TheWayoftheWeb

Peterborough's station on Flickr by rayparnova (CC licence)

In the current economical and environmental climate, we’re all being encouraged to use public transport, but surely there’s one essential paradox that needs to be solved first:

The more people use it, the worse the experience is.

For example, a packed train to London saw me paying to sit in the rather pretentiously named vestibule between carriages, by the toilet, with my laptop on my knees for the two minutes before the battery died and I ended up reading a warning sign for the rest of the journey.

The return journey saw me in an almost empty carriage, in a comfortable seat, with pretty quick wifi, and two plug sockets for my laptop and mobile.

There has to be some way to do something different and make the experience actually improve if I encourage friends and colleagues to join me on the train. Savings, priority for packed trains, or even something really odd, like having a fridge full of free drinks which are only accessible if two or more people both insert barcoded tickets into a machine.

I don’t have the answer, but at least I recognise the problem of trying to convince me to pay more than the cost of petrol for the same trip, and then penalising passengers if the service becomes more popular. And making travel more social and helping self-forming groups may work.