Bleedin'obvious

Politicians are just like the rest of us - they want to keep using cars as well. But their need is obviously justified and right, whereas ours is not. I think way too many people in positions of authority wush that the car could be uninvented. As it allows the hoi-polloi to be too darn independent.   

I remember being invited to a West Midlands business group meeting some years ago about road pricing. And the local CBI man said that road pricing was essential to make sure that the roads did not get over-crowded and could still be used. I challenged him by saying what he really meant was that other people had to be priced off the road so he could keep using them. Which actually got a cheer from the rest of the meeting. I was not invited back.....

Whatever else happens to me in life, as long as I'm not reduced to having to take the bus everywhere when I'm old, I will consider my life a success. When do you ever see anybody looking happy on a public bus?

We use the Shrewsbury park and ride service quite a lot, which is about my limit of bus transport.  

My mother is 80 in December and I can confidently state that at no time in her life in Europe and the USA (she came over from S.Africa in 1962) has she stepped foot on a bus, aside from airport runway buses. I catch buses because I live and work in London boroughs: never been on a non-London bus in the UK (London Country in the '70s counts as London before PG picks me up on the 406, which is now a London route anyway).



This is the most true statement ever written about private car ownership in the UK. The Left hate it as the left's leaders tend to be totalitarian bastards that want the workers to remain "the workers" as defined by some pre-Victorian standards whilst they remain, as Union leaders always have, a step above them with the RIGHT to tell them what's best for them after taking their union subs from them; the Right hate it as it means their leaders and funders have to share: something that is not popular amongst their ranks, especially sharing with those beggarly folks that inhabit the lower class neighbourhoods.

I voluntarily took a bus on Monday night. To get home from a meeting of the Cabinet of Hammersmith & Fulham Council about a local road closure and it was quite clear that the council's long-term desire is for all citizens to be made to walk and cycle everywhere in a delightful transport-free green idyll that takes absolutely no account whatsoever of the demands and vicissitudes of daily life. It was altogether a very "municipal" experience.

And to be fair, the bus decision wasn't mine. I left chatting to a neighbour and he (being old enough to qualify for a free bus pass) suggested catching the 295 as the quickest way home, and so it proved, bus lanes being marvellous things for bus users.