Re: toll lanes
"This is only half true." etc
Interesting - a couple of downvotes.
Over the years, from school, through university to work I've used a wide range of ways to travel - on foot, cycle, motorcycle (does a BSA Bantam count?) car, bus, train and tube, individually or in combination. I've managed to miss out horse riding, ferries & flight but I think it was a fair sample.
The single worst commute was by train and tube from High Wycombe to central London in pre-privatisation days. No matter whether it was walk or drive to the station, train to Marylebone or Paddington, one tube or two all the rides, walks and waits for trains and tubes added up. At best they added up to at least an hour and a half each way or, as I regarded it, the equivalent of two extra full-days work a week, unpaid and unproductive. The Paddington route ran alongside the traffic jam that was the A40 and was clearly a better solution than that, but efficient? No.
I'm aware that for many an hour and a half each way would be less than many experience. But it's not what ought to be an acceptable way to expect people to live in what's supposed to be an advanced society.
But, my downvoters, don't you realise that your presumably preferred trains, electric cars or whatever aren't the solution? They're part of the cause of the problem. Every advance in transport since the invention of the horse-drawn omnibus has facilitated the clustering of workplaces into ever larger lumps, ever increasingly separated from where people live. It's an unsustainable mess. We ought to be looking at how to fix it, not doing more and more of the same.
