Public transport

London

It’s been two years in this city and when I first landed here I wanted to write ‘ a first impressions’ kind of thing, but never got around doing it. Well, this is just not that, it is more of ‘here we are again’ kind of a thing. The first impressions thing I will do some other day! The city has changed me, one of the most remarkable thing that it has done to me is make me ‘vehicle less’, it is not an unusual thing for people living in pretty much any where in ‘Greater London’ for not driving to work especially if there is a commute that involves going into central London and the congestion charge! The public transport system in this city is the very best and the most extensive compared to any where in the world. You can on most days get to your ‘intended destination’ more efficiently and economically than you would by say a ‘taxi’ or a ‘car’. The saying is if you really hate some one and want to torture them send the bloke to central London having to drive a vehicle!. Another thing quite acute about the public transport is that every one uses it, the Mayor of the Greater London Authority commutes from his house in North London to his central London office on a tube (underground), so do most of the millionaire chief executives of FTSE 100 companies and well every one. It is more of an ordeal for the ‘more wealthy’ citizen because most of them actually prefer to live in one of the many villages/towns on the outskirts of the Greater London because those are the best places to live in England, re good schools, amenities, larger houses etc. That means their commute time is any thing between an hour and two!! I on the other hand have a fifteen-minute commute to my office, door to door it is just 35 minutes and that’s not bad considering the fact that I live some 19 miles from central London. The point is even after two years I am just not comfortable in not getting around with a car, some days I have these cravings and others I simply think of moving to a city that supports ‘vehicular commute’. Driving is very much synonym to every thing macho! The rev of the engine, the pick, the speed, the cruise and the control over all that horsepower! I can quite well remember buying my first car a 1998 Honda Civic Lxi, now that was fun, of course cannot stress enough the sense of loss and depravity I had to endure when selling my Pajero before moving here, that baby took me to the beaches, sand dunes, off road in to the desert, hell I even made it to the ‘Rab ul Khali’ or the empty quarter on the UAE-Saudi Arabia border, where the average dunes are the size of a ten story building!