Quickly now, before they fix it. How to get from South Ken to Crystal Palace, via Shepherds Bush, Kew and most of London. If you’re in a taxi, make sure they aren’t using Google Maps for navigation…

Adam writes about the joys of rubber-necking. What confuses me is why british motorways don’t have hedges or somesuch dividing the different flows of traffic. I’ve seen them all over the continent, and not only does it improve the rubber-necking situation, it helps enormously during rainy nights, since you don’t have everyone else’s headlights blinding you.

Steve is making me feel guilty about my lack of fitness. I’ve got a long term plan to run the marathon, but that’s probably long-term as in never. We’ll see.

I came across a link to their website today, and it reminded me of when I first came across the concept of OYBike. Coming home from a DramSoc event in the early hours (or very, very late hours, depending on your sleeping patterns), a beggar-type came up to me on Shepherd’s Bush Green, wanting to show me something. He led me over to a pair of bikes, shackled to a bike rack, and explained that you could hire them by sending a text. He thought it was brilliant, in a what-will-they-think-of-next, what-a-cool-world-we-live-in kind of way.

He then sponged some money off me, but that’s beside the point.

Is this the next big transport idea? Pah. Is it ever going to make money? Doubt it. Maybe if they sink lots of money into it, there’ll be enough locations to make it worth while. The company involved has got the co-operation of the council, so maybe if they can get financial co-operation, they’ll be sorted. Sponge off the state, it’s the only way to go.

Even though it was great fun, I’m not sure I’ll be in much of a hurry to try it again. Saturday saw us getting together to do the infamous “Monopoly Board Pub Crawl”, and the foolish decision to attempt it in both order and including stations was made. I didn’t intend to make it the whole way round (especially as I had my digital SLR with me), but, you know, things happen, and I completed the whole lot. Whoops.

You’ll need to wait for Mr Tucker to do his write-up, or for me to get a net connection at home, cause I’m not going to attempt to write it up while I’m at work. I will, however, leave some words here as reminders for me and others in the years to come.

Stilton. Fire hydrant. Champagne. Deaf girls. Handstands. Dropping your trousers. Both of those together. The rain. Bus south of the river. Jude’s prepay Oystercard. The longest escalator on the underground. Sooooo many half-pints.

My new favourite hobby on the bus is to watch the CCTV images that are relayed to screens around the shiny new double deckers on my way into College. My favourite view is the dashboard cam (closely followed by the one at the back of the ground floor which lets you read whatever the person sitting below it is reading). The dashboard cam has an overlay indicating braking and indicators, and I guess makes the video system a bit of a black-box device for buses.

The pictures from the dashboard cam are reminiscent of police patrol cameras, and are the only ones specifically of external goings-on. But it’s notable how much of the exterior is caught by the interior cameras (9 or ten of them by my count) – and so, depending on your political leanings, count them as mobile street cameras bristling with “prying” eyes. I’ve heard on the radio that the police have used passing buses’ cameras to help solve crimes (although there was a recent case where a driver got stabbed while his bus was lacking film: it was being used to help with another enquiry). Will there ever be a time when a police foot patrol could consider diverting a passing bus to point its multitude of high resolution colour cameras towards an ongoing crime?

And is the use of the film properly supervised? I’m not a civil liberties nut, but I sure as hell don’t trust David Blunkett – the ultimate symbol of a big-brother authoritarian, who really, really shouldn’t be home secretary. Has he managed to bollocks up the privacy rules on CCTV yet, in the same way he’s trying to ride roughshod over every other piece of privacy laws in the country?

It’s amazing how cheap bus travel in central London has become – for me, at least – and it’s mostly thanks to the new Oystercard system. But I’m not sure that my experience is what Transport for London were intending…

When I left London a year ago, bus journeys outside Zone 1 cost 70p, and it was £1 if any part of the journey included the central zone. Since the Oystercard doesn’t know when you get off the bus, the fare basis was changed to just have one zone, and the cash prices were raised to a flat £1 wherever, whenever. To encourage everyone to use Oystercards, it’s only 70p with one – quite a large 30% discount, and so it’s what I use.

Unfortunately, lots of the oystercard readers on buses don’t work properly. Hang on, it’s not actually a misfortune, since whenever they aren’t working, I get a free bus ride. Which is about twice a week – so I reckon my average journey price must be pushing around 65p. That’s quite a contrast to Michael Jennings experience with the ticket machines in the heart of Zone 1. But given the large oystercard discounts I’m surprised that anyone still considers using cash, instead of adding a pre-pay, unregistered Oystercard to a wallet full of ‘loyalty’ cards.

Yesterday I encountered a new twist, when it comes to loading a bus at Shepherds Bush Green. A number of large bus routes start at the Green, and it’s a busy bus interchange, so quite often an entire double-decker-bus-load of people are trying to get on at once. In the past, everyone would file in in two columns, with those in the one away from the driver holding passes up for the driver to check. But now that most have Oystercards, it has turned into a single queue of people swiping past the only reader – slowing the whole process. So this particular driver was just waving everyone past, saying “just keep going, don’t worry about it”, and so I took his advice, and had a free trip.

Interestingly, Oystercards are supposed to speed up loading a bus, by removing the need for bus drivers to deal with cash (and TfL are aiming for cashless busses by next year). Someone didn’t do their research properly though – most people, especially during busy commuting times, rarely paid cash fares, and introducing Oystercards has slowed the verification of pass-holders. Perhaps the busses could have additional readers installed on the right-hand side of the entrance, and we can go back to the two-column loading routine.