Rolling Home

The pie man has, temporarily, become a road commuter.

Due to my impending child situation I am shunning my usual 1hr 30 mins each way train journey in favour of a 1hr (Give or take) car drive. This is largely to allow me a quick return home should my young be in danger of spawning.

So, here are my first impressions of car vs train on a regular commute.

I actually prefer the train. In sheer practicality, the car is the winner, it gets me home around 3o mins faster and allows me about 15 mins more sleep in the mornings. I am also technically travelling for the full hour not waiting at platforms. Overall I should really be bigging up the car. After all, its my own box, I don't need to cope with someone trying to take up more than their share of the seat next to me, I can listen to whatever i want on the stereo without headphones and control the temperature as much as an elderly Renault Clio will allow. Some may ask, why would I give this up to sit on crowded trains with all the irritating fellow members of the human race?

There are several reasons why I prefer the train. While the trip is longer the amount of effort I actually have to make is minimal, I can read the Metro, or a book while doing my hour and a half commute. In the car, I'm driving. In fact I'm driving even when I'm stuck in the inevitable queues that form when driving on the M8 through Glasgow to motherwell, surely one of the most poorly designed stretches of motorway in Britain. And this is the crux of the matter. On a train all the idiot fellow commuters are soft human lumps like me. We are all in the same can, and occasionally you see great acts of kindness and decency that almost give you hope as a species. On the road the same idiots (obviously not the exact same idiots) have been given a death box to practice their idiocy in, so instead of their selfishness and stupidity merely being an annoyance, it is now endangering my life. Ok I exaggerate a little but really, even with the bottlenecks speed changes and the like a Motorway should only grind to a halt if it is actually closed. The reason it stops is because of poor driving, such as the following examples.

1. Phantom Jam. This is a recorded phenomenon. It is caused by breaking, not any breaking, but tailgaters breaking. See if someone is not leaving a decent space, they ted to be a bit punchy on their breaks when the car in front starts to slow down (Sometimes wheather it breaks or not) This usually means they loose more speed than they should have trying to match the car in front, this causes a domino effect that can bring traffic behind to a standstill.

2. Lane Skipping. Often caused by phantom jams, but happens anywhere where all lanes are slow moving traffic queues. You always have captain impatient who is sure the other stream of traffic is moving faster, so he'll switch lanes. In slow traffic this means stopping his lane and the one he's trying to get into in order to change. With one car its an embuggerance, but there is never just one. This is why lanes seem to take turns in changing speed. If everyone stuck to their lane in a traffic queue it would flow, slowly but flow, but because we have idiots jumping for the greener grass on the other side of the fence that lane has more cars, and slows down, while the lane beside has fewer, and so appears to be going faster, so what do they do, change again. Next time you're stuck on the M8 look for a distinctive vehicle, a van or something. You'll pass it, it will pass you, you'll pass it again. Basically you both get to the end of the jam at roughly the same time.

3. Queue jumpers. The M8 is really bad for this, due to its poor design around charing Cross, incidentally its main black spot, it has ample opportunity form people to try and skip the queue as the motorway temporarily expands to three lanes. Now, for the first stretch it is technically a 3 lane motorway, however in reality it is just a slip road, Eastbound leading to cathedral, and westbound to charing cross, if you needed to overtake in normal traffic, fair enough, but when the traffic is one big queue all you're doing is jumping, and causing more holdups as you try and squeeze back in to the traffic further up. Westbound I've actually seen the cars in the slip road held up by some selfish moron who has waited until just before where the road splits to attempt to merge back in. He's stationary beeping at the understandably irritated drivers who don't want him to profit form queue jumping, and the drivers behind him wish he'd take it like a man and go through charing cross, admitting that he couldn't beat the traffic this time.

See, morons but with way more power.

Cost wise, at base its a tough calculation. My work pays for half my train fares, but assuming they didn't.

Travel from Home to Motherwell costs (Using Monthly passes) around £150 per month, calling a month 4 weeks that's £38 per week approx.

The tank on the smaller car costs around £40 to fill up and gives me around 350 miles. Round trip for work is 66 miles a day meaning I should technically have to fill up once a week. So this actually looks like it's only £2 more expensive per week to knock over an hour from my total round trip commute. Ok it adds up to £104 per year, but then that's over 52hrs of my time, or over 2 days not spent travelling. Only problem with this sort of calculation is that it doesn't take into account the true cost of the car.

If we go with one car, the Big one, costs more to fill but gets more from it, it also needs road tax, which with a 2 litre Diesel engine is only going to increase. It also need insured, and I cannot guarantee exclusive use because there will come a point where my wife gets sick of taking our soon to be born baby on the bus. Still disregarding those factors, adding in Road tax, Insurance and servicing, we're talking adding around £500 per year, now including that in my travel costs is arguable, as we'd be keeping the car anyway. But keeping the small car it is at least £300 per year assuming the elderly car doesn't break.

I'll stay on the train.