Should drivers in London start paying for the damage, deaths and misery they cause?

[cosmictanya]

Originally Posted by spindrift

Less telling people to piss off and personal spats, more stuff about buying shoes for working girls plz. Or, you know, the actual topic.

i didn't tell him to piss off - i told him to apologise & ring me if he required - he can even with-hold his number - i don't mind.

what was the actual topic? oh yes traffic jams/cycling.

no i don't cycle outside the gym. and because i live in the middle of london, i don't use my car much, but when i do, a jam doesn't annoy me. my assistant/au pair/babysitter/secretary/whatever is on my car insurance (which apart from access to my clothes is the only perk i can offer, and a pretty good one to a girl at art school) - and she drives my son around - say maybe out to legoland.

and if i have a large evening thing, and will be drinking - she drives me so i don't have to muck around with cabs. although if it isn't a work event, then i just share a cab with friends, or even *intake of breath* get the nightbus.

so technically speaking there are always at least two people in that car when it's in use

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by cosmictanya

no i don't cycle outside the gym

Do you ever get caught in a traffic jam on the way to use a stationary bike down the gym?

[cosmictanya]

Originally Posted by spindrift

Do you ever get caught in a traffic jam on the way to use a stationary bike down the gym?

no i walk to and from the gym.

[Loathing]

Honestly, some of you people really are monstrous. And to think you spend so much time detailing your monstrous desires and the twisted logic behind them!

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by Loathing

Honestly, some of you people really are monstrous. And to think you spend so much time detailing your monstrous desires and the twisted logic behind them!

I'm ashamed and embarrassed, I did approach a girl on the fifth floor of Harvey Nick's and offered to buy her shoes.


"They're too tight!"

She exclaimed.

"Try with the tongue out!"

I said.


"Dere dill doo dight!"

She said.

We never did get married.

[cosmictanya]

Originally Posted by spindrift

I'm ashamed and embarrassed, I did approach a girl on the fifth floor of Harvey Nick's and offered to buy her shoes.


"They're too tight!"

She exclaimed.

"Try with the tongue out!"

I said.


"Dere dill doo dight!"

She said.

We never did get married.

you twisted monstrous git

[JimB]

Originally Posted by spindrift

London coped fine with the Olympic Lanes, make them permanent for cyclists and we could end up with a peaceful, safe, unpolluted city like Berlin:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20068083

That was during the summer holidays - when half of London always goes abroad anyway. More so during this summer, when even greater numbers left to get away from the Olympics and the ceaseless dreary weather.

So the fact that London's traffic ran relatively smoothly during the Olympics is no barometer of how closed lanes might affect a fully occupied and working London.

[spindrift]

Take all of London's cyclists off their bikes and put them in cars. Would congestion improve or worsen?

[JimB]

Originally Posted by spindrift

Take all of London's cyclists off their bikes and put them in cars. Would congestion improve or worsen?

Take all the bears down to the woods.

Would they shit?

What's the point of your question?

[JGG]

Originally Posted by spindrift

Private motoring throughout the UK is massively subsidised, HGVs even more so.

Motorists pay virtually nothing towards the damage and injuries and deaths they cause.

Think about it, one person in a half ton vehicle drives it into London, causing pollution and congestion, then sits clogging the roads up for 8 hours then gets driven home. A complete waste of resources. bringing a motor vehicle into London is essentially a selfish act. But let's look at the economics.


VED revenue in 2004/2005, for example, was £4.7bn (Table 7.15 in DfT 2006, 129) whilst total expenditure on road building and maintenance in England alone in the same period was £6bn (Table 7.13 in DfT 2006, 128). Clearly road maintenance is therefore being subsidised by other forms of taxation in addition to VED, and any driver who argues for a direct link between road use and expenditure is in effect calling for a higher level of road tax.

Fuel duty and vehicle excise duty are respectively 1.7% and 0.4% of GDP. This is estimated to be £38.3 bio this year, or 7% of all government receipts.

Therefore taxing car / truck driving is a highly profitable business for government.

Green cars are becoming a real problem for the government because they do not pay VED or FD which is anticipated to leave the government with a major funding shortfall. Yet at the same time it makes sense to encourage them.

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by JGG

Therefore taxing car / truck driving is a highly profitable business for government.

Only if you ignore the externalities. Once you deduct the cost of policing, infrastructure, congestion and pollution it's a very different story.

Especially with HGVs:

The research shows that:

Different studies have produced different estimates for how far heavy lorries cover their costs. On one estimate, HGVs in the UK meet only 36% of their costs – a shortfall of £6.7 billion (2006 prices)

HGVs could be said to cover 41% of their costs if VAT on the fuel duty is counted as income - a £6.1 billion annual shortfall

Taking the lowest HGV costs and greatest income, calculations from various studies show that at best HGVs cover 61% of their costs - a shortfall of up to £3.35 billion a year

Only by excluding congestion costs altogether can HGVs be said to just about meet their costs overall, and even then that is only on motorways.

Some lorries are 171,000 times more damaging to roads than cars, according to the methods traditionally used by road engineers to calculate road damage

http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/me...l_2008/lorries

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by JimB

Take all the bears down to the woods.

Would they shit?

What's the point of your question?

You seemed to be saying that more cycling wouldn't ease congestion. A third of private motoring in London is Leisure/shopping/personal business, not commuting or business related. So the congestion is caused by the selfish few who insist on taking their vehicles out onto London roads.

The IPPR urged the Chancellor to press ahead with future fuel duty rises including 3p scheduled for Jan 1.

“Compared to users of public transport, there is no war on motorists,” said Will Straw, the IPPR’s associate director.

“Rail and bus users have seen fares spiral out of control while the cost of driving has actually fallen over the last decade.

Users of public transport rarely have an alternative, while car drivers can switch to smaller and more fuel-efficient cars and cut out non-essential journeys.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...hink-tank.html

For some, there are no alternatives, but this is a tiny fraction, just 3% of drivers have health or disability issues. For the rest, alternatives exist.

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by JimB

That was during the summer holidays

The picture is of Berlin. Germans have similar car ownership rates as the UK, yet cycling and walking rates are far higher. Berlin is coping just fine.

[JimB]

Originally Posted by spindrift

You seemed to be saying that more cycling wouldn't ease congestion. A third of private motoring in London is Leisure/shopping/personal business, not commuting or business related. So the congestion is caused by the selfish few who insist on taking their vehicles out onto London roads.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...hink-tank.html

For some, there are no alternatives, but this is a tiny fraction, just 3% of drivers have health or disability issues. For the rest, alternatives exist.

How on earth did you come to that conclusion?

I merely commented on your observation that London coped pretty well with Olympic lanes and pointed out that it wasn't a true or reliable barometer.

[JimB]

Originally Posted by spindrift

The picture is of Berlin. Germans have similar car ownership rates as the UK, yet cycling and walking rates are far higher. Berlin is coping just fine.

Another strange post which seems to stem from your inability to read or comprehend posts properly.

I wasn't referring to the picture - as should have been obvious from the content of my post. Once again, I was referring to your observation that London coped well with Olympic lanes - which is why I highlighted that section of the quote in bold.

[spindrift]

Jim, can you please try to limit the personal abuse?

I said the Olympic Lanes could be turned over to permanent cycle routes. Do you think this could work?

[spindrift]

Thanks to a combination of Allied bombing and the Communists' insatiable appetite for pulling down lovely buildings and replacing them with brutal new ones, many of Berlin's streets are incredibly wide. So are London's. The population density of Amsterdam is very close to London's.

Wouldn't a lasting Olympic legacy be the turning over of the olympic lanes to cyclists?

Jon Snow thinks so:

The Olympic lanes across London send a powerful signal across all Britain’s cities about the art of the possible. I set off this morning from a meeting in Highgate, north London, and cycled down to our studios in the Kings Cross area.

This is a route with regular bottlenecks that snake traffic up every major road you can see. Today the pavements thronged with pedestrians walking to work, the streets were dominated by cyclists and what traffic there was made up of largely unoccupied taxis and small delivery vans.

Some businesses to which I have spoken have organised early morning and evening deliveries to avoid adding to, and suffering from, any jams.

http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/o...ss-alive/18241

And Boris is proposing something along those very lines, from last week:

EXCLUSIVE: Mayor plans central London cycle 'super corridor'

15 November 2012

Boris Johnson plans to create a cycle “super-corridor” across central London as he asks the Government for an urgent law change to improve road safety in the capital and save riders’ lives.

The Standard has learned that the Mayor wrote to Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin to complain about Whitehall regulations holding back his plans to test new techniques in continental-style road safety measures.

His intervention comes as the spotlight again falls on riders’ safety after cyclist deaths on London’s roads this year rose to 12 last week.

The "freedom" of drivers to drive and park in the city impedes the freedom of the residents to get around it. A bit like if I visited your house on my bicycle and brought it inside and left it in your hallway.

There is not the space for everyone who lives in or visits the city to all drive and park everywhere, nor the need: London has very well-developed public transport links.

[cnapan]

Originally Posted by JimB

How on earth did you come to that conclusion?

I merely commented on your observation that London coped pretty well with Olympic lanes and pointed out that it wasn't a true or reliable barometer.

It's worth noting that the 'games lanes' generally weren't needed because so few people were using the roads anyway.

On my daily commute through knightsbridge, the games lane was only in operation on 2 days that I remember. The rest of the time people could use it normally.

I've never known London to be so quiet as it was during the Olympics. This was reflected in the shop takings too.

So I don't think we ought to read anything into the traffic patterns around the olympics, except perhaps to observe that London moves more freely when there are fewer people around.

...try bringing that point up in one of the debates fuelled by people hoping for London to double its population :-)

[NCT]

Originally Posted by spindrift

Take all of London's cyclists off their bikes and put them in cars. Would congestion improve or worsen?

Don't be so disingenuous. In the case of inner London the natural alternative is the Tube, trains and buses. The public transport system wouldn't even begin to notice the extra pressure, and yes congestion definitely would improve because bikes don't get in the way of buses anymore.

[NCT]

Originally Posted by spindrift

Thanks to a combination of Allied bombing and the Communists' insatiable appetite for pulling down lovely buildings and replacing them with brutal new ones, many of Berlin's streets are incredibly wide. So are London's.

Which ones? If you are going to compare to Berlin, then give me a road that is wide enough to fit 1 uninterrupted cycle lane, 1 uninterrupted bus lane, 2 lanes for general traffic in each direction for at least 3 miles.