Транспорт в Лондоне — Getting about London
London is a huge metropolitan area that’s why public transport is vitally important for the city dwellers as well as tourists, for whom it might be quite confusing to get about London. Unlike Russian public transport, British transport system is reliable and quite cheap. However, due to the increase of car ownership, London traffic has become 3 times as heavy as it used to be and the length of the traffic jams increased dramatically.
As a result, the problem of fatal car accidents appeared.
Apart from taxies, there are 2 main methods of transport in London: the Underground and the buses. Buses are best for sightseeing, especially double-decker buses. However, they are rather slow, especially during the rush hour.
On the traditional double-decker there were no doors and passengers leaped up and off the bus and conductor was moving about and collecting fares from the passengers. However, nowadays fares are given directly to the driver or to the machine. Moreover,
London Underground, which is also called Tube, offers people more convenient, speedy and direct form of travel. The Underground war opened at the end of the 19th century, in 1884. Now there are more than 270 stations.
You can recognize the Tube stations by the red and blue signs at the street level. There is no fixed fare, because it depends on the distance you travel. You can buy a ticket or a ticket-stub from a booking office clerk or from a machine. There are 8 different underground lines in the London Underground system.
The travelers, who are not familiar with the Tube, should always consult the map.
So, London transport system is rapid and fast, but sometimes I can be really confusing sometimes.
First of all, I’d like to mention some global companies: Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, IBM, McDonald’s and Intel, the full list of which we can find in the Forbes magazine. Such big companies, as Nestle or Pepsi have lots of subsidiaries all over the world, and such company as
Moreover, every company is always willing to hear the customer’s opinion about its products, to receive some suggestions, how to improve the product. Some people can say that they’ve opened new world thanks to globalisation and, particularly, watching «soap operas». What’s more, global companies try to adopt their products to the traditional way if using them. On the other hand, globalisation hurts the local government’s ability to deal with wages and taxes. Another bad point is that local factories, which are disappearing every day, use more clean methods of production, as it’s not necessary to transfer production on long distances, for example.
And now I want to quote Valentine Matvienko, vice-premier of Russia, who took part in the work of Third World Commission of Social Aspects of Globalisation on October, 15th in Geneva. She said that the positive side of globalisation is that qualified workers can migrate to other countries and get a well-paid job. At the same time, she said Russia doesn’t want to be out of the border of the world processes.
She also told that some problems of globalisation, for example, Russian producers are not ready to rival fight. The will of many foreign companies to weaken our economy in order to put local producers away from the rival market was also mentioned. Vice-minister told that we should save our local culture when entering the global economy, and I fully agree with this.
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