Loser cruiser? Chauffered loafer!

Wrightbus have successfully won market share in the fiercely competitive bus market. I'd never heard of them until recently. Obviously I'm a lapsed industrial designer. Or they build buses too quietly.

Some people refer to modes of public transport, particularly omnibuses, as loser cruisers. I think this originates from Margaret Thatcher who described "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure."

From a snobbish Tory point of view, public transport is not aspirational. Despite my engine punk proclivities, I am an enthusiastic and regular user of public transport. Having adopted the train and walking as the means of my commute (apart from the short drive to the station) I have become a leisure driver. Apart from shopping trips, these days I drive purely for pleasure.

From my latest environmental audit, I am greener than most. This always surprises me because engine punks like me are suppoosed to be public enemy number one. 

I use public transport, my cars are looked after better than most, I don't have a dog and I will leave no legacy of carbon emissions once I'm gone because I don't have kids. The main area of improvement is to update my domestic appliances and heat my home more effectively. My most recent exploration of foreign parts only added to my surprisingly green credentials, foreign as in not Cornwall.

I spent a weekend on a jaunt up to York and back, simply because I'd never been there and wanted to see the Jorvik Viking Centre and the National Railway Museum. Driving was one option but I did a little travel plan and found much better alternatives. In my experience, cars are no good for point to point city centre travel. They're only really effective for touring or convoluted journeys. If you can do without flexibility, public transport comes out tops and for inter-city travel, trains are best. No wonder they call them inter-city.

Rather than leave my car for several days cluttering up the streets in town - I refuse to pay parking fees following the debacle over charges at Liskeard railway station (see earlier rants on this blog) - I caught the rural bus that runs hourly passed the bottom of my road. The rail service was a direct connection to York through Birmingham New Street with no changes and chatting with Jo in the ticket office confirmed that by booking well in advance I had saved over £50. The price of the tickets was less than a tank of fuel to drive up to York one way, even if I took my most economic road module. In the end, it didn't quite arrive on time but only 10 minutes late

Once in York, I walked a great deal and also sampled the open topped double deckers when my feet got sore. 

Tourist buses used to be old and decrepit but this Dennis Trident was a very smart conversion. You could sit up front in the warm or take photos at the back also in the warm! If you sat on the right - as far as you could go to the right - you sat on top of the heater. Lovely! And with that special perspective that double deck travel gives you, too

I like these sight-seeing buses. I've used them on a number of visits to historic cities and they all offer 24-hour tickets and the ability to hop on and off if a part of the city takes your particular interest. 

I also sampled the regular bus services and although the one I really needed was a bit unpunctual and could be cheaper, there were still no concerns about navigating to a parking space.

It wasn't all such sweetness and light on the rail journey home, though. Signal problems at Morpeth slowed progress before my train reached York and then an abusive passenger who insisted on smoking had to be arrested at Newcastle.

He was probably still cross about what Thatcher said about him.

That is the problem with public transport. You share it with the public and sometimes, no matter how good the technology or organisation, your fellow travellers let you down.

This can also happen on the roads, of course, but since most people on the roads are driving wheeled cages they can get angry with each other and smoke in privacy.

I regard people going the same way as me as companions who have the same interest, namely that of reaching our destination. In fact, I am usually going in such an odd direction that anyone even crossing my path is worthy of comment. With that little bit in common, we can then share all sorts of other enthusiasms and advice. We even had some community singing on the return train, which now an hour late, lost its path at Birmingham, so we had to alight at Derby and board the following train, which was also running down to Penzance.

Sometimes, though, I don't want to share anything with them because the general public can be truly horrible but this is rare.

By the time I got back to Liskeard, the buses had stopped running so a taxi was my choice of travel. It was expensive (7 quid for a 3 mile journey) and I could have walked but there's no footpath and I had a little too much luggage to drag around the - surprisingly busy - country lanes after dark. 

So there I was, home again having been chauffered virtually the length and breadth of the country. I'd do it again, too. I think at 1.85m tall I am the maximum size for a public transport user. Some railway carriages offer poor leg room, presumably so they can cram more passengers on. The regular DMUs on my weekly commute are so poor I often wedge my legs in and afterwards my knees don't feel right having been pressed hard up against the seat in front of me. Cross Country trains are a lot better but I still got my feet trodden on by the passenger in front. 

What chance would Ivar the Boneless have had of a comfy journey? At 9 feet tall, this Viking conqueror of York would've hated public transport. Some say his Boneless nickname stems from having a twisted back. Others say it was because he was impotent (although I think boneless is a twentieth century description). Both maladies could have resulted from poor seating arrangements on public transport. Another, theory is that he was such a limber fighter that he moved as if he was boneless. Maybe he could've contorted himself into a modern train.

Richard Seymour in a short film telling the secret of how he won the design contract for the Inter City 250

Among other things, in the National Railway Museum I watched a short interview with Richard Seymour of industrial design consultancy Seymour Powell, the company responsible for the design of the most recent high speed trains in Britain. His winning pitch to his clients centred upon reviving the boyish aspirations of being an engine driver. This struck a chord with me - that's engine punk!

So the wheel is turning, turning away from Thatcher's doctrine about failure. Public transport is once again becoming aspirational. 

There's more.

To a simple country boy, bendy buses are amazing and York had several. Best of all were these Wright bendy buses. I didn't have the opportunity to sample one myself because I ran out of time but I aspire to. I think they look sensational!

Bendy buses have a bad name in Britain but I undertand form a friend of mine in the logistics world that this was a media inspired slur and all the claims of being fire traps and cyclist killers are lies. They might be difficult to get on a normal size low-loader but would you really try that with a double-decker, the bendy bus's alternative? Only the fare dodging claims stand some scrutiny and even then they're not as bad as the media claims.

And because they are bendy maybe old Ivar the Boneless could've coped with them better than squeezing his lanky frame into a longboat. 

Cars and motorbikes have a spirit of adventure about them. Commuting to work does not and should not. Who wants to appear to struggle in to work? Apparently, SUV drivers do and, stressed out and spiteful, they compensate for their mundane lives by trying to look as if they are a bit exciting. Nobody really believes these people have an active life style when they see what lard arses they are. When I see a SUV commuting, I see the fear that dwells in their drivers' hearts - the fear of road rage, getting lost (which is having a real adventure and being able to cope with it), of finding somewhere to park and of being able to afford the parking space once they find it. 

And these are the sorts of people who call the likes of me a loser through my choice of transport. 

This is the sensational Wright StreetCar, making small boys want to become bus drivers. Inspirational and aspirational, just the point Richard Seymour was putting across.

The only way to really avoid public transport is to have your own dedicated road. Even if you fly you're sharing airspace with someone so that dedicated road should be empty of all other transport. 

In short, it should look like a Bus Lane.

There's scope for a different kind of excitement with travel. It may be a mundane everyday journey but see what nonchalance I display as I hop from one form of transport to another while SUV man is still looking for a parking space.

So rather than a loser in a loser cruiser, on public transport expedition I felt like a chauffered loafer. I had no worries about getting lost en route or of finding somewhere to park my bus or train at the end of the journey. I could get something to eat, read, walk around, sing with my fellow passengers and look out of the window. Or just fall asleep. The only things I didn't do were flash up my laptop or watch a DVD. My simple journey was cheaper than using private transport, too.

So who's the loser now?

Chauffered loafing - try it! Now!