My first Saturday job was serving in a petrol filling station, 5 star (remember that?) was 37.5p per gallon.
Eee 37p a gallon. Me sat on the back of a trailbike balancing a couple of x MOD jerry cans,and heading up a farm track tospend all day on our home made track.... Goes all misty eyed. 😆
Nah....I like where i live, i like my job(s) collegues and working conditions as if i need a day off for medical reasons or even if i feel i need one i take it, no hassle at all. I'm not fussed bout money in the slightest as i'd rather have my quality of life and see trees and barren galloway hillsides from my window, whether that be at work or home. As for retraining i do have a BSC in Mech Eng, also HND in Electronic Engineering and i originally qualified as a motor vehicle mechanic so i guess i could prob do something else but finding an employer who will employ someone with lifelong/ongoing spinal medical issues is impossible despite what the government legislate regarding equal opportunities blah.
And i'm glad you took what i said with nae offence, i type as i would speak to mates etc and nae ill-will or suchlike is inferred in the slightest.
PS: I took my time in the car to get to work, i managed over 33mpg t'day 😉
i'll believe that people find fuel expensive when they stop driving like it isn't. The ***ts hooning past my house all day (residential street that leads nowhere really) are clearly in a hurry to burn as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
i think it is expensive, so i drive like a nun. The abuse i get for sticking to speed limits suggests that i'm wrong though.
[i]Says the single man that no doubt lives in the city.
Haven't we been through this bollocks many times before?[/i]
Yes with TJ.
If fuel went up to £12 a ltr we wouldn't be able to afford to travel on public transport either!
That photo of me was taken in about 1973-4 IIRC, my Ma & Pa took it over in 1969 & fuel was 78 old pence a gallon according to the AA
[i]i'll believe that people find fuel expensive when they stop driving like it isn't.[/i]
This. I tootle to work each day watching my miles per gallon ometer go up & up, but sticking to the speed limit & I always get some silly git up my arse who's either late for work, loves their job & can't wait to get there or doesn't give a toss about the price of fuel.
& as for people moving closer to work, WTF planet are you on Edukator?
edukator for ignoramus of the day! no acknowledgement for the knock on effects it would have on society & the millions already struggling to get by.
Everyone would have a much nicer life is they just lived near where they worked
Where are all these empty houses near workplaces that we can just move into?
Oh and if people are on the breadline how the F are they expected to be able to move house? It isn't free.
Feel the love.
I live on the same planet as you, however the countries I spend most time in are talking about the "energy change". A move to a society in which the pattern of energy use and production changes to a more sustainable model which also reduces dependency on fossil fuels.
The cost of public transport in neither country has anything to do with fuel cost. It is priced to get a maximum number of people to use it. It only takes six people on a bus to get better energy efficiency than those people in six average cars. My local busses cost 1e a trip (less if you buy a book of tickets), regional busses 2e a trip, commuters can get passes for trains that make journeys cost less than the petrol alone. Tax petrol and use the money to subsidise more energy efficient public ptransport. Make using individual cars the expensive and inconvenient option.
i think we need to accept that people change jobs more often than perhaps they would like.
I'm only 35, i've been made redundant ... 6 times.
i moved closer to my jobs, each time it was an expensive mistake - i won't be doing it again.
A bus with 6 people in it is not more efficient than a car with 6 people in it. That's just wrong. Buses are much bigger, heavier and are built to carry many more people so when they are not carrying more people they are not more efficient. Public transport, whether privately funded and run or publicly, has to run at a profit and there lies the problem and the paradox. For public transport to be attractive to people it needs to be convenient - which means alot of busses running, on many routes visiting every town and village. This means alot of empty busses not making much money. You can make public transport work in large and highly populated towns and cities, like London, Birmingham, Manchester etc, but beyond that it is very difficult to run an extensive network efficiently (both economically and environmentally). So public transport is only the solution in some areas.
Care to post up the fuel consumption figures for a bus and the average car Wobbliscott. If you accuse someone of posting incorrect information it's only polite to post figures.
How about comparing a 17-seater Renault Master Bus with your own car, Wobbliscott. The kind of bus that is ideal for serving rural areas. That wasn't the basis for my six times figure, I checked the figures for a normal city bus and derived my six people figure for that compared with the urban figures for a medium car.
& as for people moving closer to work, WTF planet are you on Edukator?
Think I'm with Edukator on this one. Society has been transformed by decades of cheap fuel. Big suburbs, out of town shopping, etc. clear divisions between industrial space and living space with the car transporting people between the two. This doesn't seem compatible with the rising cost of a limited resource so at some point something will need to change.
Top candidate as the next ten pager pointless thread.
Could you link me a less pointless thread please, Ian.
£20 billion they reckon
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18617815
Im curious, how bad will the air need to get before people stop using their cars for every journey less than 5 miles. Funny everyone seems quite upset about possible water contamination from fracking but the idea of driving less to make the air less poisonous is quite outlandish.
Cars are great and we need them. We do not need to stop driving, but we should start using cars more responsibly. Most of the people where I work live locally yet few cycle. Kids are all taken to school in the car etc. A large proportion of journeys are less than 4 miles, but people just jump in the car.
Ed,
The subject matter is irrelevant, it's the back and forth of repeated arguments for one opinion or another that defines these threads.
Your view and the alternatives are clear but these go on and on and on ...
(Fwiw i dont even know how much fuel is, I barely use a car, live and work in close proximity and enjoy the lifestyle that allows very much).
The only reason people lived local to work in the past is people couldn't afford cars
Surely the fact that in many households nowadays two people work, and not usually at the same place makes a big difference too?
Although vast numbers of people do live short distances like 5 miles or less from work and don't cycle, I don't know how common it is to actually be not practically able to get to work by anything other than car (I suspect it is a bit biased on here with lots of people in high paid but often high staff turnover IT jobs, where people tend to move jobs quite often and look for jobs within quite a wide radius.
The thing to remember is that whilst it is inefficient to drive short distances and the cost per mile is high, the actual cost is pretty low. A tank lasts ages.
Surely fuel is only a temporary solution for transport.
If fuel was sustainable, the discussion would change to congestion/parking/peak car/etc which it more important imo.
Putting fuel prices up to subsidise development of alternatives would make sense I think, but only to drive development. Using it to deter people from making bad decisions is pointless - it always just means that the wealthy can do what they like and the already struggling suffer further. Education is far more important.
The problem is that currently, electric cars aren't the answer in isolation.
I'd love to live close to work but as I work at client sites no place is good for me. We have two cars as both work but as I'm working in London these days it hardly gets used so a bit of a waste really.
Car ownership has generally increased over time and maybe that means society has been getting a little more equal? I remember when the M25 was built going passed the bottom of my school, imagine what driving around the SE would be without that now - so many more car trips made. People wouldn't like not being able to afford to drive - human rights right? Like having Sky TV and fags. So a decrease in car ownership would be considered a bad thing - like falling house prices, the government have propped them both up in recent years.
Currently working in Oman at the moment where its equivalent of 20p litre, so of course everyone drives everwhere in 4litre v8 land cruisers doing 9 mpg, so i guess affordability does play into people decision making. Also in the omani press yesterday i read an article about car accidents here being one of the leading causes of death and disability, not to mention the effects of air pollution. So I guess in the uk whilst 6.30 a gallon is what we pay, it certainly falls short of the true cost to society. Not that im anti car, but i think the bigger picture is often forgotten when we chose to drive our cars.
Fuel should be £12 a gallon, then maybe people would think more seriously about finding better ways of getting around (by bike perhaps!!).
Yeah, right! When you live maybe seven, eight, or ten miles from the nearest town with any kind of shopping facilities, when the nearest place you can find work is fifteen or twenty miles away, and when the only form of public transport is one bus each way a day, at a time totally incompatible with any kind of working pattern?
Genius suggestion. Move closer to where the work is? Who's going to pay the extra cost of a mortgage somewhere where the cost of housing is going up because its a commuter belt town?
Where I work there are people who start at 6am, who travel to Chippenham from Cirencester, Bristol and Swindon;
what public transport could possibly be used? And there are no jobs in their home areas, because the industry (print), has contracted so much in recent years, that's why they travel.
Maybe all the rich townies could move to the country and generously donate their s****y town houses to the impoverished country dwellers who can't find local jobs, and who have no facilities, or public transport, and who can barely afford to drive cars because of the higher cost of fuel in the countryside, if they even have a local filling station any more, as most have closed, like the schools, the pubs, the post offices, the shops...
Or maybe we can all go and live in Edukator's paradise, it sounds wonderful there. 🙄
This. I tootle to work each day watching my miles per gallon ometer go up & up, but sticking to the speed limit & I always get some silly git up my arse who's either late for work, loves their job & can't wait to get there or doesn't give a toss about the price of fuel.
That'd be me. Sometimes late (damn kids), loving my job and in hurry to be there, with a general disregard for the cost of fuel or the mpg of the car. Doesn't matter what I don't to it, I can't get it below 40mpg and I have fun on the way.
Could I ask that if you come across a slower moving vehicle, you hang back though so I can jump up the line. Thanks.
With the amount of unnecessary car journeys (i.e. local school run) even those on low incomes make, and the number of cars owned by those out of work, I'd say the price obviously isn't high enough.
Everyone would have a much nicer life is they just lived near where they worked...
Speak for yourself, I work in the City, no bloody way I'd want to live there, and with my parents having just sold a small studio (ie single room) flat in the Barbican for £445k I'd never be able to afford to either!
I see a couple of people have commented on countries with cheaper fuel (such as here in the USA), and how we all drive big V8s. True, most people do have big engines, however, even "fuel efficient" cars here have crap fuel consumption!
Over here a 1.6l Fiesta with a manual is rated at 31mpg (37UK). A Prius only gets 48 (57UK). The deck is seriously stacked here to keep the populous hooked on spending on fuel. Plus, the average motorist here in the midwest drives over 20,000 miles a year vs half that in the UK. We have zero public transport as an alternative too!
"Over here a 1.6l Fiesta with a manual is rated at 31mpg (37UK). A Prius only gets 48 (57UK)"
Do these figures account for a US gallon being ~3.8 litres and a UK gallon being 4.54 litres?
Various people have mentioned that if you live in the country, you need a car because there are no shops and no public transport.
There was a time when motoring was too expensive for most people and there were local shops and good rural public transport.
What a lucky coincidence.
thekingisdead - Member
"Over here a 1.6l Fiesta with a manual is rated at 31mpg (37UK). A Prius only gets 48 (57UK)"Do these figures account for a US gallon being ~3.8 litres and a UK gallon being 4.54 litres?
Yip.. The numbers in brackets are converted to UK mpg...
MidlandTrailquestsGraham - Member
As long as there are more car drivers than pedestrians, cyclists and bus passengers combined on the roads, motoring is far too cheap.
Or public transport to expensive?
the UK is tiny. how far are you ever from work? and with the population density, public transport should be easy.
people are going to have to get used to the lack of convenience mindset pretty soon, as oil is not coming down in price again.
There was a time when motoring was too expensive for most people and there were local shops and good rural public transport.
What a lucky coincidence.
I think the public transport element of this was a very brief phase, as is the current car as personal transport phase. In the grand scheme of things.. In general people just rarely left the villages they inhabited.
the UK is tiny. how far are you ever from work? and with the population density, public transport should be easy.
Tell that to those commuting into London from Bristol. And that has good transport links.
Don't get me wrong, their choice. But they pay a lot, and it's no 30 minutes bicycle ride. And the cost of public trains taken at short notice, to get you into an office for office hours can be eye wateringly expensive.
Yes cars fuel has become expensive, but to a degree the cost has been offset by development of cars and their efficiency in recent years.
I mused on this whilst driving a borrowed Insignia Ecoflex diesel the other week. Nearly 60mpg without trying, whilst still capable of similar speeds to the 2.0litre petrol cars of 20 years ago.
if fuel cost £12 a gallon that would ... make a biking trip to Wales, Peak District, Scotland etc look very very pricey - never mind driving to the Alps.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that that's a good thing.
Yup stop the biggest industry in rural areas, tourism, by driving up the cost then whilst there's no more coming into area and transport cost have increased watch the prices of goods in rural areas soar, jobs lost and people move out of the area. Great do it straight away.
You miss the point that if [b][i][u]fuel[/b][/i][/u] was £12/gallon, flying abroad would be prohibitively expensive.
Imagine if all those £££ spent on flights to Malaga were actually spent on the drive to Margate? It'd be a huge boost to the tourism industry (although it would bankrupt the airports, but they're not British owned so less of a blow).
flying abroad would be prohibitively expensive.
Is aviation fuel taxed at the same rate as car fuel ? I am asking as most of what I put in my engine is tax rather than cost of production, so not necessarily linked to cost of flying. Bizarrely putting up car costs may driv e people abroad instead of keeping them at home to spend their money.
By the way I am in the put petrol up lobby, BUT this need to be accompanied by a massive investment in public transport infrastructure to enable us to still get round.
For all of us complaining there are no jobs in the country, what do you think will happen to all the companies in big towns who suddenly can't get staff anymore ? Would they not look to relocate ?
Imagine if all those £££ spent on flights to Malaga were actually spent on the drive to Margate? It'd be a huge boost to the tourism industry (although it would bankrupt the airports, but they're not British owned so less of a blow).
Tourists come to Britain too. I've no idea how much of a difference it would actually make.
Other than less traffic at airports.
By the way I am in the put petrol up lobby, BUT this need to be accompanied by a massive investment in public transport infrastructure to enable us to still get round.
I'm in the public transport should be run as a service, and not for profit lobby. I'd be happy to pay for it via taxation.
If I believed that taxation was both affordable to all, and efficiently spent on the right things.
Does anybody have a breakdown of public spending going into public transport, and how much of that spending is subsidising private operators trying to turn a profit?
Tell that to those commuting into London from Bristol.
see? you can commute to work three or four cities away. Now that's a lifestyle choice.
piemonster - Member
Does anybody have a breakdown of public spending going into public transport, and how much of that spending is subsidising private operators trying to turn a profit?
£6Billion a year on Trains subsidy apparently.
bigrich - Member
see? you can commute to work three or four cities away. Now that's a lifestyle choice.
How can you possibly know what choices are available? just making presumptions.
Well the rising price and lower wages seems to have changed things around here, loads more people commuting via bike, there's barely enough room for all the bikes in the office I work at.
If you live in the country, miles away from everything and have trouble affording petrol, tough. Move closer to work like everyone else does.
Keep zooming up in price as far as I'm concerned, it's a limited supply and the price reflects this. Truffles don't cost so much because the dogs are on £100k salaries.
If you live in the country, miles away from everything and have trouble affording petrol, tough. Move closer to work like everyone else does.
Troll, ignorant or stupid?
It is a choice for lots of people though. I'm considering moving house at the moment. I can choose to live in the city centre, walking distance to everything. I can choose to live a small distance away, with viable public transport. Or I could be dependent on the car. Each of these choices means compromises.
I'm not sure that the ability to commute thousands of miles a year is a good thing overall, either for the individual or society
How can you possibly know what choices are available? just making presumptions.
There's always Swindon?
My point is the UK is so small, and travel is so cheap, you get to choose to live a long way from work.
If travel was expensive, and you had no choice but to have your family in Bristol, then you would have to take lodgings in the city where you worked; like people did before the advent of oil exploitation.
