Okay, I couldn't resist getting replying to this! I now live on the west coast of Canada but before that I lived in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. When I used to work just outside Portsmouth, I cycled there but suffered several accidents of one sort or another and was happy not to have to do that any more once I could afford a car. My last job was mostly in New Malden in Surrey (near Wimbledon) which was a 65 mile drive. If I was on the road by 5:30 in the morning, I could do the trip in 45 minutes door-to-door as it was mostly motorway or dual carriageway (and no, I may not have stuck to the speed limit!) If I left much later, it could take up to 4 hours. Driving home on a Friday afternoon in the summer was a nightmare with all the traffic heading for the coast, even using 'rat runs' around Hindhead (the main slow area by the time I left). Until my job required me to work a lot of extra hours, there used to be a group of 4 of us who would commute - someone to talk to when you are stationary in a queue of tr affic!
A lot of people use public transport in the big cities but outside it just isn't available a lot of the time. Growing up on the border of Bedfordshire/Cambridgeshire/Hertfordshire, we had no bus service to our county town (Bedford - where I used to play hockey) or my school town (we had a special school bus) or most other places. There were a couple of buses to Cambridge if you were willing to walk to the main road to get to it. Now, my recently widowed mother, living in the same village, doesn't even have that level of service with public transport. There are no buses to the nearest railway station and the nearest taxi (and I would dread to think how much they would charge) is 5 miles away. I can't comment on all areas but the ones I am familiar with (and nearly all my family members live in rural areas scattered around the UK) have very poor or non-existent public transport available. My first summer job was in Cambridge and I went in each day by bus. Though it was o nly 15 miles usually, the trip would take over an hour as the bus wended its way around all the intermediate villages. Still, it was my only option at that time. People here in the Vancouver area talk about heavy traffic but I have never seen anything close to the traffic jams in England. Looking at a map and measuring distances is one thing, looking at what the roads are like and where the route takes you is another. Then you have to add how many people are trying to use the same route and the differences between England and North America become apparent. Here in North America I have had occasion to work (and commute) in Massachusetts, California, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec and I have yet to witness anything like the traffic conditions in the UK (I worked in Edinburgh for a while as well). The 'grid system' in bigger towns and cities here also help getting through them as there tend to be alternative routes if there is an accident or something. One other comment - a US gallon is smaller than an imperial gallon. That doesn't mean that prices over here aren't a lot lower (and even more so in the US) but it is another factor to consider. Ever since I came here in 1997, it has worked out fairly accurately that I pay roughly the same price number-wise for petrol/gas as family members back in the UK, just with a different currency sign in front! As I said, I couldn't resist :-) Helen. On Sunday, June 01, 2008, at 10:54AM, "Dora Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Aren't walking and bicycling both more popular options in England than here? >And isn't public transportation far better and far more publicly accepted as >an actual transportation option? In the U.S., only the poor and students >would be caught dead taking public transportation, except in New York City, >where the middle class are sometimes caught dead taking public >transportation but the rich never do. Here there are two badges of honor >of any worthwhile human being - driving a car, and nto sharing housing, and >people literally starve to maintain that standard of living. > >Also, the distances are much shorter in England than here. You can >actually drive from Scotland to London in a few hours. I think half of >England is within an hour's drive of London. Certainly two hours. In >otherwords, you can drive halfway across England in the same time I can >drive from one end of Austin to the other, and you could certainly drive >across England in less time than I can drive from Austin to Houston. > >If gasoline ever reaches $8 a gallon here, I think there'll be a revolution. >Either that or the population will finally learn how to ride bicycles. > >Yours, >Dora Smith >Austin, TX >[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
