In 2000, London’s previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, began the process of fixing forty years of mistakes that had been made in the pursuit of the impossible — the comfortable accommodation of mass motor vehicle use in a dense city centre. He recognised that cities are supposed to be places for people and returned key locations like Trafalgar Square to use as more than mere traffic gyratories.

Continue reading at cotch dot net…

LAs are told to take into account existing local car ownership rates when doing this.  Fair enough, but why aren’t they also told to take into account the elasticity of modal share in the local area?

The line reminded me of the comment made recently by Andrew Boff, summarising the views of Conservative members of the London Assembly, who recently rejected the idea of a “road user hierarchy” which puts cyclists and pedestrians above motor vehicle users:

“It is true that we [the Conservatives] are, by instinct, anti-hierarchical and I agree with you that we should be making decisions to accommodate people’s choices not what we think their choices should be.”

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

This was during the first of the student protests last year, when Conservative Party HQ was smashed up for the cameras.  It was long over by this time, but there was still a large backlog of arrests being processed in the background and obviously it was still the top story on the rolling news channels.

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Brian Haw had a few weird ideas amongst the good ones in his head — in that he was not unusual.  But the weird ones do not mean that we don’t all owe him thanks for the good ideas and the way he acted on them.  For ten years he sat in his deckchair, inches from the trucks and taxis, staring across the road, a constant reminder for the Members of Parliament who were battling their own consciences and their own constituencies to take us to war.  Every once in a while one of our representatives would catch a glimpse in the corner of their eye as they walked past a window or raced across Bridge Street from Whitehall.  They knew they were being watched.

He deserves our thanks for something else, something unintended.  Brian Haw made Parliament Square a place again.

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Cost-benefit analysis is systematically rigged in favour of business. Take, for example, the decision-making process for transport infrastructure. The last government developed an appraisal method which almost guaranteed that new roads, railways and runways would be built, regardless of the damage they might do or the paltry benefits they might deliver(8). The method costs people’s time according to how much they earn, and uses this cost to create a value for the development. So, for example, it says the market price of an hour spent travelling in a taxi is £45, but the price of an hour spent travelling by bicycle is just £17, because cyclists tend to be poorer than taxi passengers(9).

I was vaguely aware that the government had complicated infrastructure cost-benefit formulae that included attempts to put value on people’s time, but I wasn’t aware that they had gone so far as to value the time of cyclists versus the time of taxi passengers.  So I followed the reference #9.  I’ve read some absurd documents in my time, but I wasn’t quite prepared for this.

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

The main driving force for creationists is not science, but ethics. Their trump card is that “evolution is immoral”: they cite “might makes right” and eugenics, quote Darwin’s supposedly racist terminology in The Origin and Voyage, and put evolution at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Everything from school massacres to teenage pregnancy is blamed on “evolutionization”.^[1] It is not evolution that specifically bothers them; rather, evolution is a prominent representative of all things that aren’t biblically literal. In a world where the bible is not simple, straightforward and inerrant, ethics require rational thought and empirical facts. There are fuzzy lines between right and wrong, and tough choices where the lesser of two evils is difficult to determine. Creationists don’t care about the truth; rather, they are angry that evolution casts doubts on their book of simple rules.

The anti-abortion movement appears convinced that a massive international genocide is occurring. Their argument is that taking a life is murder, and life begins at conception. They are not using “life” in any scientific sense, nor expecting their argument to be taken as a scientific one. To try arguing the matter on scientific grounds is to throw your time away. Try a Socratic session of defining terms and you will be accused of dehumanising through language, in the mould of the Nazi holocaust. Arguments over when consciousness or pain detection begins to develop will persuade nobody, because they rely on the anti-abortionist admitting that life does not have solid boundaries, but has grey areas, in which difficult ethical decisions lie. The argument is not about when life begins, it is about simple rules.

G.K. Chesterton is oft quoted as saying something along the lines of “the problem with not believing in God is not that one believes in nothing, but that one will believe in anything.”^[2] I am not so pessimistic, but it does seem to be true that in the absence of God’s simple rules, people do their best to fill the vacuum. Take the organic food movement. Organic food is quickly rising in popularity in the United Kingdom because it markets itself as tastier and healthier, but most of all because it is ethical: good for the environment, and fair on the producers. Buyers of organic are making the simple rule “organic is ethical”, and delegating the difficult tasks to the producers and guardians of the organic brand. Technically, this may be classed as the fallacy of “appeal to authority”, but in practice it is reasonable, as none of us has time enough to investigate everything in depth ourselves, and so we must delegate at least some of the work to authorities. However, when delegating the task, most people assume that the producers and the guardians of the organic brand will be taking an empirical approach to deciding the most ethical growing practices, and the rules for producing the healthiest, tastiest and most environmentally friendly food. Sadly, they are not. The organic movement has written its own holy book of simple rules and superstition. The empirically determined healthiest and tastiest product is substituted with the most natural product. All chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and GM are out, while natural equivalents are in: a surrogate in place of improving biodiversity. Instead of developing sensible rules for the use of pharmaceuticals and antibiotics, which farming has traditionally grossly misused, the organic movement dispenses with them in favour of — don’t laugh, animal welfare is at stake here — homeopathy.

In last December’s leader criticising the organic and fair trade movements, The Economist miss the point. Instead of criticising those movements for judging their efficacy by surrogate outcomes and arbitrary rules, they simply list their own alternative surrogate outcomes and arbitrary rules. Both sides are merely providing just-so stories for why their farming methods are better, rather than looking at actual empirical measurements of the true results they want to achieve. Of course, The Economist is not even interested in the same results as the organic and fair trade movements: they are interested in the simple rule of a free market, no ifs and no buts.

Simple minds need simple rules; but intelligent rational people can easily find themselves seduced by them too, if they are not wary. Science has simple rules too, but of a different kind. Science has elegant equations and beautiful theories that make your heart race when their simplicity clicks. Witness Thomas Henry Huxley’s comments on closing The Origin of Species: “Why didn’t I think of that?” The most awesome aspect of evolution is that such simple rules produce the complex wonders of life. Life, when it becomes complex, no longer conforms to any one simple rule. Neither can our lives. In an episode of Father Ted, the senile old drunk Father Jack professes the least understanding, but provokes the most productive thought from others, with his mantra “that would be an ecumenical matter”. If you’re faced with difficult questions or fierce arguments, and in need of a simple rule, I offer you this: “that would be an empirical matter.” And from there, let the wonderful complexity blossom.

References

1. Tom DeLay, quoted in “Evolution Revolution”, PBS.org.
2. Though the American Chesterton Society have trouble verifying the source.

If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse”.

VAT and fuel duty have just risen, while petrol prices continue to rise as it becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous to source at the same time that global demand rises.  The press seem to think that it’s time to make another fuss about the pains that come with the death of the oil age — to pretend that they could somehow be avoided.  What must be done to relieve our pain?  Fuel prices should be lower: customers want it, hauliers need it, The Daily Express Says So.  Labour think that the government could be “doing more”.  If only the government were to be fair and reasonable with the poor motorist, everything would be alright and the motorist would live happily ever after.

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…