On The Buses

Reg Varney

One of the things we're told to do if we want to cut our carbon footprint is use public transport more instead of the car.

That's okay if you live in a city or big town. The buses/trains are usually regular and you can make use of cheap deals like season tickets. Having lived most of my life in London, I know this for a fact.

Now that I've moved away from the capital, I've discovered just how rubbish public transport can be. So I rarely use it anymore. Or, at least, until I changed jobs a month ago. Now, thanks to there being almost no parking at my new company, I'm forced to use that "rubbish public transport". Oh, the irony.

Still, my experiences so far have been fairly positive.

• Bus frequency: Good actually. Every 15 minutes. Probably because the journey's between 2 sizeable towns. The door-to-door time is reasonable too. Mostly a 50 minute journey compared to 30 to 40 minutes by car.

• Cost: Good. If I compare the costs of driving my Prius to work with taking the bus (using an annual season ticket), they're pretty much the same. That was surprising.

• Comfort and Convenience: It's nice to be able to read a book on my way to work. However, the seats seem to have been designed by sadists, or aliens with no understanding of human anatomy, or someone who came really cheap.  And I'm not looking forward to the Winter - All that waiting around in the cold and rain. Urghh!

• Carbon Footprint: Ah. Here's the bad news. According to my friendly carbon footprint calculator, going to work by bus (7000 miles per year) adds 0.33 tonnes to my footprint (Compared to my car). This is despite the fact that I'm sharing the bus with some 50 others!

So my opinion of public transport in 'the sticks' is changing. As long as you live in a decent size town, the buses are regular. Smaller towns and villages are less well served.

Costwise, you've got a good chance of saving money on your daily commute. But you need to work out the costs quite carefully, I don't think season tickets will work out cheaper for everyone.

As for cutting your carbon footprint, I guess if you have a standard family car that does something less than say, 45 mpg then it may be worth considering. If I'd been driving my previous car, a Nissan Primera (30 mpg), I'd be saving around 0.6 tonnes a year.

Yeah, buses, worth a look. And the trains? I looked into that too: Almost double the cost of the bus!