Don't worry, I'll have got over this episode soon and will then shut up.
Second huge source of traffic-creating irritation: the price of local bus fares.
I'd like to use the train to get to London sometimes. I don't, and consequently drive, for three reasons:
1. The trains that get there quickly and offer reasonable comfort - Virgin- are way out of my price range now.
2. The trains that I can afford, just about, - London Midland - take over two hours to get down and over three hours to get back. And they're cattle trucks. And if you have to work lateish they offer the delightful prospect of being abandoned without assistance at New Street late at night because an indolent and sackable LM conductor, or however they style themselves these days, possibly 'senior customer experience executive', is entitled, as one such explained to me once, to take his meal break, even if that means hundreds of other working people can't get home from Birmingham late at night. On that occasion, I saw a weeping teenage girl being turned away from the LM 'help desk'.
3. But the main reason is that if I use a local bus in Stafford to get to the station, it adds nearly a fiver to the cost of my commute. The single fare, from a mile and a half away, is £2.20. In London, I can take a bus five miles from Victoria to Cricklewood for £1.40. Stafford local buses will sell me a multiple journey ticket that reduces the fare, but that has validity for a week, I believe, or possibly a month, after which the money remaining is lost to me. In London, the money I put on an Oystercard stays there until I use it,,whether that's next week or next year.
If we had a local authority in Stafford that cared about reducing traffic, improving the environment and actually doing something that would really help the people who pay its wages and from whom it extracts, with ruthless efficiency, threats and bullying bailiffs, the council tax which it's supposed to use for the benefit of all (as opposed to endless face painting sessions for children at the castle every summer and a largely invisible police presence and providing lovely new surfaces for the lanes in close vicinity to the farmhouse residences of various 'cabinet members' for this and that - oh no, silly me, that's the county council isn't it) then we might, just possibly, have a local bus service that people who have to pay their own fares could actually afford to use. But it appears to be the case that as long as a Stafford bus can fill up with those who travel free or heavily subsidised - with which I don't have an issue - the rest of us can go hang. Just as those of us who have to endure the school parking shenanigans can go hang: not our problem, walk away whistling and let's get some more face painting laid on for hard-working families. Or is it supposed to be hard working people? No, I'm sure we're still on 'families'...
It would be truly in the realms of fantasy though, wouldnt it, to imagine local buses that were not noisy, filthy, rattling and uncomfortable relics of the 1980s, such as might possibly be provided for the citizens of Stafford if transport operators were required to meet more than the bare minimum of a service requirement? Or that had modern ticketing equipment that might permit the use of modern ticketing and charging methods? Or whose drivers were able to keep to a published timetable of an evening, when there is practically no traffic, weather, war or pestilence in Stafford town centre that could possibly prevent their doing so, but there ARE cold, tired and hungry people waiting up to ten minutes (in my personal experience) longer than the scheduled time to be picked up from outside the railway station so that they can hand over their £2.20 for the next five minutes spent listening to teenagers swearing loudly. And - this is really mad - whose drivers do not sit immobile and unsmiling, doubtless expecting a middle aged civil servant to run away without paying, until the final five pee of the £2.20 has been laid down and stepped away from, before pressing the button that causes the ticket to be issued?
OK, I've finished. Feel a bit better now.