Best Of

Cyclists piss me right off.

Specially designed cycle paths on the hill out of Brixham and towards Paignton. Specifically introduced to help cyclist safety from large articulated fish lorries, and seasonal traffic.

Cyclists generally ignore it, block traffic cause gridlock.

Many with more fecking cameras on them than GCHQ... Ready to report you for yelling "get on the fucking cycle path" as you drive past.

There are three types of cycle path.

1. Well-designed cycle paths that make cycling better - cyclists will use these paths.
2. Badly-designed cycle paths that make cycling more dangerous, or less convenient - cyclists will not use these paths.
3. Paint on the road surface - car drivers will ignore these.

Which category are the ones you are talking about?

Much though I hate to defend that poster, that's not altogether true. Next to the A449 from Wolverhampton to Penkridge (on both sides) is a cycleway that's beautifully laid out. It's wide, straight, surfaced properly, grade separated, no pedestrians and has pelican crossings so you can navigate safely. It must be the best cycleway in the whole Midlands.

Some utter twat persists, every day, in cycling rather slowly up the middle of the nearside lane of the dual carriageway, causing total chaos.

There is no excuse for that other than to be a total arsehole. Unless this person is such a total idiot he has not noticed the cycleway signs literally at his elbow, in which case he should probably not be allowed out without an escort.

If that total idiot was in a car he would not be causing traffic either.

This is what our can't misguided think-beyond-their-own-experiences city dwellers fail to comprehend. Roads that typically travel at or about the speed limit can be seriously damaged by one individual who is not doing the limit that then snarls everyone behind them until they can get into a different lane to overtake.

Whether that one individual be an agricultural vehicle, the bin lorry, a cyclist or an elderly driver afraid to drive properly.

Shared spaces mean they can all be on the road, but the idea its great that they are and should be celebrated is not necessarily correct and depends upon the circumstances.

It's not a matter of celebrating that one is stuck behind someone driving more slowly than you are comfortable doing. It's a matter of co-operating with other road users so everyone gets to their final destination in one piece.

There are too many drivers who seem to have either a death wish, or believe that they are invincible, or in their rage at being slightly inconvenienced and delayed lose all sense of proportion and put everyone else on the road in the vicinity at risk of death or serious injury.

My 14-year old daughter* is doing a sponsored coast to coast bike ride the weekend after next, so I have an unusually heightened sense of cycle safety at the moment (not least after the headmaster at her school was killed cycling home a couple of months back). I'm generally fairly relaxed about sharing a road with vehicle traffic, but you notice driver behaviour a lot more when your daughter is on the road.
My perspective is that almost all drivers are pretty considerate, especially in towns or on small country lanes. Trying to force an overtake which isn't there is very rare; they will almost always wait to be waved on. The roads which worry me though are country A roads. With my daughter, I will go a long way out of my way to avoid these. It's not even that I blame the drivers: but if the expectation is that you can be travelling at 60mph, you can very quickly be on a slow moving vehicle you didn't expect to be there.

*actually the two of us - but she is the one fundraising; I'm just there to keep an eye.

Good luck to her (and you, of course!) Who is she fundraising for?

Thank you! She's doing a Camps International trip in 2027 to Cambodia - one of those where teenagers go and Do Practical and Useful Things for Impoverished Communities - so it's fundraising for that.
We've been doing a fair bit of training, so - while it's considerably further than she's been before, and further than I've been before come to that - I'm feeling broadly confident. Well, broadly confident of her cycling ability. I'm still worried about weather, possible mechanical issues, making the train connections and packing two people's stuff in my saddlebags!

FPT

A case study in why resisting reasonable development entirely can come back to bite you (if the developer ploy here works)? Work in the system to resist where you can, don't just pretend the system doesn't exist because you don't like it.

Council rejects 100 homes.

Developer wins appeal for 75 homes.

Developer then submits another 65 homes on the remaining land.

End result? Residents could get 140 homes instead of the original 100. Now they claim they’re being “picked on”.

https://nitter.poast.org/jakewg_/status/2063551764796752183#m

No sympathy for NIMBYs

What about local democracy?

Sadly I seem to repeat the same issue

we have the same population as France but 7 million fewer homes..

We've arrived at this point almost entirely by virtually unrestricted immigration and given the birth rate we could very easily shrink our population back again by making further immigration almost impossible.

That is a much better deal for almost everyone than continually concreting over the country to build horrible Barratt new builds without any accompanying infrastructure.

No more immigration, almost no more new housing, and in 15 years time housing will be affordable again. As a bonus, we can fill in the various holes in our labour force by redeployment of the people who are building houses to cope with immigration.

Here’s 170 you can redeploy already.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/170-jobs-lost-historic-gateshead-34087173

Where to start;

No one is building homes to cope with immigration, we aren’t building enough homes because not enough people can afford new ones. Largely flatlining wages after inflation , higher prices and supply and demand mean there are too few buyers who can afford them.

If we stop immigration the average age will be 45 in 2040 with far too few young people and a rapidly ageing population. Are the pensioners going to build their own houses.


In this scenario under sixteens would drop from 18% to 14%, the working population from 62% to 55% and the over 67’s would grow from about 19% to 29%…

So dependency would go from roughly 2:1 to close to 1:1.

Hey Presto not only no need for new houses with a collapsed economy no money to build them either!

Peter.

We've spent 25 years trying the approach of allowing mass immigration to increase the working age population in the face of what would otherwise be a natural decline and it has led to poor productivity growth, stagnant wages, inflated asset values and political instability. It's about time the people who advocated it learned to have some humility.

We have had 25 years of large scale immigration.
We have increased the working age population.
We have so far managed to avoid the economic cliff edge of a naturally declining population.
We have had low productivity and low wage growth.

And you have abjectly failed to establish a causal link between them.

Other Countries with high immigration have had productivity growth; the US for one.

Developed Countries like Japan have had slow wage growth and little immigration.

Peter.

The onus isn't on me to prove a causal link. I have democracy on my side.

No you have Populism and what’s popular isn’t always right and what’s right isn’t always popular.

Essential you are adopting the Trumpian logic, that for something to be true the majority just has to believe it.

Much like his Meet the Press walk out. His evidence consisted of only what he believed, nothing more.

I am old fashioned, I like evidence based argument and still believe in objective truth.

Peter.

That’s not Trumpoan logic. It’s politics.

We’ve had governance by opinion poll for many years.

It hasn't worked very well.

So, you don't like democracy then?

The problem is people having factually wrong opinions. On immigration for example you can legitimately want less of it, or be comfortable with a high level. But it's a problem if people think that immigration is currently very high when it isn't, or that most new housing goes to immigrants when it doesn't, and politicians devise policies based on those demonstrably wrong perceptions.

I think your biggest problem (and that of your liberal ilk) is that you think you're always right - and any contrary opinion is therefore "wrong" - and are totally blind to the fact you have an ideology of your own; you genuinely think the facts support it.

I'd anchor that ideology around the complete fungibility of all individuals, and championing things like choosing your own identity and free movement regardless of any evidence of the social problems this causes.

We all suffer from cognitive bias, whether we are liberal or illiberal.
We get comfort from people who think like us and get frustrated by people who don't.
We all look for evidence that supports our views and ignore evidence that doesn't.
We all do.

The remedy is to be aware of that behaviour and actively manage it when it comes to evidence.

But our opinions also depend on our values and these are not evidence based but deeply and emotionally ingrained. It takes a lot to shift them.

So we can amicably disagree when it comes to values, but we shouldn't accept "alternative facts" when the evidence contradicts them.

My wife likes to say that I always think I am right, which she appears to find irritating. My response is always, of course I think I am right. Everybody thinks they are right. If I thought I was wrong I would have changed my mind. This is a criticism I really can't understand.

I suspect the irritation is less that you think your opinion is correct and more the certainty with which you hold it. Sometimes the most honest answer is simply, “I don’t know.”

That applies to all of us. We hold views because we think they’re right, but the confidence we have in those views should depend on the strength of the evidence behind them.

I agree with that stance and nothing said could change my mind on it.