I’d always got the impression that rail travel in mainland Europe was much more efficient, reliable and sensibly organised than it is in the UK. Maybe it is within a single country but from trying to book trains for a two week trip I discovered that the European rail network seems to have as much lack of joined up thinking and just as complicated a fare structure as there is in the UK.

The main failing as far as I can see is the lack of a single easy to use booking system. If you want to book online, the site you need to use depends on where you’re going. Rail Europe is not bad, but it doesn’t give results on many long distance searches, particularly ones that involve more than a certain number of changes. It also only has the larger stations in its database. For example London to Malaga which you wouldn’t think was too demanding gives no results, and directs you to phone the call centre. Looking up Paris to Malaga reveals that there is a handy overnight train on this route that you can get with a cabin for as little as £59, but if you wanted to go from London or Bristol, you probably wouldn’t have typed that in.
I’ve found the best sites for looking up long distance Euro rail travel are the German and Belgian national rail sites, which seem to allow searches between pretty much any UK/European station and another. The problem with these sites is that although they give routes and times they are unable to give prices for any journey that doesn’t begin or end in the site’s home country.

I’m trying to avoid flying these days, but the companies who provide the alternatives don’t make it easy for you.

These days there is a lot of talk in the media about Global Warming, and also a lot of information flying around about what people can do to lessen their contribution to the problem. The worst suggestion of all as to what people can do to lessen their contribution is Carbon Offsetting. This gives people the impression that they can carry on exactly as they are as long as they pay a bit extra, which is quite dangerous thinking when the reality is that people need to change their behaviour for us to have a realistic chance of stopping global warming before its too late. A prime example of this is driving. The message that people are receiving is that “doing your bit” involves buying a more efficient car, rather than not driving at all and catching the bus. I’ve seen an advert recently by the UK Department for Transport telling people how to reduce their C02 emissions, including making sure your car has the correct tyre pressure.

After an indepth conversation with my father on the causes and possible solutions to Global Warming, and seeing The 11th Hour on TV the following day, I’m more convinced than ever by the seriousness and need for urgent action to combat this problem. Many campaign organisations who are trying to combat global warming seem to focus their efforts on either preaching to the converted, or trying to convince people to petition governments to take action. My perspective on this is that petitioning governments is unlikely to be effective, because pretty much any decision made by government designed to combat global warming is not going to be popular, and the unfortunate reality is that the number one priority of most senior politicians is staying in power.

Carbon Dioxide emissions are caused by the combined actions of a large number of individual people. Getting people to change their behaviour is key to solving the problem. Campaigning to people directly to change their behaviour could well be more effective than trying to convince government to introduce measures to change people’s behaviour.

I think many people are resigned to it being such a big problem that there’s nothing they personally can do about it. If people can be convinced that its down to them to act, and given a clear and concise list of changes they can make in their lives to help out, this may be the best chance for real change.

After watching a documentary film called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” I started looking into electric cars and discovered one that most people don’t seem to be aware of, the Tesla Roadster. The Tesla is very different from most existing electric cars. Its a good looking sports car, it does 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, has a top speed of 130mph and can travel 250 miles per charge. Its a light relief from previous efforts that tend to be ugly, slow and not go very far between charges, an example being the G-Whizz. Tesla have proved that electric cars can be cool, and plan to follow it up in 2008/2009 with a cheaper, larger appeal family saloon car.

Links:
Who Killed the Electric Car
Tesla Motors

General Motors have launched an advertising campaign called “Live green, go yellow” which promotes their Flexfuel vehicles. Flexfuel means they can run on any mixture of petrol and ethanol, up to 85% ethanol (known as E85).

E85 is far better for the evironment as ethanol is produced from wheat, grain and other crops which take carbon dioxide from the air as they grow, and release a similar amount when they are burned. Unlike fossil fuels which realease carbon dioxide that has been accumulated over millions of years.

According to their advert they have already produced 1.5 million Flexfuel cars, however many people are unaware that they own these vehicles. GM are trying to address this lack of knowledge by fitting yellow petrol caps to all new Flexfuel vehicles, which is what the “Go Yellow” slogan is about. Existing GM (and other manufacturers) car owners can apparently check their vehicle serial number here to find out if their car is E85 compatible.

This is definately a step forward, it would be nice to see something like this happening in the UK. The furthest we’ve got with low-emission fuels so far is a single Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bus

Last Thursday I went for an interview for a marketing job with Traveline, the organisation which provides public transport information via phone, web and text. A part of the interview I had to give a presentation on a subject of my choice, so I decided to do something relevant, which was “How to get commuters out of their cars” giving the benefits, the reasons why people are in their cars and what can be done to change it. They seemed quite interested in my ideas, but I didn’t get the job. I don’t really have much proveable marketing experience, so I guess I could have been as interested as you like in public transport but without the right experience its not much use.

Its a real shame for me, as I was looking forward to the opportunity to make a difference.

There are 2 very useful plugins available for Firefox if you’re a webmaster:

Web Developer extension
Has far too many functions to mention, but it is very useful

Alexa/Google Pagerank toolbar
This is quite useful as it shows you Google PageRank the same way the google toolbar for IE does. Also displays Alexa rank and sends stats back to them.

This week IT Productivity Center reported Firefox’s market share as being 10.28%, more than doubling its share of the market since January with a 6.05% rise. Meanwhile Internet Explorer lost 1.78% of its share, showing that Firefox are a serious contender.

Also this week Firefox announced that they are nearing 50 million downloads, which they are celebrating by giving away comemorative coins to users who promote the browser in an inovative way. Join the party and get your copy of Firefox.

This week I’ve been trying out the GMail spam filter and although I have no idea what rules it uses to decide what is and isn’t spam it seems to route about 90% of spam to the spam folder and so far no genuine emails have ended up in the spam box.