To cut a long story short, for some obscure reason to do with 'encouraging' people to use green alternatives to get to work, our lass has lost her parking permit at work as they've been 'rationalised'. She's decided she'll walk in future, which didn't appeal to me as she drops me off, but told me I can have the car. Now as it costs £2.20 a day to park i did the maths and worked out it's gonna cost me £44 a month ....so I thought bollox to that..I'LL GET THE BUS ... until my daughter informed me it'll cost me £2.60 a day to use the bus ...that's me walking ...........or buy a bike.
.....funny how they bang on about using public transport and price it out of the equation .....

£2.60 dont be stingey

It is a rip off though. If there are two or more of you it's cheaper to get a cab than the bus, and it drops you off door to door and you don't have to stand around wiating in the cold for it not to turn up!

hey do you mind i have feelings too

if you are in the town get a megarider £8.10 for unlimited travel for 7 days and when you arent using it your lass can use it as there is no photocard or anything with it

Sounds like sound advice that.

The cheapest option might be to get your lass to give up work Snowy and drop you off and collect you every night, thus avoiding bus fares and parking charges, assuming that there's no moves afoot to charge you for parking at your own home, which will probably be next.

I can see your reasoning, but I'd like a public transport system that was cheap. reliable, regular and comfortable...at present we've got a monopoly service run by a private company whose fares have went through the roof...I'D EVEN ADVOCATE SUBSIDIES... but only if the company and it's profit margins are justifiable.

I can see your reasoning, but I'd like a public transport system that was cheap. reliable, regular and comfortable.

i would very much agree about the comfortable option. the drivers cabs on the buses are like greenhouses in the summer and fridges in the winter not to mention how bloody uncomfortable the seats are but the passenger seats are even worse for lack of comfort but passengers are only on for 20 min or so but we are on for up to 4 hours 45 minutes at a time.
but define cheap
1.35 from clavering to south fens is cheap
90p from dyke house to the town centre is cheap
and half that for under 16's

compare that against parking prices in the town centre and then add in the petrol costs of driving to and from town to home and i think its reasonable
and according to last nights chip paper soon there will be a 12 hour period where buses will run every 7/8 minutes

It costs me about that from the Fens to get to the town centre

I get a Megarider. Much cheaper in the long run

What is a "bus"?

You rode on a 'special' one when went to school, remember?

Nope.

I always walked to school.

Is a "bus" what comes to take you to the pub when you ring Hudsons?

yes after you have given up waiting for the taxi thats "just around the corner"

well get on at fens shops its only £1.25 to town then

Public tranasport is going down the pan....now run to maximise profit which really isn't what it should be about....I had to laugh at a bit of irony last week...remember the council transport depot, built1984, as a state of the art bus depot....well now it's home to bin wagons. Meanwhile the buses used by the public are parked up in the open air in an old builders yard ....

but that was down to the goverments decision to privatise local transport.
can you see the council tax payer being happy to pay out the cost of running a quality service if it was taken back on by the council and paying premium rates on weekends bank holidays etc and too many management staff the fares may not rise as much as under stagecoach but how much would the tax rise be to fund the service

1 yuan 2 jiao (8.5p) to go anywhere on any bus here within the city AND you can get a card with some discount. Buses every ten minutes from 6am to 11pm.

Who'd buy a car??

when I started working at ICI Billingham 21 years ago, I could cycle from King Oswy to Hartlepool train station, get on the train with my bike, and peddle from Billingham station to work, all within half an hour - and I'd still be at work for 6.45 am, in time for 7 till 2 shift.
If I tried that now, the earliest I'd get to work is 8.30 - way past the 7 o'clock start

I've cycled from Carlton Street (when I lived there) to work in about 45 minutes, because the train wouldn't get me between Hartlepool and Billingham on time any more. However that really is only for the warmer months - it's not much fun peddling 10 miles into a gale force wind in the middle of winter to get to/from work.
Our lass just has to accept that she hasn't got use of the car when I'm going to graft, which means we have to organise all the things for the pub in my days off, and that doesn't give me any time to myself when I'm supposed to be relaxing!!!

Don't ICI do works buses any more, then?
My first job was in the registry at ICI and my sister worked in lab there, mysteriously named A2. Anyway, we were regularly to be seen haring round St Aidan's corner in the mornings, with only seconds to spare for the works bus

ICI doesn't exist as an entity on Teesside these days, all the different business areas have been sold off to various new owners. As a result, it would be a logistical nightmare coordinating and dividing the costs for a works bus service by trying to decide how many employees were travelling to which company - plus the fact that the workforce total is now only about 15% of what it was 21 years ago on ICI sites across Billingham, and there simply wouldn't be enough people on the bus now from Hartlepool!!!!

the only "works" buses now are the service 20/980 for stadium but as it is closing we shall see if the service continues

Now this may sound odd to some on here but I really do curse the car even though I have one...they cost a packet to run and park and oddly enough they make spending money so much easier...."run me down to so and so..." and you spend money, which pre car we wouldn't have been able to because we couldn't have been arsed to walk all the way back down for....
The supermarkets are designed for the motorist, try getting into Tesco's on foot. They used to have a bus stopr ight outside the store entrance for bus users, complete with layby...then they moved it to a layby near the garage entrance, then they took the shelter away...so anybody contemplating using the bus would have to walk all the way down to the garage and stand in the open air for a bus ....wonder why you hardly ever see anyone get the bus there

In the entire history of bad timing.... I really excelled myself there.....

that was a long thread just to sell a knockie off
so did the Pope get back to her then?

is it one of these?
i'm just experimenting to see if i can post photos.....here goes

-thanks to katcha and the especially helpful gremmlin.

Some people have all the luck. The photo Mr gremmlin insisted on helping me with was of ghastly Richard Branson

only because ou said you wanted him for your desk top

she might want his head on her desktop, so as to store her pens in and such like.

No I don't want my pens festooned with Richard Branson's grey matter!

I'll stick with the photo. Which I've already scribbled on and thrown darts at

You've got more than one?? Ooohh get her!!!

I bet you can't write a bet in John Joyce's these days unless you bring your own......

I have lots of pens, some blue ink and some black, some discarded in me middle drawer for having nibs that are too thick or too thin. A pen has to be just right, I always say

Erm, John Joyce?? That's a blast from the past isn't it?

I got me bike pinched from outside John Joyce's.

Our kids strimmer was strapped to it.

I see. So that's how we've got so much mileage out of that particular joke

...could be your kids strimmer got nicked and your bike was strapped to it.... that makes it his problem then and he owes you for a bike..... lateral thinking

I could try that but I bet I could write down the answer now.

Anyway I made the strimmer bit up actually, but the bike bit is true.