Applications have rolled in...

...and some have gone straight to the spike.
It seems that the first recourse of many of the more than 120 applicants when faced with the admittedly prosaic, if not downright boring, title Young People and Transport was to type youth + transport into Google. Well, at least that counts as research.

There are now around 40 applicants on the first shortlist who showed some orginality or journalistic initiative or were scrupulous in attributing information and quotes or simply wrote clearly and coherently or took some care over their work.
We will now begin contacting those people to organise the first interviews.

To those who do not know what it is like to be a young person without transport imagine getting up at 4 am to take a 6 am bus to get to your 8 am class. One of the applicants wrote that she has been doing that for the past two years.

The application deadline was October 5, 2007.