Nothing fast about Fastway this morning

Sometimes even I am astonished by my naivety.  Perhaps misplaced optimism is a better alternative.

After last night’s walk I knew there would be no buses up Tollgate Hill (no problem as I don’t want them anyway) but I just sort of presumed the more level roads would be better anyway and that the main roads between local shopping parades and the town centre had more chance of having been treated – so I walked the mile up and down hills to the Fastway stop and discovered just how wrong I was.Having got that far I decided it would be easier to walk the remaining four miles to work than to come back up the hill.   I also thought I should make the effort just in case our VIP visitor did manage to make the journey in the afternoon.

By lunchtime we saw some No. 10 buses go past our offices, but they only had town centre as a destination.  By mid-afternoon it was confirmed the VIP visit was off so I came home and found that the No. 10 was going as far as the Broadfield stadium, which helped a lot – I’m still not happy though.

I am giving the optimism a rest for now.  I have decided to not even bother putting out my bins or my four weeks’ recycling tonight.

The iconic Crawley crows feeling the cold

Atheist bus in London

Despite sounding like something from the recent prog rock season on BBC Four, I like the idea of the atheist buses.  Anything to stimulate a bit of free-thinking is OK with me.

Having said that, and remembering my years living in London, and hours waiting for the 172, 141 or 36A buses I can think of another appropriate bit of signage which I fully expect some proto-Banksy to do for real any minute now.  In the meantime, here is an artist’s impression…

Coming to a bus stop near you soon...

All very spurious, but I reckon you could make a case for a similar assertion about being in this corner of Sussex and Crawley Luxury coaches.  Sometimes it seems like you can’t make a journey on the roads around Crawley of more than a few hundred metres without seeing one of their coaches.  You would stand more chance of going to a community event in the town and not seeing Irish dancers.

Sometimes you feel that they must have a fleet of hundreds of vehicles because they are so ubiquitous. All the more surprising given that the colour scheme is not exactly blatant.  Despite the fact that you can’t travel anywhere during daylight hours without seing these coaches the words “luxury” and “Crawley” still are not inextricably linked on most people’s minds.

Could be down to that colour scheme again.  Light beige is not generally a colour that screams out luxury is it?  Personally I find the livery reassuring because it looks like it belongs on a vintage bus and not a modern luxury coach.

To set the scene then, there was an e-mail asking for items to raise at the Metrobus meeting on May 9th.  The first reply was from Alan Quirk and it said:

Can you raise with the bus Company the fact that their buses appear to be
breaking up the road surface on their routes in Broadfield please?. It is
effecting the normal road users and cyclists.

Have they spoken to the County Council, and what plans are in place to
reinstate the surface?

Plenty to complain about in a short e-mail, but it was only mildly mad; the follow-up was the real blinder. I’ll get to that in a moment.  First of all, what does ‘normal road users’ imply?  To me it is saying that bus passengers or cyclists don’t belong on the roads, that cars (and motorbikes) are ‘normal’ and everyone else is therefore a bit weird or only there under sufferance.  Bus passenger travel in a vehicle that has its road tax paid, and via their fares they are contributing to that tax, so they are every bit as much a valid road user as anyone else.

I’m sure buses do contribute to wear and tear on the roads, as do cars, bikes, dustcarts, delivery vans, fire engine, trucks and any other vehicles but to say the buses break the road up as if nothing else does just gives the wrong impression.  And its not just an opinion.. its a FACT.  Besides which, as I said before, that is what roads are for!  They are designed and maintained to handle the expected traffic, and buses were expected at the time the roads were built.

Not sure about the last bit though.  It reads like it is suggesting the bus company should pay to re-surface the road although it doesn’t actually say that. If I was a bus company faced with such a question I would answer “yes I have spoken to the county council to complain about the state of the roads”.

What happened next was that this e-mail inspired Lucy Brockwell to reply with the following:

We should add this to the list of reasons for using smaller, lighter buses
of say 16-21 seats on more routes, more frequently.

I hope WSCC imposes a limitation on neighbourhood roads or a charge for
large vehicles causing damage.

This is the one that I really enjoyed…   Just what is this list of reasons for using smaller buses to which road dmage should be added?   There must be a list because Lucy says there is.  I would love for her to let us know what all the other reasons are, because I can’t really think of any.  At best I can think of reasons why you might augment the current services with some extra routes that go into smaller roads to pick up those who can’t easily get to the bus stops – but that is covered by things like Dial-a -Ride isn’t it?

I can think of a few reasons why you wouldn’t want to use smaller buses, and most of them are economic reasons.  First of all, running more buses means having more drivers.  That is a major cost to the bus company for no extra return – assuming the number of passengers is more or less the same.  Unless some kind local authority is going to inject massive subsidies that will mean a bankrupt bus company, or even higher fares.  Another problem with having more drivers is that there is a permanent shortage of drivers already.

Another consequence of having more buses is that the bus company has to actually have more buses and they cost money as well, directly and indirectly.  They might be cheaper per unit, but would it work out cheaper overall?  Not to mention that when you park them all up, four 16-seaters would take more space than a single 64-seater – so they need a bigger depot with more parking (and much bigger facilities for canteen/mess, lockers, etc. to handle all the extra drivers).  Those buses that take up more space to park overnight are also going to be taking up more space on the roads during the day.

Another cost is fuel.  No argument that it is more efficient to run a vehicle with a smaller engine, but is it cheaper to run two smaller-engined vehicles than one larger one?  I haven’t done the sums, but it seems unlikely.

Agreed that it is wasteful when off-peak buses are running with most seats empty, and there might be an argument for having smaller ones at those times.  Mind you, I’m still not convinced that the savings in fuel would outweight the cost of buying and keeping the extra vehicles.  Thinking about it, if it did work out cheaper to do that the bus companies would already be doing it – they have a vested interest in keeping their costs down as much as they can.

A non-economic reason for not having minibuses is that they really are not designed for easy wheelchair access, or for pushchairs/prams, and could not take advantage of the raised kerbs installed at bus stops.

As for the road damage itself, I’m not qualified to know for sure, but I am guessing that a bus for x passengers actually weighs more than half the weight of one for 2x passengers so that a move to smaller buses would put more total weight on the roads, albeit in smaller units.  Is that going to do more damage or less?  Is there a civil engineer in the house?

So the list of reasons for not having lots of small buses keeps growing, but I haven’t yet thought of one compelling reason for having them, so I really would like to see a copy of this supposed list.

The last bit, about charges or restrictions, is truly appalling.   We are talking about the public highway: you pay your road tax and you can use it.  How can you restrict the use?  Even if WSCC wanted to do it, you would surely need to have national legislation to enable that.

Having only owned cars I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that trucks, buses and other larger vehicles already pay more for their road tax than I do, in which case they are already, in a way, being charged more for using the roads.

On reflection, the first e-mail is not too bad – it only asks some fairly open questions, possibly rhetorical ones – but it was the catalyst for the unreasonable, ill-though-out, and plain barking specific suggestions of the second one.

Not that I can be bothered to go out any do anything like proper research or anything, obviously, but maybe there is a way to settle the question about how much damage buses do: go out and look at the dedicated bus lanes.  If buses do all the damage, then surely the bus lanes would be in as bad a state as the other roads…   Another possibility is to look at all the roads that are not on a bus route and so would never have had a bus on them: they should all be in pristine condition.  A few examples of residential streets with massive potholes should settle the argument.

I’m sure I will be in a better position to know after I get my bike – you tend to notice things more on a bike.

A few weeks ago, shortly before the local elections, a council officer e-mailed all the Crawley councillors to ask if they had any business they would like raised at the regular meeting with Metrobus. I can remember when we used to get asked the same thing and would ask our representatives to raise the topic of high fares, or to complain on behalf of residents about buses sitting with their motor running under somebody’s windows at 5am, or to ask whether the Fastway route could be slightly amended so it ran up Tollgate Hill, or to ask about enforcement matters relating to cars parking in the bus stops at the Barton.

But that was then and this is now, so one of the e-mails received complained about the state of the roads in Broadfield and asked if Metrobus could do something about how their buses are damaging them. Furthermore it suggested that Metrobus might consider smaller buses that would not cause so much damage.

Really.

Now I am no local historian, but I am willing bet large amounts that buses were invented before the roads were built around here, so you would expect them to be built to withstand traffic. Given that little fact there can only really be two reasons why the roads are now full of potholes, cracks and dips – either they were badly designed and built or they have been poorly maintained. Nobody who has travelled on the bus to or from Broadfield where it can be standing room only would seriously think that making the buses smaller is a good idea.

My own suspicion is that the roads have been inadequately maintained over a long period, which amounts to a false economy really because it will result in a large unplanned expense rather than smaller planned expenses.

And who was this berk¹ who was trying to blame the manifest and chronic failures of the county council to keep roads repaired on the bus company? None other than my own councillor Alan Quirk, whose grip on reality is increasingly tenuous. Apparently this e-mail still exists somewhere: anybody got a copy?

1. look it up

To put it all in some sort of perspective, at the moment the BBC and Guardian websites have headlines on their front pages like:

• Are soaring fuel prices keeping you off the road?
• Why are oil prices so high?
• Oil price ‘may hit $200 a barrel’
• Government urged to take action over fuel prices
• News blog: motorists feel squeeze

And the slightly more positive:

• Petrol-electric hybrids: the driving future

And all that is from the calmer, more objective sites. I dread to think what the Mail and Express are like.

The main headline of that last story from the Guardian was “Fuel costs 16p per mile. Why?” and it provoked some interesting and amusing discussions at lunch today, of which more later.

Now I don’t like to pay a lot for petrol any more than anybody else does, but one fact remains: it is still cheaper for me to run a car than to take the bus to work. I am taking into account the cost of tax, insurance, MOT, petrol and (this year) a £500 bill for servicing and repairs and still it costs me less to run my car than it would cost me to just take the bus to work every day! It would be even less if I only used the car for commuting and not for a few other local trips per week too.

Even with the recent price rises it is still cheaper for me to run a car, and it is a lot more convenient and faster. That can not be right. There is no personal incentive for me whatsoever to change to the bus. And this is not new. The high petrol prices are new and catching all the headlines but the rail and bus prices have been high compared to car travel for ages with hardly any interest.

The difference is that public transport does not have anything half as effective as the motoring lobby.

I’m not arguing, by the way, that fuel costs should be higher: just that even at current levels they are not as bad as rail and bus fares. I would argue to bring public transport prices down to the level of running a car rather than bring motoring costs up to the levels of public transport.

I know that I am not typical: my car has a small engine and is supposedly cheap to run. I only use it to go to work and I only work a few miles from home, but doesn’t that make me a prime candidate for taking the bus – or cycling, but that’s another story. The fuel cost for my motor is less than the 16p a mile figure quoted in the Guardian, but even so look at the public transport costs I could have instead.

As the crow flies I live about 3 miles from work, although its more like 5 miles by the route I take. To take a bus would mean a fare of £1.50. Each way. That is more like 50p a mile – three times more than the 16p a mile of average fuel costs. Before the recent round of increases it probably cost 4 times more to take the bus. Petrol would have to be something like £4 a litre to make it financially worth my while to take the bus.

Or how about the train? Last week I took a train from St Pancras to Three Bridges. That is about 25 miles I think. Maybe 27. The fare was £10.90. That is 43p per mile, still nearly 3 times the motoring (fuel) cost.

I was coming back from France, where I had taken an RER train from central Paris to Versailles which cost me 2.8 Euros. That works out at about £2.22 for 12 miles or about 18.5p per mile. Still a little more than the cost of fuel for a car but its in the same ball park.

The difference is that the French recognise the benefits of greater use of public transport and subsidise it enough to make it competitive with motoring on cost. They also tend to not live so far from work, which helps. And they are quite big on car-sharing – the ‘co-voiturage’ sections of our company bulletin boards are the largest and most active sections.

It would take a long time for our culture to change enough that people here get away from thinking that its sensible to live 100 miles from where they work and a long time to persuade those that live closer to choose buses and trains over cars – but making the trains and buses not 3 or 4 times more expensive than driving, and providing more route options would at least make it register as a viable alternative.

The wider benefits would be as great as they would be hard to quantify and so with current attitudes we are not likely to see any reasonable subsidies from government at any level or even from employers. (Mine provide free on-site parking but they would not, I am sure, give staff a bike or make a contribution towards fares at the same cost to them – but that’s as much a function of the tax regime as the company’s attitude)

So don’t give me all this ‘war on the motorists’ cobblers. Us motorists have been happy to see those who have no choice but to use public transport systematically pissed on for decades and now we are expected to pay a third as much per mile as they do we are kicking off. The word ’systematically’ is deliberate. When the GLC actually did try to implement subsidised fares in London the Government of the day had the decision reversed through the law, and taxation and housing policies all encourage driving more than anything else.

I wonder though. If you did a venn diagram of those who exclusively use public transport and those who do not bother to vote, would most of the members be in the intersection? I can’t see any sort of change until those who are most affected by the outcome of elections stop being those least likely to take part. There is a huge untapped pool of people out there who do not realise how much potential influence they have.
One interesting thing is that we no longer hear the argument from the fuel strikes of a couple of years ago about how much cheaper petrol is on the continent. Remember all those stories about lorries filling up in France before coming over here? With the global price increases and the pound/euro rate their fuel now costs only a little less than ours (for unleaded that is). Where we do see the difference is in the cost of train tickets and probably bus tickets, but that isn’t generating a mass outcry for subsidised travel.

I think I will save our lunchtime flights of fancy about alternative fuels for a separate post.

The story explains that the moving of Eurostar services from Waterloo to the new St Pancras station causes a problem because while Waterloo is South of the river, St Pancras is in North London and thus further away and harder to get to for those of us in West Sussex, which all sounds perfectly reasonable – if you know bugger all about London’s rail services.

After spending 6 years working at Waterloo I can confirm that getting to Kings Cross/St Pancras from there is a pain in the arse. Waterloo is, I think, the only London terminus without a direct main line or underground connection to Kings Cross. You can take a tube to Euston then change for one stop on the Vic line, or you can take a train from Waterloo East to London Bridge to get a Northern line tube, or several other unappealing options. My colleagues would often walk part of the way or even walk all the way there just to avoid the tortuous rail journey.

After lots of lobbying, TfL have agreed to run a shuttle bus from Waterloo to St Pancras, and Cllr Tex Pemberton of West Sussex county council said:

“When a contact at Transport for London wrote to tell me about the decision he joked they were going to call the bus the ‘Tex Express’, in recognition of my lobbying activity.”

Or maybe they thought it should be called that because it will be expensive and do nothing for railway passengers from West Sussex?

For the benefit of anyone who is as unfamiliar with public transport as Mr Pemberton appears to be, trains from West Sussex go to Victoria station, which has a direct link by tube to Kings Cross/St Pancras, except for a few which go to London Bridge which also has a direct tube link to Kings Cross/St Pancras, and the erstwhile Thameslink service which goes directly to, er, Kings Cross and will soon stop at the new St Pancras International instead.

In fact, getting to St Pancras or a station which is directly linked to it is as easy as just not getting off your train from West Sussex until you get to central London. Getting to Waterloo, on the other hand, involves changing at Clapham Junction, where there are no lifts, no escalators, no trolleys, and wheelchair users are advised to allow one hour to get from one platform to another. And don’t get me started on the crowds and how you can wait on platform 10 for ages, watching packed trains pull in before you find one you can just squeeze onto – and that is without luggage.

If I wanted to get a train from Crawley to France I could travel to Victoria, get a Vic line train to St Pancras and hop on a Eurostar. or I could travel from Three Bridges station and catch a train directly to Kings Cross. OK, there is a walk from there to St Pancras but its shorter than the walk from the Waterloo platforms to the bus stops. Or I could catch a train from Crawley, Ifield, Horsham, Chichester or wherever and change at Three Bridges, East Croydon or Gatwick onto a Kings Cross-bound train. (Gatwick would be better with luggage because of the lifts)

For some reason Tex thinks I would rather change at Clapham Junction, fight to get on an SWT train to Waterloo, try to find which of the 30 bus stops around the station the shuttle leaves from and take a bus through London’s crowded streets. And there was no mention of it being a free shuttle either was there?

Another consideration is that visitors to London really do not like taking buses if they can take a train or tube instead, they just feel uncomfortable and worry that they will not know where to get off. Personally I prefer the buses to the trains, but I am in a minority and as an ex-Londoner then an ex-commuter I am not a casual visitor.

I feel in the mood for some proper fisking of the article…

He became concerned when the move was announced that there would be no provision for passengers who travel from Sussex and use Waterloo as their main port of call in London.

ie stupid people. People who would get off a train which is going where they want to go and change onto a train which is going somewhere awkward instead.

He claimed passengers faced having to make several changes on the underground, change buses, take a taxi or face a walk from King’s Cross station to St Pancras.

Only if they are such a nimrod that they went to Waterloo in the first place. The walk from Kings Cross tube to St Pancras is not far. Possibly not as far as the walk from platform 12 to platform 10 at Clapham Junction or the walk from Waterloo to the bus stops. The walk from Kings cross Thameslink station is a little further, but within weeks that will be moved to St Pancras anyway. And its not several changes on the underground anyway: its only one change unless you go a really silly way.

He said: “I contacted Transport for London about this issue because for most people from Sussex getting to Waterloo to catch Eurostar trains has been comparatively easy

Compared to what? Not compared to getting a tube from Victoria or not having to change at all on Thameslink.

“However, getting to the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras from Waterloo is not as easy. It currently involves making several changes on the bus and underground or having to use a taxi, which is certainly not suitable for everyone.”

By which he might mean not suitable for anyone who is not on expenses. But this whole argument is based on a false premise. You might as well say that getting to St Pancras from the Isle of Wight is not as easy – its true but there is no good reason to go via the Isle of Wight. And I am still wondering how it takes ’several’ changes on the underground.

Anyway, well done to Tex. He has managed to get an unappealing solution to a problem that did not exist in the first place. About the best that can be said for it is that it will be cheaper than Fastway and in any case will not be paid for by West Sussex. It is not totally useless though: it will be very handy for anyone in the South West or in South West London whose train services all do go to Waterloo.

Just a thought though. Is it more worrying that out of all the 70-odd Tory councillors on WSCC they decided Tex was the expert on transport, or that Transport for London didn’t have anyone familiar enough with main line rail routes to point any of the above out to Tex in the first place to save him all that lobbying? Are they so wrapped up in their tubes and buses that they don’t know what happens on the big railway?

And for once I know I am not alone. Between reading that Argus story this afternoon and bothering to write about it tonight lots of people have added comments saying much the same thing, including:

• He has not got any idea about our train system
• He is an embarrassment to the smooth running of local government.
• Am I missing something here? Sussex trains don’t go to Waterloo they go to Victoria…
• No doubt Tex has actually never been on a train
• Tex Pemberton and WSCC transport are a waste space.

And, amazingly, none of those comments is even from RWS!

One of the highlights of the year is the veteran car run at the end of the year, when all the old cars stop off in the High Street for a breather.

Today it was the same sort of thing, but for commercial vehicles. The Historic Commercial Vehicles Society had a London to Brighton run today and used the Broadfield Stadium car park as a halfway house.

I got down there at about 8:45am – not a time I would normally be up and about on a Sunday – to see the first ones arriving. By the time I left at about 10:30 the car park was heaving with old buses, vans, lorries, fire engines and all sorts of other contraptions.

There were some lovely old Morris Minor and Austin vans, a wide variety of buses from steam powered ones up to Routemasters, lots of antique lorries and nearly all of them looked a lot more shiney than my 7-year-old Mondeo. Obviously a lot of care has been taken with these vehicles. Most of them are in far better condition than when they were new as they are not now being used as workhorses.

Having said that, I think a few are still used, like how Harrods have a couple of their old delivery vans. There was a butcher’s van with “No to Tescos” stickers in the windows which made me suspect it still belongs to a butcher’s shop.

Just before 10 a whole fleet of fire engines arrived. They were of varying types and age but all came from Essex, including one from my old home town, Basildon. Quite a few vehicles had their original livery, especially the buses, which had route numbers and destinations on them and drivers and conductors in period outfits. I wonder how many of them have appeared in films or TV programmes set in the past?

I was quite surprised, given that this was a national event, how many of the vehicles were quite local to us. Sussex was very well represented, and one of the most local machines was also one of the most impressive – a steam omnibus from Horsham.

This St. John’s ambulance is an interesting one. I assume from the colour scheme and the word ’sympathy’ that is was used to carry dead bodies, but it does not look big enough to lay a person out in whether they are dead or alive.

One of the more unusual vehicles was an old British Railways service lorry. It was a Scammel articulated lorry with a three-wheeled cab. Inside the cab there were three pedals on the floor and three levers like signal box levers. One of them came up between two of the pedals. When I flew a helicopter there were fewer controls! The amazing thing was that if you stuck your head in the window the thing still smelled of railways

While I was at the stadium I met up with someone I have been looking forward to meeting for a long time after corresponding online for a while. George is a retired chap with various enthusiasms including cycling and photography which he combines to generate an enormous number of pictures of Crawley and beyond. We have been comparing pictures for ages, and jointly administer the Crawley group on Flickr , but never actually met until today.

A lovely man, and I’m not just saying that because he was one of the few people who voted for me and TP in Furnace Green!

I only got a little bit carried away with the camera… if anyone is really interested in old buses (and I know a couple of my ex-bosses at London Underground who that applies to) the complete set of photos is on Flickr.

I can't help thinking that if a certain house in Bewbush had such a gadget back in October 2005 it might have looked something like this… 

View inside the house:

View outside the house. 5 minutes later: