Driving reign

Before it began, I considered myself as someone with good green credentials when it came to travelling. I cycle to work, I like to walk, I use the train for long distances. But did I miss my own personal easy means of door-to-door transport. The car is a very useful beast of burden. Public transport is fine if your feet are just carrying yourself and a reasonably-sized bag. But once you need to take anything else, such as a new duvet or a set of shelves, you hit problems. You have to get it up the step into the bus or train, having first dragged it from the shop to the bus stop. Then you have to find a space to put the thing without dumping it on someone else’s feet, blocking the aisle or pushing it into someone else’s lap. Finally, having reached your home stop, you have to get it out of the bus, again without hitting someone.

With a car, you take the thing from shop to boot and there it stays, perfectly harmless, until you reach your destination where you pull it out. Then there are the joys of public transport late at night in York. First you have to find a timetable, bearing in mind that the few timetables that are on bus stops can’t be read in the dark. If you have to change buses, don’t expect them to connect. They won’t. There were times in the last year, standing at a dark bus stop endlessly waiting, I found myself longing for the Meeting Of The Trams.

This system in Brno, the Czech Republic, has been running for half a century or so, and means that no matter what time of night you are travelling and what part of the city you are in, you know when your bus/tram/trolley bus will arrive and that it will connect with one taking you to your destination, without fail.

Every hour, on the hour, all the incoming trams meet at the main railway station in the city centre. Passengers change between them, and off they go to connect in the suburbs with buses and trolley buses, which go out to the remoter areas where they turn round so they can connect with the next inward-bound tram. As long as you know how far you are from the railway station, you know when you have to be at the nearest bus/tram/trolley bus stop and when you will reach your destination. But then Brno was run for decades by communists who were good at public transport. They had to be very few communist citizens had cars.

As for carrying bulky objects, I am very grateful to my friends who helped out at times of need, some many times. Yes, I used the delivery services provided by supermarkets and other shops.

But you have to pay per shop and be at home when the lorry arrives and you don’t always have much say in when that might be. And if you are like me and play music, you have instruments and scores to carry to rehearsals and performances. So now the car is sitting at home, waiting for the next rehearsal or bulky purchase.

Or so I tell myself, trying to convince myself that I have still have green credentials. But the spring weather is reminding me that for a year the Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors and a long list of tourist attractions without little or no bus service have been out of reach. The open road calls.