Mark Holland

You’d think that for people inclined to sharing that carpooling would be the obvious answer.

From the comments here.

Mark Holland

Peter Hitchens has written a tremendous wide ranging blog posting on transport issues. I’m inclinded to agree with a great deal of it.

As someone who travels by car, bicycle, boat and train I don’t understand why anyone should have an extremely entrenched position about which is the “best” form of transport and every other option is worse than useless. Surely it should be horses for courses. And, from a libertarian perspective, as it’s a given that we’re against subsidy, I think there really does need to be seriously good look at the true cost of road transportation. From common carrier restrictions onwards the playing field has been anything but level.

Make sure you don’t miss Hitchens’ the follow up either.

Brian Micklethwait

Ferrari are seriously pissing on their brand.  Read about Segway (and yes there is now a Ferrari Segway) engadgetry generally here.  Early last month, a fat cop used one to catch a bad guy, or so it says here.

Are Segways sane or merely the latest manifestation of the Sinclair C5 syndrome?  Do they perhaps have a future in a world dominated (a) by flat pedestrianised surfaces and insanely long pedestrian ramps to anywhere higher or lower, and (b) by vast herds of old people who will otherwise hardly be able to move at all?  Maybe they do.

Rob Fisher

I recently took the overnight Trenhotel train from Paris to Barcelona, a fun, if technologically inferior, alternative to a budget airline.  Booking can be a pain, but the useful Seat 61 site helps, and I found it easier to call Rail Europe than to use their clunky web site.

Obviously the journey takes longer by train: we left Waterloo at midday and arrived in Barcelona at 8am the next day—but it was easier than the return plane trip (which also involved a taxi, two coach rides each an hour long to and from the far out of town airports, and the tube).  A lot of that time was spent sleeping, so isn’t really lost time at all, and a couple of hours were spent outside a cafe in Paris drinking beer.

Another advantage over flying is the lack of luggage restrictions.  It turns out to be impossible to make two weeks’ worth of stuff weigh less than 15kg.  I don’t mind paying Ryanair 8 Euros per extra kilo, but I do wish they wouldn’t treat me like a naughty boy and make me go and stand in Yet Another Queue to pay for it.

There’s a certain romance to train travel, especially in Europe with its departure boards showing exotic destinations.  At dinner this more than made up for the food not being all that great and having to share our table.  In fact, I’m being unfair.  Our British companions were charming and interesting, and after a few glasses of wine I kept expecting Miss Marple to appear and interview me about the murder.  Dinner on the train was a wonderful experience.

Accomodation was comfortable—we had a private cabin with bunk beds and a sink.  Cabins with showers are available, but I found those tickets impossible to get.  The website has a virtual tour showing what it’s like on board.  Unlike the night train I once took from Trondheim to Bodø, I found the particular rocking motion of Trenhotel quite unsettling, but felt better after taking some pills.

Crossing the border was achieved by handing over our passports to the staff at the beginning of the journey and being handed them back the next morning.  Exactly what happened to them in the meantime I’ll never know.

Sleep came easily, but morning still came too soon.  Arriving in Barcelona at 8am meant wandering around the city in a daze, pretending to sight-see and drinking cortados just to stay awake until our hotel room was ready.

Have a look at The Man in Seat 61 for train travel ideas.

The remaining mystery is that even though we were travelling by train one way only, we had to buy return Eurostar tickets from London to Paris.  Single tickets are more than double the price.  I can only speculate as to the economic forces that contrive this situation.

Rob Fisher

The video speaks for itself.

Actually, I learnt some time ago that the M4 bus lane isn’t really a bus lane at all—it’s a cunning traffic management scheme that solves a problem caused by a bridge that can’t be widened.

Update:  The article explaining the bus lane is part of Chris’s British Road Directory, which is a fun site if you’re in the mood for geeky articles about junction design and road numbering.

David Farrer

I read about this story on the scot-rail.co.uk discussion site.

Wemyss Bay is a small village on the north Ayrshire coast. It serves as the terminal for ferries to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. A train service from Glasgow “connects” with the ferry.

On the day of the “incident” the ferry arrived about 10 minutes late at Wemyss Bay and the 25-or-so passengers rushed up the ramp to the rather beautiful station to make the train connection. You can probably guess what happened next. Yes, the conductor shut the doors and let the train leave a few seconds before any of the passengers were able to board. The next train is an hour later.

Then:

The station supervisor, hastily beat a retreat to his booking office and pointed to a sign ,in true jobsworth tradition ,stating that trains would not be held for late boats!

This event has generated a lot of interesting comments, but it seems likely that the conductor may well have been acting rationally - if he wanted to keep his job.

The train itself is operated by First ScotRail but the track and stations are under the control of Network Rail, essentially an arm of the government. Train operators must pay substantial fines to Network Rail should any of their trains run late. But Wemyss Bay is a tiny station with one train per hour, you may think. Yes, but a few miles down the track the line is joined by the one from Gourock with three trains per hour (each way). A little bit further and you’re at Paisley Gilmour Street where the line from Ayr and Largs comes in with four more passenger trains per hour in both directions as well as coal trains running up from Ayrshire and aviation fuel going down to Prestwick airport. Ten minutes later you’ll be approaching Glasgow Central, the busiest UK station outside London. So a couple of minutes’ delay at Wemyss Bay could have led to a series of hold ups, literally down the line, that could have inconvenienced thousands of people, costing goodness knows how much in money terms.

Many of the commenters on the thread work in the railway industry and make it clear that the “jobsworth” conductor had no choice but to signal the train off on time, with or without the passengers.

Needless-to-say, some folk blamed all this on privatisation and the “bean counter” mentality. Forgetting for the moment that it’s the quasi-government entity Network Rail that levies the fines, I’d like to defend the “bean counters”, partly because I am one myself.

Accountants are there to tell management this:

If you want to do “X”

It’ll cost you “Y”

And - this is the most important bit - you can’t therefore use the same resources to do “Z”.

Or, putting it colloquially, “You can’t have your cake and eat it.”

That’s true whether the system is capitalist or socialist, but capitalism provides the incentives that guide us to use resources in the most efficient manner, as judged by consumers.

In the ideal world there’d be a train waiting for us at the station no matter when we turned up. In fact I’d like my own personal train to be kept ready at Haymarket, steam fully primed, dining car fully stocked, and ready to take me wherever I want to go at no charge. But the world isn’t made like that and folk who think it is - let’s call them socialists - are deluded. I’ll try and remember that next time I’m at Wemyss Bay.

Michael Jennings

I put my complete trust in the satnav and it led me right into the path of a speeding train.

- Paula Ceely of Worcestershire, narrowly avoiding both death and a near certain Darwin award. There isn’t really a lot more that needs to be said.

I've been slow to comment on Transport 2000's^* overcrowding survey but I will now even if all I've got to say is:

• I do not believe that the worst overcrowding is away from London
  
• If the 10th worst service (as they claim) really is only 45% over capacity then to all intents and purposes we've got overcrowding licked.

At this point I usually say something about fare control but you've heard it all before, so I won't bother.

^*Yes, I know. There was a time when the 2000 bit sounded terribly futuristic. No, really.

Patrick Crozier

Croziervision is down.  It has been down for a couple of days now and I haven’t a clue why.  It is hosted from exactly the same place as Transport Blog, and shares a database and a control panel.  But Transport Blog is just fine.  To the best of my knowledge there are no bills outstanding and I haven’t changed anything.  I can think of nothing to have caused it to go down other than sabotage or perhaps someone installing a new version of PHP on the server.

Anyway, in the meantime, here is an emergency version.  Not all links are working.

Update Croziervision is back up.  In the end it came down to de-assigning and re-assigning the add-on domain.  Weird.

Andy Wood

From here, via Patri Friedman.

Patrick Crozier

Following on from the last posting perhaps it’s time we had an open comments thread.

You can say what you like here.  I guess you can say whatever you like on any other posting but it just wouldn’t seem right.  Anyway, you can say anything you like here.  Preferably about transport or the blog - we’re more likely to pay attention to it that way. 

What would be really cool would be if people could flag up stories that we haven’t covered or their own experiences.  You can, of course, e-mail us if you prefer but you might find this easier with the added advantage that whatever you have to say is, at least, out there somewhere in cyberspace.

Just to make the point that things said here do matter, whenever a comment is left here both an e-mail is sent to the author ie, me and a note is left on our top secret behind-the-scenes notice board.

Michael Jennings

On the right is Emma Maersk, the world’s largest container ship (and the world’s largest ship of any kind that is still in operation), at the A P Moller terminal in Aarhus harbour in Denmark on November 11, a few minutes after completing her maiden voyage to Asia and back (Aarhus, Gothenburg, Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Algeciras, the Suez Canal, Singapore, Yantian (Shenzhen), Kobe, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yantian, Hong Kong, Tanjung Pelepas, the Suez Canal, Felixtowe, Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, Gothenburg, Aarhus). On the left is her identically sized sister ship, Estelle Maersk, in port in Aarhus, waiting for a few technical difficulties to be resolved prior to her maiden voyage on a similar route. I went to Aarhus because I knew that Emma Maersk was coming into port. The presence of Estelle Maersk was a bonus.

Now on her second voyage, Emma Maersk sailed through the Suez Canal yesterday, and next docks in Singapore. Estelle Maersk left Rotterdam they day before yesterday, and next docks in Algeciras.