Bus Lanes and car sharing

Terry Wogan always used to rant about bus lanes that had no buses in them whereas cyclists are always cursing the cars that use the bus lanes illegally. Leeds City Council have just announced that they are going to put cameras on bus lanes to catch and fine bus lane abusers. This may help with the flow of traffic a little but it doesn’t get to the root of the problem – our over dependence on the car.

I know public transport isn’t always that great, especially during rush hour on a wet day so how can we reduce our use of the car?

One suggestion is to increase car sharing. I worked for 12 years in a secondary school about 15 miles from home. Public transport took far too long and I often had piles of exercise books to transport. Our solution was car sharing. Three of us (with occasional student teachers hitching lifts) took turns to drive to school. This was brilliant! It reduced our fuel bill, gave us some great social time where we chatted, planned a revolution or listened to each others music, and only one person had to do the driving so we arrived at work less stressed 2 out of 3 days.

There were downsides. If we were driving we had to leave a little earlier in order to pick up our passengers, sometimes we had to wait later when someone had a meeting or had to prepare something, and sometimes we didn’t feel like talking to each other! But with a bit of give and take we muddled along and the days felt better for it.

So, if you drive to school, want to arrive at school a little less stressed some days of the week, and want to save a bit of money why not see if some of your colleagues want to car share sometimes. You don’t have to do it every day but every little helps.

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