Also, a taxi will use less road and parking space than 20 private cars; probably cause fewer accidents as its driver will be more experienced and should have his eyes on the road instead of eating / shaving / totting-up expenses, and the gain in national productivity in allowing the passengers to eat / shave / tot up expenses instead of driving themselves.
An example of selective-quote-then-unjustified-extrapolation that would do Safespeed proud!
I think you accidentally missed out the preceding sentence. Let me help: "Existing research consistently shows that speed cameras are an effective intervention in reducing road traffic collisions and related casualties."
Needless to say, it's quite difficult to do properly controlled trials in this context, and deal with confounding factors. There are plenty of people out there all too keen to give us bizarre explanations of how the safety improvement around cameras is actually not caused by cameras at all. ;-)
And if you're not quite satisfied by that report, there are plenty more.
My job is totally unrelated. Nice attempt at ad hominem, though.
excuse me how many buses and routes do you have within a twenty minute walk. How many train stations, how many tube? How many private hire companies not to mention the black cabs all over the place. How frequent are the buses/trains/tubes when you get to a stop/station?
There are 5 bus routes here with only a few dozen buses/day over all of those routes and almost no service at all outside of the working day. No trains, no tube, one private hire company, no black cabs.
Fecking Londoners don't know when they are really very well served by public transport.
No, it was not accidental, but if you insist, lets quote all of the relevant bit:
"Existing research consistently shows that speed cameras are an effective intervention in reducing road traffic collisions and related casualties. The level of evidence is relatively poor, however, as most studies did not have satisfactory comparison groups or adequate control for potential confounders."
To paraphrase: "There is evidence which can conceivably be interpreted as showing . . . but the quality of the evidence is sufficently poor that it might equally mean something quite different."
You cannot draw *any* valid conclusions in scienific research unless you can control the experiment sufficiently well to determine the effect of the individual factors which you are studying. This has patently not been done in respect of speed cameras.
Fair enough. I suspected from your previous post that you might have a vested financial interest in proving cameras to be 'beneficial'. I'm happy to hear that you don't!
For your case that's probably a fair point, then. I don't think that even if I was that busy (which I'm admittedly not - while I currently commute weekly from Milton Keynes to Den Haag by a combination of bus, train and air I rarely work while travelling bar reading documents and such) I would want to be dealing with that kind of stuff in a cab, because it isn't the right environment for me to do a decent job of doing so.
Nor do the Dutch...while I'm busy enthusing about the HTM bus and tram operation in Den Haag, some Dutch people my friend knows were moaning to him about the self same operation...
I do. I use it a fair amount and find it very good. I tend to avoid the tube as I find it boring - I can do most of my journeys, or at least the major part, by the overground. I should say I hardly ever travel in rush hour, though.
Hmm. You make it sound like you never have to wait for one. This isn't the case at busy times and certainly not if you want one to come to your house. I could virtually guarantee a quicker public transport time to anywhere in London from my home in London if you include the waiting time for a cab to arrive.
You have my sympathy. Den Haag is only slightly more exciting than Brussels.
It does depend on the type of material and activity that one is handling, I agree and also the journey.
For example, quite a proportion of emails during a typical day consist of reminding someone to do something, asking them how their progress is or giving a short reply - typically of 3-4 lines. This is PDA work and it's easy to rattle off several during a taxi ride or make phone calls if required. Just this can save me an hour a day and if half a day is taken out of responding/initiating a message which would otherwise have waited until the evening, it adds up to a lot.
I do use public transport where it makes sense. For example, for a trip to the centre of Paris, choices are to fly or take the Eurostar. The former is sometimes an hour faster door to door, but the journey is broken up into small bits which are not very usable. On the train, I have a journey of an hour complete with power for the notebook and internet access for emails if I need it. This is followed by crossing a short distance across Waterloo station and perhaps a half hour wait in a lounge with wireless access. Eurostar again has notebook power and a period of just under three hours during which a lot of work can be done, again with UMTS access for much of the time. SO in terms of usability, the latter is currently a better option. When Eurostr moves to St Pancras, the balance may well tip the other way and I may need to review this.
This is true - but then the equivalent UK trains aren't much better. After all, Nederlandse Spoorwegen is a glorified commuter operation - the country isn't really big enough for it to need to be anything else.
Thalys I agree about - but it's TGV-derived so the French probably had more say in it. The classic "internationale trein" is more comfortable, if slower so not as practical for business travel.
If you ever get depressed with it, get on the commuter train that goes from Den Haag to the People's Republic of Zoetermeer - a very short trip. Den Haag will then seem positively cosmopolitan.
I do those as well, and you're right, they are usually more involved.
Fair point. Fortunately the level of subsidy means that it's cheap enough to use first class, although even that is marginal.
I just thought that the trains have become rather tired and tatty.
The treintaxi strikes me as the most useless invention of the Dutch. Three people pile into a taxi and the driver decides the order that he will drop people off. On one occasion I arrived 45 minutes late for a meeting in Eindhoven at an office that was only 5 minutes from the station. Never again. I suppose it's OK for pensioners wanting to go shopping or something.
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