Help me become a Londoner!

[Paul Makepeace]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 6:29 AM, Luis Motta Campos
<luismottacampos at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> From: Paul Makepeace <paulm at paulm.com>
>> Sent: Tue, 24 November, 2009 12:17:27
>>
>> Get a bicycle or a scooter* or a motorbike and avoid public transport
>> as much as possible. Not that public transport isn't good in London,
>> all things considered, it's just that a motorbike is far, far better.
>
> I've been to London only once (on vacations), and, as far as I was concerned, public transport is not that bad. Of course, I was not using fixed routes or trying to get somewhere at a specific time during rush hours, that should make some difference.
>
> In a general broad sense my experience with public transport in London is that it's decent reliable and efficient enough to help you without being such a pain to use.

Yeah, I'm not dinging TfL, and yes, they do provide a reasonable means
of getting around London with the caveat that you check for line
closures on every journey (something that I don't recall methodically
doing 10 years ago).

It's that your own two wheeled transport is just so much quicker. The
earlier-quoted w9 to w2 3RL journey would be about six minutes on
a(ny) bike, and no walking.

Where a bike really excels however is at night. If you go out late and
need to get home the ratio between time on night bus and bike can be
upwards of 10x.

Paul


>
> Of course, my opinion might be slightly biased by the fact that most of my life I've used public transport in third world countries, where, I can assure you, everybody prefers to have a car and handle the maintenance burden and the parking hassle than to rely on public transport...
>
> My 2 travelled cents. ;)
>
> Cheers
> --
> Luis Motta Campos is a software engineer,
> Perl junkie, foodie and amateur photographer.
>
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