Bonkers Busway
This article on the Cambridge Evening News is so sad it’s funny.
It’s almost as the fare system for the new busway was designed by a Mr. M. Python.
But rather than one ticket for both services, people can only get on buses run by the operator whose name is on their ticket.
The county council, which is in charge of the system, has launched a website for passengers, explaining where the main bus stops are, and how tickets can be bought.
Passengers hopping aboard the buses when they are on normal roads can pay the driver in the usual way – but if they get on at one of the stops on the guided section, between Cambridge and St Ives, they will have to buy a ticket from a railway station-style machine, before a bus arrives.
So you’ll need to take binoculars so that you can determine which bus is coming, before buying a ticket. Or they could set up a CCTV system, so you could see what’s happening a kilometre down the track! Perhaps though, the electronic bus indicator saying how long before the next bus arrives, will say the company!
They say that they haven’t had time to develop electronic ticketing! Hmm! I was in London today and used my Oyster card, which I seem to remember has worked on buses for quite a few years now! That must have been a mirage.
But then I suspect all this doesn’t matter too much to those who’ve planned, designed and promoted this scheme, as they need won’t use it anyway! It should actually be condition of election that you have to get to council meetings by either public transport, bicycle or Shank’s pony.
As I said in an earlier post, I wish the busway well, but it does seem that it is doomed by bad planning, unthought design and late delivery.
Ipswich Film Theatre
The Corn Exchange cinema in Ipswich is to close.
Sad, but it was a place where my late wife and myself spent many happy days watching good films.
A New Variety of Dead Parrot Sketch
I liked this comment from The Times on Thursday.
“I wish to register a complaint.” Britain’s financial services industry heard this refrain nine million times over the past three years, according to new figures from the Financial Services Authority.
This sounds like an awful lot of unhappiness. Dissatisfied customers are now returning their dead parrots at the rate of more than 8,000 a day.
This is the first two paragraphs and it continues in the same vein.
But doing simple maths says that we complain about 3,000,000 times a year about the financial services industry. That probably means it’s about one complaint for every six or seven houses in the UK. As probably only half the houses do anything governed by the FSA, that’s one hell of a level of complaints. So it’s nearer one-in-three!
I could add my complaints too. About excessive paperwork for a start. It seems that every time you move or breathe anywhere near any financial company they need everything in triplicate down to your inside leg measurement. You need certificates for this, documents for that. Surely, the fact that I pay my taxes and I only bank with reputable UK banks should be enough and they should guarantee my probity.
Job done!
How many complaints are of this nature?
But just imagine this level of complaints on cars. No-one would ever buy one. So perhaps this is why people don’t buy pensions.
After all if you want to make a small fortune, give a large one to a financial adviser.
Conservation is Dangerous
I’m watching Stephen’s Fry program called “The Last Chance to See” on BBC2. One of the people in the program told how six enviromentalists had been killed in Cambodia and hos the Amazon and it’s famed piranhas was much less dangerous.
A couple of tales illustrate this.
Perhaps ten or twelves years ago, my late wife and myself were staying in the Datai on Langkawi. This hotel regularly makes the top two or three in the world and having stayed there for a week, you know why.
The hotel organised tours with two local wildlife experts. One was Malaysian and the other was the son of a British squaddie and his Nepalese wife. To say he had the air of a hard bastard was probably an understatement. But he needed to be as poachers and collectors were always trying to either shoot or dig up something. At the time, they’d just taken on the Malaysian government about preserving the last piece of rainforset on Langkawi. They’d won at the time and my son has confirmed in the last few weeks that it is still there.
So perhaps to get things done, you not only need good economic arguments as they did, but you also need a touch of the Rambos.
It must have been about 1988 and I was in San Francisco. I needed to get to San Jose, so I took a shared limousine as one does. Or did! Hopefully, they’ve built a more affordable rail system. But I doubt it! I hadn’t hired a car as someone was driving me around.
Two of us got in first and like me, the other was something in computers. We were then joined by a tall, slim man about fifty or so, with a long grey ponytail. He had a powerful bearing and looked extremely fit under a linen suit.
I thought for a moment he might be into something like drugs, but he told a tale about how he had been in US Special Forces in Viet Nam. He’d retired as an officer and was now working protecting World Bank projects in the Amazon rainforest. He talked about how if you harvested plants and trees very selectively, you could give the people an income about ten times more than they got from subsistence agriculture where you burned the forest.
But this didn’t work because to do this you needed to built tracks into the jungle, which allowed the cut and burners to do their damage easily and also because by giving the people a good income, you broke the power of the loan sharks who preyed on them.
Hence the need for men like him to protect the projects and those that worked on them.
Just as Stephen Fry’s film showed, to get conservation to work, you must get the economics right and make sure you control those violent men, whose interests you destroy.
Fun and Games at the Fourth Plinth
This morning I went to London to support an Internet friend who was appearing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. I took a lot of video at seven in the morning and it will be going up soon.
But the twist was, that someone had called off at the last minute, so they went looking for volunteers. As Sir Arnold Bax once said, “One should try everything once, except incest and folk dancing”.
So I accepted and you can see the result here.
I shall post my video in the next couple of days.
The Anonymous Widower 