On the buses: a complete farce

Heard the one about the late bus? Bet you haven’t heard the excuse my driver gave when he showed up 20 minutes late: “I’m running late as I keep stopping to let people get on.” Well excuse us, I thought, as I surveyed my other partners in crime — two old ladies, a teenager and a couple going shopping. Bloody buses. Believe Wendy Cope’s poem and eventually two or three should appear. Not in rural Essex, where only days earlier, on a Sunday, I’d waited 45 minutes for a no-show that was supposed to trundle through our village every two hours.

It is getting harder and harder to own and run a car. There’s fuel costs, car tax,insurance, the ever-soaring cost of parking, congestion charging, more stringent speed measures . . . And yet even for those of us who fancy kicking the four-wheel habit, dumping the car often just isn’t possible.

Take me. Since moving out of London I barely use public transport. I’d love to avoid filling up with expensive petrol, as well as the sheer drudge of the M25 and A13 on my hour-long commute to work (we’re talking almost 100 miles a day on the clock — no good to man or car). Yet, although my village of East Hanningfield is 15 minutes from Chelmsford and its regular train service to London, I have no choice. The park-and-ride closes at 7pm (“It’s not designed for people going into London”, according to the council), and the station carpark fills up way too early for a 10am starter such as me, unless I guarantee my place with a £1,200 annual fee. Oh, and don’t forget the two-year waiting list.

Exhorting people to ditch their old banger or reduce their gas-guzzling carbon footprints is fine from the comfort of a big city such as London but doing so outside London is quite another matter. Public transport for me is synonymous with a ridiculously long, tedious journey that is way more expensive than driving.

To prove my point, I’ve locked the car up, ditched the keys and, for one week, am laying myself at the mercy of buses, Tubes and trains.

It seems that the two “bus rage” timetable incidents that occurred during my test week, are nothing compared with the routing difficulties. Though I live only seven minutes’ drive from the nursery school that my son goes to on a Monday and from my sister, who looks after him the rest of the week, I find to my horror that the only way of getting to either is to take a bus into Chelmsford, then another out again, almost parallel to the first route but farther north.

Luckily, Christian, my son, seems to think that this is all a big game and seems perfectly happy to climb on and off buses, then back on again. Even when we discover on the Monday evening that no, I haven’t mislaid the last page of the bus timetable, the last bus from Chelmsford to East Hanningfield really does leave at 18.50, my two-year-old is philosophical. “Just get a taxi Mummy,” he says.

By that time, I am exhausted. It’s taken five buses, two trains, two Tubes and five hours to do what I would normally do in just over two in a car. What’s more, I crawled in 45 minutes late to work, although my tardiness meant that I benefited from a cheap-day return on the train, slashing the cost from £21.40 to £11.70.

I still end up coughing up a total of £40.70 for a day’s travel — not far off what I pay to fill up my tank with petrol for the week. This public transport lark is expensive, particularly if you work only four days a week, one of which is at home, so a season ticket doesn’t come in cheaper.

It’s also mind-bogglingly difficult to decipher bus prices. This isn’t helped travelling with two different bus companies — Regal Busways and First. It’s not until Tuesday, when working from home means that my journey is limited to six bus trips and a cab, that I find someone on First who knows about an £8 daily ticket valid on both services. When I use it on Regal, the driver has to call through to check if she can accept it. “There are so many tickets, we don’t know them all,” she tells me. “This one’s new.”

Travel improves on Wednesday, when I persuade my sister to meet us in Chelmsford to see how quickly I can get to work without the detour to her house. The trains are behaving, the Gods smiling, and I make it in a record hour and a half, including the Tube and a 15-minute walk to the office — still not very satisfactory, but enough to warrant a night out in London to celebrate.