musings

london 10.20am 9C raining sunday 2018 today is the autumn equinox

6:49 AM sunrise

6:59 PM sunset

Length of Day 12 h 10 m

Tomorrow will be 3 minutes 55 seconds shorter

its not equal day and night.

these two days have been raining a lot in london. it is unusual. but it is not so heavy that it caused floods. so our life in london  is not much affected. i read in a blog that the heating is put on. its a bit early for that but some living in old houses will feel the cold.

in my case all this rain just means i go out later. but it still did not stop me from going out. and yesterday when i was on the bus to the marylebone library, it seems the whole world was also out , because there was a huge jam in the hydepark corner area , making the traffic blocked all the way back to victoria. it is hard to figure out why there should be so much traffic there.

(hmm, i just figured it out… the wet weather has made more people take their cars out, and drive into london instead of taking public transport. there is no congestion charge on the weekend. also this weekend is the open house, where u can walk into any of those buildings that normally are closed to casual visitors to have a gander.)

anyway, i decided to get off the bus and take the tube instead. the tube was full of people too… one wonders where they are going. they cant all be going to oxford circus , can they? and this is the weekend.

it occurred to me to wonder why london transport is not making money. with all these people using it why should it not be making tons of money. then i remembered the mayor khan had freezed fares for 3yrs… as a bribe to get elected. haha.  they must lose a lot of money with that freeze. even a 10p rise in fares can raise a huge amount of money due to the numbers of users and the number of journeys.

but it seems the main reason why it is not making more money is because fewer people are using the tube. the bus journeys are still ok, but tube journeys have gone down. i wonder why? they have even reduced the tube fare outside zone 1. but it did not seem to entice more people to travel by tube. perhaps the bus is better value… now that they have brought in free travel on the bus within an hour of boarding one, so u can make any amount of transfer inside that hour and still spend only £1.50.