I found a leaflet about the forthcoming congestion charge for taking your car into central London, which starts next month. I think it should be renamed to a £5 stupidity tax, but that’s not really very politically correct. There’s already been threats that vigilante car-lovers will be taking to the streets to try and destroy the cameras that read your registration number. I hope that if they do, they get a right good beating up from the police. But again, not very politically correct.

Basically, what gets on my nerves are the complaints about public transport in London. It’s obviously not perfect, but trust me, if you’ve every tried living out in the west of Scotland, the transport system in London is pretty darned impressive. On Monday, I paid £8.50 for my first bus pass (I’m bored with walking in and out of college) which gets me all zones, unlimited journeys, all services and operators, twenty four hours a day (and the buses do run all night, every night) for seven days. Which is rather good value. The down side is that the buses aren’t particularly fast - although at peak times the nearest bus stop has three routes, two of which have buses at 4 minute intervals (so around 1-2 minutes between buses!), it’s not significantly quicker than walking. That’s because there’s so many cars, each with one or two people in them, crawling along, parking in bus lanes and clogging up the roundabouts. If there were no cars, the buses would go much faster, and would therefore be seriously good. It’s not like the drivers are a major proportion of commuters - less than 10%. Get rid of them, and the 30% of commuters on the buses would end up with a gold plated service, and we’d even let former car drivers come and join us, for much less than they currently pay.

I sincerely hope that the £5 congestion charge is the start of a slippery slope of increasing charges and increasing zone areas, ending up with a few stubborn drivers entirely subsidising the public transport for the rest of us. That would be sweet.