From the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious

[Janet]

2 Hrs by public transport to work, half an hour on the bike, simples! (not to mention £20 a day on a season ticket Vs £6 in petrol)

Well it was, till my employer took all the motorbike parking bays away......

I'm self employed and work from home now, but in my last regular job I used to have to get into central Bristol. There was a bike parking bay outside my office, but a few years ago, when petrol prices shot up, it started getting over-full. In theory this wasn't a problem for me, as I tended to come in early, but I also liked to go home early to balance this  . Unfortunately, on more than one occasion, somebody had shoved in a bike (normally, but not always, a scooter) so close on the right of me that I couldn't get the bike off the side stand. And it became only a matter of time before somebody got too close and scraped or knocked over my bike. I did try talking to the council, but they weren't interested in giving bikes more space (no surprise there since the rest of the street was given over to lucrative pay and display). In the end I stopped bringing the bike in. My employers had a secure car park for managers' cars, and it had a few odd corners that would have been perfect for a motorbike and not much use for anything else. But there was a policy decision that motorized two wheelers couldn't use the car park at all ... :'(