Be an even more green cyclist

Principled entrepreneur Simon Nash has set up Green Oil to sell plant based lubrication and cleaning products for bikes. They don't use petrochemicals and they don't sell to the automotive industry, though they could make a lot of money from doing so. The factory is in Wales, and the containers are recyclable, or can be refilled with the same product.

Bikewise Havering: volunteers needed

Havering LCC will have a stall at  LB Havering’s Bikewise event on 6 March.  The stall will be open from 10am - 4pm and volunteers are needed to staff it.

Please email Gerhard@lcc.co.uk, if you can help, saying what times you can do.

Gold card discounts now apply to Underground only Oyster PAYG, and Gold Cards go electronic

According to fares supremo Barry Doe (widely respected, but still a secondary source) annual season ticket holders whose ticket is valid for a station n the London and South East network area can have their Gold Card (which is included in the annual's price) coded onto their Oyster card, so avoiding the inconvenience of carrying round a piece of cardboard and remembering to claim the discount for the Gold Card.

Additionally, the discount of 34% is now extended to Underground only Oyster PAYG fares (similar ts and cs doubtlessly apply). The cheapest annual season ticket used to be Ryde St Johns Road to Ryde Esplanade on the Isle of Wight. It is currently £140 pa and might not take that long to pay for itself.

Cavalier abuse of cycle track

The cycle track in Pickering Road was in general use as a car park today.Image to follow when I work out why the server is rejecting it.

More Rs

There used to be three - Reduce, re-use, recycle. Then 'repair' was added. Now, according to Rachel Botsman of Collaborative Consumption (author of What's mine is yours) we should add 'redistribute' as redistribution markets such as e-bay and Swap Tree lead us back to collaborative lifestyles.

ELT wins an award

The East London Transit is widely mocked for its name and the insistence that it's not a bus, even though it stops at bus stops, charges bus fares, is shown as a bus on maps and in journey planners as a bus, runs over the route of a bus that hasn't run since it was introduced, and - above all - uses the same vehicles as a bus. Writing "transit" on the side of a bus doesn't stop it being a bus, writing "Rolls Royce" on a Datsun Cherry would achieve the same - nothing except a laugh.

It was going to be  a tram, and at one point monorail plans were if not drawn up, given the artist's impression treatment.

Anyway, to crown it all it's now won an award, partly because it serves Barking Town Centre, from where buses were excluded in the early 1990s.

So that's divert buses away from a town centre and 15 or so years later undo your work, but calling a spade a material extraction device, and get an award for it. Hmm.

Parking charges will stop people using their cars! D'Uh.

In today's Evening Standard (London) there's an article about councils putting up charges for parking to help meet the shortfall in revenue that the current swingeing cuts will cause. One vox pop contributor says: "driving costs more and more, and it'll put most of us off doing it." It isn't really clear whether she thinks this is a bad thing, though the general tenor of the article is anti, but yes, if you put the price of something up, usage will typically fall - it's called elasticity. If car use falls, car ownership will fall too, public transport ridership will tend to increase and so will cycling. This will ease the environmental problems caused by cars, as well as meaning they'll take up less space between them. Basic.

What we want from our transport and communication system(s) is the reduction of the problem of people not being near the resource they need to access. People should have a big fat broadband pipe in their home, with an easy to use terminal connected to it. Amongst the services they should be able to easily access from this is the use of an appropriate vehicle to move things and people to a certain place by a certain time. More private cars is not the solution.