Ride to Work Week UK

Pepé at work

Ride to Work Week UK

The idea behind this is to get people out of their cars and onto two-wheels,  It will reduce congestion, save on parking spaces and reduce pollution.

As my commuting into London days were over a few years ago, once I came to terms with having to sell an organ to pay for the train fares every month,  it was a bit of a shock to see what the every day motorcycle commuter has to contend with.  

Although saying that, the "ride" time is not much different to two years ago when I commuted on Döra the Explörer.

I made pretty good progress at first.   From home to the Darenth Interchange was just shy of 50 minutes. Google maps (below) has the time at 55 mins.  As this bit was pretty much free moving traffic that's no surprise. There was a little congestion where the cars were actually stationery on the M20 by Maidstone but I safely filtered through. Google maps is aimed at cars and not the more traffic slipping motorcycle.

At least the weather was kind.  Sunny but no too hot so I could wear my Joe Rocket mesh jacket.

Google Map of full journey

From the map we can see a few problems but this was made after I arrived at work. The two accidents marked towards the bottom right weren't there when I cruised through.

It's hard to see from this map the changes in colour to show traffic.  There are some roadworks and it seemed like they had coned off the entire left lane, but there was no sign that anyone had got off their arses to do any work. 

Fifty minutes to get to the Darenth Interchange.  Then another 50 minutes to get to work due to basically solid traffic requiring filtering (lane splitting) all the way from about a mile north-west of Darenth and through the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames.  This can be better seen from the second Google Map.

Only another 50  minutes for this section is a bit better than the car estimate.  The problem with this part is that the approach to the tunnel is three lanes but each lane is narrower. As the tunnel is only two lanes there is a massive tailback and far less room to filter as everyone has to squeeze together and a lane is lost.

And to get home?  That's about six hours in the future.  But I expect the same traffic and hassles.