more cheaply
by car if there are two or more of us. This may well change soon. And
of course, the currrent simple comparative costs don't take into
account whether one is carrying a substantial load of stuff, or
perhaps transporting a baby, or whatever. People will make their
travel arrangements according not only to the cost, but to their
individual circumstances. Big increases in either will have a strong
knock-on effect for some locations; for example those that depend on
several people travelling, such as UK holiday destinations.

---
GR

Chris wrote:
magwitch wrote:
Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.

Public transport is useless.

Getting to work :- By car 20-30mins - £3/4 Petrol. Public transport
- 1 Hour £8
Visiting my parents (there and back) :- By car 5-6hrs £40 Petrol.
Public transort 9 Hours £111

Here's exactly the problem. It's far too easy to think of motoring
costs as just the fuel. I know I tend to. The £3-4 for the commute
probably translates to about 30 miles? At a fairly miserly 30p/mile,
the real cost for this journey is about £9/day. I agree that the other
problems with public transport (not door-to-door, extra travel time,
othe prople, etc) are often quite off-putting too. I'm in favour of
adding at least the cost of VED onto the price of fuel, (assuming it's
done in a tax-neutral fashion, and the cost of whatever MOT & insurance
check replaces it doesn't creep up...) This might make people think
twice about using their cars at least occasionally or for local
journeys.

TL

On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:55:33 GMT, "Paul" wrote:

Huge wrote:
On 2006-11-01, Paul wrote:
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 13:09:10 on Wed, 1
Nov 2006, Huge remarked:
The downside of this, as several people have pointed out, is that
if your job can be done remotely at home, it can be done remotely
in Hyderabad.

And we all know how badly even a simple thing like a call centre
transfers to Hyderabad in most cases. It's not as easy as it sounds
(local teleworking as well as 5,000 mile teleworking).

ps. I wonder if they are teleworking from the moon these days. A
speaker at a conference I'm attending referred to people working
"hundreds of thousands of miles away"

They are *awful*. As soon as I get the "sounds as though he's on
Mars" line quality, the poor English, the accent, and the background
noise, I say "can you tell me where you're speaking from please?"
If it's other than the UK, I hang up.

You do realise they're trained to lie, don't you?

I've covered that. If I don't believe them I hang up anyway. I could write
you a program to deal with it but I can't be bothered, my brain suffices.

If you are communicating with someone like BT, you have no choice.
They aren't trained necessarily to lie. But they are apparently
trained, in traditional BT fashion, to profess not to understand your
problem and to deal efficiently with it.

---
GT

"magwitch" wrote in message
...
The Natural Philosopher muttered:

magwitch wrote:
Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.
As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now:
unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and
probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which
happens to
be damaging the planet.

So make it relatively expensive then...

Yes, fuel consumption _should_ be made relatively expensive. Just
gradually
up the duty on petrol, as they were doing until a few years ago, giving
society time to adapt and using the extra money solely on public transport
nation-wide.


Buses and trains aren't green you know!
In the west Midlands buses generate more pollution than cars (I expect
elsewhere is the same).
You see hundreds of them running around with no passengers just generating
pollution at five-ten times the rate that the cars do.
At least with cars the thing is being used for a journey, with buses/trains
they are just making a scheduled trip.

AFAICS the only time buses and trains save pollution is during the rush hour
and then only on the routes with lots of passengers.
Running a frequent service any other time is just adding to the pollution.

Now who is going to use an infrequent service?
How are you going to run the service outside rush hour without just
polluting?

On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:53:13 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi opo diwn
te shops to get a newspaper?

And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

---
GR

The Luggage wrote:
Getting to work :- By car 20-30mins - £3/4 Petrol. Public transport
- 1 Hour £8
Visiting my parents (there and back) :- By car 5-6hrs £40 Petrol.
Public transort 9 Hours £111

Here's exactly the problem. It's far too easy to think of motoring
costs as just the fuel. I know I tend to. The £3-4 for the commute
probably translates to about 30 miles? At a fairly miserly 30p/mile,
the real cost for this journey is about £9/day. I agree that the other

Yes but even if I use public transport I'm still incurring some of the
costs for my car so adding them is only valid if I could eliminate the
car completely. As far as my commute is concerned cost isn't really
the issue, you could easily increase the costs to £30 a day and I'd
still come in by car. Public transport needs to be better. Joined up.
On time. Comfortable. Not crap, unreliable, dirty, uncomfortable.

A massive price hike for car travel probably would induce me to car
share but I honestly don't see it happening.

Working from home is definitely an option for me, i could easily do 99%
of my job function at home, but my employer doesn't see fit to trust
employees to work from home and insists they come into the office.

I would, however, still have to own a car.

Chris wrote:


Here's exactly the problem. It's far too easy to think of motoring
costs as just the fuel. I know I tend to. The £3-4 for the commute
probably translates to about 30 miles? At a fairly miserly 30p/mile,
the real cost for this journey is about £9/day. I agree that the other

Yes but even if I use public transport I'm still incurring some of the
costs for my car so adding them is only valid if I could eliminate the
car completely. As far as my commute is concerned cost isn't really
the issue, you could easily increase the costs to £30 a day and I'd
still come in by car. Public transport needs to be better. Joined up.
On time. Comfortable. Not crap, unreliable, dirty, uncomfortable.

For example, Arriva buses to my village near Tunbridge Wells: Passable in
the morning in a school week, though still misses the train by 3 minutes
needing another 25 minutes wait. Coming back - totally unacceptable; one
every 2 hours if that, and the train is guaranteed to be late 30% of the
time and miss the connection.

It's not like they have to devise a system that works - go to Switzerland
and do whatever they do *exactly*. Their PT system works - I spent 3 weeks
there on holiday using nothing but PT with a heavily pregnant wife and the
system is impeccable. When the bus timetable says xx.02 it means that the
bus will come at 02 minutes past the hour -1/+2 minutes, usually within 1
minute of the correct time.

They apologise in 4 languages profusely when the train (on only one
occasion) was 5 minutes late, due to all the tourists taking ages to board
and alight. And then they hold the connecting trains - and tell you this in
advance, again in 4 languages, in between apologies.

Working from home is definitely an option for me, i could easily do 99%
of my job function at home, but my employer doesn't see fit to trust
employees to work from home and insists they come into the office.

In my last job I could trivially work at home 2 days per week as proven on
the few occasions snow blocked the railways. However my jurassic management
would not agree to it in a regular basis - and people like them never will
unless legislation forces their hand.

I would, however, still have to own a car.

Likewise. My new job is 20 minutes drive away, bang next to a mainline
station. I estimate it would take me 40-50 minutes to do that by bus and
train at 3-4 times the cost.

Cheers

Tim

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
snip
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi opo
diwn te shops to get a newspaper?

Spellchecker broken or have you put the gloves back on? :-)

On 2 Nov 2006 02:55:38 -0800 The Luggage wrote :
Here's exactly the problem. It's far too easy to think of motoring
costs as just the fuel. I know I tend to. The £3-4 for the commute
probably translates to about 30 miles? At a fairly miserly 30p/mile,
the real cost for this journey is about £9/day.

No, unless you are willing to give up owning a car. Once you have
decided to own the car, the cost of a journey is the marginal cost
whilst PT requires (ignoring subsidies) to pay the average cost.

My car will be traded at 3 years before battery, tyres or exhaust need
replacing and my mileage is such that servicing is time-based not
mileage based, so the cost of making journeys is about 12p per mile.
If I was considering driving 100 miles a day, with consequent
increases in servicing, tyres and depreciation then the cost would of
course be more.

--
Tony Bryer SDA UK 'Software to build on' http://www.sda.co.uk

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:09:57 +0000 Gropius Riftwynde wrote :
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?

And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

--
Tony Bryer SDA UK 'Software to build on' http://www.sda.co.uk

Gropius Riftwynde wrote:
On 2 Nov 2006 01:59:33 -0800, "Chris"
wrote:

magwitch wrote:
Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.
Public transport is useless.

Getting to work :- By car 20-30mins - £3/4 Petrol. Public transport
- 1 Hour £8
Visiting my parents (there and back) :- By car 5-6hrs £40 Petrol.
Public transort 9 Hours £111

Both journeys involve a train and a bus and are "on a good day" and I
live across the road from a train station. Obviously there are other
costs associated with owning a car but at present I have to own a car
so I have to pay them whether I use it or not.

Even if travelling by car was more expensive I'd still think twice just
because of the sheer inconvenience. Especially the journey to and from
work.

There are two things to consider here, before getting excited about
relative transport costs. The first it that the Government could make
car transport even more expensive per journey, and secondly, the train
companies coud also make the equivalent journeys more expensive.
Current comparisons are probably misleading. At present I can travel
to Cambridge more cheaply by train as an individual , and more cheaply
by car if there are two or more of us. This may well change soon. And
of course, the currrent simple comparative costs don't take into
account whether one is carrying a substantial load of stuff, or
perhaps transporting a baby, or whatever. People will make their
travel arrangements according not only to the cost, but to their
individual circumstances. Big increases in either will have a strong
knock-on effect for some locations; for example those that depend on
several people travelling, such as UK holiday destinations.

---
GR
It would cost me about £35 to get to Cambridge and back by public
transport..£10 twice for a taxi to newmarket, and a tenner for a return
coach fair..probably similar for the train..


Car? its about a fiver.

Gropius Riftwynde wrote:
On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:53:13 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi opo diwn
te shops to get a newspaper?

And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

---
GR
You are ****ed.
Ive seen 82 year old pensioners moving at 2mph across a busy junction
that they haven't even stopped for. They don't last long ;-)

Chris Shore muttered:

France runs on (mainly) nuclear power (77%).

Which is why they'll be laughing all the way to the bank in 30 years
time when we will most likely buying the vast bulk of our electricity from
them...


Querite.

Chris muttered:

Especially the journey to and from
work.

I know (o:

Mainly why I decided (and fortunate enough) to chuck in the day job.

Tony Bryer wrote:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:09:57 +0000 Gropius Riftwynde wrote :
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?
And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

Precisely.

Here where the nearest national brand supermarket is 10 miles away it
costs 6 quid roughly to make the trip..

we have three healthy village stores withing 4 miles..

dennis@home muttered:


"magwitch" wrote in message
...
The Natural Philosopher muttered:

magwitch wrote:
Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.
As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now:
unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and
probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which
happens to
be damaging the planet.

So make it relatively expensive then...

Yes, fuel consumption _should_ be made relatively expensive. Just
gradually
up the duty on petrol, as they were doing until a few years ago, giving
society time to adapt and using the extra money solely on public transport
nation-wide.


Buses and trains aren't green you know!
In the west Midlands buses generate more pollution than cars (I expect
elsewhere is the same).
You see hundreds of them running around with no passengers just generating
pollution at five-ten times the rate that the cars do.
At least with cars the thing is being used for a journey, with buses/trains
they are just making a scheduled trip.

AFAICS the only time buses and trains save pollution is during the rush hour
and then only on the routes with lots of passengers.
Running a frequent service any other time is just adding to the pollution.

Now who is going to use an infrequent service?
How are you going to run the service outside rush hour without just
polluting?


Think back to 1987 and the hurricane. Imagine having one of those every few
years or so. It stopped everything for weeks... cars, trains buses, power
supply, water supplies.

With the leaves still on the trees and temperature into the 70s most of this
October it would only have taken an severe anticyclone to bring chaos. I was
surprised we didn't get another one.

In message , at 12:06:11 on Thu, 2
Nov 2006, Tony Bryer remarked:
My car will be traded at 3 years before battery, tyres or exhaust need
replacing and my mileage is such that servicing is time-based not
mileage based, so the cost of making journeys is about 12p per mile.
If I was considering driving 100 miles a day, with consequent
increases in servicing, tyres and depreciation then the cost would of
course be more.

It's still costing you maybe 15p-20p a mile in marginal depreciation
(depends on the model). When you sell, having low mileage will increase
its value, just as high mileage will reduce it. (Unless your car is
leased, and the leasing company has made a bet about how many miles it
thinks you'll do and charges you a flat rate per month).
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 12:06:12 on Thu, 2
Nov 2006, Tony Bryer remarked:
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?

And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

But if transport becomes £4 a mile, will the shops re-open?

--
Roland Perry

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:36:13 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Only then does PT become feasible - but as usual the emerging plan seems
to be screw over the public by removing choice, rather than thinking about
the bigger picture and tackling the wider issues so that more people *can*
use PT.

Well thats Nu Laber innit? Nanny Knows Best

Trouble is, what faith does anyone have that a different government would
do any better? All political parties seem to use the same rules - don't
look beyone the next five years and don't worry if something screws up
that they put in place five years ago, as they can rely on some new crisis
to divert people's attention with.

The core issues vary between parties, sure, but it's all short-term,
quick-win thinking - and patching up the mess a little down the road is
somebody else's problem.

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006 12:49:51 +0000 Roland Perry wrote :
It's still costing you maybe 15p-20p a mile in marginal
depreciation (depends on the model).

Not below a certain mileage. I traded my last Honda Jazz in for a new
one at 3 years with 10K on the clock (£4100 cost to change). I don't
think that a mileage of 20K would have made any difference, certainly
not £1500-2000.

--
Tony Bryer SDA UK 'Software to build on' http://www.sda.co.uk

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:21:11 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Tony Bryer wrote:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:09:57 +0000 Gropius Riftwynde wrote :
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?
And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

Precisely.

Here where the nearest national brand supermarket is 10 miles away it
costs 6 quid roughly to make the trip..

we have three healthy village stores withing 4 miles..

We have a Tescos in town, 6 miles away, and it is 11p a mile in petrol
cost terms: £1.32 for a round trip. Are you running at 30p per mile?
What have you got, a tank?

We also have a well stocked village shop, and a post office (which you
can use as a bank for paying in and withdrawals). It all depends on
the relative costs for what we want to buy, and the quantity. For
routine stuff like milk and newspapers, I actually walk! I suppose I
drive into town about once a fornight.

---
GR

In message , at 13:14:42 on Thu, 2
Nov 2006, Tony Bryer remarked:
It's still costing you maybe 15p-20p a mile in marginal
depreciation (depends on the model).

Not below a certain mileage. I traded my last Honda Jazz in for a new
one at 3 years with 10K on the clock (£4100 cost to change). I don't
think that a mileage of 20K would have made any difference, certainly
not £1500-2000.

Of course, a dealer is more likely to forget to mention such a thing.
Look it up in Parkers. The Honda Jazz will be at the bottom of the
scale, being a small car.
--
Roland Perry

magwitch wrote:
dennis@home muttered:

"magwitch" wrote in message
...
The Natural Philosopher muttered:

magwitch wrote:
Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.
As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now:
unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and
probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which
happens to
be damaging the planet.

So make it relatively expensive then...
Yes, fuel consumption _should_ be made relatively expensive. Just
gradually
up the duty on petrol, as they were doing until a few years ago, giving
society time to adapt and using the extra money solely on public transport
nation-wide.

Buses and trains aren't green you know!
In the west Midlands buses generate more pollution than cars (I expect
elsewhere is the same).
You see hundreds of them running around with no passengers just generating
pollution at five-ten times the rate that the cars do.
At least with cars the thing is being used for a journey, with buses/trains
they are just making a scheduled trip.

AFAICS the only time buses and trains save pollution is during the rush hour
and then only on the routes with lots of passengers.
Running a frequent service any other time is just adding to the pollution.

Now who is going to use an infrequent service?
How are you going to run the service outside rush hour without just
polluting?


Think back to 1987 and the hurricane. Imagine having one of those every few
years or so. It stopped everything for weeks... cars, trains buses, power
supply, water supplies.

Ah, but once you fix em, the next one has no more trees to take down.

With the leaves still on the trees and temperature into the 70s most of this
October it would only have taken an severe anticyclone to bring chaos. I was
surprised we didn't get another one.

We have had lots of anticyclones this year..I assume you mean cyclones.
Or deep depressions. With Nu Laber in power what else is there?

Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 12:06:12 on Thu, 2
Nov 2006, Tony Bryer remarked:
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?

And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

But if transport becomes £4 a mile, will the shops re-open?

Of course.

If you can get away with a 10% premium over a supermarket, by virtue of
being local (and actually OUR local shop is CHEAPER then the supermarket
for fresh fruit, meat and bacon and eggs)then its an attractive business
proposition.

One of the side effects of the sorts of fundamental tax changes I have
been proposing is that it leads naturally to a re-localisation of
LIVING, work, being largely telework, becomes global or local..mediuem
scale commuting 20-80 miles) has got to go...and localisation means you
know your neighborhood, take care of it and police it yourself.

Personally I think this is a great social plus.

Gropius Riftwynde wrote:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:21:11 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Tony Bryer wrote:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:09:57 +0000 Gropius Riftwynde wrote :
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?
And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?
If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

Precisely.

Here where the nearest national brand supermarket is 10 miles away it
costs 6 quid roughly to make the trip..

we have three healthy village stores withing 4 miles..

We have a Tescos in town, 6 miles away, and it is 11p a mile in petrol
cost terms: £1.32 for a round trip. Are you running at 30p per mile?
What have you got, a tank?


No, a car that needs taxing, insuring, maintaining and depreciates
largely through wear and tear.

Tax insurance MOT and maintenace runs close to £1000 a year. So does
depreciation. At about 5000 a year on any vehicle, thats 20p a mile
without diesel. At around £4 a gallon and 30 mpg (we HAVE to run 4WD to
get out of the drive in snow) thats 13p a mile more..33p a mile effectively.

even if you regard the opportunity cost alone..there are still tyres
brakes, screenwash and oil and some maintenance (or depreciation if its
new to take into account.


We also have a well stocked village shop, and a post office (which you
can use as a bank for paying in and withdrawals). It all depends on
the relative costs for what we want to buy, and the quantity. For
routine stuff like milk and newspapers, I actually walk! I suppose I
drive into town about once a fornight.


We try to keep it to once a week, but often its twice.

The village shop is daily though.

---
GR

In message , at 13:55:38 on
Thu, 2 Nov 2006, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
One of the side effects of the sorts of fundamental tax changes I have
been proposing is that it leads naturally to a re-localisation of
LIVING, work, being largely telework, becomes global or local..mediuem
scale commuting 20-80 miles) has got to go...

aiui you were proposing to pay me to sit at home, and if that's the case
perhaps I won't even need to telework, let alone try to find a job
locally which suits my skills. Will you also pay all my house moving
costs (and have zero rate Stamp Duty) in case I want to find a job
somewhere else that suits my skills?
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 14:01:01 on Thu, 2
Nov 2006, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
we HAVE to run 4WD to get out of the drive in snow

Can't you telework on those handful of days there's snow?
--
Roland Perry

Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 13:55:38 on
Thu, 2 Nov 2006, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
One of the side effects of the sorts of fundamental tax changes I have
been proposing is that it leads naturally to a re-localisation of
LIVING, work, being largely telework, becomes global or local..mediuem
scale commuting 20-80 miles) has got to go...

aiui you were proposing to pay me to sit at home, and if that's the case
perhaps I won't even need to telework, let alone try to find a job
locally which suits my skills. Will you also pay all my house moving
costs

No

(and have zero rate Stamp Duty)

Yes.

in case I want to find a job somewhere else that suits my skills?

Well what are your skills?

Jules wrote:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:41:44 +0100, magwitch wrote:

Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.
As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.

But I still don't get how PT *on its own* can ever be sufficiently
attractive for the significant number of people who don't happen to live
within city boundaries. A bus every ten minutes taking a reasonable route
to every single destination just isn't practical - what's needed first is
a fundamental shift in the way people work and shop and manage their time,
such that there's less need in the first place to do so many journeys or
micro-manage them to tight timescales.


Public transport was developed to meet the needs of inter-urban
transport, and slow but regular village to center transport.

It and the urban centres and market towns developed because they fitted.
Road transport and cheap fuel has meant the rise of the suburban sprawl.
And commuting.

Change the ground rules and the pattern of housing will change to suit.


Only then does PT become feasible - but as usual the emerging plan seems
to be screw over the public by removing choice, rather than thinking about
the bigger picture and tackling the wider issues so that more people *can*
use PT.

Well thats Nu Laber innit? Nanny Knows Best


Business as usual I suppose - short-term measures which soon do more harm
than good, just so that whoever happens to be in power can be seen to be
Doing Something. Then when it all screws up five years down the line and
all that money's been wasted, someone else comes in and repeats the cycle.
It's about time we got someone in charge who thinks not 4-5 years ahead
but 40-50 or even longer... :-(


Someone who actually thinks at all would be a welcome change.

The current climate favors playing the blame game and knee jerk
overreaction to ill informed public opinion.

cheers

Jules

In message , at 14:31:15 on
Thu, 2 Nov 2006, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
in case I want to find a job somewhere else that suits my skills?

Well what are your skills?

(Or indeed anyone else who is looking for a job)

In the broadest sense I'm a teacher. My pupils tend to be in Capital
Cities. Living in any of them (within walking distance) would be
v.expensive.

ps I can't do my work by telecommuting, it has to be face to face.
--
Roland Perry

Chris muttered:


The Luggage wrote:
Getting to work :- By car 20-30mins - £3/4 Petrol. Public transport
- 1 Hour £8
Visiting my parents (there and back) :- By car 5-6hrs £40 Petrol.
Public transort 9 Hours £111

Here's exactly the problem. It's far too easy to think of motoring
costs as just the fuel. I know I tend to. The £3-4 for the commute
probably translates to about 30 miles? At a fairly miserly 30p/mile,
the real cost for this journey is about £9/day. I agree that the other

Yes but even if I use public transport I'm still incurring some of the
costs for my car so adding them is only valid if I could eliminate the
car completely. As far as my commute is concerned cost isn't really
the issue, you could easily increase the costs to £30 a day and I'd
still come in by car.

My annual commute by car to station (50 miles round trip + parking at
station) then train to London cost me @ £5k a year about £15 a day. This was
the cheapest I could make it, annual season and parking tickets high mileage
per gallon car.

The daily 50 mile car journey could have been avoided if only the Newmarket
to Cambridge train had a better scheduled service. Fine in the morning, but
in the evening the trains stopped about 6:30 not enough time to get back
from London to get to Newmarket. There was another one later in the evening
at 9:45 pm, but after a hard day at work waiting at Cambridge station for a
couple of hours didn't appeal.

Public transport needs to be better. Joined up.
On time. Comfortable. Not crap, unreliable, dirty, uncomfortable.

Yes true.

A massive price hike for car travel probably would induce me to car
share but I honestly don't see it happening.

No it probably won't because politicians will never really tackle the
problem, they just like to be seen to do so.

Working from home is definitely an option for me, i could easily do 99%
of my job function at home, but my employer doesn't see fit to trust
employees to work from home and insists they come into the office.

I think they'll have to learn to be more flexible on this one or only employ
people who live around a city with good PT links ‹ they'd have to pay the
sort of salary that enabled their employees to afford the higher mortgages,
of course (o:

I would, however, still have to own a car.

Not a problem owning a car ‹ even a Hummer P ‹ it's how much and often you
_use_ it.

Roland Perry writes:

In message , at 14:01:01 on Thu,
2 Nov 2006, The Natural Philosopher remarked:
we HAVE to run 4WD to get out of the drive in snow

Can't you telework on those handful of days there's snow?


I have about 50m to navigate before I get to the road. I've never had
a problem in a two wheel drive car in the 8 or so years I've lived in
Cambridge. But perhaps I _need_ a 4WD car as well, just in case

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:55:38 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

One of the side effects of the sorts of fundamental tax changes I have
been proposing is that it leads naturally to a re-localisation of
LIVING, work, being largely telework, becomes global or local..mediuem
scale commuting 20-80 miles) has got to go...and localisation means you
know your neighborhood, take care of it and police it yourself.

Personally I think this is a great social plus.

Indeedly so. My clients come to me (the B&B season), or I to them
(sometimes as far away as - oh Oxford and Cambridge - about 300+
miles), and sometimes virtually, as far away as California (web
clients). I don't care where they come from as long as I make a
living. It's when I physically have to travel myself that I get grumpy
about it. The normal commute from the bedroom to the bathroom is the
most difficult bit.

There is a lot to be said for earning a living in virtual worlds.

---
GR

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:32:07 -0600, Jules
wrote:

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:23:22 +0000, Gropius Riftwynde wrote:
Here where the nearest national brand supermarket is 10 miles away it
costs 6 quid roughly to make the trip..

we have three healthy village stores withing 4 miles..

We have a Tescos in town, 6 miles away, and it is 11p a mile in petrol
cost terms: £1.32 for a round trip. Are you running at 30p per mile?
What have you got, a tank?

Well I suppose other wear and tear adds to that, though - although 6 quid
seems a bit high, unless that includes parking costs.

Not 6 quid. 6 miles.

The post office case I find interesting - the thinking at the moment seems
to be to take functionality away from post offices because they're not
doing well, rather than giving more services to post offices so that they
*can* do well. In other words, the trend is toward more centralisation
(and associated travel / vehicle wear and tear / emissions) rather than
less.

The banking facility at post offices seems to me one of the most
valuable services that they could offer. If you can pay in and
withdraw for nothing, locally, then it saves a car trip and the
associated parking probs.

---
GR

Gropius Riftwynde wrote:
... The normal commute from the bedroom to the bathroom is the
most difficult bit.

You work from your bathroom???

TL

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:55:19 +0100, magwitch wrote:

Jules muttered:

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:41:44 +0100, magwitch wrote:

Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.

As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.

But I still don't get how PT *on its own* can ever be sufficiently
attractive for the significant number of people who don't happen to live
within city boundaries. A bus every ten minutes taking a reasonable route
to every single destination just isn't practical - what's needed first is
a fundamental shift in the way people work and shop and manage their time,
such that there's less need in the first place to do so many journeys or
micro-manage them to tight timescales.

Public transport _on it's own_ isn't the answer,

But that seems to be the extent of current thinking - force them on to PT
by any means possible and to hell with whether them using PT is
actually *practical*.

but a limit on the amount
of petrol per month would at least limit unnecessary journeys and there
are thousands of them.

But there are also thousands of journeys which are necessary. I know
plenty of people whose weekly fuel budget simply gets them to work and
back, with either a weekly or fortnightly shopping run - there's no
splashing out on frivolous trips involved.

kids to school by car when there is a perfectly good bus. I used to
commute a round trip of 120 miles a day by train yet worked alongside
people who (pre-charge) who lived 15 miles from London and came in by
car.

Yes, I suppose mine used to be about 60 miles and was a mixture of train
and walking. After three years of it I finally got sick of overcrowded,
late or missing trains and high ticket costs (the walking bit I never
did mind) and got myself a car instead. I tried to do my bit by doing the
PT thing and it just didn't work.

Only then does PT become feasible - but as usual the emerging plan
seems to be screw over the public by removing choice, rather than
thinking about the bigger picture and tackling the wider issues so that
more people *can* use PT.

PT seems to work really well in Europe. Why don't they just go over
there, do a study and replicate exactly the same system here?

I've not seen the system in Europe - does it cope well in the rural areas?
Mind you, I suppose pace of life in a lot of Europe - particularly
outside the cities - is a lot more laid back than in the UK. Maybe nobody
cares if they have to wait a few hours for a bus because they're not
imposing on anyone else by taking their time getting to their
destination?

Business as usual I suppose - short-term measures which soon do more
harm than good, just so that whoever happens to be in power can be seen
to be Doing Something. Then when it all screws up five years down the
line and all that money's been wasted, someone else comes in and
repeats the cycle. It's about time we got someone in charge who thinks
not 4-5 years ahead but 40-50 or even longer... :-(

Trouble is Stern seemed to think that we need to make major changes
within the next 10 years, we don't have the luxury of 40Â*50 years now.

Yes, we've quite possibly left it too late - although I'm not convinced
that even if we had done the things being talked about ten years ago it
would have been enough to make a difference.

Quite what the backup plan is, I'm not sure :-)

Tony Bryer muttered:

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:09:57 +0000 Gropius Riftwynde wrote :
If it cost you £4 a mile to travel, would you use teh car toi
opo diwn te shops to get a newspaper?

And if you were a pensioner, with no local shop?

If transport was £4 a mile people in villages would have kept using
their village shops so they wouldn't have closed.

As they are now if they still have one, when I first moved up here the
village shop was hardly ever busy, but ever since petrol went to over 90p a
litre it's been packed.

Jules muttered:

On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:41:44 +0100, magwitch wrote:

Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.

As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.

But I still don't get how PT *on its own* can ever be sufficiently
attractive for the significant number of people who don't happen to live
within city boundaries. A bus every ten minutes taking a reasonable route
to every single destination just isn't practical - what's needed first is
a fundamental shift in the way people work and shop and manage their time,
such that there's less need in the first place to do so many journeys or
micro-manage them to tight timescales.

Public transport _on it's own_ isn't the answer, but a limit on the amount
of petrol per month would at least limit unnecessary journeys and there are
thousands of them. I know lots of mothers who take just their own kids to
school by car when there is a perfectly good bus. I used to commute a round
trip of 120 miles a day by train yet worked alongside people who
(pre-charge) who lived 15 miles from London and came in by car.

Only then does PT become feasible - but as usual the emerging plan seems
to be screw over the public by removing choice, rather than thinking about
the bigger picture and tackling the wider issues so that more people *can*
use PT.

PT seems to work really well in Europe. Why don't they just go over there,
do a study and replicate exactly the same system here?

Business as usual I suppose - short-term measures which soon do more harm
than good, just so that whoever happens to be in power can be seen to be
Doing Something. Then when it all screws up five years down the line and
all that money's been wasted, someone else comes in and repeats the cycle.
It's about time we got someone in charge who thinks not 4-5 years ahead
but 40-50 or even longer... :-(

Trouble is Stern seemed to think that we need to make major changes within
the next 10 years, we don't have the luxury of 40*50 years now.

cheers

Jules

In message , at 18:39:49 on Thu, 2 Nov
2006, magwitch remarked:
As they are now if they still have one, when I first moved up here the
village shop was hardly ever busy, but ever since petrol went to over 90p a
litre it's been packed.

It's been below 90p where I live for months. (85p average I suppose).
--
Roland Perry