Its not luck that gives you a public transport / cycle commute. Its about setting your priorities and building your life around not needing a car.

Not really – unless I want to move house nearer my job – which considering I have very little job security beyond a rolling 12 months isn’t going to happen.
There isn’t a great deal of work in my industry in bike-commute distance from home.

My place has 24 employees and enough parking spaces for everyone -which is good considering pretty much everyone drives.
We’re on an out-of-town industrial park with poor public transport.
For me to commute via public transport from Bromley to Laindon would be Bus-Train-Tube-Train-Bus and 3 hours+
Cycling not an option – 29 miles with the Dartford crossing in between.
Driving – 35-40 mins.

tjagain – Member

Its not luck that gives you a public transport / cycle commute. Its about setting your priorities and building your life around not needing a car

That’s you humped for the District Nurse job then.

Nobeer – no – just pointing out there are other ways of living your life with different priorities.

One of mine is that work must be within muscle power of home. Another is I have to live within easy distance of a main line train station.

Its all about the priorities you set for living yo9ur life. I made my choices, you make yours but don’t pretend there is no alternative. There are – just ones you chose not to take.

Your life, your choice but don’t confuse “want” with “need”

PP – I hated driving a car around for the DN job I had briefly – but I still cycled to work – the car was kept at work not at home.

Approximately 300 people in our office and maybe 25 spaces.. City centre location and only the top brass get a space plus visitors.

We have a deal where we can park in a local multi-storey for £4/day which is a ten minute walk away..

I try to cycle most days as there is secure bike storage and good showers etc. You still get people saying stuff like:

“What’s up? Is your car in the garage?”
“You cycle 6 miles to work, no way!”
“Surely you didn’t ride your bike in that?! (rain)”

Mental. I realise I’m lucky in that I can cycle to work because it’s only a short distance and the facilities are good – Having been at my current place for 7 years don’t think I could take a job somewhere where I relied purely on my car.

About 100 employees. 100 spaces. Everyone car commutes. 0700 start is before public transport.
I salute the mobility given by the car.

don’t pretend there is no alternative.

I don’t recall saying that? I’m quite happy to cycle to work, 3 days as I do, the other 2 I have to be home to get the wee yin.

Not aimed at you specifically.

0

research institute/uni in central london

quite close to the tube and plenty of bike racks, and a big track pump next to them

36 people and no parking spaces – nearest unpaid spaces are about a mile away.
I cycle in, and bring my Brompton into the office and put it under my desk which I think upsets some people – but I don’t care.

Scud – Bishopbriggs?

Typically the County Councils will require 1 parking space for every 25m² of office floor space.

I live 12 miles away – train would take two and a half hours! I’d cycle but we have no showers and its up a dirty great hill so wet wipes wouldn’t do the job.. I often need my car to visit sites at short notice so its not really doable.

2 spaces (directors) and 80+ employees in Manchester city centre.

I can see the train station from my window and we’ve got a good few that cycle in. New building doesn’t have any though.

3 in office… about 10 spaces in our car park.

I cant think of any reason why I would want to work in a city center.

Potential for 4500 people, several thousand parking spaces

about 14000 people on site, maybe 7000 spaces.

Loads of public transport links (30-40 buses per hour at peak times/shift changes/etc) 15km from the city centre, effectively on our own site.

Loads of people cycle/motorbike, 20+ bike parks/motorbike parks, mostly full most of the summer, 2/3rds full through the winter. (motorbike parks are empty, only the hard of thinking would ride a motorbike in the winter over here). Loads of lift sharing going on too, think theres even a few shift/building based websites to support it.

Unfortunately, due to a load of bus route changes, i’ve gone from a 75-90 minute public tranpsort journey to 2:30 minimum. So i drive 50 minutes each way.

No, i’m not moving.

6000+ employees over a combination of office staff, 2+3+4 shift workers. Loads of people lift share not sure how many spaces. Only a problem days to lates. The biggest pain is trying to get of the car park at the end of a shift. Bike sheds but I wouldn’t leave my bike in one, bikes continually go missing.

We pay for parking here, but it’s a wage realted scale, but it stops meaning that the majority of staff have the worst deal. it’s cheaper to get a parking ticket a month than pay.

Also no discount for cycling – so i’d have to pay full price when i normally ride 4 days per week.

Its not luck that gives you a public transport / cycle commute. Its about setting your priorities and building your life around not needing a car.

until they cancel the bus service from your suburb.

3 people, 2 spaces. One drives, one cycles and I walk. Works for us.

What amazes me is places like Chandlers Ford near Southampton.

They say 1 parking space per 2 workers (or whatever it is) and afaik there is no regular and reliable bus route to most of it from the nearby residential areas or Southampton city centre. The roads are too narrow to cycle safely on, they’ve not put proper cycle infrastructure in and the nearest rail station (which incidentally is poorly served for coming in from the east so it’s only any use from Southampton central or Bournemouth) is at least a mile away and probably more.

By 800 in the morning every side street is rammed with cars to the point that coming out of a car park is a lottery as every exit has seriously obscured sight lines.

It’s not isolated either. The development at Whiteley is just as bad.

I’m all for trying to encourage people to use sustainable options but the point is they need to actually exist before you create a culture of I’ll just drive anyway and dump it here on the kerb/grass/zebra crossing. Once people become accustomed to the crap facilities you have totally lost all chance imo.

Shame there’s some great office property out that way!

About forty of us and enough spaces for all plus visitors. Quite a few car share, one or two cycle and I walk, cycle or drive depending if I need to travel to visit customers or suppliers. This week I walked Monday, Tuesday, car today as I had to visit a customer DC, car tomorrow to visit our HQ and a customer’s shops. Nice canal walk in and home on Friday.

Another spoilt public sector employee here in a rundown northern industrial town.400ish staff,10 spaces,2 reserved for disabled the rest for the managers but it’s my turn to have our command’s space tomorrow as our manager is off 🙂
TJ our office is due to close sometime between now and 2020,though noone can actually give us a definitive date.Most staff here live locally and that’s why they work here.There are decent local buses and trams but no train station now because we got the trams.Lots of other staff were at other local offices but due to their local office closures and centralisation of work had to move here and have to drive,it was either that or no job.Our “cushy” public sector condidtions have been changed so that we can be moved anywhere in the UK as long as it’s “reasonable”.
We will all be in the same boat in the next two years.

30 odd people, everybody drives. We are on a private site, the company that owns the site forbids us walking to the canteen on the misguided basis of h&s

bamboo – how would you get to the canteen if you didn’t have a car?

57 people in my work, space for 60 cars plus the works vans in a barrier controlled yard at the rear. Was all fine until a kid’s gym opened up next door, they now use our car park and park all over the place! I’m the only one to cycle in, two walk, 3 motorbikers (2 when it’s sunny only) and the rest drive. Not too bad considering we start and finish at all hours of the day and night.

If I lived further out than I do now I would drive to the north of Cardiff, park in Forest Drive and bike in from there. Plenty do already as it saves the city centre traffic chaos and it’s traffic-free along the Taff Trail into the city centre. I am noticing a lot more commuting cyclists this year, even before the weather got good.

Tj- the only other option is bike/motorbike. Everybody drives. Funnily enough the site owners built a load of bike sheds and purchased a load of boris style bikes over 12 months ago, but their health and safety people have prevented them being introduced.

You can get to the front of the site via bus, but if you work at the back of the site you aren’t allowed to walk to your office.

This is one of the government enterprise zones.

1, 10 employees. I park for free 100m away in the local market square.

I do think TJ has a point. Long term a population all commuting daft distances by individual fossil fuelled vehicle is not sustainable. Those working in A and living in B and vice versa in a web of shuffling us all around twice a day.

My wife used to work for an employer with 4000 staff on the site and about 1000 car park spots – a maximum the local authority would allow them to have when they expanded to minimise traffic on/off site. There was a lot of car sharing with the matches arranged by the employer. Also a shuttle bus to the nearest railway station. There was a system where locals could shop employees trying to park in local residential streets with disciplinary consequences (bringing into disrepute). It kind of worked but there were plenty of folk grumpy about it.

I like the idea of paid for staff parking with the cost varying by wage but only if you used the funds raised to subsidise alternative transport costs or facilities or the mother of all christmas parties. And charged by the day to promote part time public transport/cycling use and discounting cars carrying more than one employee.

I do wonder if the employer could/should take into account how their potential employees would get to work when taking them on if they are not able to park them on site – the candidate needs to provide a transport to work plan when they apply or they restrict their ‘catchment’ to provable possible locations. Business rates could also include the commuting impact of your employees to encourage keeping their commuting to a minimum or pay more if you don’t care.

16k employees, not all in the office at the same time (because there ain’t enough desk space) and 2 parking spaces.