To the people of Greece

When your country needs as much business, tourism and good will as it can get, why are you calling a general transport strike tomorrow?

I cannot get home from my business meeting in your country any more, and at the moment feel like I won't be coming back if I can help it.

You're really not helping your cause!

Still, at least there's a pool and internet...

Sustainable public transport

We've heard it all before "rural bus service cuts". We'll it's happening in Elvington and it's all quite silly.

To give bit of background. We have a bus service (195) that runs a few times a day. The busiest times are at 7:30 to York and 5:15 from York. This service gets about 6-12 commuters from Elvington plus another 12 or so from other villages. So, it's hardly full, but it's keeping 24 cars off the road.

During the day, the other bus services (apparently subsidized by the council) have a "few" (3?) people on them.

Anyway, the morning and evening runs of the 195 will be stopped from 5th September 2011 because it's not financially viable (while the empty daytime runs continue).

The cynic in me thinks that the company would rather run an empty bus paid for by the council than one that's actually well used but doesn't have a bum on every seat.

I'm sure that the day time buses provide an irreplaceable service for the OAPS, and others who do not have a car to get into York! But stopping the morning/evening commuter services so that people end up buying a car to go to work seems completely at odds with the York City council's recently published strategy on transport! All 5 themes in the document are basically saying that it's important to stop people using the car to get to/around York.


A few suggestions:

• Think about the services that we subsidize.
  
• Plan timetables better: think about what services people will use, not what services happen to fall neatly within the bus company's schedule when they have a spare bus that's on its way back from somewhere else.
  
• Make it 30 minutes later in the morning (7:50 in York is a fraction early really for many commuters)
• Advertise it! According to the transport policy, we have to encourage behavioural change - so let's go out of our way to promote it, make it actually a viable service. Many, many people in Elvington work in York, why don't they take the bus. Who pays for the advertising? Council? Bus companies? Word of mouth? Elvington Parish Council? Actually all should play a part.

Binless Wifi

The "departure" area of the Eurostar at St Pancreas appears to have no rubbush bins, but does have free internet access.

Normal Service Resumed

After a short break from both posting here and air travel, I'm back in the emergency exit seat again. I should have taken the train to Paris last week.

In other news, I am so pleased that I took a TomTom with me!

My planned 30 minute taxi ride from the station to the airport was shattered by the discovery that a suburb of Paris was lacking in taxis. According to TomTom, the 30 minute drive was only a 40 minute walk..so I gave it a try. TomTom took me on a pleasant walk through the countryside, up hills, round a lake through the woods. In smart shoes and trousers, mud was no object and I arrived safely at the hotel, although hot, sweaty and muddy. Yes, it seems that TomTom knows all the muddy footpaths in Paris!

Planes, trains and spaghetti

I have travelled quite a lot, in Europe at least, but never have I had such a stressful nor disastrous trip as my most recent to Venice, Italy.

I don't know whether I am lucky to be finally waiting in the airport lounge for the return trip, or unlucky that I had such a hard time to get here. My glass is generally half-full so I'll go for the first option.

It should have been a nice week at Ada Europe, a small conference for people who care that software works correctly, in a beautiful city and lots of good food.

Instead, this trip involved manning a booth without a booth (at first at least), flooding (in Venice!), a projector that broke just before I gave a technical presentation (yes, I dictated source code and waved graphs with my arms), missing the last train of the day, being stranded on a motorway (on foot) three miles from the hotel at 1am and carrying a 30kg box from Venice to Mestre on a 30'C day.

However, the food was indeed good and apparently the presentation was actually quite memorable, there's certainly a novelty about an oral code review.

This trip also broke the jinx of the emergency exit...on Easyjet you get to choose your own seat.