Lockdown - has it made driving slower and drivers more courteous?

[bludger]

So is that your way of accepting that "wE sUbsIdIsE LoNdON" is completely mistaken or what.

[Jaded]

So is that your way of accepting that "wE sUbsIdIsE LoNdON" is completely mistaken or what.

How about each area looks after itself. You can keep your money and we will keep our food.

[bludger]

[Jaded]

So, why are you moving the goalposts?

How are you getting on on PistonHeads?

[davelodwig]

So is that your way of accepting that "wE sUbsIdIsE LoNdON" is completely mistaken or what.

How about each area looks after itself. You can keep your money and we will keep our food.

From the occasions work sends me to London, the offices don't seem to be busy until after 9 and are usually empty before 5, on this basis they are all feckless layabouts that don't do any work. Nothing get's made in that city as far as I can tell it's just a bunch of bankers and politicians so we can probably do without it, the KSI stats will look great if we just bulldoze it into the sea. 

Failing the lack of bulldozers a nuclear warhead should do the trick, sends a message to other bankers as well.

Then maybe we can spend some money on other bits of the place, you know the proportion that contains most of the electorate.  Maybe we could save the busses first they might be useful.

Ban London

[Cudzoziemiec]

Bristol's announced an accelerated revamp for the pandemic too.
https://news.bristol.gov.uk/news/pandemic-accelerates-revamp-of-bristols-transport-network
A whole five streets which virtually no one drives on anyway.
The dodgy thing is that Broad Quay, marked on that map as open to all traffic, has for the last few years been buses only. I'm not sure if this is a badly designed graphic or something more underhand.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Having been inside working all day, I went for a walk aboout 9pm. Seems that the majority of the traffic in the evening is delivery scooters. I was surprised to also see a taxi.

[TimC]

Go along to Tim's meeting with the council and you'll soon find out!

Bludger, the difference between you and me is that I'm doing something constructive to reduce car use . You're just shouting 'ban cars'. And you're doing it on a cycling forum. Grow some balls and go and do it on Pistonheads, or Top Gear's forum, or the Daily Mail's website. Or even, for that matter, the Green Party's website. At least there you might get some sympathy while they educate you in how to achieve change. Clue: you don't do it by shouting.

Must give the Porsche a blat tomorrow.

[Davef]

It is important to appreciate that Britain is not homogeneous. Taking a simplified model of the country, In London very important pieces of paper are shuffled around. This is achieved with a high population density where walking and mass public transit are effective.

The rest of the country is engaged in producing and pumping in food, water, electricity and dealing with the pumped out effluent. This needs a low population density where walking and mass transit are ineffective.

People in London walking and using mass transit are not using cars directly, in the same way by pushing our manufacturing to China reduces our direct co2 output.

I like to think of London as the essential organ fulfilling the primary purpose and the rest of the country as the surrounding body providing the enabling infrastructure.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[bludger]

The rest of the country is engaged in producing and pumping in food, water, electricity and dealing with the pumped out effluent. This needs a low population density where walking and mass transit are ineffective.

It's completely false. 80% of this country lives in towns and cities. This is a fiction designed to make people feel resigned to motoring instead of being on hand with the facts. How do people think industry used to function before you could get a car with finance? My grandpa worked at John brown in Glasgow. He got there by bike - until the authorities built the workers a scheme to live in that was miles and miles from the yard, because they could "just drive there". It's the motor car that fosters sprawl, which creates "need" for it which is why it is such an evil, pernicious machine.

Go along to Tim's meeting with the council and you'll soon find out!

Bludger, the difference between you and me is that I'm doing something constructive to reduce car use . You're just shouting 'ban cars'.

It's two written words pal. This is pure projection. You have no idea what I do outside of yacf. Get a grip.

grow some balls

Holy toxic masculinity batman 

That this really innocuous two word slogan is triggering such an emotive reaction is a signifier of how powerful a psycho social grip the death cage has on its users.

Driving is an environmental and social disaster. It's always forced into countries using the barrel of a gun, with police ready to bash and lock up anyone who impedes "progress and development". Dependency on the car is foisted on people by authorities, by taxing them, spending their money on paved roads for drivists, negotiating sweetheart deals for the auto industry, and then slashing the services like trains and affordable buses, all while ignoring the sprawl impact of the car

You trying to frame my objection to this death spiral as "shouting" (bless) with your tone policing nonsense speaks more about yourself than it does me.

Ban cars

[lahoski]

It's quite interesting that people are very certain that change is effected only by reasoned arguments and not by shouting.

A lot of our rights and civil liberties were won by people being shouty.

Without the shouty people moderate people don't get listened to at all.



And tbh, if we start with "ban cars" we might actually get some kind of reduced car use. If we start with "let's reduce the driving modal share"* we get a public health crisis, motor vehicle dominance of public space and catastrophic climate change.

Ban cars?

*Hint. This is what we've been doing...

[bludger]

Oh and there's some very on-topic news today.

TFL has been forced by the Tory governments to "pay its own way" using ticket sales (which disproportionately impact the worst-off as a de facto regressive tax) and no strategic treasury financing (unlike the auto industry which is subsidised by the treasury yearly with a fuel duty freeze and much else...). This has meant TFL finances have been slashed by 90%.

Sweetheart bungs for the drivists, hard cheese for everyone else. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/sadiq-khan-congestion-charge-tfl-bailout-government-a4441361.html

[Jaded]

Probably best to shout elsewhere.

Nothing quite like putting supporters of a plan off it.

[davelodwig]

London public transport still getting more than the entire rest of the country though, how dare Londoners have to pay the cost of public travel, shock horror like the rest of the country

Ban london, in fact burn london.

* but keep the busses, a service from here through, bisley, camp and birdlip would be ace.

[bludger]

This is the cagers ignoring that the rest of us are paying for "their" fuel again.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-fuel-duty-freeze-has-increased-uk-co2-emissions-by-up-to-5-per-cent

https://twitter.com/theifs/status/1047366148197666816?lang=en

£9bn/year out of our pockets to pay for the motoring royalty's fuel, while the strategic transportation in the country's capital city is hung out to dry.

Ban cars

[Ben T]

It's quite interesting that people are very certain that change is effected only by reasoned arguments and not by shouting.

A lot of our rights and civil liberties were won by people being shouty.

Without the shouty people moderate people don't get listened to at all.



And tbh, if we start with "ban cars" we might actually get some kind of reduced car use. If we start with "let's reduce the driving modal share"* we get a public health crisis, motor vehicle dominance of public space and catastrophic climate change.

Ban cars?

*Hint. This is what we've been doing...

As I've demonstrated even if he got his way it wouldn't have the desired effect - but hey, details are boring, man .

[bludger]

Yeah writing out 15-page draft legislation for an online forum is a great use of my time Ben. You go right ahead.

[Jaded]

Oh and there's some very on-topic news today.

TFL has been forced by the Tory governments to "pay its own way" using ticket sales (which disproportionately impact the worst-off as a de facto regressive tax) and no strategic treasury financing (unlike the auto industry which is subsidised by the treasury yearly with a fuel duty freeze and much else...). This has meant TFL finances have been slashed by 90%.

Sweetheart bungs for the drivists, hard cheese for everyone else. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/sadiq-khan-congestion-charge-tfl-bailout-government-a4441361.html

To prove the point about drivers having a hard time he uses an article that says congestion charge is going up massively and early. 

[Hot Flatus]

This is the cagers ignoring that the rest of us are paying for "their" fuel again.

So how much out of your delivery boy salary do you think you are paying towards my fuel?

£9bn/year out of our pockets to pay for the motoring royalty's fuel, while the strategic transportation in the country's capital city is hung out to dry.

The bolded are the same people....unless, of course, you think that £9b comes solely from delivery boys.

You pay fuck all.

[lahoski]

As I've demonstrated even if he got his way it wouldn't have the desired effect - but hey, details are boring, man .

I'm not sure that is in any way a response to my comments. However, in the spirit of engaging with this conversation and avoiding doing some marking, I'm also not so sure you demonstrated anything of the sort. You came up with some fanciful imaginary scenarios in order to apparently skewer your opponent with your wit, alongside some demonstrable false statements about equality between economic classes. I think there might have been something about ambulances too.

[TimC]

It's quite interesting that people are very certain that change is effected only by reasoned arguments and not by shouting.

A lot of our rights and civil liberties were won by people being shouty.

Without the shouty people moderate people don't get listened to at all.



And tbh, if we start with "ban cars" we might actually get some kind of reduced car use. If we start with "let's reduce the driving modal share"* we get a public health crisis, motor vehicle dominance of public space and catastrophic climate change.

Ban cars?

*Hint. This is what we've been doing...

Being shouty about cars on a cycling forum is hardly revolutionary, thobut. Managing to piss off a bunch of cyclists by refusing to engage in reasoned argument with the people most likely to be allied in the process of reducing car use is spectacularly missing the target!

Car use is not going to go away until and unless an alternative is provided. There is no way we're going to 'ban anyone who doesn't live in a big town', and neither are we going to provide the kind of public transport network that could make getting rid of personal transport a realistic aim. But we can persuade people to significantly reduce car use by a combination of legislation, advice, increasing the inconvenience of using vehicles, pricing and a bunch of other stuff. We have to be careful that in doing so we don't make it impossible for the old and infirm to travel to the services they need, and we have to work hard to adapt public transport to better serve those outside towns. But the idea that personal vehicular transport of some sort won't be part of the mix in a country with very diverse needs is fanciful.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Hm. TfL has received a £1.1bn grant and a further £0.5bn loan. Good. But hardly paying its own way. Contrast with other parts of the country where bus operators are going bust and services scrapped.

Financial sector workers, I discovered, are classed as key workers. Which is interesting.

[bludger]

Quite right cudzoziemiec the idea of "paying their own way" is a shell game when we'll plumb big subsidies and sweetheart deals into building runways, highways, and fuel duty. The whole idea that there is a 'free market' where rational people weigh up pros and cons in laboratory conditions and that's why people drive is absurd. This is a motorist government, who've aggressively pushed motoring using all branches of the state, and that's what we've had since the 1960s. They'll slash buses and trains, and spend billions in capital to put up new motor roads and plough the rest into cheap fuel. It's a political choice.

[ian]

I'm minded that we should ban the countryside, it's populated with people who are a bit odd, all they do is put up big PRIVATE - KEEP OUT! signs, eat badgers, and vote Conservative.

Provincial towns too. What is the point of Birmingham? Norwich? Nottingham? See. We would just have London and the nice-but-mostly-dull bits for Londoners to visit and complain about the lack of street food (let's set the bar to jackfruit tacos). I'd keep Scotland because they have proportionally more redheads and a liking for minced beef products.

(There's a serious point about the sustainability of rural communities, of course, which really should be embedded. My in-laws live the Cotsworld – not renowned for rural poverty, admittedly – but even there, as they creep into their 80s, they have to keep driving. Or surrender their independence. Yet another downside of car-dependency.)

[Hot Flatus]

You'd be surprised at the number of Londoners who have weekend homes in the Cotswolds. Dont think they come here by train.

I wonder if all the high salaried city workers live in London...