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You are here: Home / Garden Hens / Slight Direction Change

Slight Direction Change

Thursday 27th August 2009 by Steve Mayne

In this blog I’ve decided to cover a couple of green issues too.

Nothing spectacular – just the odd thing that we try to do to reduce whatever our carbon footprint is – which if people were really that concerned about Green Issues they’d live in a cave, utter the occasional, ‘Ugg’, and never buy a Fraber-Mocher-Freezer-Chino from their local (yet International Chain) of coffee shop.

So our latest escapade has been Public Transport. Or more precisely, the Bus.

So as a bit of fun we though we’d take our toddlers out on the bus instead of using Daddies Car.

First off, as last time I used the bus it was 25 pence to travel 1.5 miles I though we’d better check the cost for two adults, and two children to the next-village-but-one.

So armed with the Internet, and a brochure picked up from the local Tourist Information Center, we felt we were prepared and able to pre-calculate the cost of going to where we needed.

Despite searching the bus company website, and searching the compreshensive bus route brochure, there was nothing to be found on carriage charges. So we rang the number listed on the brochure. They said they had no idea, and we’d need to call the local depot. We called the depot – despite ringing several times – there was no answer.

Time was getting on and out options were closing. We decided to just go for it – worst case we’d chalk it up to experience and leave it at that. Packing our smallest buggy, we set off for the bus stop in good time.

Yes – guess what – the bus was twelve minutes late. Twelve minutes may not sound much but when you are trying to control two toddlers by the side of a busy road those minutes stretch into hours.

The bus arrived, we paid our fare, which turned out to be £4.80 for two adults and two toddlers, and we alighted.

The journey was without incident apart from hanging on for dear life whilst we went up the stairs to the top deck with the bus underway. The bus also stole priority from oncoming traffic when it had no right-of-way.

The return bus was just as late, and if we look at what the cost would have been for us to drive to the village we’d have saved a good 75% of the cost by going by car, would have got there in 6 minutes instead of 26 minutes, and it would have been a lot more comfortable too.

We took the smallest buggy we owned, about half the size of the dual buggy we have, but even that didn’t fit in the luggage rack. Goodness knows what we’d have done if we’d have had a weeks worth of shopping with us too.

Public Transport is poor because

  • It is never on time
  • Too expensive
  • Inflexible
  • Does not accommodate luggage

This is why the Car will always be king.

Very disappointing.

We’ll be using the bus again – on account of it being cheaper than a Theme Park – but it’s a Novelty Item only – not a serious option.

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