You should all try this

[techierob]

it says all my routes are equivalent at about 70 minutes during rush hour, but I know that's a crock. The bus takes over two hours (not including the wait and bus ride to the bus stop), the car takes almost two hours on a good day (and would cost me 8 quid for the privilege) and both the bike and tube take 45-60 minutes - and that's for a journey of 15 miles.

Another thing it doesn't illustrate is the fact that four pounds a week buys enough fuel for my bike to do the journey to work and back five times, while after the prices are hiked in the new year, the same amount of money would buy me a one-way trip on the tube or a journey each way on the busses.

All this assumes that I can actually depend on public transport, but the fact is that I can't. Public transport routinely leaves me high and dry and the only recourse I have is to claim back the cost of a one-way journey, if it can be proven that I was kept waiting for more than twenty minutes at any one time - that means that a journey time of eight hours would be considered well within their guaranteed level of service.

Public transport becomes virtually unusable after 11:30pm, but there's no curfew for the bike. Also there's no dicking about with exact chance, no two-mile walk at the end of the route, no overcrowding, no pickpockets, no beggars, no strikes etc. etc.

The only way I'd stop using the bike is if the government/department of transport/tfl contrived a way to price me off the road

[scabstermooch]