Month: August 2005

The fixtures are out for the Brighton Bears and it looks like there are quite a few in the Brighton Centre this year.

I’ve only just found citystats.org, which gives information and maps for Brighton. The mapping is pre-google maps so it feels clunky, but on the other hand the data is Ordnanace Survey to 100m (meters) plus photos to that sort of level too. I couldn’t find any mention of Jedis in the census data for religion, so that must have been bucketed into “other”.

I stumbled on this while researching the proposed changes to central Brighton parking, and how it would effect our street: £3 per hour pay and display parking, double yellow lines elsewhere.

The gay pride parade and festival was excelent. I’ve not been to the Brighton one before, but apparently it was the
best yet with more than 120,000 in attendance.

There are pictures scattered here and there around flickr.

Watching many many people doing the actions to a certain village people song while following a bus was a memorable sight, not quite captured by the video, but it gives you the idea (best with sound on):

The other week I had a business meeting in Manchester, and, to cut a long story short, there’s no good way to get Brighton to Manchester for a day trip unless you hire a helicopter. I didn’t hire a helicopter, although I did look into that option.

Of the sane options — drive, train, fly — the cost/time/environment equation for a trip was surprising to me.

By car the journey would have taken 5hr 30mins (one way), pushed out about 0.21 tonnes of CO2 and cost something like £180+ as I would have to had hired a car for this journey the way things panned out. I’m not willing to drive 11 hours in one day.

I don’t know what the CO2 would be like for the train trip (I suspect the lowest) but it was the most expensive at £250 — I had no idea it was possible to pay so much for a standard one-day return fare. That trip would have taken 4+ hours with two changes and a taxi. Not too bad.

The option I went for was to fly: including taxis and taxes and trains and waiting around at airports it worked out to £220 and a 3hr 50min door-to-door trip. And less CO2 than the car, at 0.06 tonnes. That’s the part I can’t understand. Maybe I’m not using the calculator correctly, or have I misunderstood the air-travel-will-destory-the-planet reports?