Joe D » at war with the motorist

AWWTM: Democratising mobility

Joe — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:07:20 +0000

Shortly before parliament rose for the summer, an unusually large audience tuned in to the entertaining spectacle of Prime-Minister’s Question Time in a week when a scandal-rag had sunk in its own great scandal. I don’t suppose anybody noticed the interruption of David Ward, the hon. member for Bradford East. Ward, a Liberal Democrat backbencher loyal to the coalition (who voted for the higher university tuition fees and previously spoke against education maintenance allowance), who stood on this occasion to ask the PM a friendly question about what he was doing to help young people in need:

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AWWTM: Cycling abuse

Joe — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:06:11 +0000

I stumbled upon an article in The Lancet, volume 138, issue 3554, of the 10th October 1891, which it seems has been overlooked by the internet so far. It celebrates the rise of the bicycle, but warns against its abuse — addiction, even. It has a message that James Cracknell might like to ponder before getting too carried away with the fabulous medicinal properties of bicycle helmets: cycling isn’t dangerous, it’s those sick addicts who like to race themselves to exhaustion who are dangerous.

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AWWTM: You can do better than this

Joe — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:04:24 +0000

The Cycling Embassy has a manifesto and a set of demands. But it needs something shiny, a pretty picture to grab the attention of the people who need to read that manifesto and meet those demands. We’re looking for poster and postcard design ideas. Something that sums up the problem and the solution: the fact that fear of traffic prevents people getting around by bicycle, and that separation from traffic removes that barrier. Send them here.

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AWWTM: Pickles peddles pointless parking press release

Joe — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:55:21 +0000

This week, the Department for Communities and Local Government put out a press release about town centre parking. Unlike last time, they didn’t even have to announce that Pickles is ending The War On The Motorist™. On that point, their work was done for them, by 36 newspapers and the Daily Express. Aren’t they well trained?

This time around, Rubberknickers Pickles is ending The War by lifting restrictions on how much of our town centres can be given over to car parking. The idea is nothing new, of course, but it is assumed that most will have forgotten the previous occasions when it was announced. The “news” is that the paperwork has gone through: the new version of the government’s planning rules are complete.

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AWWTM: Smoothing the flow: pushing more kids into cars

Joe — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:54:20 +0000

We know that Boris Johnson’s fantasy of “smoothing traffic flow” will act as an incentive for people to get into their cars and, even more so, for businesses to move more stuff around. In a city like London there is much more potential demand for road space than could ever be supplied, because individuals and businesses who see an empty bit of road will always conjure some reason to fill it. An equilibrium is maintained by the tolerance that individuals have for sitting in traffic and the tolerance that businesses have for spending money doing business on the roads. Add or remove capacity to London’s road network and it will not make the slightest difference to congestion or journey times. It’s not like we haven’t tried it enough time to be sure of that.

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AWWTM: Delivering excellence

Joe — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:51:31 +0000

In a post about designing ever increasing amounts of truck and van dependence into business models, I mentioned that an “Edgar’s Cool Water” had followed me on twitter and had justified their business with the argument that some people in London and the South East need water deliveries because their workplaces do not have plumbing.

I did a double take when quickly scrolling through old phonecam pictures.

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AWWTM: Friday photo: Ribblehead

Joe — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:50:16 +0000

As in so many of the things that the Europeans do better than us, the model by which our railways came about is shared with the Americans rather than our continent. When the railways arrived in the middle of the 19th century, most European governments saw the need for their own guidance in planning the railway network, to ensure that it was rational and efficient. But in Britain and America, anybody who could raise the capital could build any railway they liked. Our railway network is the bizarre product of mad Victorian capitalists fighting over real and imaged markets. For the first hundred years, three railways competed for the London-Scotland market — the routes that are now the East and West Coast Main Lines, plus a third, the Midland from St Pancras. Extending the Midland Mainline from Leeds to Settle, the third railway then climbs up the 16 mile long drag to the top of the Yorkshire Dales, the highest point of the mainline network, and down the other side to Carlisle, through 14 tunnels and over 22 viaducts along the way — amongst them the 24 arches of Ribblehead, 100 ft above the boggy valley.

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AWWTM: Once more unto the bridge, dear friends, once more

Joe — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:49:10 +0000

After the Conservative group of the London Assembly walked out on the first attempt to discuss Jenny Jones’s Blackfriars Bridge motion, the members redeemed themselves somewhat by voting unanimously — all parties, all members — against making Blackfriars Bridge and the Blackfriars Station road junction even worse for cyclists and pedestrians. Boris has refused their plea for a review of the speed limit increase, but even he recognises that the plans are nowhere near good enough for the centre of a modern world-class city.

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AWWTM: Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Joe — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:48:10 +0000

In December 2005, an article of massive importance was published in the British Medical Journal. Doctors counted up the number of children being admitted to A&E with musculoskeletal injuries (breaks and sprains — many of which would have been caused by bicycle-related incidents) on summer weekends and discovered a startling pattern. A new preventative intervention was discovered. They authors say:

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AWWTM: Appendix: Bad Science Bingo in the BMA’s “safe cycling” pages

Joe — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:47:18 +0000

This is just a crude brain dump of a post that comes after the serious series — posts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight.

Sorry, I just can’t get over these extraordinary pages on the BMA’s website. Here’s a very quick run through some of the Bad Science Bingo points that leaped out.

There were the canards, fallacies, and methods of misdirection:

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