Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Entirely unashamed anti car propaganda, and the more the better.

I support AFC Wimbledon and live in Tulse Hill. Absolutely fucking ideal travel scenario for me: direct journey taking just 12 minutes.

On every single one of the three home games I’ve attended so far, there were widespread train cancellations. On every single day.

There are only two trains per hour on a Saturday, so it’s far from a Tube service. If I’m planning to meet my mates for a couple of drinks before kick off, having a half-hourly service cancelled really fucks up your day. I can forgive the odd mishap, but cancelled services on every single occasion I needed to travel is fucking pisspoor and suggest a systematic problem.

So each time I ended up driving myself to Plough Lane in a Zipcar, and then booking an Uber for the journey home, because by then I really didn’t want to risk another cancellation. More expensive for sure, but when faced with a service so consistently unreliable you feel it’s heads or tails whether you might have to spend an extra 40 minutes on a miserable deserted platform to undertake a 12-minute journey, it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone if people give up on public transport.

Bottom line: people are never going to be deterred from embarking on car journeys, whether private car or a taxis, when even the most idealistic and shortest of public transport alternatives are laughably unreliable.
 
T & P said:
I support AFC Wimbledon and live in Tulse Hill. Absolutely fucking ideal travel scenario for me: direct journey taking just 12 minutes.

On every single one of the three home games I’ve attended so far, there were widespread train cancellations. On every single day.

There are only two trains per hour on a Saturday, so it’s far from a Tube service. If I’m planning to meet my mates for a couple of drinks before kick off, having a half-hourly service cancelled really fucks up your day. I can forgive the odd mishap, but cancelled services on every single occasion I needed to travel is fucking pisspoor and suggest a systematic problem.

So each time I ended up driving myself to Plough Lane in a Zipcar, and then booking an Uber for the journey home, because by then I really didn’t want to risk another cancellation. More expensive for sure, but when faced with a service so consistently unreliable you feel it’s heads or tails whether you might have to spend an extra 40 minutes on a miserable deserted platform to undertake a 12-minute journey, it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone if people give up on public transport.

Bottom line: people are never going to be deterred from embarking on car journeys, whether private car or a taxis, when even the most idealistic and shortest of public transport alternatives are laughably unreliable.
Click to expand...
As all football games are essentially the same, couldn't you just check the scores online from the comfort of your home? That'd save you needlessly polluting the environment.
 
farmerbarleymow said:
As all football games are essentially the same, couldn't you just check the scores online from the comfort of your home? That'd save you needlessly polluting the environment.
Click to expand...
I guess I could do that. I’ll also stop going on holiday, since at the end of the day all places are the same when you think about it. And even if not, I can still find lovely pics of my intended destination online, so no excuse really. What kind of selfish cunt could possibly justify travelling to the Lake District for a break, whether by car or train, when you can look it up on Google?
 
T & P said:
I guess I could do that. I’ll also stop going on holiday, since at the end of the day all places are the same when you think about it. And even if not, I can still find lovely pics of my intended destination online, so no excuse really. What kind of selfish cunt could possibly justify travelling there for a break, whether by car or train?
Click to expand...
Why go through all the hassle and expense of going on holiday when you can find images of any given place in seconds? The pictures are also likely to present the place in a much more flattering light than reality ever will.
 
T & P said:
I guess I could do that. I’ll also stop going on holiday, since at the end of the day all places are the same when you think about it. And even if not, I can still find lovely pics of my intended destination online, so no excuse really. What kind of selfish cunt could possibly justify travelling to the Lake District for a break, whether by car or train, when you can look it up on Google?
Click to expand...

The future is a marvelous place. You don't even have to leave your home anymore.
 
krtek a houby said:
The future is a marvelous place. You don't even have to leave your home anymore.
Click to expand...
Ah but you can if you get there by public transport. Even a two week European train extravaganza is allowed, because trains. A four-mile trip by car to watch the football though, you might as well nuke the Arctic Circle.
 
T & P said:
I support AFC Wimbledon and live in Tulse Hill. Absolutely fucking ideal travel scenario for me: direct journey taking just 12 minutes.

On every single one of the three home games I’ve attended so far, there were widespread train cancellations. On every single day.

There are only two trains per hour on a Saturday, so it’s far from a Tube service. If I’m planning to meet my mates for a couple of drinks before kick off, having a half-hourly service cancelled really fucks up your day. I can forgive the odd mishap, but cancelled services on every single occasion I needed to travel is fucking pisspoor and suggest a systematic problem.

So each time I ended up driving myself to Plough Lane in a Zipcar, and then booking an Uber for the journey home, because by then I really didn’t want to risk another cancellation. More expensive for sure, but when faced with a service so consistently unreliable you feel it’s heads or tails whether you might have to spend an extra 40 minutes on a miserable deserted platform to undertake a 12-minute journey, it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone if people give up on public transport.

Bottom line: people are never going to be deterred from embarking on car journeys, whether private car or a taxis, when even the most idealistic and shortest of public transport alternatives are laughably unreliable.
Click to expand...

I hate trains pretty much for these reasons. You may not want to but it’s about 30mins on bike on pretty quiet roads, as long as you’re not drinking too much.
 
Not 100% clear what the moral of T & P 's story is. Is it that we should stop spending his hard earned tax money on public transport because he can afford to bypass it with uber?
 
I think the point is that we need to spend more on public transport to make it more reliable and more prevalent. I’m up for that. I’m going into the office tomorrow and rather than walk to my nearest station, which effectively has a train every two hours, or drive 10 minutes to Dorking, which now only has one train an hour, I’m going to drive for 30 minutes to Epsom, which has a proper service comprising lots of trains. This is clearly a stupid situation to be in — the infrastructure is basically there but too thinly applied to be practical. It doesn’t help that the train operating companies took COVID as an excuse to halve their already thin service.
 
T & P said:
I support AFC Wimbledon and live in Tulse Hill. Absolutely fucking ideal travel scenario for me: direct journey taking just 12 minutes.

On every single one of the three home games I’ve attended so far, there were widespread train cancellations. On every single day.

There are only two trains per hour on a Saturday, so it’s far from a Tube service. If I’m planning to meet my mates for a couple of drinks before kick off, having a half-hourly service cancelled really fucks up your day. I can forgive the odd mishap, but cancelled services on every single occasion I needed to travel is fucking pisspoor and suggest a systematic problem.

So each time I ended up driving myself to Plough Lane in a Zipcar, and then booking an Uber for the journey home, because by then I really didn’t want to risk another cancellation. More expensive for sure, but when faced with a service so consistently unreliable you feel it’s heads or tails whether you might have to spend an extra 40 minutes on a miserable deserted platform to undertake a 12-minute journey, it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone if people give up on public transport.

Bottom line: people are never going to be deterred from embarking on car journeys, whether private car or a taxis, when even the most idealistic and shortest of public transport alternatives are laughably unreliable.
Click to expand...
This is an argument for better public transport, not for cars.
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
This is an argument for better public transport, not for cars.
Click to expand...
Erm, yes, that was actually my point. But what chance is there to convince people to abandon car travel in cities if the public transport alternative is just not good enough? Provide a reliable network first, then ask people to ditch car journeys. The other way around is just not going to cut it.
 
The thing is that unlike in the Surrey hills public transport is already pretty good in South London and the train is not the only option to get between those two places. There's a reliable and frequent bus service, which in most cases will be a little slower than going by private car. The main thing that could be improved about bus journeys is to make them faster and this could be achieved with more dedicated lanes and less traffic on the roads. But you have people arguing against measures that could achieve those things and they'll nearly always also be saying that they shouldn't be implemented until public transport is improved.

In many places it's valid to say that you can't really expect people to start using their cars less - until the alternatives are improved. Not in relatively central London though. The alternatives will never be improved "enough" for most people who employ that argument. It will permanently be just not quite good enough yet. Even if the Thameslink service were totally reliable and ran every 10 seconds, we'd still have T & P telling us about some other journey that he can make more conveniently by private car, and telling us that we should not make those private journeys more inconvenient until the alternatives are better. Even when the only way to improve the alternatives relies on making those private journeys more inconvenient.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Yossarian
Entirely unashamed ant car propaganda
Replies
7
Views
434
dessiato
dessiato
ska invita
Car diagnostic computer scanners
Replies
8
Views
340
mauvais
mauvais
A
First car / how do people afford cars when in low paid work?
2
Replies
59
Views
1K
Chz
Chz
kebabking
Car buying websites?
2
Replies
38
Views
1K
colacubes
colacubes
danny la rouge
Car insurance rocketing
2 3 4
Replies
115
Views
4K
Puddy_Tat
Puddy_Tat
Back
Top Bottom