Sometimes we hear that transport is in a dire state, other times the sector is hailed as heroes.The truth is somewhere in between I’ve had a right royal shindig of a past month or so, on and off trains and buses, in all parts of the UK. I’ve clocked up more miles than Phileas Fogg and if the…
Rishi Sunak seems to have concluded that adopting macho anti-environment policies across the board could be a vote winner Last week the PM took a helicopter to Norwich to meet housebuilders Taylor Wimpey and announce that water protection measures need to be swept away Opportunist. Unprincipled. Shameful. Shameless. Desperate. Choose your adjective to describe the full frontal attack…
“Florida has North America’s best passenger rail service.” That was my thought after riding Florida East Coast Railway’s Brightline passenger rail service which runs between Miami and West Palm Beach. Unfortunately, I also experienced what it’s like to be delayed when a Brightline train hits a trespasser, which is unfortunately a frequent occurrence. Fort Lauderdale Station to Miami Central Fort…
More Magnificent Maps (Well, One More) Heathrow Area Bus Diagram It looks as if someone has found this map somewhere at the back of an electronic cupboard and included it to be helpful. It isn’t! It claims to be ..,. … but there is no page 2! It offers a link … … which simply takes us back to where…
First The Good News (If You Can Fund It) It would seem that the very last thing Heathrow wants to do is to give you helpful information about anything. What Heathrow wants to do is to encourage you to travel on a plane to exotic places. Lima (Peru) was the home of Paddington Bear and still is the home of…
Playing Catch-up The airport people are keen for their passengers and staff to use public transport rather than their cars; and over the years have invested quite large sums of money to support new bus ventures and encourage train travel. But it all went a bit belly-up with Covid. Services were curtailed or cancelled “for the duration” and some have…
• If the bus networks are poor, then so are we (TheTimes) • Death of the front garden: Brits spending £27Bn turning front gardens into parking (DirectLine) • Holloways, England’s mysterious sunken roads, extend longer than thought (BBC) • Surprisingly beautiful Berlin U-Bahn stations (ExBerliner) • Helsinki building car-free tram ‘Crown Bridges’ (Built) • New study looks at horrible impact…
Always ready to give his readers a linguistic challenge, the above piece of Japanese orthography forms the core of our first Monday Variety item. It is, as you will all know, the name of a town in Japan. So here is the far less challenging headline in English text. Unusual Utsunomiya Undertaking And there it is, approx 100km north of…
Chaos And Confusion In California This sounds like particularly good news for the sir-travelling American folk as the nation and its inhabitants wrestle with the challenge of global warming, cheap oil, pollution, air quality and international pressure to save a bit of the planet. Although six train sets to serve the massive mega cities of the USA west coast doesn’t…
Befuddled By Brands Almost all pictures of buses in Cherbourg show route numbers and the brand Zephir. The town core network consists of services numbered 1 to 6 … … plus one night service. Interurban routes are lettered. Le réseau devient effectif au 30 août 2021, la nouvelle marque et le nouveau réseau commence cependant avec plusieurs problèmes notamment des…