Flat enough to cycle in and around urban areas. Which it is! But don't worry because urban buses and trains aren't going anywhere for those who don't want to cycle.
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Road spending vs Rail spending.
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Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Indeed true, but there is scope for variation.
Once again, being highly selective. Because the bit you ignore is the number of times British companies have taken over or operated services in Europe - which happens alot, but that's a bit inconvenient for you to point out.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
As I said, %GDP is too simplistic a measure. Consider a poor African country - even a much higher %GDP than us might mean awful services.
It may be that to get effective public transport we have to spend a higher %GDP than NL. It's about designing what you want and funding it, not picking random figures.
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I know, I live in a reasonably hilly bit. But e-bikes remove hills, for about the 25th time.
I think you are missing the point about being institutionally carist. The decision makers and institutions - planning, building and design in particular, but others also - politicians - approach everything transport with the private car in mind foremost. They are inherently more disposed to private motoring. This is partly their prism on life and partly the knowledge and experience that other private motorists will be vociferous if they are not. They are not against walking, cycling etc - it just doesn't come close on the radar. Therefore decisions are taken which put car use in pole position, and this generally puts other modes at a disadvantage. There is nothing deliberate or malicious in this, it is just the natural way of doing things. Public transport is for losers, an image helped along by the motor car manufacturers of course. With a car you are free as a bird.... If you don't believe me, try working with these people. They'll pay lip service to sustainable modes but..... The few people who are pro public transport are totally lost in this maelstrom. Yes, some places are more successful than others, but how to move from the present position? It is not as simple as saying 'make it so'!
People in London are more likely to be using as bus than in other English cities because using a car is so difficult there, for historic density reasons in the main, and for this reason there is a frequent bus service with comprehensive coverage running at all hours. Certainly this is helped by the overall level of spending on London buses compared to elsewhere, but how are you going to get past the sceptics who do not want to become beholden to public transport control of their travelling lives - unreliability of services, strikes etc are not helping of course.
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Sir Felix Pole
Established Member
If you want to see the ultimate horror of a car-centric society try the Inland Empire area behind LA in Southern California. Hideous suburban sprawl, chronic traffic congestion, next to no public transportation, no sense of community and no sidewalks on hardly any of the roads. Parts of the UK are in danger of going the same way if we keeping on pandering to the private car and building on green field sites.
Cycling around Gtr Manchester, as I do regularly, one readily appreciates the environmental damage caused by motorists - the pollution, dirt, noise and the smashed up communities. Perhaps the biggest irony for me was running into a CAZ protest last year - consisting of black cabs belching out black smoke.
Cycling around Gtr Manchester, as I do regularly, one readily appreciates the environmental damage caused by motorists - the pollution, dirt, noise and the smashed up communities. Perhaps the biggest irony for me was running into a CAZ protest last year - consisting of black cabs belching out black smoke.
And yet, amazingly we still have NZ, DB, SNCF, SNCB etc.
That's before you get onto other entities such as the Utilities.
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I do regard this Establishment mindset as malicious as it directly disadvantages me.
The continent shows that this country is a weird outlier in this respect.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
How do you sway them? You make the service really good and market it properly!
I know there's been some sort of falling-out with the company there, but Alex Hornby's Transdev Yorkshire seems to have managed to sell bus travel to the posh, Range-Rover-driving denizens of 'Arrigut. I rather bet a basic Arriva bus service to the standard of Milton Keynes' would have achieved no such thing and would have exclusively been used, near enough, by passholders and children.
I think that it's you who is missing the point.
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If you actually read the thread, you'll see that the basis of the discussion is a changed government. These things are all easily swept away by an incoming government with a radically divergent agenda. It's difficult to see a future in which the current trajectory of government is anything but totally discredited.
The change won't take everyone with it, of course, this is very rare. But those who continue to hold out using cars will be few in number if good alternatives are consistently provided by judiciously applying tax and public funding, and they would be hit with higher and higher prices for doing so, and eventually generational change will overtake the people who can even remember such cheap motoring as we have had during the 2010s.
It is rather strange that a discussion about road and rail spending has been dominated by cycling!
I grew up in Cambridge half a century ago, have visited it frequently all my life, and moved back recently. I'm not quite sure what "institutional cycling" means, but cycling in Cambridge isn't easy or cheap, so they can't be the reasons why we do it.
Cycling was a very common form of transport before mass car ownership. Look at archive film footage of workers going home from factories at end of shift. When I was young many people cycled to get to and from school or work. Leisure journeys of fairly long distances would also be done cycling: before they had children my parents would cycle from Cambridge to Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket to visit relatives.
To digress slightly, only the Fenland part of East Anglia is flat, the rest is just not high. And cycling in the Fens can feel quite hilly in a strong wind.
What's different and interesting about Cambridge is that cycling never fell away in the way that it did in most other parts of the UK once mass car ownership became affordable.
These are two of the reasons but there are others.
One is the River Cam, which embraces the old centre on 3 sides, and when I was a child there were only 4 road bridges at Fen Causeway, Silver Street, Magdalen Street and Victoria Avenue. I can remember the Elizabeth Way bridge being built.
However there have always been lots of bridges for cycles at Sheeps Green, Garret Hostel Lane, Jesus Green, Fort St George, Cutter Ferry and Green Dragon. We now also have the Equiano and Chisholm cycle bridges.
I still have an old Cambridge street map from the 1970s with proposed roads joining Brooklands Avenue and Barton Road, and Wadloes Road and Cam Causeway (those interested can look those up on a map). Neither got built. That wasn't University obstruction, it was Cambridge people saving the green spaces on Lammas Land, Sheeps Green and Stourbridge Common.
It has always been a lot easier to cross the river by bike than by car.
Another is that Cambridge has also chosen not to increase road capacity by building dual carriageways in residential areas. Apart from a few miles of dual carriageway around Elizabeth Way, with the Grafton Centre coming along at roughly the same time, Cambridge has never expanded road space to meet additional demand.
Similarly, Cambridge has resisted the temptation to provide lots of car parking in the centre. When I was a child the only multi-storey car park was Park Street, though in the 1970s we did get Lion Yard (now Grand Arcade), Grafton Centre and Queen Anne Terrace. Of these only the Grafton Centre has good road access to get in and out. There were all sorts of mad car parking proposals, including an underground car park at Parkers Piece (in the style of Hyde Park in London), but they didn't happen.
Cambridge has kept as much road traffic as possible out of the City, helped by the northern and western bypasses (now the A14 and M11) and five Park And Ride sites on the edge of the city
As a result car journeys within the city suffer badly from congestion and cycling is the fastest and most reliable way to get around Cambridge. Most Cambridge people know that, if they want to be at place X by time Y, the only guaranteed way of arriving on time is to cycle.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
If you want to live in a less car-oriented place, you can of course emigrate to the Netherlands, but much as it is a decent country (and to me the one in Europe that's culturally closest to us) I'd rather we made some progress here.
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Cycling is cheap anywhere if you want it to be. You need a bicycle, and you can often get one for free. And if you have a cheap, basic, scruffy bike, the chance of it being nicked is low, too. This is how most urban Dutch people cycle, with an ageing Omafiets.
I don't see the current opposition as being radically divergent at best it is a luke warm reheat of 25 years ago, things can only get better!
GDP is a good indicator of the Government's ability to raise tax revenue, especially taxes on income (personal income tax and corporation tax) and taxes on expenditure (VAT and duties).
Only partially, because government expenditure can be funded by borrowing, not just taxes.
But you're right that too much spending funded by borrowing and not enough funded by taxes can damage credit rating and make future borrowing more expensive. The UK had a sharp lesson in that last autumn.
I think that is absolutely not the case.
You make it sound like this change would be a positive. I doubt that most voters would agree
Who own more cars per 1000 people than we do.
I'm not expecting miracles, but the current lot have had years to get the trains running round here. Time for someone else to have a go.
Nah - it is not malicious ('intending to do harm')
Not so sure about that - I was reading an article recently bemoaning the last 40 years of development in France and how public transport has often been disadvantaged to the private car at out of town shopping and business developments, and in new housing areas. On other continents (USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia) you will find exactly the same.
Yes, but it will be those very people that will be influencing the allocation of money to make the service really good and market it properly, so it probably just won't happen. That still doesn't get over the problem of 60 years worth of development that has inherently disadvantaged public transport (from road humps to cul de sac estates)
Alex Hornby is one of a very small number of people who understand the issues and how to deal with some of them. But even he cannot overcome many of the carcentric design and decision challenges! Without denigrating at all his work on the 36, this is a particularly favourable route; others did not respond so favourably. Hope his difficulty is resolved soon.
It is good to dream, but I don't think the people want their car use impeded. There are simply not enough public transport-centric movers and shakers out there.......
If you haven't got the taxi drivers and fishermen on your side, then forget it.
Some people always resist positive changes though, in hindsight people will always come to see it differently. The Netherlands removed lots of urban highways to great controversy, and yet now nobody would suggest paving over the world class public spaces created just for car parking.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It's an indication of lots of things. What it doesn't tell you, though, is much about the actual spending as against the costs of operation, i.e. how much any given country will need to spend to get high quality public services. Though if that figure turns out to add up to over 100% you're going to have a problem, of course.
Generally the best approach, just like personal finances, is that borrowing is for capital expenditure and not for operational expenditure. That is, it's fine to borrow to buy a new car (or build a high speed railway, for instance) but not for buying your monthly shop or funding ongoing operational subsidy on the railway, give or take that it's sometimes necessary to do small amounts of borrowing to smooth large expenditures from one month to the next, e.g. if you have an unusually high opex expense one month like the need for major work on the car.
You're free to see it how you like, and I assume that's coloured primarily by your own experiences and lifestyle. But the reality is that public transport is a big issue. Sadiq Khan has made a successful career out of his transport policies for example, and is very popular as a consequence.
And before you rush in with all the comments about how people in central government hate him, and are desperately trying to unseat him, that's precisely the point. They can't stand the idea of someone with such wildly contrasting policy being more successful than them.
London isn't the UK, it is a one of the worlds few mega cities.
Again, wrong. Please read through the thread. Three quarters of the UK lives in densely populated urban areas, just like London. Nothing fundamentally different between Croydon and Stockport.
I have read the thread but I don't happen to agree with your apparent fundamentalist anti-car views.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Not a single person in this thread is displaying fundamentalist anti-car views.
For instance, not one person in this thread has suggested that cars should be banned or even heavily restricted. What this thread contains is advocacy for quality alternatives and taxation of the most harmful car use, which is a fairly progressive approach which is followed by e.g. Khan.
OK but if you'd actually read the thread, you'd have seen that nobody is proposing to ban private motoring or abolish roads. Hence my conclusion either you haven't really read it or you're making a personal criticism in bad faith here.
Furthermore you made a point about London and I challenged you on it. Now you're changing the subject to distract from your being wrong.
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Exactly.
You challenged my point about London by giving an example of Stockport and Croydon which are neither that similar or hugely representative of their respective cities as a whole.
Your earlier posts:
I don't think that is quite right - 75% live in urban areas (which includes sprawling suburbs, market towns etc). In 'densely populated' urban areas will be measurably less. You are quite right to say that public transport is an issue, but not to everyone in urban areas, and probably only to a majority in the densely populated areas.
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