In message , at
14:24:45 on Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Dan Gravell
remarked:
Roland Perry wrote:
Quite the reverse. The people whose lifestyle appears to dictate that
they are unwilling to be held ransom by the vagaries of public
transport, are much more likely to make singleton journeys. They don't
ant to be held ransom to car-sharing either.

Well, victims of the system or just misguided idiots, I guess that's a
matter of opinion.

No, just busy businessmen who have found from painful experience that
their means of transport is the best on offer.

Sorry Roland, but I really cannot believe how an individual would
possibly think driving into central London would be quicker than
getting a train in. I guess a few are novices and might not have tried
the train. But if that were the case there must be a hell of a lot of
novices around (given your figures).

It's true. When you look at reliable door-to-door times, the car wins.

Not everyone's lifestyle is the same. As an extreme example, what would
you think if the PM was half an hour late for his questions in the House
of Commons because of problems on the Northern Line? And is paying him
about £100 an hour to sit on a tube train better than having him in a
car and reading his briefing papers in peace?

Somewhere between the PM and "do you want fries with that" is a
crossover line. It seems to be 90:10. I suggest you'd have a very
difficult time making it 95:5, and would be better employed making sure
it didn't degrade to 85:15.

Because it's door to door, and runs when they want it to - not on
some mythical once-every-15-minutes that tuns out to involve half an
hour waits in the rain once too often.

Door to door? There's parking space outside every door in London now?
Central London?

Close enough for most of the purposes we are discussing. And an awful
lot of the cars in *central* London have drivers.

Are we even talking about London? The picture you paint is not one I
recognise.

The people in the cars will typically live in the stockbroker belts.

What's "long"? There are very large numbers who drive more than 50 miles.

I think you answered above - I'd consider long to be a journey where
rail becomes the best bet.

So highly dependent on how close to a viable station the person lives.
Just the difficulty of parking near many of them rules them out as "P&R
for London".
--
Roland Perry