Rob wrote:
>It is quite clear you don't live in Houston.<G>
>For me it would work out:
>Car: 40 minutes (realistically, probably over an hour)>Train: N/A>Tram:
>N/A>Bus: 60 minutes>Bicycle: 2+ hours
I think I have you beat: each way my commute to a customer I need to work on
site twice/week is:
Car: 40-45 minutes, realistically
Train & Tram: N/A
Bus: the only possibility here is to go to the nearest park and ride for
downtown, catch a bus downtown, find another park and ride going counterflow,
take that, and then walk to where I work. If the bus schedules timed
perfectly, it would take about 2.5 hours each way. With realistic timing, I'd
say about 3-3.5 hours each way.
Bicycle: I'm not sure about this, because I take the freeway about 35 miles
each way. I can't take my bike on the freeway, and would be leary about the
feeder roads (when I did ride a bike to work 2 miles each way for about 2
years, I was hit by cars twice...even though I was able to ride on the
sidewalks and side streets.
Now, Charlie Rob and I do not live in London, so our experiences do not
directly translate. What interests me in the article is that the ban is not
simply in central London, which was explictly declared insufficient, but all
the boroughs...which I've seen on Wikipedia to encompass 175 square miles.
Without cars, one would require a very dense public transportation network,
probably greater than inner London, or require people to walk blocks after
getting off public transportation. The other option, of course, is biking or
walking the entire way.
What I don't understand about Martin's comments is that he seems to think that
the potential downside to this is tangential to meeting pollution goals by
eliminating cars. I tried to catch every post of his, but may have missed one,
so I hope I can ask the question why adressing the downside to a proposal is
not germane to the proposal?
I'd be willing to wager that, if you looked at banning cars from London, you
would find a number of people who would have to find far more expensive means
of transportation than automobiles. In saying this, I am thinking about the
value of people's time. The value of my time is clear to me because I am a
consultant, and see unbillible hours as pure drain. If it takes 1 hour to go
to work instead of 15 minutes, then that's a loss of 1.5 billible hours. When
I commute to the site of the one customer, I don't bill those hours (as is
customary for technical consultants, long term large contracts with in town
customers do not include billible hours for driving in town)....and determine
my effective compensation based on the entire time spent on that customer.
I see the origional article as an off the cuff assessment, which will have
little bearing on things, beside the letting the author feel rather smug about
himself. This is, of course, a YMMV viewpoint.
Dan M.
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