Tomorrow morning, really bloody early, I’ll be heading off to Barcelona to attend Mobile World Congress, an event of gargantuan proportions (from what everyone tells me). I’ll be blogging as much as possible on the Taptu blog and twittering away*. If I’m lucky, I should have the time to post a few videos to my Qik profile.

If you’re also attending Mobile World Congress, then pop by and see me at the Taptu stand, 7D42, in hall 7 and join me for a coffee or a beer!

[* Thanks to Alex Payne at Twitter, I now have the username Vero, which uber-rocks!]

Below, I’ve copied an email I received from the administrator of the Cambridge Congestion Charge forum. I haven’t had the time to edit it or summarise it for my readers, but if you live in or work in Cambridge, please read this, go fill in the survey and let your councilors know that before they smack us with a charge, they’ll need to come up with some solutions.

In my eyes, the first changes they should make are:
1. Encourage carpooling by improving routes reserved to buses and cars with two or more people in it;
2. Improve bus service so that it doesn’t take 3 times longer to get from A to B on the bus than in your own car (see Ottawa’s OC Transpo bus service for an example of a well thought-out plan);
3. Do not include Science Parks in the areas covered, because that’s just money grabbing rather than problem-solving and makes the city look like a bunch of greedy idiots.

Without further ado, here’s the email… Share this information far and wide!

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Hello,

Firstly may I thank you for registering on the Cambridge Congestion Charge website. Secondly may I take this immediate opportunity to say that this will not be sending out regular emails to you.

The Cambridge City Council has launched its public consultation. This basically seems to consist of an online web questionaire and a series of public roadshows around the Cambridgeshire region. I would urge you to take the online questionaire if you haven’t already done so, and visit one of the roadshows as well as contact your local Councillor (easy to use contact details are at the bottom of this email). In the run up to Christmas and New year this important issue may slip your mind and then it may be too late for you to get your point of view across.

As you may know one of the main driving points behind introducing a congestion charge in Cambridge is the investment of a substantial amount of central government money into Cambridge’s transport infrastructure. This money has been offered in return for introducing a congestion charge.

The full proposal document which will form the basis of the City councils bid to get the central government money has been written and is available for download from http://www.cambridgecongestioncharge.co.uk/cambridgecongestioncharge/cambridgecongestioncharge.pdf (copy and paste this link if you need to). The document gives insight into the extensive planning that the council has already made and pinpoints the locations of cameras that would catch motorists that don’t pay, along with plans for mobile vans operating at random locations. I strongly urge you to read this document as either way it will change your way of life in the near future. It is quite long and you have to read it closely to establish exactly what they want to do (such as make Huntingdon Road a one way street for cars going out of the city) but it really is worth it. If you don’t find out about it now and make your views known you may regret it in just a couple of years time.

It also seems that normal “Joe Public” will have to pay a charge of £5 per day at current pricing which doesn’t take into account inflationary increases.

Some useful links and information for you:

City Council Proposal Download
City Council Online Survey (watch out for closed and / or misleading questions & note that this is very difficult to find on the City Council website)

City Council Road Show Locations (watch out for odd opening times)

Link to Contact details for all Cambridge City Councillors including email addresses, postal address and phone numbers: http://www.cambridge.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/about-the-council/councillors/

Please remember to make your view known, especially directly to the council, and please feel free to come back to the cambridgecongestioncharge.co.uk website and continue contributing.

If I can be of any assistance to you regarding this matter or using the website please do not hesitate to ask.

Best Wishes,

Cambridge Congestion Charge Website Administrator
www.cambridgecongestioncharge.co.uk

While we’re on the topic of travel blogging, I couldn’t help but introduce the Active Hotels blog, which we launched in February.

As you may or may not know, I send the Active Hotels weekly newsletter, in which I try to cram as many good travel deals as I can find.

But recently, I’ve been coming across tons of last second wicked deals which would have quickly evaporated before the next newsletter went out. And by wicked deals, I mean, even I was baffled by the rates and would eye my calendar for a free weekend to go laze around in some of the posh spa hotels I found.

After scratching our heads about the best way to tell people about these deals without filling their inboxes with daily emails, we thought a blog would be a great place to start. Between the blog and RSS feed, hopefully we’d manage to use it as a good way to converse with our past and future guests.

It’s only a humble little WordPress blog and there’s still a whiff of fresh paint in the air, but I hope we can make it a good spot to find deals and some rants and reviews on all things travel-related, so feel free to stop by and say hi!

I love travelling, world history, new exotic food, but I sadly spend very little time seeing the world. So I live vicariously through some of my favourite travel blogs.

Darren at Travel Rants is organising a Blog-a-thon Challenge, with the aim of getting new travel writers to come out of the woodwork.

So if you fancy yourself as a travel writer or want to share some of your past unique travel experiences (some of my Namibian friends’ childhood stories and my sister’s many South American trips come to mind here!), visit Darren’s blog and read up on the challenge.