Mizter T wrote:

That said, I am in favour (I think!) of the massively expensive
Crossrail project... for a long time I didn't really have any properly
considered thoughts on it because I thought it was unlikely to ever
happen, but it seems it is now happening (as ever there's some
uncertainty of course). Though Crossrail won't facilitate long-
distance commuting per-se directly, but inevitably that will be a side-
effect.


An article I read a few years ago suggested that Crossrail would enable
the affluent professionals who are living to the west of London to get
to their highly paid jobs in the City with ease, and the poorer people
from the East End to get to their (not much more than) minimum wage jobs
in the West End in less time than now. :-(


I should just add that I'm not anti-professional people (whatever that
means!), nor anti-commuting as such. I certainly appreciate the
complex and multi-layered reasoning at play behind the decision of
people to do more lengthy commutes. Though I (obviously) do take some
issue with long-distance daily commuting (FSVO "long-distance", which
is of course debatable!).


Yes, I suppose I opened up a can of worms. ;-)


And sometimes I think I might implode under the mass of my own
internal contradictions... and then just propose that everyone should
go off and live off the land, being crofters and woodsmen, where the
big journey is into the next town but one! But the genie of travel is
of course out of the bottle.


We cannot hope to address climate change without taking a good hard look
at transport.

But I am pleased to report that sales of videoconferencing systems are
holding up well in spite of the recession. Companies are at last
beginning to see it as a genuine alternative to expensive and time
consuming travelling to meetings.

I have no doubt academia will lag years behind commerce, with the usual
underworked scientists insisting (to the few who listen) that the
scientific value of face to face networking far exceeds the economic and
environmental cost of their time and travel to and from the meetings. Of
course these are the same guys who will be lecturing us on changing our
travel habits, indeed our whole way of life, in the papers they present
at their far-flung and highly repetitive conferences. ;-)

I used to be lectured by a scientific colleague who strongly criticised
my use of a car for leisure trips because of the CO2 it emitted. The
same guy was a regular visitor to the Galapagos Islands, often more than
once in a year, and drove over 30,000 business miles a year in a car
with a 2.7 litre V6 that drank petrol like it was going out of fashion.
If he had used a more economical car, such as mine, he would have saved
far more CO2 than all my annual car use emitted, leisure *and* business.

Aren't scientists wonderful.