I was up and away early this morning, far too much work to do. I've been getting a lift of the wife recently but wanted to start work before 8, that was a definite no go so it had to be the bus.
It's about a 2 mile ride, would be a bit shorter if it went from A to B in anything like a straight line but it doesn't, it goes around the houses stopping every 100 yards, we don't want people to have to walk too far do we? Anyway the price of this 15 minutes of joy is £1. Use it to and from work every day and that's............(carry the 2).... £10 a week. It's a 2 mile journey. Or 20 miles for the week. It costs £10. Why the fuck does it cost £10 to travel 20 miles on a stinking piece of shit bus?
Our car does roughly 35-40mpg. So even with the starting and stopping we are going to easily use less than a gallon of petrol. Going with a nice extortionate £1.25 a litre that's roughly £5.60 (for the full gallon) to do the same trip in the car and in comfort. Not only that but it gets much worse if you think that there are 2 of us heading for work each day. If we both got the bus that would be £20 a week, or nearly 4 times what it costs to go to work in the car*. It's not even like the buses are adding anything to the experience, they usually stink and they are always slower than driving. Why would anyone want to pay at all to get on a bus, never mind paying more than it costs to drive?
Just to show how shit this situation is the lads and I went for a beery day out to Ramsey the other month. It was £2.50 per person each way, so £20 all in for the 4 of us. Driving to Ramsey and back is about 30 miles or as I prefer to think about it, £4.20 worth of petrol. IF we could find a designated driver that £15 could have gone in to the drinks kitty. Not ever likely to happen but it proves the point, if you had a friend who doesn't drink. Yeah I know the bus driver has to be paid and the bus has to be serviced and tax and yadda yadda but still, I don't care about that. We have a car anyway, if anybody wants people like us to stop using it for work then they'd better come up with something a little bit better than the current bus situation.
The real "thick as pig shit" thing that makes all this even worse is that our bus service is still running a loss. So they are over charging and running at a loss.
So either:-
1. Not enough people use the buses to pay for them
2. There are too many buses on the roads
3. The bus staff are being paid too much
It's the Isle of Man, there's no way that the staff wages are going anyway but up, any attempt to reduce the service will be met by the screeching blue rinse brigade (Another fucking rant just waiting to happen). That only leaves the option of trying to get more people on them, well that's not going to happen as long as it's more expensive to get on a bus than it is to drive.
* I'm not going in to parking, the wife has a free park. I've had free parks with the majority of the places I work as well. If you do have to pay to park, unlucky, that's another huge rip-off where the numbers don't add up either.
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