Transport blues

Every time I need to take a journey I do try and look at the alternatives, and one has to conclude that despite the rhetoric, the UK government are either impotent, complacent or complicit in making it very hard to be green, and making public transport options far too expensive.

Of course the green sages would say don't travel. Well maybe the world comes to them, but for work, I need to go and see how the hospital at St Helens and Knowsley are managing the transition from paper records to electronic practice. In their case, Electronic document management, ie scanning the paper and showing the result on screens as much as possible.

It's a trip organised by our local acute hospital, so we started with 'the project manager will be flying on this particular flight from Southampton to Manchester, who wants to share a taxi'. Well, for team building and being in the meeting at the right time, we all would. But for sustainability, internal UK flights really shouldn't feature.

So I looked at the train. From Poole, there used to be several direct services a day to Manchester, Edinburgh and other points north. To convenience the train operators, they were allowed to truncate services some years ago at Bournemouth, saving 5 minutes off the journey, (or even Southampton for some services) but meaning changing trains and wasting between 1/2 and an hour waiting. Targets and stupid privatisation of the railways.

The 05:00am train (crikey, I'm used to getting up early if I have to, but not that early) would, via London, get me to St Helens around 10:30am. No wait, that is £100 more expensive than the plane. Avoiding London is £2 cheaper than the plane, but gets me there at 11:30am.

So despite wishing to do the right thing, I am booked onto the flight. I'll take that same train from Poole to Eastleigh Airport at stupid o' clock, but should be at Manchester about 8am, and then a taxi.

And then I found that the meeting is due to be 09:30-2pm, so my train options would have made me very late. Or to get there on time, spend the overnight 5 hours on Birmingham New Street station (which I did after a Genesis concert years ago).

When you look at the options that are available, they are all rubbish. And our government seem set to make them less attractive. I am not a great fan of the idea of High Speed Train, (I prefer more frequent trains across the network) but time is an issue when working, and the logic is not green at all. :(