How many people who criticise cities in the Midlands and North have actually spent more than 10 minutes in them?
[...tots up time in head on how long in cities in North and Midlands...over a decade]
Fair point. I have spent a fair while in points from Brum upwards, and there are many nice places (York, the Yorkshire Dales) and there are ratholes (Middlesbrough!). Similarly in the South there are nice places (Haslemere, Aundel) and ratholes (Southend on Sea).
It isn't northern cities that are the problem - it is northern towns. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle - these hold their own against anywhere else. Even Hull can.
The issues are massively deep-rooted. Yes a lack of money, jobs, opportunities. But also a fundamental collapse in local society. The reason why these houses are £10k is because nobody sane would live there.
The solution is two-fold: One - have the entire area bought on a CPI and redeveloped. Either a wholesale refurb of these properties or bulldoze the whole lot and build new. Make the area habitable Two - rescue the people from the squalor. Axing Sure Start was the worst thing the coalition did. We need to train an awful lot of new parents on how to be adults, never mind how to be parents. And for everyone else a direct police presence. Reclaim these shitholes from the scumbags.
Incidentally, when Asylum Seekers were given grief on Teesside for being given "free housing", they were put in HA homes on estates like this where absolutely nobody wants to live.
I wonder whether the way Trump's legal woes are dominating the media agenda in the US makes it difficult for anyone else to attract attention. For example, I think it makes it harder for a Democrat opponent to Biden to get airtime. While Trump's woes are a good reason for the Republicans to pick someone else to run for President, how does a someone else build momentum when they can't get a word in edgeways?
Nobody's tuning in nationally yet anyhow. The place to get attention is in the debates, and in retail politics in the early states. You can win the Iowa Caucus with like 30,000 votes, you can pretty much go door-to-door for those.
What did the CCP really gain from throttling Hong Kong?
They had a magnificent, thriving, near World City in their control and on their doorstep. A glittering gateway and a bright advert for China. Now it plunges down the rankings, it may never recover
I guess they set an example and scared Taiwan. But jeez
Holding power matters far more than keeping a territory successful, to the leaders of the CCP.
You could place these people in charge of Switzerland, and they'd turn it into a cesspit, so long as they profited personally.
The three most successful low tax countries on the planet are Ireland, Switzerland and Singapore. It's probably no coincidence that all three are also militarily neutral. Ireland isn't politically neutral because it's an EU member, but it isn't in NATO. They also have relatively low levels of corruption. Neutrality and low corruption allows them to attract money from everywhere without fear of state capture through either grift or geopolitics.
Political risk has gone higher up the list of location factors than it was before - roughly - the 2014 Ukraine invasion. Since 2014 we've seen political risk featuring more and more in multinationals' decisions driven by the Scottish and Catalan independences referendums, the Brexit vote, Trump, multiple ratchets on the Russian journey to pariah state from Crimea onwards, China's crackdown in Hong Kong and its threats to Taiwan. Meanwhile Singapore, Ireland and Switzerland sail serenely on, untouched by any of this except as beneficiaries (Ireland post-Brexit - and would also have benefited post Scottish Indy; Singapore post-HK; Switzerland post EU Russian sanctions, sadly).
These three are also in the goldilocks position of being small and outward facing enough to focus their economies on attracting FDI while being large, developed and (more recently) transparent enough not to be punished internationally as classic tax havens or spurned by investors as hard to get to or lonely outposts.
Singapore and Switzerland do have quite formidable militaries. Ireland benefits from being protected by NATO, without having to contribute towards it.
Neutral countries are either heavily armed with their own indigenous industries, or shelter under another's umbrella. Neutral countries that don't do this soon stop being neutral or stop being countries. Ukraine (assuming it was neutral - apols if it wasn't) is giving us an object lesson in this.
Or don't have standing armies, like Costa Rica. It doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
I really don't see why the car vs public transport debate generates so much heat. It seems obvious that public transport is more suited to dense urban areas - such as Edinburgh, where I once lived, which has a population of ~520,000 in the city council area over 264 square kilometres - and the car is more suited to sparsely populated rural areas - such as West Cork where I now live, where the whole of County Cork has a population slightly larger than Edinburgh's (~580,000), although about half of those are in Cork city, and the whole county has an area of 7,500 square kilometres, such that the population density in rural West Cork is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude lower than in Edinburgh, possibly lower.
It should be obvious that if the population density is below 100/km2 then the car will be dominant, and above 1,000/km2 that reliance on cars will cause gridlock and public transport is more suited.
In between that it gets a bit more messy, and obviously people cross the boundaries between one area into another, but I think those thresholds would actually cover most of the land area of Britain and most of the population.
I think the issue becomes hot because you have one side who advocate for active travel and public transport who refuse point blank to accept that neither are a good replacement for a car in most spaces. I say this as someone who hasnt owned a motor vehicle for 15 odd years though still have a licence and live somewhere that most people would class as a reasonably good bus service which I do use when I have no choice but to leave the house.
Public transport really is crap. For example going to the supermarket for me involves waiting for the bus which only turns up at all about 95% of the time and is pretty much always late by 5 to 10 minutes when it does turn up. That gets me to the town centre in about 30 minutes once it arrives. I then need to get another bus to get to the supermarket which means another wait of upto 40 minutes before another 15 minute journey. It is not unusual for example to leave my house at 10:50 am and finally get to the supermarket around 12:30pm and that costs me 4£.
To get to the supermarket by car on the other hand takes about 5 minutes.
I don't know where you live, but it doesn't sound like a particularly densely populated urban area. In the cities that I've lived in it hasn't been unusual for me to live within easy walking distance of two different supermarkets, let alone others on a single bus journey.
Even in Chippenham, my mother, who has Parkinson's and consequently difficulty in walking long distances, would walk to the supermarket and take a taxi home. I don't think she'd have been able to take a bus there instead.
I'm not opposed to cars, but they're a tool and any tool has its appropriate and efficient use, and other situations where it isn't appropriate or is inefficient. Even in a rural area such as West Cork, one of the local towns gets horrendously gridlocked quite often, because all the parking is located in the town centre, and so people driving around town looking for a parking spot block the traffic trying to cross the town. If they'd just complete the plan to build a car park by the bypass, for which there is a bridge to the town centre across the river, they'd take masses of traffic out of the town centre. But for some reason it is seen as being anti-car to ask them not to park wherever people please, even if it ends up in a worse outcome for everyone.
Even as someone who lives outside of the town and has to drive in I can see that this would make sense for everyone, but sensible changes are blocked as being anti-car. It's completely irrational.
I live in what Eahbahl would class in an urban area population about 36k , a population density of about 3.6k per square kilometre. Yes I am in walking distance of a local shop but what the fuck use is that to anyone. Its great for incidentals but not for getting most of what you need
I wasn't talking about a little shop. I meant what I said - an actual supermarket. I find it weird that you can live in a reasonably substantial urban area and not be in walking distance of a proper supermarket.
I've never paid much attention to it when choosing where to live, haven't had the luxury of being able to choose exactly where to live in a city - I've always taken the place I could afford - but that has always landed me within walking distance of a supermarket. I'm a bit surprised.
Shrugs the supermarket is on the other edge of town to me, I am on one edge its on the other. The only other major supermarket in town is a marks and spencers food hall and a lidl. I don't goto the M&S one because expense of it even though would cut out the second bus. There is also a large lidl but it is 100 yards from the one I go to. All the rest are the tesco express type
It depends on your income level. A surprising number of people don’t realise that being a short walk from a full sized supermarket, a zone 2 tube station and a row of bus stops on the high street is a sign of wealth, in London.
But I've always bought/rented the cheapest properties in the places that I've lived in, and I've always been within walking distance of a supermarket. This was even true in the small town I lived in in the Forest of Dean, and although Exeter likes to style itself as a capital city, it's really not that big.
Actually, there was one place where we weren't within walking distance of a supermarket, and that was Bracknell - perhaps coincidentally somewhere that was designed around the car.
Bad town planning forces people to use cars, but there's no particular need why they have to be so designed.
QED.
Bracknell is a terrible place in terms of large town design. Massive housing estates with nothing at all in the way of facilities, and the old town centre with nowhere to park except for the cinema/bowling place.
One issue creeping up on the Tories unawares is the increasingly rapid death of bus travel. If you live in a big place you likely still have buses - possibly less frequent and more expensive.
If you live outside of a big place, your bus options likely to be increasingly threatened with not being there at all. Access to buses so that village ladies can go to town and shop has been a successful Tory campaign topic in the past, yet now there is silence as what services are left are removed.
There is still a lunatic mentality that government - national or local - has no place running services and if it tried it would be terrible. And yet we have an awful lot of councils essentially being held hostage and hard bargained by Arriva. Which is the german government...
But also because councils are squeezed between the costs of Social Care (becuase we don't want to pay for that explicitly) and effective caps on the funds they can raise through Council Tax.
Meanwhile, stuff still costs what it costs- you can sweep it under the carpet a bit, but not indefinitely.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Serious question would you take the bus if your 10 minute car journey took an hour and sometimes more if the bus didnt turn up?
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Seawater cloud injection is probably one of the safer forms of geoengineering and as such worth investigating, especially now we have a real world analogue to look at. It won't wipe out global warming alone though, just slow it down / mask it.
Come on now, world temperatures are either rising or falling. There isn't a class hierarchy of cooling that it's only a 'mask' if it isn't forcing people to give up their cars or remodel their houses.
JSO's worst nightmare is a geoengineering solution that works.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
I drove yesterday into Maltby, which is a "town" by anyone's imagination. Parked up briefly in the Tesco Car Park, bought some swim nappies and onto the leisure centre which had ample parking. Parking for picking up items from Worksop post office is a bit iffy mind; the last time I had to properly PLAN and pay for parking was in Manchester (Obviously a city) last weekend meeting some friends, Lower Chatham St carpark nicely close to the motorway though. Parking in Harworth, Carlton, Langold or Oldcotes tends to be trivial though (All villages) - so I'd say the smaller the locality the easier the parking unless it's a tourist hotspot like York.
I excepted supermarkets, whose USP is extensive free parking. Leisure centres tend to be the same (but it's pay and display in my local town) so that leaves the Post Office, which is a pretty good proxy for all the non-supermarket shops you might otherwise want to visit.
So excluding places you might want to go to, there might be a problem?
Where exactly is this supposed problem of yours? And pay and display parking is still parking, nothing wrong with that. So long as there's ample spaces, its clean, well lit and secure. If you're using a service, there's nothing wrong with paying for it.
Sure, you can classify places like the post office as not "places you might want to go to." I have already pointed you to an ostensibly well-researched article in a respected newspaper identifying numerous market towns where the problem is critical. If your ambition is limited to weekly shops at tesco I appreciate there is less of a problem for you. As far as paying for it is concerned, some people are poor and some people are lazy. i am one of the two.
You shared a clickbait article about what clearly aren't typical towns actually. And I'm sceptical how much credit to give to such clickbait anyway.
My local Post Office is in a local community centre which has a car park. The Post Office where I used to live was in a shop, with a car park. Any Post Office I've ever been to has parking, either it's own, or on the road.
And the emptiest car park I ever go to is the main Post Office depot nearby, if I need to collect a "you were out" parcel. Their car park is unnecessarily big, but it's their land so up to them what they do with it.
Never been to a Post Office you can't park at. Not sure why any town would ever have one, what would be the point of it?
Sure.
Clickbait has a specific meaning: lurid headlines placed on third party websites to induce the idle surfer to follow them to a page full of lurid advertisements for timeshares and penis enlargement and such. I can find no links to that article on third party websites, and, having disabled my adblocker, can see no ads on the page itself. What is the basis for your use of the term, other than that the article destroys your point?
This is nonsense about post offices. The main sorting depot obviously has lots of parking, but other than collect parcels there's generally nothing you can do there. There is no parking at either town centre post Office in my local town.
No ads on the page itself? This is what popped up when I clicked on the page, covering a third of my screen. [EDIT the ad is so big, that PB Vanilla is now shrinking my screenshot of it]
Then under the article is this ad.
The Grauniad is full of ads and clickbait, just begging letters are its ads not penis pumps, and the clickbait is bullshit like that you just shared that it thinks people will share and click
I simply don't believe that you do not have a Post Office you can drive to, I don't believe it. Not my experience at all, and if you go to the Post Office website they're very happy to provide details of where you can drive to in order to get Post Office services.
Please feel free to name any town that you can't drive to and park near a Post Office, as its BS in my eyes.
Not seeing the bait element here, Barty. And I don't want to park "near" the PO I want to park at it, and without faffing about with coins and parking apps and similar balls, and walking 10 minutes.
I think this is a generational thing. you regard all that shit as "easy parking." Not how it used to be.
Guardian doesn't have ads for me. I use Adblocker. The fundraising popup is very occasional.
Don't worry they have learned from Cambridge Analytica and are getting their value from you.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
I drove yesterday into Maltby, which is a "town" by anyone's imagination. Parked up briefly in the Tesco Car Park, bought some swim nappies and onto the leisure centre which had ample parking. Parking for picking up items from Worksop post office is a bit iffy mind; the last time I had to properly PLAN and pay for parking was in Manchester (Obviously a city) last weekend meeting some friends, Lower Chatham St carpark nicely close to the motorway though. Parking in Harworth, Carlton, Langold or Oldcotes tends to be trivial though (All villages) - so I'd say the smaller the locality the easier the parking unless it's a tourist hotspot like York.
I excepted supermarkets, whose USP is extensive free parking. Leisure centres tend to be the same (but it's pay and display in my local town) so that leaves the Post Office, which is a pretty good proxy for all the non-supermarket shops you might otherwise want to visit.
So excluding places you might want to go to, there might be a problem?
Where exactly is this supposed problem of yours? And pay and display parking is still parking, nothing wrong with that. So long as there's ample spaces, its clean, well lit and secure. If you're using a service, there's nothing wrong with paying for it.
Sure, you can classify places like the post office as not "places you might want to go to." I have already pointed you to an ostensibly well-researched article in a respected newspaper identifying numerous market towns where the problem is critical. If your ambition is limited to weekly shops at tesco I appreciate there is less of a problem for you. As far as paying for it is concerned, some people are poor and some people are lazy. i am one of the two.
You shared a clickbait article about what clearly aren't typical towns actually. And I'm sceptical how much credit to give to such clickbait anyway.
My local Post Office is in a local community centre which has a car park. The Post Office where I used to live was in a shop, with a car park. Any Post Office I've ever been to has parking, either it's own, or on the road.
And the emptiest car park I ever go to is the main Post Office depot nearby, if I need to collect a "you were out" parcel. Their car park is unnecessarily big, but it's their land so up to them what they do with it.
Never been to a Post Office you can't park at. Not sure why any town would ever have one, what would be the point of it?
Sure.
Clickbait has a specific meaning: lurid headlines placed on third party websites to induce the idle surfer to follow them to a page full of lurid advertisements for timeshares and penis enlargement and such. I can find no links to that article on third party websites, and, having disabled my adblocker, can see no ads on the page itself. What is the basis for your use of the term, other than that the article destroys your point?
This is nonsense about post offices. The main sorting depot obviously has lots of parking, but other than collect parcels there's generally nothing you can do there. There is no parking at either town centre post Office in my local town.
No ads on the page itself? This is what popped up when I clicked on the page, covering a third of my screen. [EDIT the ad is so big, that PB Vanilla is now shrinking my screenshot of it]
Then under the article is this ad.
The Grauniad is full of ads and clickbait, just begging letters are its ads not penis pumps, and the clickbait is bullshit like that you just shared that it thinks people will share and click
I simply don't believe that you do not have a Post Office you can drive to, I don't believe it. Not my experience at all, and if you go to the Post Office website they're very happy to provide details of where you can drive to in order to get Post Office services.
Please feel free to name any town that you can't drive to and park near a Post Office, as its BS in my eyes.
Not seeing the bait element here, Barty. And I don't want to park "near" the PO I want to park at it, and without faffing about with coins and parking apps and similar balls, and walking 10 minutes.
I think this is a generational thing. you regard all that shit as "easy parking." Not how it used to be.
Guardian doesn't have ads for me. I use Adblocker. The fundraising popup is very occasional.
Don't worry they have learned from Cambridge Analytica and are getting their value from you.
Convincing reasons to think reducing SO2 emissions from ships has caused oceanic warming (ie it's not just correlation). Bad news in itself, good news on the broader level that it shows we can geoengineer the climate
I've been thinking about this. The reason we cut SO2 was that it converted into sulphuric acid, H2SO4, in the clouds causing acid rain which had significantly adverse effects on both life in the oceans and forests, reducing their CO2 absorption, increasing global warming. Chris Peckham mentioned this in his Earth series. Large quantities of SO2 meant that 96% of life in the seas died.
Pumping SO2 into the atmosphere for a short term gain will definitely need a lot more thought.
96% of sea life died? That is a mega mass extinction. Now I know that Packham is a twat of the first order (cannot understand why such a dreadful presenter is on TV at all) but I would be surprised if even he suggested that
I'm sceptical on that figure. Only thing I can find like that is in a specific region, for specifically sea-floor living animals, in a mass disaster near Russia that seems to be getting blamed on a pesticide leak.
Can't find anything like 96% for oceans globally, that just doesn't pass the sniff test.
Permian Extincvtion. At the end of the Permian. Massive; that 96% will depend on how you define the scoring, but it was radical by any count. Try and find a Youtube by Michael Benton, as he is a well known researcher on this.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
I drove yesterday into Maltby, which is a "town" by anyone's imagination. Parked up briefly in the Tesco Car Park, bought some swim nappies and onto the leisure centre which had ample parking. Parking for picking up items from Worksop post office is a bit iffy mind; the last time I had to properly PLAN and pay for parking was in Manchester (Obviously a city) last weekend meeting some friends, Lower Chatham St carpark nicely close to the motorway though. Parking in Harworth, Carlton, Langold or Oldcotes tends to be trivial though (All villages) - so I'd say the smaller the locality the easier the parking unless it's a tourist hotspot like York.
I excepted supermarkets, whose USP is extensive free parking. Leisure centres tend to be the same (but it's pay and display in my local town) so that leaves the Post Office, which is a pretty good proxy for all the non-supermarket shops you might otherwise want to visit.
So excluding places you might want to go to, there might be a problem?
Where exactly is this supposed problem of yours? And pay and display parking is still parking, nothing wrong with that. So long as there's ample spaces, its clean, well lit and secure. If you're using a service, there's nothing wrong with paying for it.
Sure, you can classify places like the post office as not "places you might want to go to." I have already pointed you to an ostensibly well-researched article in a respected newspaper identifying numerous market towns where the problem is critical. If your ambition is limited to weekly shops at tesco I appreciate there is less of a problem for you. As far as paying for it is concerned, some people are poor and some people are lazy. i am one of the two.
You shared a clickbait article about what clearly aren't typical towns actually. And I'm sceptical how much credit to give to such clickbait anyway.
My local Post Office is in a local community centre which has a car park. The Post Office where I used to live was in a shop, with a car park. Any Post Office I've ever been to has parking, either it's own, or on the road.
And the emptiest car park I ever go to is the main Post Office depot nearby, if I need to collect a "you were out" parcel. Their car park is unnecessarily big, but it's their land so up to them what they do with it.
Never been to a Post Office you can't park at. Not sure why any town would ever have one, what would be the point of it?
Sure.
Clickbait has a specific meaning: lurid headlines placed on third party websites to induce the idle surfer to follow them to a page full of lurid advertisements for timeshares and penis enlargement and such. I can find no links to that article on third party websites, and, having disabled my adblocker, can see no ads on the page itself. What is the basis for your use of the term, other than that the article destroys your point?
This is nonsense about post offices. The main sorting depot obviously has lots of parking, but other than collect parcels there's generally nothing you can do there. There is no parking at either town centre post Office in my local town.
No ads on the page itself? This is what popped up when I clicked on the page, covering a third of my screen. [EDIT the ad is so big, that PB Vanilla is now shrinking my screenshot of it]
Then under the article is this ad.
The Grauniad is full of ads and clickbait, just begging letters are its ads not penis pumps, and the clickbait is bullshit like that you just shared that it thinks people will share and click
I simply don't believe that you do not have a Post Office you can drive to, I don't believe it. Not my experience at all, and if you go to the Post Office website they're very happy to provide details of where you can drive to in order to get Post Office services.
Please feel free to name any town that you can't drive to and park near a Post Office, as its BS in my eyes.
Not seeing the bait element here, Barty. And I don't want to park "near" the PO I want to park at it, and without faffing about with coins and parking apps and similar balls, and walking 10 minutes.
I think this is a generational thing. you regard all that shit as "easy parking." Not how it used to be.
Guardian doesn't have ads for me. I use Adblocker. The fundraising popup is very occasional.
Don't worry they have learned from Cambridge Analytica and are getting their value from you.
Some of us switch cookies off.
And the vast majority don't.
If you know enough to turn cookies off why wouldnt you?
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
I drove yesterday into Maltby, which is a "town" by anyone's imagination. Parked up briefly in the Tesco Car Park, bought some swim nappies and onto the leisure centre which had ample parking. Parking for picking up items from Worksop post office is a bit iffy mind; the last time I had to properly PLAN and pay for parking was in Manchester (Obviously a city) last weekend meeting some friends, Lower Chatham St carpark nicely close to the motorway though. Parking in Harworth, Carlton, Langold or Oldcotes tends to be trivial though (All villages) - so I'd say the smaller the locality the easier the parking unless it's a tourist hotspot like York.
I excepted supermarkets, whose USP is extensive free parking. Leisure centres tend to be the same (but it's pay and display in my local town) so that leaves the Post Office, which is a pretty good proxy for all the non-supermarket shops you might otherwise want to visit.
So excluding places you might want to go to, there might be a problem?
Where exactly is this supposed problem of yours? And pay and display parking is still parking, nothing wrong with that. So long as there's ample spaces, its clean, well lit and secure. If you're using a service, there's nothing wrong with paying for it.
Sure, you can classify places like the post office as not "places you might want to go to." I have already pointed you to an ostensibly well-researched article in a respected newspaper identifying numerous market towns where the problem is critical. If your ambition is limited to weekly shops at tesco I appreciate there is less of a problem for you. As far as paying for it is concerned, some people are poor and some people are lazy. i am one of the two.
You shared a clickbait article about what clearly aren't typical towns actually. And I'm sceptical how much credit to give to such clickbait anyway.
My local Post Office is in a local community centre which has a car park. The Post Office where I used to live was in a shop, with a car park. Any Post Office I've ever been to has parking, either it's own, or on the road.
And the emptiest car park I ever go to is the main Post Office depot nearby, if I need to collect a "you were out" parcel. Their car park is unnecessarily big, but it's their land so up to them what they do with it.
Never been to a Post Office you can't park at. Not sure why any town would ever have one, what would be the point of it?
Sure.
Clickbait has a specific meaning: lurid headlines placed on third party websites to induce the idle surfer to follow them to a page full of lurid advertisements for timeshares and penis enlargement and such. I can find no links to that article on third party websites, and, having disabled my adblocker, can see no ads on the page itself. What is the basis for your use of the term, other than that the article destroys your point?
This is nonsense about post offices. The main sorting depot obviously has lots of parking, but other than collect parcels there's generally nothing you can do there. There is no parking at either town centre post Office in my local town.
No ads on the page itself? This is what popped up when I clicked on the page, covering a third of my screen. [EDIT the ad is so big, that PB Vanilla is now shrinking my screenshot of it]
Then under the article is this ad.
The Grauniad is full of ads and clickbait, just begging letters are its ads not penis pumps, and the clickbait is bullshit like that you just shared that it thinks people will share and click
I simply don't believe that you do not have a Post Office you can drive to, I don't believe it. Not my experience at all, and if you go to the Post Office website they're very happy to provide details of where you can drive to in order to get Post Office services.
Please feel free to name any town that you can't drive to and park near a Post Office, as its BS in my eyes.
Not seeing the bait element here, Barty. And I don't want to park "near" the PO I want to park at it, and without faffing about with coins and parking apps and similar balls, and walking 10 minutes.
I think this is a generational thing. you regard all that shit as "easy parking." Not how it used to be.
Guardian doesn't have ads for me. I use Adblocker. The fundraising popup is very occasional.
Don't worry they have learned from Cambridge Analytica and are getting their value from you.
Some of us switch cookies off.
And the vast majority don't.
If you know enough to turn cookies off why wouldnt you?
Well, quite. But maybe some folk confuse them with "biscuits"?
How many people who criticise cities in the Midlands and North have actually spent more than 10 minutes in them?
[...tots up time in head on how long in cities in North and Midlands...over a decade]
Fair point. I have spent a fair while in points from Brum upwards, and there are many nice places (York, the Yorkshire Dales) and there are ratholes (Middlesbrough!). Similarly in the South there are nice places (Haslemere, Aundel) and ratholes (Southend on Sea).
It isn't northern cities that are the problem - it is northern towns. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle - these hold their own against anywhere else. Even Hull can.
The issues are massively deep-rooted. Yes a lack of money, jobs, opportunities. But also a fundamental collapse in local society. The reason why these houses are £10k is because nobody sane would live there.
The solution is two-fold: One - have the entire area bought on a CPI and redeveloped. Either a wholesale refurb of these properties or bulldoze the whole lot and build new. Make the area habitable Two - rescue the people from the squalor. Axing Sure Start was the worst thing the coalition did. We need to train an awful lot of new parents on how to be adults, never mind how to be parents. And for everyone else a direct police presence. Reclaim these shitholes from the scumbags.
Incidentally, when Asylum Seekers were given grief on Teesside for being given "free housing", they were put in HA homes on estates like this where absolutely nobody wants to live.
Same in Gateshead. They were put in some real hovels. There’s a fair bit of competition for that title in Gateshead as well.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Wrong. The councils are represented on the management board, but it deters micromanagement.
Edit: also 100% council owned, and (before covid) something of a minor cash cow for the councils.
From the boffins at Nottingham Trent University. One side effect of high tuition fees is that any university can pay for top class researchers and facilities.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upon the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
I drove yesterday into Maltby, which is a "town" by anyone's imagination. Parked up briefly in the Tesco Car Park, bought some swim nappies and onto the leisure centre which had ample parking. Parking for picking up items from Worksop post office is a bit iffy mind; the last time I had to properly PLAN and pay for parking was in Manchester (Obviously a city) last weekend meeting some friends, Lower Chatham St carpark nicely close to the motorway though. Parking in Harworth, Carlton, Langold or Oldcotes tends to be trivial though (All villages) - so I'd say the smaller the locality the easier the parking unless it's a tourist hotspot like York.
I excepted supermarkets, whose USP is extensive free parking. Leisure centres tend to be the same (but it's pay and display in my local town) so that leaves the Post Office, which is a pretty good proxy for all the non-supermarket shops you might otherwise want to visit.
So excluding places you might want to go to, there might be a problem?
Where exactly is this supposed problem of yours? And pay and display parking is still parking, nothing wrong with that. So long as there's ample spaces, its clean, well lit and secure. If you're using a service, there's nothing wrong with paying for it.
Sure, you can classify places like the post office as not "places you might want to go to." I have already pointed you to an ostensibly well-researched article in a respected newspaper identifying numerous market towns where the problem is critical. If your ambition is limited to weekly shops at tesco I appreciate there is less of a problem for you. As far as paying for it is concerned, some people are poor and some people are lazy. i am one of the two.
You shared a clickbait article about what clearly aren't typical towns actually. And I'm sceptical how much credit to give to such clickbait anyway.
My local Post Office is in a local community centre which has a car park. The Post Office where I used to live was in a shop, with a car park. Any Post Office I've ever been to has parking, either it's own, or on the road.
And the emptiest car park I ever go to is the main Post Office depot nearby, if I need to collect a "you were out" parcel. Their car park is unnecessarily big, but it's their land so up to them what they do with it.
Never been to a Post Office you can't park at. Not sure why any town would ever have one, what would be the point of it?
Sure.
Clickbait has a specific meaning: lurid headlines placed on third party websites to induce the idle surfer to follow them to a page full of lurid advertisements for timeshares and penis enlargement and such. I can find no links to that article on third party websites, and, having disabled my adblocker, can see no ads on the page itself. What is the basis for your use of the term, other than that the article destroys your point?
This is nonsense about post offices. The main sorting depot obviously has lots of parking, but other than collect parcels there's generally nothing you can do there. There is no parking at either town centre post Office in my local town.
No ads on the page itself? This is what popped up when I clicked on the page, covering a third of my screen. [EDIT the ad is so big, that PB Vanilla is now shrinking my screenshot of it]
Then under the article is this ad.
The Grauniad is full of ads and clickbait, just begging letters are its ads not penis pumps, and the clickbait is bullshit like that you just shared that it thinks people will share and click
I simply don't believe that you do not have a Post Office you can drive to, I don't believe it. Not my experience at all, and if you go to the Post Office website they're very happy to provide details of where you can drive to in order to get Post Office services.
Please feel free to name any town that you can't drive to and park near a Post Office, as its BS in my eyes.
Not seeing the bait element here, Barty. And I don't want to park "near" the PO I want to park at it, and without faffing about with coins and parking apps and similar balls, and walking 10 minutes.
I think this is a generational thing. you regard all that shit as "easy parking." Not how it used to be.
Considering I haven't carried cash in years, no I don't faff about with coins either. Only used a pay and display once all year and that cost £1.20 was paid for by contactless.
Again, name any town you can't park at a Post Office. I'm calling Bullshit. I bet if you name any town I could go to their website and find a Post Office you can park at.
Yes if you mean one in a shopping centre you might need to use the shopping centre's car park but that's neither a problem, nor representative of most Post Office branches.
Typical it seems to me is simply parking at the Post Office. Which makes sense as you can drive to take a parcel there to post, or drive back after picking up one.
I really don't see why the car vs public transport debate generates so much heat. It seems obvious that public transport is more suited to dense urban areas - such as Edinburgh, where I once lived, which has a population of ~520,000 in the city council area over 264 square kilometres - and the car is more suited to sparsely populated rural areas - such as West Cork where I now live, where the whole of County Cork has a population slightly larger than Edinburgh's (~580,000), although about half of those are in Cork city, and the whole county has an area of 7,500 square kilometres, such that the population density in rural West Cork is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude lower than in Edinburgh, possibly lower.
It should be obvious that if the population density is below 100/km2 then the car will be dominant, and above 1,000/km2 that reliance on cars will cause gridlock and public transport is more suited.
In between that it gets a bit more messy, and obviously people cross the boundaries between one area into another, but I think those thresholds would actually cover most of the land area of Britain and most of the population.
I think the issue becomes hot because you have one side who advocate for active travel and public transport who refuse point blank to accept that neither are a good replacement for a car in most spaces. I say this as someone who hasnt owned a motor vehicle for 15 odd years though still have a licence and live somewhere that most people would class as a reasonably good bus service which I do use when I have no choice but to leave the house.
Public transport really is crap. For example going to the supermarket for me involves waiting for the bus which only turns up at all about 95% of the time and is pretty much always late by 5 to 10 minutes when it does turn up. That gets me to the town centre in about 30 minutes once it arrives. I then need to get another bus to get to the supermarket which means another wait of upto 40 minutes before another 15 minute journey. It is not unusual for example to leave my house at 10:50 am and finally get to the supermarket around 12:30pm and that costs me 4£.
To get to the supermarket by car on the other hand takes about 5 minutes.
I don't know where you live, but it doesn't sound like a particularly densely populated urban area. In the cities that I've lived in it hasn't been unusual for me to live within easy walking distance of two different supermarkets, let alone others on a single bus journey.
Even in Chippenham, my mother, who has Parkinson's and consequently difficulty in walking long distances, would walk to the supermarket and take a taxi home. I don't think she'd have been able to take a bus there instead.
I'm not opposed to cars, but they're a tool and any tool has its appropriate and efficient use, and other situations where it isn't appropriate or is inefficient. Even in a rural area such as West Cork, one of the local towns gets horrendously gridlocked quite often, because all the parking is located in the town centre, and so people driving around town looking for a parking spot block the traffic trying to cross the town. If they'd just complete the plan to build a car park by the bypass, for which there is a bridge to the town centre across the river, they'd take masses of traffic out of the town centre. But for some reason it is seen as being anti-car to ask them not to park wherever people please, even if it ends up in a worse outcome for everyone.
Even as someone who lives outside of the town and has to drive in I can see that this would make sense for everyone, but sensible changes are blocked as being anti-car. It's completely irrational.
I live in what Eahbahl would class in an urban area population about 36k , a population density of about 3.6k per square kilometre. Yes I am in walking distance of a local shop but what the fuck use is that to anyone. Its great for incidentals but not for getting most of what you need
I wasn't talking about a little shop. I meant what I said - an actual supermarket. I find it weird that you can live in a reasonably substantial urban area and not be in walking distance of a proper supermarket.
I've never paid much attention to it when choosing where to live, haven't had the luxury of being able to choose exactly where to live in a city - I've always taken the place I could afford - but that has always landed me within walking distance of a supermarket. I'm a bit surprised.
Shrugs the supermarket is on the other edge of town to me, I am on one edge its on the other. The only other major supermarket in town is a marks and spencers food hall and a lidl. I don't goto the M&S one because expense of it even though would cut out the second bus. There is also a large lidl but it is 100 yards from the one I go to. All the rest are the tesco express type
It depends on your income level. A surprising number of people don’t realise that being a short walk from a full sized supermarket, a zone 2 tube station and a row of bus stops on the high street is a sign of wealth, in London.
But I've always bought/rented the cheapest properties in the places that I've lived in, and I've always been within walking distance of a supermarket. This was even true in the small town I lived in in the Forest of Dean, and although Exeter likes to style itself as a capital city, it's really not that big.
Actually, there was one place where we weren't within walking distance of a supermarket, and that was Bracknell - perhaps coincidentally somewhere that was designed around the car.
Bad town planning forces people to use cars, but there's no particular need why they have to be so designed.
QED.
Bracknell is a terrible place in terms of large town design. Massive housing estates with nothing at all in the way of facilities, and the old town centre with nowhere to park except for the cinema/bowling place.
I used to live near Bracknell. The only good thing I would say for it is that it was incredibly easy to get around by bike on a multitude of cycle paths. When my daughter was 2 I would be able to cycle my mountain bike from one side of Bracknell to Swinley Forest on the other with her on the rear baby seat. Never had to deal with any dangerous traffic or crossing because it was so well setup for bikes.
We moved to a largish village when she was 4. Don't feel comfortable with any of my kids cycling around the village as there are no cycle paths and people, no matter where they are, will always drive like idiots around bikes.
I really don't see why the car vs public transport debate generates so much heat. It seems obvious that public transport is more suited to dense urban areas - such as Edinburgh, where I once lived, which has a population of ~520,000 in the city council area over 264 square kilometres - and the car is more suited to sparsely populated rural areas - such as West Cork where I now live, where the whole of County Cork has a population slightly larger than Edinburgh's (~580,000), although about half of those are in Cork city, and the whole county has an area of 7,500 square kilometres, such that the population density in rural West Cork is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude lower than in Edinburgh, possibly lower.
It should be obvious that if the population density is below 100/km2 then the car will be dominant, and above 1,000/km2 that reliance on cars will cause gridlock and public transport is more suited.
In between that it gets a bit more messy, and obviously people cross the boundaries between one area into another, but I think those thresholds would actually cover most of the land area of Britain and most of the population.
I think the issue becomes hot because you have one side who advocate for active travel and public transport who refuse point blank to accept that neither are a good replacement for a car in most spaces. I say this as someone who hasnt owned a motor vehicle for 15 odd years though still have a licence and live somewhere that most people would class as a reasonably good bus service which I do use when I have no choice but to leave the house.
Public transport really is crap. For example going to the supermarket for me involves waiting for the bus which only turns up at all about 95% of the time and is pretty much always late by 5 to 10 minutes when it does turn up. That gets me to the town centre in about 30 minutes once it arrives. I then need to get another bus to get to the supermarket which means another wait of upto 40 minutes before another 15 minute journey. It is not unusual for example to leave my house at 10:50 am and finally get to the supermarket around 12:30pm and that costs me 4£.
To get to the supermarket by car on the other hand takes about 5 minutes.
I don't know where you live, but it doesn't sound like a particularly densely populated urban area. In the cities that I've lived in it hasn't been unusual for me to live within easy walking distance of two different supermarkets, let alone others on a single bus journey.
Even in Chippenham, my mother, who has Parkinson's and consequently difficulty in walking long distances, would walk to the supermarket and take a taxi home. I don't think she'd have been able to take a bus there instead.
I'm not opposed to cars, but they're a tool and any tool has its appropriate and efficient use, and other situations where it isn't appropriate or is inefficient. Even in a rural area such as West Cork, one of the local towns gets horrendously gridlocked quite often, because all the parking is located in the town centre, and so people driving around town looking for a parking spot block the traffic trying to cross the town. If they'd just complete the plan to build a car park by the bypass, for which there is a bridge to the town centre across the river, they'd take masses of traffic out of the town centre. But for some reason it is seen as being anti-car to ask them not to park wherever people please, even if it ends up in a worse outcome for everyone.
Even as someone who lives outside of the town and has to drive in I can see that this would make sense for everyone, but sensible changes are blocked as being anti-car. It's completely irrational.
I live in what Eahbahl would class in an urban area population about 36k , a population density of about 3.6k per square kilometre. Yes I am in walking distance of a local shop but what the fuck use is that to anyone. Its great for incidentals but not for getting most of what you need
I wasn't talking about a little shop. I meant what I said - an actual supermarket. I find it weird that you can live in a reasonably substantial urban area and not be in walking distance of a proper supermarket.
I've never paid much attention to it when choosing where to live, haven't had the luxury of being able to choose exactly where to live in a city - I've always taken the place I could afford - but that has always landed me within walking distance of a supermarket. I'm a bit surprised.
Shrugs the supermarket is on the other edge of town to me, I am on one edge its on the other. The only other major supermarket in town is a marks and spencers food hall and a lidl. I don't goto the M&S one because expense of it even though would cut out the second bus. There is also a large lidl but it is 100 yards from the one I go to. All the rest are the tesco express type
It depends on your income level. A surprising number of people don’t realise that being a short walk from a full sized supermarket, a zone 2 tube station and a row of bus stops on the high street is a sign of wealth, in London.
It is. I am within 5 minutes of a very big Sainsbury's, a big M&S, a small Tesco and two smaller Sainsbury's, and 2 minutes from an excellent WholeFoods, which is across the road from Yolam Ottolenghi's Favourite Greengrocer (which is incredible in its variety, fresh custard apples and dragon fruit and insanely weird oils and herbs)
It's brilliant. It makes shopping a pleasure
The only thing lacking is a dedicated wine shop, but I can stroll to Primrose Hil High Street for that. Plus I have maybe 200 small food outlets in Camden Market
Meanwhile I can walk to the West End in 30 minutes, or get there in 8 minutes by Tube. Luvvit
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Wrong. The councils are represented on the management board, but it deters micromanagement.
Edit: also 100% council owned, and (before covid) something of a minor cash cow for the councils.
One of the curiosities of British public transport- lots of stops so each stop has fewer potential passengers, so the system doesn't work as well economically.
Tom Forth goes on about this a lot:
Let's turn up the nerdery and introduce the concept of Passenger Transport Access Nodes aka stops. Within 10km of Manchester? 1.2m people and 5000 stops. Within 10km of Amsterdam? 1m people and 2000 stops. Feels a bit like a trade-off we're dodging to me.
Seawater cloud injection is probably one of the safer forms of geoengineering and as such worth investigating, especially now we have a real world analogue to look at. It won't wipe out global warming alone though, just slow it down / mask it.
Come on now, world temperatures are either rising or falling. There isn't a class hierarchy of cooling that it's only a 'mask' if it isn't forcing people to give up their cars or remodel their houses.
JSO's worst nightmare is a geoengineering solution that works.
Convincing reasons to think reducing SO2 emissions from ships has caused oceanic warming (ie it's not just correlation). Bad news in itself, good news on the broader level that it shows we can geoengineer the climate
I've been thinking about this. The reason we cut SO2 was that it converted into sulphuric acid, H2SO4, in the clouds causing acid rain which had significantly adverse effects on both life in the oceans and forests, reducing their CO2 absorption, increasing global warming. Chris Peckham mentioned this in his Earth series. Large quantities of SO2 meant that 96% of life in the seas died.
Pumping SO2 into the atmosphere for a short term gain will definitely need a lot more thought.
96% of sea life died? That is a mega mass extinction. Now I know that Packham is a twat of the first order (cannot understand why such a dreadful presenter is on TV at all) but I would be surprised if even he suggested that
I'm sceptical on that figure. Only thing I can find like that is in a specific region, for specifically sea-floor living animals, in a mass disaster near Russia that seems to be getting blamed on a pesticide leak.
Can't find anything like 96% for oceans globally, that just doesn't pass the sniff test.
Permian Extincvtion. At the end of the Permian. Massive; that 96% will depend on how you define the scoring, but it was radical by any count. Try and find a Youtube by Michael Benton, as he is a well known researcher on this.
Yes, I get that now. I thought he meant in recent years, caused by human pollution. Not hundreds of millions of years ago.
If it had happened in recent years from human influence I'd like to think we'd all know about it.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
I really don't see why the car vs public transport debate generates so much heat. It seems obvious that public transport is more suited to dense urban areas - such as Edinburgh, where I once lived, which has a population of ~520,000 in the city council area over 264 square kilometres - and the car is more suited to sparsely populated rural areas - such as West Cork where I now live, where the whole of County Cork has a population slightly larger than Edinburgh's (~580,000), although about half of those are in Cork city, and the whole county has an area of 7,500 square kilometres, such that the population density in rural West Cork is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude lower than in Edinburgh, possibly lower.
It should be obvious that if the population density is below 100/km2 then the car will be dominant, and above 1,000/km2 that reliance on cars will cause gridlock and public transport is more suited.
In between that it gets a bit more messy, and obviously people cross the boundaries between one area into another, but I think those thresholds would actually cover most of the land area of Britain and most of the population.
I think the issue becomes hot because you have one side who advocate for active travel and public transport who refuse point blank to accept that neither are a good replacement for a car in most spaces. I say this as someone who hasnt owned a motor vehicle for 15 odd years though still have a licence and live somewhere that most people would class as a reasonably good bus service which I do use when I have no choice but to leave the house.
Public transport really is crap. For example going to the supermarket for me involves waiting for the bus which only turns up at all about 95% of the time and is pretty much always late by 5 to 10 minutes when it does turn up. That gets me to the town centre in about 30 minutes once it arrives. I then need to get another bus to get to the supermarket which means another wait of upto 40 minutes before another 15 minute journey. It is not unusual for example to leave my house at 10:50 am and finally get to the supermarket around 12:30pm and that costs me 4£.
To get to the supermarket by car on the other hand takes about 5 minutes.
I don't know where you live, but it doesn't sound like a particularly densely populated urban area. In the cities that I've lived in it hasn't been unusual for me to live within easy walking distance of two different supermarkets, let alone others on a single bus journey.
Even in Chippenham, my mother, who has Parkinson's and consequently difficulty in walking long distances, would walk to the supermarket and take a taxi home. I don't think she'd have been able to take a bus there instead.
I'm not opposed to cars, but they're a tool and any tool has its appropriate and efficient use, and other situations where it isn't appropriate or is inefficient. Even in a rural area such as West Cork, one of the local towns gets horrendously gridlocked quite often, because all the parking is located in the town centre, and so people driving around town looking for a parking spot block the traffic trying to cross the town. If they'd just complete the plan to build a car park by the bypass, for which there is a bridge to the town centre across the river, they'd take masses of traffic out of the town centre. But for some reason it is seen as being anti-car to ask them not to park wherever people please, even if it ends up in a worse outcome for everyone.
Even as someone who lives outside of the town and has to drive in I can see that this would make sense for everyone, but sensible changes are blocked as being anti-car. It's completely irrational.
I live in what Eahbahl would class in an urban area population about 36k , a population density of about 3.6k per square kilometre. Yes I am in walking distance of a local shop but what the fuck use is that to anyone. Its great for incidentals but not for getting most of what you need
I wasn't talking about a little shop. I meant what I said - an actual supermarket. I find it weird that you can live in a reasonably substantial urban area and not be in walking distance of a proper supermarket.
I've never paid much attention to it when choosing where to live, haven't had the luxury of being able to choose exactly where to live in a city - I've always taken the place I could afford - but that has always landed me within walking distance of a supermarket. I'm a bit surprised.
Shrugs the supermarket is on the other edge of town to me, I am on one edge its on the other. The only other major supermarket in town is a marks and spencers food hall and a lidl. I don't goto the M&S one because expense of it even though would cut out the second bus. There is also a large lidl but it is 100 yards from the one I go to. All the rest are the tesco express type
It depends on your income level. A surprising number of people don’t realise that being a short walk from a full sized supermarket, a zone 2 tube station and a row of bus stops on the high street is a sign of wealth, in London.
But I've always bought/rented the cheapest properties in the places that I've lived in, and I've always been within walking distance of a supermarket. This was even true in the small town I lived in in the Forest of Dean, and although Exeter likes to style itself as a capital city, it's really not that big.
Actually, there was one place where we weren't within walking distance of a supermarket, and that was Bracknell - perhaps coincidentally somewhere that was designed around the car.
Bad town planning forces people to use cars, but there's no particular need why they have to be so designed.
QED.
Bracknell is a terrible place in terms of large town design. Massive housing estates with nothing at all in the way of facilities, and the old town centre with nowhere to park except for the cinema/bowling place.
I used to live near Bracknell. The only good thing I would say for it is that it was incredibly easy to get around by bike on a multitude of cycle paths. When my daughter was 2 I would be able to cycle my mountain bike from one side of Bracknell to Swinley Forest on the other with her on the rear baby seat. Never had to deal with any dangerous traffic or crossing because it was so well setup for bikes.
We moved to a largish village when she was 4. Don't feel comfortable with any of my kids cycling around the village as there are no cycle paths and people, no matter where they are, will always drive like idiots around bikes.
If you ever want to depress yourself pointlessly, do a Google Images search under "old Bracknell"
It was an absolutely lovely English market town. They knocked it all down to build....... THAT
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
I'm not seeing any difference to the building etc except that one photo is in black and white, the other is in colour?
The sunny blue sky versus black and white does look better but because sunny blue sky is nice, not because there's an almost completely empty pavement now with just a few people on it.
How many people who criticise cities in the Midlands and North have actually spent more than 10 minutes in them?
[...tots up time in head on how long in cities in North and Midlands...over a decade]
Fair point. I have spent a fair while in points from Brum upwards, and there are many nice places (York, the Yorkshire Dales) and there are ratholes (Middlesbrough!). Similarly in the South there are nice places (Haslemere, Aundel) and ratholes (Southend on Sea).
It isn't northern cities that are the problem - it is northern towns. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle - these hold their own against anywhere else. Even Hull can.
The issues are massively deep-rooted. Yes a lack of money, jobs, opportunities. But also a fundamental collapse in local society. The reason why these houses are £10k is because nobody sane would live there.
The solution is two-fold: One - have the entire area bought on a CPI and redeveloped. Either a wholesale refurb of these properties or bulldoze the whole lot and build new. Make the area habitable Two - rescue the people from the squalor. Axing Sure Start was the worst thing the coalition did. We need to train an awful lot of new parents on how to be adults, never mind how to be parents. And for everyone else a direct police presence. Reclaim these shitholes from the scumbags.
Incidentally, when Asylum Seekers were given grief on Teesside for being given "free housing", they were put in HA homes on estates like this where absolutely nobody wants to live.
Same in Gateshead. They were put in some real hovels. There’s a fair bit of competition for that title in Gateshead as well.
In Sunderland they were put in "Murder Mile".
Homes that nobody in their right mind wants to live in. Due to the decay, damp and dangerous neighbours. So instead of standing empty the Housing Association puts asylum seekers in them.
The people who refused to live there then get told by the right that they should be angry at these scroungers being given "free homes" which they can't have.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
All areas that benefitted from the manufacture of the car just pay reparations now.
I do wonder how much a divide on this issue in the Tory party will have an impact.
Are there many of those convinced enough that man-made climate change is important to oppose the current government's pandering to a populist appeal by the headbanger* wing of the Conservatives?
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
In Glasgow (and elsewhere), private companies cut the non-profitable services. But the profitable services were only making money because they were part of a coherent city-wide network.
A big part of it is cultural/presence. There are over 700 buses trundling round Edinburgh. They are the default option for any journey over a mile.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
Cynical answer is that a council-owned BusCo doesn't release windfall profits unless it is sold off. Blah blah Macmillan family silver et cetera.
The other thing worth saying is that there are examples of private bus companies doing a damn fine job; Brighton & Hove, or Southern Vectis on the Isle of Wight. Wonder if the other part of the equation is having a firm embedded in a community (even if it is linked to a distant conglomerate), as they both are. One of the things that has become a lot less common in my lifetime is proper, but proudly provincial, companies. The Daily Yourtown Gazette, Countyshire Building Society, that sort of thing. Maybe it's not wonder that London is the only place that works properly.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
BusCo owned and ran on behalf of the Council is perfectly legal in England and can be set up by any Council. The buses ran in Warrington Borough Council for instance are ran by the imaginatively named "Warrington's own buses" company.
So there's nothing to change nationally to enable that. Its already an option.
Part of the reason Arriva runs so many services though, is that they've simply been able to do a better job in many places than state owned and operated alternatives, so they can pick up the pieces and then do an OK job.
Simply saying that you can own a business, is not the same thing as saying you can own and successfully run a business. Those are two very different propositions.
I do wonder how much a divide on this issue in the Tory party will have an impact.
Are there many of those convinced enough that man-made climate change is important to oppose their own party's current government's pandering to a populist appeal by the headbanger* wing of the Conservatives?
Is there much of any similar tendency in Labour still standing?
* not sure as to what the word I want is there. I mean the tendency that is cancelling LTNs, has suddenly found £20bn down the sofa for roadbuilding, has cut foreign aid, and so on.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
London actually has excellent public transport connections. They have buses, subway, trains, comprehensive cycle network. 👍
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
BusCo owned and ran on behalf of the Council is perfectly legal in England and can be set up by any Council. The buses ran in Warrington Borough Council for instance are ran by the imaginatively named "Warrington's own buses" company.
So there's nothing to change nationally to enable that. Its already an option.
Part of the reason Arriva runs so many services though, is that they've simply been able to do a better job in many places than state owned and operated alternatives, so they can pick up the pieces and then do an OK job.
Simply saying that you can own a business, is not the same thing as saying you can own and successfully run a business. Those are two very different propositions.
Nottingham is also a case in point.
NCT is about 80% Council owned with a minority private shareholder, and seems to be well-run. I'd put it in category 2.
Normal profit margin is 5-8%, now making a modest loss whilst recovering from COVID. 50 million passengers per year. They have done things like fully accessible buses and free wifi - no idea how common that is.
Refugees are about to be marched onto that very safe prison ship.
There are bound to be pictures of their humiliation, probably including one showing a few of them carrying iPhones or something so that Heil and Express and Torygraph readers can get a hard-on.
Yep: here they are:
The reporting that everything had to be delayed because of, sigh, "safety checks", was especially well done. "They come over here, and they expect British people to delay schedules so that they can be 'safe'. Ooh, and that one's carrying a better suitcase than I've got. And how can she afford to have her hair done like that if she's a 'refugee'? Wish I could have a holiday in a hotel, all expenses paid", etc.
Pure Daily Mail heaven.
And there are still people who think Labour will re-establish the Red Wall because of something to do with the state health service.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
BusCo owned and ran on behalf of the Council is perfectly legal in England and can be set up by any Council. The buses ran in Warrington Borough Council for instance are ran by the imaginatively named "Warrington's own buses" company.
So there's nothing to change nationally to enable that. Its already an option.
Part of the reason Arriva runs so many services though, is that they've simply been able to do a better job in many places than state owned and operated alternatives, so they can pick up the pieces and then do an OK job.
Simply saying that you can own a business, is not the same thing as saying you can own and successfully run a business. Those are two very different propositions.
Funny, round here it's usually the private companies which drop bus services to whole areas without warning.
Edit: obviously the laws of physics, biology, and economics change at the Border.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
London actually has excellent public transport connections. They have buses, subway, trains, comprehensive cycle network. 👍
That's how that park was made possible. 👍
Central London also has a population density of over 10k so public transport makes more sense there.
The rest of the country has parks everywhere too, there's loads of parks both within walking distance and within a five minute drive of my house. No public transport in that area (though there is cycle paths there) so its not like you need public transport to enable parks.
For areas with a population density of less than roughly 5k/km^2 then the car makes by far the most sense for transport. Roughly over 10k/km^2 then public transport makes more sense.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
BusCo owned and ran on behalf of the Council is perfectly legal in England and can be set up by any Council. The buses ran in Warrington Borough Council for instance are ran by the imaginatively named "Warrington's own buses" company.
So there's nothing to change nationally to enable that. Its already an option.
Part of the reason Arriva runs so many services though, is that they've simply been able to do a better job in many places than state owned and operated alternatives, so they can pick up the pieces and then do an OK job.
Simply saying that you can own a business, is not the same thing as saying you can own and successfully run a business. Those are two very different propositions.
Funny, round here it's usually the private companies which drop bus services to whole areas without warning.
Edit: obviously the laws of physics, biology, and economics change at the Border.
Eh? That's not what I said, I said about being profitable.
Private companies (including Arriva) change services based on profitability yes. State-ran businesses tend not to, so they end up running out of money, and either need to be sold off or a company like Arriva ends up coming in to pick up the pieces.
Refugees are about to be marched onto that very safe prison ship.
There are bound to be pictures of their humiliation, probably including one showing a few of them carrying iPhones or something so that Heil and Express and Torygraph readers can get a hard-on.
Yep: here they are:
The reporting that everything had to be delayed because of, sigh, "safety checks", was especially well done. "They come over here, and they expect British people to delay schedules so that they can be 'safe'. Ooh, and that one's carrying a better suitcase than I've got. And how can she afford to have her hair done like that if she's a 'refugee'? Wish I could have a holiday in a hotel, all expenses paid", etc.
Pure Daily Mail heaven.
And there are still people who think Labour will re-establish the Red Wall because of something to do with the state health service.
The mistake they make is not to consider the emotions that many experience when they think about different topics presented in news items, e.g. when there's a powerful story like this one about immigration, full of almost archetypal imagery, and...well there aren't any powerful stories about health provision, but "here is Sir Keir and yes I suppose the Tory rich don't care much about the health of the lower orders, it's the same the whole world over - the rich that get the pleasure, and the poor that get the blame"...sure, very true, many would tick "YES" to that statement if a pollster asked them about it, but the feeling on the latter issue is essentially one of despair, not hope, and more importantly, it's not visceral anger. You remember best what you felt and feel most emotional about.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
London actually has excellent public transport connections. They have buses, subway, trains, comprehensive cycle network. 👍
That's how that park was made possible. 👍
I'd question the comprehensive cycle/mobility network. The last number I saw, good quality mobility tracks had only reached within 400m of about 20% of the population, with a target of 40% by 2025. They've only just started.
I really don't see why the car vs public transport debate generates so much heat. It seems obvious that public transport is more suited to dense urban areas - such as Edinburgh, where I once lived, which has a population of ~520,000 in the city council area over 264 square kilometres - and the car is more suited to sparsely populated rural areas - such as West Cork where I now live, where the whole of County Cork has a population slightly larger than Edinburgh's (~580,000), although about half of those are in Cork city, and the whole county has an area of 7,500 square kilometres, such that the population density in rural West Cork is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude lower than in Edinburgh, possibly lower.
It should be obvious that if the population density is below 100/km2 then the car will be dominant, and above 1,000/km2 that reliance on cars will cause gridlock and public transport is more suited.
In between that it gets a bit more messy, and obviously people cross the boundaries between one area into another, but I think those thresholds would actually cover most of the land area of Britain and most of the population.
I think the issue becomes hot because you have one side who advocate for active travel and public transport who refuse point blank to accept that neither are a good replacement for a car in most spaces. I say this as someone who hasnt owned a motor vehicle for 15 odd years though still have a licence and live somewhere that most people would class as a reasonably good bus service which I do use when I have no choice but to leave the house.
Public transport really is crap. For example going to the supermarket for me involves waiting for the bus which only turns up at all about 95% of the time and is pretty much always late by 5 to 10 minutes when it does turn up. That gets me to the town centre in about 30 minutes once it arrives. I then need to get another bus to get to the supermarket which means another wait of upto 40 minutes before another 15 minute journey. It is not unusual for example to leave my house at 10:50 am and finally get to the supermarket around 12:30pm and that costs me 4£.
To get to the supermarket by car on the other hand takes about 5 minutes.
I don't know where you live, but it doesn't sound like a particularly densely populated urban area. In the cities that I've lived in it hasn't been unusual for me to live within easy walking distance of two different supermarkets, let alone others on a single bus journey.
Even in Chippenham, my mother, who has Parkinson's and consequently difficulty in walking long distances, would walk to the supermarket and take a taxi home. I don't think she'd have been able to take a bus there instead.
I'm not opposed to cars, but they're a tool and any tool has its appropriate and efficient use, and other situations where it isn't appropriate or is inefficient. Even in a rural area such as West Cork, one of the local towns gets horrendously gridlocked quite often, because all the parking is located in the town centre, and so people driving around town looking for a parking spot block the traffic trying to cross the town. If they'd just complete the plan to build a car park by the bypass, for which there is a bridge to the town centre across the river, they'd take masses of traffic out of the town centre. But for some reason it is seen as being anti-car to ask them not to park wherever people please, even if it ends up in a worse outcome for everyone.
Even as someone who lives outside of the town and has to drive in I can see that this would make sense for everyone, but sensible changes are blocked as being anti-car. It's completely irrational.
I live in what Eahbahl would class in an urban area population about 36k , a population density of about 3.6k per square kilometre. Yes I am in walking distance of a local shop but what the fuck use is that to anyone. Its great for incidentals but not for getting most of what you need
I wasn't talking about a little shop. I meant what I said - an actual supermarket. I find it weird that you can live in a reasonably substantial urban area and not be in walking distance of a proper supermarket.
I've never paid much attention to it when choosing where to live, haven't had the luxury of being able to choose exactly where to live in a city - I've always taken the place I could afford - but that has always landed me within walking distance of a supermarket. I'm a bit surprised.
Shrugs the supermarket is on the other edge of town to me, I am on one edge its on the other. The only other major supermarket in town is a marks and spencers food hall and a lidl. I don't goto the M&S one because expense of it even though would cut out the second bus. There is also a large lidl but it is 100 yards from the one I go to. All the rest are the tesco express type
It depends on your income level. A surprising number of people don’t realise that being a short walk from a full sized supermarket, a zone 2 tube station and a row of bus stops on the high street is a sign of wealth, in London.
But I've always bought/rented the cheapest properties in the places that I've lived in, and I've always been within walking distance of a supermarket. This was even true in the small town I lived in in the Forest of Dean, and although Exeter likes to style itself as a capital city, it's really not that big.
Actually, there was one place where we weren't within walking distance of a supermarket, and that was Bracknell - perhaps coincidentally somewhere that was designed around the car.
Bad town planning forces people to use cars, but there's no particular need why they have to be so designed.
QED.
Bracknell is a terrible place in terms of large town design. Massive housing estates with nothing at all in the way of facilities, and the old town centre with nowhere to park except for the cinema/bowling place.
I used to live near Bracknell. The only good thing I would say for it is that it was incredibly easy to get around by bike on a multitude of cycle paths. When my daughter was 2 I would be able to cycle my mountain bike from one side of Bracknell to Swinley Forest on the other with her on the rear baby seat. Never had to deal with any dangerous traffic or crossing because it was so well setup for bikes.
We moved to a largish village when she was 4. Don't feel comfortable with any of my kids cycling around the village as there are no cycle paths and people, no matter where they are, will always drive like idiots around bikes.
Yes, it was indeed easy to walk or cycle around - during the day.
At night, much less so, as all of the tunnels under the roundabouts became somewhat unpleasant places, with the local hoodlums hanging around.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
London actually has excellent public transport connections. They have buses, subway, trains, comprehensive cycle network. 👍
That's how that park was made possible. 👍
Central London also has a population density of over 10k so public transport makes more sense there.
The rest of the country has parks everywhere too, there's loads of parks both within walking distance and within a five minute drive of my house. No public transport in that area (though there is cycle paths there) so its not like you need public transport to enable parks.
For areas with a population density of less than roughly 5k/km^2 then the car makes by far the most sense for transport. Roughly over 10k/km^2 then public transport makes more sense.
In between you need a mix of both.
You suggested that Jubilee Gardens needed a road and parking spaces to be accessible. That's very silly.
A bit like your suggestion ULEZ was the same as Section 28.
And your £1 trillion investment in roads for economic growth.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
The NE Region of the FBU has withdrawn support from the Sir Kid Starver Party after a senior FBU official was suspended from the party for liking tweets supporting striking NHS nurses.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Three models for buses: 1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn. 2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business 3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
BusCo owned and ran on behalf of the Council is perfectly legal in England and can be set up by any Council. The buses ran in Warrington Borough Council for instance are ran by the imaginatively named "Warrington's own buses" company.
So there's nothing to change nationally to enable that. Its already an option.
Part of the reason Arriva runs so many services though, is that they've simply been able to do a better job in many places than state owned and operated alternatives, so they can pick up the pieces and then do an OK job.
Simply saying that you can own a business, is not the same thing as saying you can own and successfully run a business. Those are two very different propositions.
Funny, round here it's usually the private companies which drop bus services to whole areas without warning.
Edit: obviously the laws of physics, biology, and economics change at the Border.
Eh? That's not what I said, I said about being profitable.
Private companies (including Arriva) change services based on profitability yes. State-ran businesses tend not to, so they end up running out of money, and either need to be sold off or a company like Arriva ends up coming in to pick up the pieces.
You're displaying a fine example of the Beeching fallacy - forgetting the nature of feeder branches and integrated ticketing. Lothian Buses can run those services partly with a bit of cross subsidy sometimes, buyt also because the ticketing is the same, so anyone can use their day ticket to change over to another bus at zero cost, and bus usage and income rises.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
To be clear, that second image is a fake. It's a render. You can obviously tell
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
Ditto fresh air, no pollution, etc.
How many people want to live next to a motorway?
I'm dithering about booking a holiday here, for the obvious reason. It should be a no-brainer for someone into naval history. But the Admiralty built it next to the M25, very inconsiderately. (No, not really, but the way some folk talk about the right to underground car parks everywhere ...).
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
@Leon - completely different subject: last year, you recommended to me somewhere to visit in North Cornwall, and it never made it onto our itinerary for the week, cos it was a heatwave and everything was brilliant withouteven trying. Can you remember what it was? Vaguely gardensy/verdant landscape type thing? Scanning the OS maps now trying toremember. It wasn't St. Nectan's Glen,was it?
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
[Radio Norwich. Alan sits behind the mixing desks in the radio studio, wearing a Pringle sweater.] Alan Partridge: That was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they paved paradise to put up a parking lot, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn't quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song. It's 4:35 AM, you're listening to Up With The Partridge.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
To be clear, that second image is a fake. It's a render. You can obviously tell
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
It's not just the cars, though - and there are far starker examples in North America, and perhaps Australia, where entire historic city areas have been demolished for high rise buildings and surface car parks.
Compare with say the Barbican, which even if the architecture is not approved of, is fairly well integrated into the City.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Cars stopped cities from being choked in horseshit, with all the accompanying disease. If you want to know why armies fell victim to disease so readily in the past, it was due to having to march through the tons of shit.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
To be clear, that second image is a fake. It's a render. You can obviously tell
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
That's a render of the new Jubilee Gardens. A park since 1977, but recently renovated.
What did the CCP really gain from throttling Hong Kong?
They had a magnificent, thriving, near World City in their control and on their doorstep. A glittering gateway and a bright advert for China. Now it plunges down the rankings, it may never recover
I guess they set an example and scared Taiwan. But jeez
To show who's boss. How they can afford to mess up the best functioning city under their control.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Cars stopped cities from being choked in horseshit, with all the accompanying disease. If you want to know why armies fell victim to disease so readily in the past, it was due to having to march through the shit.
And cars are fun.
No. Mass transit did. Underground, El, overground, omnibus, trams. No point in cars if they choke the city physically. Cars basically parasitise on the space cleared by mass transit.
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda." "Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary." "OK. Tristan da Cunha, then." "It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide." "Pitcairn?" "Too far" "Necker?" "Sir Richard Branson says no." "OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday." "Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary." "Perfect. Get me Ben."
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Cars stopped cities from being choked in horseshit, with all the accompanying disease. If you want to know why armies fell victim to disease so readily in the past, it was due to having to march through the tons of shit.
And cars are fun.
Cars might be the new horses - I'm sure people will be riding/driving them recreationally in the future, and they'll be people who depend on them in rural areas or in particular jobs, but humanity will proceed to better things.
Actually makes the persistence of the bicycle a bit interesting. Why haven't they been replaced by escooters yet?
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
Ok, I'll have to explain in simpler terms I suppose.
Luckyguy's point raised sewage works, windfarms, and other things he presumed people would be in favour of, even though parks in the same place would be nicer. I was noting that in fact people are not in favour of things like wind farms, solar farms, or sensitive redevelopment of awful brownfield scrubland in place of parks, as countless objections and stalled works demonstrate, when they are nearby. In fact all they seem to want are parks.
It was a gag about BANANAs, not saying people don't like parks. Why would someone dislike parks?
(That being said people near me have objected to a new country park proposal recently, but because it would come with a bit of extra housing to pay for it first).
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Cars stopped cities from being choked in horseshit, with all the accompanying disease. If you want to know why armies fell victim to disease so readily in the past, it was due to having to march through the tons of shit.
And cars are fun.
Cars might be the new horses - I'm sure people will be riding/driving them recreationally in the future, and they'll be people who depend on them in rural areas or in particular jobs, but humanity will proceed to better things.
Actually makes the persistence of the bicycle a bit interesting. Why haven't they been replaced by escooters yet?
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda." "Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary." "OK. Tristan da Cunha, then." "It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide." "Pitcairn?" "Too far" "Necker?" "Sir Richard Branson says no." "OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday." "Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary." "Perfect. Get me Ben."
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
@Leon - completely different subject: last year, you recommended to me somewhere to visit in North Cornwall, and it never made it onto our itinerary for the week, cos it was a heatwave and everything was brilliant withouteven trying. Can you remember what it was? Vaguely gardensy/verdant landscape type thing? Scanning the OS maps now trying toremember. It wasn't St. Nectan's Glen,was it?
St Nectan's Glen is fun, and pretty. A cute little waterfall at the end of a walk down a ravine (IIRC - I was last there 20 years ago)
It wouldn't make a whole day out, however. Maybe half a morning?
You could combine it with the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle? They have some genuinely compelling exhibits. It's not fake or gimmicky, it can even be a bit spooky: definitely worth a go (especially on a drizzly day)
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
Both of those pictures look nice to me. 👍
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
[Radio Norwich. Alan sits behind the mixing desks in the radio studio, wearing a Pringle sweater.] Alan Partridge: That was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they paved paradise to put up a parking lot, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn't quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song. It's 4:35 AM, you're listening to Up With The Partridge.
VG, there is a Touch of Partridge about our fellow PB-er, Mister @BartholomewRoberts
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
To be clear, that second image is a fake. It's a render. You can obviously tell
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
The first image is a fake also. Is that County Hall? In which case opposite should be St. Thomas' not a car park.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Cars stopped cities from being choked in horseshit, with all the accompanying disease. If you want to know why armies fell victim to disease so readily in the past, it was due to having to march through the tons of shit.
And cars are fun.
Cars might be the new horses - I'm sure people will be riding/driving them recreationally in the future, and they'll be people who depend on them in rural areas or in particular jobs, but humanity will proceed to better things.
Actually makes the persistence of the bicycle a bit interesting. Why haven't they been replaced by escooters yet?
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda." "Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary." "OK. Tristan da Cunha, then." "It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide." "Pitcairn?" "Too far" "Necker?" "Sir Richard Branson says no." "OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday." "Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary." "Perfect. Get me Ben."
Cough cough St Helena cough cough
Isn't the airport a bit iffy in terms of what can land there, especially the size and therefore range of the planes? IANAE but have no idea what the current situation is.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
@Leon - completely different subject: last year, you recommended to me somewhere to visit in North Cornwall, and it never made it onto our itinerary for the week, cos it was a heatwave and everything was brilliant withouteven trying. Can you remember what it was? Vaguely gardensy/verdant landscape type thing? Scanning the OS maps now trying toremember. It wasn't St. Nectan's Glen,was it?
St Nectan's Glen is fun, and pretty. A cute little waterfall at the end of a walk down a ravine (IIRC - I was last there 20 years ago)
It wouldn't make a whole day out, however. Maybe half a morning?
You could combine it with the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle? They have some genuinely compelling exhibits. It's not fake or gimmicky, it can even be a bit spooky: definitely worth a go (especially on a drizzly day)
Half a morning is just perfect - thanks! Boscastle is always our standby for a drizzly day, actually. So that may be tomorrow. But it's looking like we may be striking very lucky with the weather again.
Just been crabbing in Padstow harbour. Caught about two dozen - never known it so full of crabs. Speculating that a rainy July has led to silty conditions in tge Camel, and so more food in the foodchain, or something. Of such small intricacies is a holiday made.
The Bibby Stockholm is flagged in Barbados. Obviously the port state can carry out inspections to ensure the vessel's compliance with international maritime regs and safety standards, but which country's law otherwise applies on it? Is it like a little extraterritorial piece of Barbados administered according to English law?
The NE Region of the FBU has withdrawn support from the Sir Kid Starver Party after a senior FBU official was suspended from the party for liking tweets supporting striking NHS nurses.
In that recent council by-election the hard left grifters received just FIVE votes. I know you want the Tories in power forever so that you have something to moan about, but you will never get True Socialism elected because almost nobody will vote for it.
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
To be clear, that second image is a fake. It's a render. You can obviously tell
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
The first image is a fake also. Is that County Hall? In which case opposite should be St. Thomas' not a car park.
I don't think it is fake. It is the eastern facade of County Hall - you can see it here on Street View
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda." "Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary." "OK. Tristan da Cunha, then." "It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide." "Pitcairn?" "Too far" "Necker?" "Sir Richard Branson says no." "OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday." "Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary." "Perfect. Get me Ben."
Cough cough St Helena cough cough
Has an airstrip now, not secure enough.
(As Carnyx says I believe they can essentially only fly in from one direction, and for various reasons it limits the size of plane that can make it.)
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda." "Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary." "OK. Tristan da Cunha, then." "It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide." "Pitcairn?" "Too far" "Necker?" "Sir Richard Branson says no." "OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday." "Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary." "Perfect. Get me Ben."
Cough cough St Helena cough cough
Isn't the airport a bit iffy in terms of what can land there, especially the size and therefore range of the planes? IANAE but have no idea what the current situation is.
I am not sure the proposal was to fly the Bibby Stockholm there tbf
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
"remove cars, and replace with people" is the most foolish comment yet. Its the cars that enable people to be brought to an area generally.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Cars may be better safer and cleaner than ever but that's like saying "Look we've perfected mass execution, why stop at Auschwitz?"
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
Cars stopped cities from being choked in horseshit, with all the accompanying disease. If you want to know why armies fell victim to disease so readily in the past, it was due to having to march through the tons of shit.
And cars are fun.
Cars might be the new horses - I'm sure people will be riding/driving them recreationally in the future, and they'll be people who depend on them in rural areas or in particular jobs, but humanity will proceed to better things.
Actually makes the persistence of the bicycle a bit interesting. Why haven't they been replaced by escooters yet?
Latter question is easy: informal Darwin Awards.
Small wheels and dangerous road / pavement surfaces make for lots of injuries and hospital admissions.
Also until the Govt gets off its miserable, self-serving butt they are also currently illegal in private hands.
It affects bike-riders too, however. Two weeks ago a community cycling even near Cambridge that attracts ~400 people each year was cancelled as the roads surface conditions were assessed as too dangerous.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Wrong. The councils are represented on the management board, but it deters micromanagement.
Edit: also 100% council owned, and (before covid) something of a minor cash cow for the councils.
Oh wow represented, so that means one or two on the board of maybe seven or so. Taxpayers therefore irrelevant as they can be outvoted. No just fuck off if we pay for it we get the final say
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
The 'look how much nicer a park is than a car park' image comparison is quite puerile really isn't it? Parks are also nicer than sewage works, wind farms, bus depots, bicycle factories, and a vast number of other things that the anti-car brigade presumably approve of.
Experience has taught us that, in practice, people are not really in favour of anything, even green things, if it is near them.
Really?
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
@Leon - completely different subject: last year, you recommended to me somewhere to visit in North Cornwall, and it never made it onto our itinerary for the week, cos it was a heatwave and everything was brilliant withouteven trying. Can you remember what it was? Vaguely gardensy/verdant landscape type thing? Scanning the OS maps now trying toremember. It wasn't St. Nectan's Glen,was it?
St Nectan's Glen is fun, and pretty. A cute little waterfall at the end of a walk down a ravine (IIRC - I was last there 20 years ago)
It wouldn't make a whole day out, however. Maybe half a morning?
You could combine it with the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle? They have some genuinely compelling exhibits. It's not fake or gimmicky, it can even be a bit spooky: definitely worth a go (especially on a drizzly day)
Half a morning is just perfect - thanks! Boscastle is always our standby for a drizzly day, actually. So that may be tomorrow. But it's looking like we may be striking very lucky with the weather again.
Just been crabbing in Padstow harbour. Caught about two dozen - never known it so full of crabs. Speculating that a rainy July has led to silty conditions in tge Camel, and so more food in the foodchain, or something. Of such small intricacies is a holiday made.
Cool. Enjoy. Nectan's Glen can be fun even in light rain, as it becomes more drippy and mystical and Arthurian
As you probably know Cornwall gets wilder the further north you go: on that coast up to Devon. Around Morwenstow it can sometimes feel unsettlingly remote (I like it, others don't)
Apropos of nothing, but since subtitling came up yesterday, I have to applaud the diligence of the Netflix subtitle people, I was having real difficulty with this one - accents just confuse me.
Presumably the cost of parkway would not be so prohibitive if the cost of land was not so prohibitive?
Aberdeen City spent a few million building a Park and Ride facility on the main route in from the north west as it crosses the bypass. Next to the airport.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the bus company is fully owned by the council(s), comprehensive network, profitable, and our park and rides (Ingliston in particular) run out of space.
And that is the major difference!
The secret is it is at arm's length - no meddling councillors lobbying for a bus stop.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
So payed for by council tax payers but absolutely no democratic input from those voters . You wonder why taxpayers say fuck you?
Wrong. The councils are represented on the management board, but it deters micromanagement.
Edit: also 100% council owned, and (before covid) something of a minor cash cow for the councils.
Oh wow represented, so that means one or two on the board of maybe seven or so. Taxpayers therefore irrelevant as they can be outvoted. No just fuck off if we pay for it we get the final say
Do you ever have a positive word for anything Pagan?
The argument about transport availability & cost highlights both the huge variances in availability and the huge gulf in understanding.
For your outer London resident there are riches in public transport options which are largely paid for out of general taxation. For your cundry bumpkins there is often a complete absence of public transport options despite paying general taxation.
For suburbanites it is optimal to encourage more public transport and less driving. For country folk the choice is driving or not going.*
Road pricing gets talked about as a replacement for fuel duty. And gets shouted at as being patently unfair. Which is probably true the way that shitbox UK would implement it. What we need is subsidised fuel for the countryside and heavier taxes in towns. ULEZ and similar is the right policy, just being implemented poorly.
* Before anyone says "what about walking or cycling", what about them? Too many roads between villages would be lethal to walk / cycle down, and thats before we ask about fitness / safety issues.
Agree. On your *, I agree that investment in walking and cycling, or even public transport, between villages isn't worth it.
But 83% of us live in urban areas, so investment in active and public transport makes sense for most.
Urban areas = towns, not cities.
I got a train (first time in about 5 years) recently, to and from the Airport, got the return train journey yesterday. To get to the train station took a car [in this case taxi] ride.
You seem to view the country as either Edinburgh or Sticksville. Reality is somewhat different.
I grew up in a town in rural Scotland. It had a train station. The main problem is you couldn't walk or cycle to it. Sounds like your problem too.
Even public transport in towns is designed for drivers.
Because cars work.
Towns require cars. The alternative to cars is taxis or buses. And that's the bulk of your 83%
You simply can't get your head around supply/demand, can you?
The only reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users is because there are lots of buses.
The reason Edinburgh has lots of bus users, is its a city. Its not a town, what part of this are you failing to understand?
Nothing wrong with buses existing, but buses in towns are a crappy mode of transportation that only those who can't afford their own car (or can't drive as they lack a licence) would use.
The thing with a car is if you want to get from A to B you drive there and are done.
With buses you are stuck with the bus routes, and in most towns the bus routes don't go between A and B if you aren't trying to get to the town centre. Get a bus into the bus depot in town, then another bus from the depot out of town to your destination. And of course that relies upo n the bus turning up, and the bus then follows its route stopping everywhere it has to stop.
My wife doesn't drive, she used to take two buses to get to work which took at least an hour, nearly an hour and a half sometimes one way. It took me 15 minutes to drive it, or 30 minutes return to go pick her up and drive her home.
Good luck finding a parking place at B unless your destination is a supermarket, or you are MD of the company.
I always find a parking place at B. 🤷♂️
Try leaving your bubble from time to time. Saying "oh but what about parking" to someone who drives everywhere and always finds parking, isn't much a problem.
You drive everywhere and always finds parking, in English towns, without a blue badge and without privileged access to private spaces?
I don't want to call you a liar, but happy to call you an outlier. 5 sigma.
Your kidding, right? The rest of the UK is not RBKC outside Harrods. There is plenty of parking all over the country in towns, villages, cities. Some even - gasp if you can believe this - for free.
Name me a town where you can't park without the criteria you specify.
Bath
Free Car Parks in Bath
Bath University Car Park BA2 7JX – free after 5pm every day, all day on public holidays. Sydney Road BA2 6NS – 4 hours maximum. Raby Mews BA2 4EJ – 2 hours maximum. Sydney Wharf BA2 4BG – 4 hours maximum. Daniel Street BA2 6NB – 2 hours maximum.
Those are just the free ones after a 46 millisecond google.
I was mildly joking. I agree you can generally park in most British towns quite easily. London is an outlier
I find the whole debate enervating and a bit depressing. Cars are shit and destroy townscapes. Thank god they are on the way out
What utter nonsense. A "Leon" post just to see who would bite.
Leon is right (unusually). I am someone who travels 30,000 miles a year and car travel is nightmarish. Main motorway arteries gridlocked adjacent to conurbations, particularly during rush hours. Parking is also difficult and expensive. Travel from the motorway to the parking spot is also slow and frustrating.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Just looks better too
Take anywhere on earth, and remove the cars, and replace with people, trees, greenery, and it looks infinitely better
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
And if you think the problem is colour photos vs black and white, consider these;
To be clear, that second image is a fake. It's a render. You can obviously tell
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
The first image is a fake also. Is that County Hall? In which case opposite should be St. Thomas' not a car park.
I think St Thomas's is the other side of County Hall. The plot in question was part of the Festival of Britain, then a car park, then Jubilee Gardens.
And yes, some provision for cars is going to be necessary for the foreseeable future. But that provision does make life worse for everyone else, and cars do have a habit of swallowing any provision provided and then some. So we do have to consider when there are better ways of achieving the things we use cars to do.
Off topic, greetings from Saltaire - I've just walked here from Leeds along the canal, sustained by beer and bananas. This is my third pub stop. Only another mile and a half to get home, alas half of it is uphill. It will be just shy of 16 miles door to door, which I reckon is the furthest I've done in a day.
A great day for walking. Dry and bright, but not hot.
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda." "Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary." "OK. Tristan da Cunha, then." "It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide." "Pitcairn?" "Too far" "Necker?" "Sir Richard Branson says no." "OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday." "Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary." "Perfect. Get me Ben."
Cough cough St Helena cough cough
Isn't the airport a bit iffy in terms of what can land there, especially the size and therefore range of the planes? IANAE but have no idea what the current situation is.
I am not sure the proposal was to fly the Bibby Stockholm there tbf
Sure; just a reply to Vieawcode's suggestion of St Helena!
I don't understand Ascension btw - I thought one of HMG's favourite attack lines was that asylum seekers are a security hazard?
Comments
Towns though? Middlesbrough has been mentioned - watch this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/WW2BUQxczBI
The issues are massively deep-rooted. Yes a lack of money, jobs, opportunities. But also a fundamental collapse in local society. The reason why these houses are £10k is because nobody sane would live there.
The solution is two-fold:
One - have the entire area bought on a CPI and redeveloped. Either a wholesale refurb of these properties or bulldoze the whole lot and build new. Make the area habitable
Two - rescue the people from the squalor. Axing Sure Start was the worst thing the coalition did. We need to train an awful lot of new parents on how to be adults, never mind how to be parents. And for everyone else a direct police presence. Reclaim these shitholes from the scumbags.
Incidentally, when Asylum Seekers were given grief on Teesside for being given "free housing", they were put in HA homes on estates like this where absolutely nobody wants to live.
Meanwhile, stuff still costs what it costs- you can sweep it under the carpet a bit, but not indefinitely.
I'd take the bus if there were any.
Because it doesn't control buses, and because neither of the bus companies are willing to back down on vast subsidy demands, a grand total of zero buses serve it, despite 5 routes literally passing the entrance and the airport shuttle running a few hundred metres away.
This is a source of frustration for some but the reason why the network is so efficient. The managers think in the round.
Edit: also 100% council owned, and (before covid) something of a minor cash cow for the councils.
Young genes send strong signals instructing the body to fully repair injuries; genes in older cells function less well
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/07/elderly-people-stay-stronger-muscle-waste/ (£££)
From the boffins at Nottingham Trent University. One side effect of high tuition fees is that any university can pay for top class researchers and facilities.
Again, name any town you can't park at a Post Office. I'm calling Bullshit. I bet if you name any town I could go to their website and find a Post Office you can park at.
Yes if you mean one in a shopping centre you might need to use the shopping centre's car park but that's neither a problem, nor representative of most Post Office branches.
Typical it seems to me is simply parking at the Post Office. Which makes sense as you can drive to take a parcel there to post, or drive back after picking up one.
We moved to a largish village when she was 4. Don't feel comfortable with any of my kids cycling around the village as there are no cycle paths and people, no matter where they are, will always drive like idiots around bikes.
It's brilliant. It makes shopping a pleasure
The only thing lacking is a dedicated wine shop, but I can stroll to Primrose Hil High Street for that. Plus I have maybe 200 small food outlets in Camden Market
Meanwhile I can walk to the West End in 30 minutes, or get there in 8 minutes by Tube. Luvvit
Tom Forth goes on about this a lot:
Let's turn up the nerdery and introduce the concept of Passenger Transport Access Nodes aka stops.
Within 10km of Manchester? 1.2m people and 5000 stops.
Within 10km of Amsterdam? 1m people and 2000 stops.
Feels a bit like a trade-off we're dodging to me.
https://twitter.com/thomasforth/status/1687106684819513345
If it had happened in recent years from human influence I'd like to think we'd all know about it.
Cars are an abomination. Thank God they are in the Last Gasp Saloon. In decades to come we will look back and marvel - in a bad way - at how we allowed cars to destroy and desecrate beautiful towns and cities
Fuck knows what America is gonna do, tho. It is built for cars. Take them away and what is left?
1. Privatised. Council forced to pay subsidy to private bus company to keep socially required routes on, but even then they get withdrawn.
2. Arms length. Council owns a commercial bus company and has indirect control over the business
3. Nationalised. Council directly runs the buses
We don't have any of 3 left - and its effectively illegal in the UK. Unless we change the law and give councils a load of money which they can't spend on the services they are required by law to provide but don't have the cash to do so, our options are the first two.
In what way is BusCo - owned by the council, run commercially on behalf of the council - a worse option than the alternative of let the market choose not to run any buses at all that don't make a level of profit set by the bus company?
It was an absolutely lovely English market town. They knocked it all down to build....... THAT
The sunny blue sky versus black and white does look better but because sunny blue sky is nice, not because there's an almost completely empty pavement now with just a few people on it.
Homes that nobody in their right mind wants to live in. Due to the decay, damp and dangerous neighbours. So instead of standing empty the Housing Association puts asylum seekers in them.
The people who refused to live there then get told by the right that they should be angry at these scroungers being given "free homes" which they can't have.
I do wonder how much a divide on this issue in the Tory party will have an impact.
Are there many of those convinced enough that man-made climate change is important to oppose the current government's pandering to a populist appeal by the headbanger* wing of the Conservatives?
* not sure as to what the word I want is there.
A big part of it is cultural/presence. There are over 700 buses trundling round Edinburgh. They are the default option for any journey over a mile.
The other thing worth saying is that there are examples of private bus companies doing a damn fine job; Brighton & Hove, or Southern Vectis on the Isle of Wight. Wonder if the other part of the equation is having a firm embedded in a community (even if it is linked to a distant conglomerate), as they both are. One of the things that has become a lot less common in my lifetime is proper, but proudly provincial, companies. The Daily Yourtown Gazette, Countyshire Building Society, that sort of thing. Maybe it's not wonder that London is the only place that works properly.
So there's nothing to change nationally to enable that. Its already an option.
Part of the reason Arriva runs so many services though, is that they've simply been able to do a better job in many places than state owned and operated alternatives, so they can pick up the pieces and then do an OK job.
Simply saying that you can own a business, is not the same thing as saying you can own and successfully run a business. Those are two very different propositions.
I do wonder how much a divide on this issue in the Tory party will have an impact.
Are there many of those convinced enough that man-made climate change is important to oppose their own party's current government's pandering to a populist appeal by the headbanger* wing of the Conservatives?
Is there much of any similar tendency in Labour still standing?
* not sure as to what the word I want is there. I mean the tendency that is cancelling LTNs, has suddenly found £20bn down the sofa for roadbuilding, has cut foreign aid, and so on.
I know you love to be a manic Cassandra forecasting scenarios of doom and gloom, but of all of them your suggestion of the doom and gloom of the end of cars is the most crazy you have - and furthest from the truth.
Far from the end of the age of the car, the reality is that cars are better, safer, cleaner and driven more than they have ever been in history.
Parks are a good thing to have, I think we can all agree with that. Most places, to get to somewhere like your bottom image, there's a parking lot, or road with parking, next to it. Which makes the park convenient and accessible. 👍
That's how that park was made possible. 👍
NCT is about 80% Council owned with a minority private shareholder, and seems to be well-run. I'd put it in category 2.
Normal profit margin is 5-8%, now making a modest loss whilst recovering from COVID. 50 million passengers per year. They have done things like fully accessible buses and free wifi - no idea how common that is.
No idea how that compares.
https://www.nctx.co.uk/about-nct
The reporting that everything had to be delayed because of, sigh, "safety checks", was especially well done. "They come over here, and they expect British people to delay schedules so that they can be 'safe'. Ooh, and that one's carrying a better suitcase than I've got. And how can she afford to have her hair done like that if she's a 'refugee'? Wish I could have a holiday in a hotel, all expenses paid", etc.
Pure Daily Mail heaven.
And there are still people who think Labour will re-establish the Red Wall because of something to do with the state health service.
Edit: obviously the laws of physics, biology, and economics change at the Border.
The rest of the country has parks everywhere too, there's loads of parks both within walking distance and within a five minute drive of my house. No public transport in that area (though there is cycle paths there) so its not like you need public transport to enable parks.
For areas with a population density of less than roughly 5k/km^2 then the car makes by far the most sense for transport.
Roughly over 10k/km^2 then public transport makes more sense.
In between you need a mix of both.
Private companies (including Arriva) change services based on profitability yes. State-ran businesses tend not to, so they end up running out of money, and either need to be sold off or a company like Arriva ends up coming in to pick up the pieces.
A Lab maj should be at p<0.1.
At night, much less so, as all of the tunnels under the roundabouts became somewhat unpleasant places, with the local hoodlums hanging around.
A bit like your suggestion ULEZ was the same as Section 28.
And your £1 trillion investment in roads for economic growth.
Husband, Father, Brexiter, Driver ...
Cars are evil and everyone now knows it. The whole tendency of modern societies is therefore AWAY from the car, as they destroy cities and alienate humans. I know you don't like this, but this is the arrow of time, and it points in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. Ah well, you will cope
Here is an excellent essay on how cars destroyed America
"The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink
"Car-centric infrastructure turned many into unwalkable wastelands. Planners now look to prewar cities to find inspiration for the future"
https://www.ft.com/content/27169841-7ee3-481e-919d-41b247e401f6
I think the vast majority of people like to live near a park, or have trees in their street, or own a garden at best
So that's plain wrong
But there are thousands of real examples of this: where cars have been removed and everything looks nicer and kinder and prettier
How many people want to live next to a motorway?
I'm dithering about booking a holiday here, for the obvious reason. It should be a no-brainer for someone into naval history. But the Admiralty built it next to the M25, very inconsiderately. (No, not really, but the way some folk talk about the right to underground car parks everywhere ...).
https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/semaphore-tower-58731/#Overview
Alan Partridge: That was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they paved paradise to put up a parking lot, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn't quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song. It's 4:35 AM, you're listening to Up With The Partridge.
Compare with say the Barbican, which even if the architecture is not approved of, is fairly well integrated into the City.
And cars are fun.
Underground, El, overground, omnibus, trams. No point in cars if they choke the city physically. Cars basically parasitise on the space cleared by mass transit.
"When it's full, tow it to Rwanda."
"Erm ... Rwanda is land-locked, Home Secretary."
"OK. Tristan da Cunha, then."
"It has an active volcano, Home Secretary. Even worse optics than a recent genocide."
"Pitcairn?"
"Too far"
"Necker?"
"Sir Richard Branson says no."
"OK, how about Ascension, then? It was in the papers yesterday."
"Ascension is a top secret military base, Home Secretary."
"Perfect. Get me Ben."
Actually makes the persistence of the bicycle a bit interesting. Why haven't they been replaced by escooters yet?
Luckyguy's point raised sewage works, windfarms, and other things he presumed people would be in favour of, even though parks in the same place would be nicer. I was noting that in fact people are not in favour of things like wind farms, solar farms, or sensitive redevelopment of awful brownfield scrubland in place of parks, as countless objections and stalled works demonstrate, when they are nearby. In fact all they seem to want are parks.
It was a gag about BANANAs, not saying people don't like parks. Why would someone dislike parks?
(That being said people near me have objected to a new country park proposal recently, but because it would come with a bit of extra housing to pay for it first).
It wouldn't make a whole day out, however. Maybe half a morning?
You could combine it with the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle? They have some genuinely compelling exhibits. It's not fake or gimmicky, it can even be a bit spooky: definitely worth a go (especially on a drizzly day)
https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/visit/
And if you're in the area Tintagel with its Castle of course
There are some spectacular clifftop walks around Crackington Haven, also nearby
https://www.stayincornwall.co.uk/handbook/locals-guide-crackington-haven
Just been crabbing in Padstow harbour. Caught about two dozen - never known it so full of crabs. Speculating that a rainy July has led to silty conditions in tge Camel, and so more food in the foodchain, or something. Of such small intricacies is a holiday made.
Well done, and good to see integrity on display
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.503241,-0.1174818,3a,75y,264.51h,102.24t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAkmGq3UWCZ-EENgUnPDqVA!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?panoid=AkmGq3UWCZ-EENgUnPDqVA&cb_client=search.revgeo_and_fetch.gps&w=96&h=64&yaw=281.85474&pitch=0&thumbfov=100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
(As Carnyx says I believe they can essentially only fly in from one direction, and for various reasons it limits the size of plane that can make it.)
Also until the Govt gets off its miserable, self-serving butt they are also currently illegal in private hands.
It affects bike-riders too, however. Two weeks ago a community cycling even near Cambridge that attracts ~400 people each year was cancelled as the roads surface conditions were assessed as too dangerous.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-66200673
As you probably know Cornwall gets wilder the further north you go: on that coast up to Devon. Around Morwenstow it can sometimes feel unsettlingly remote (I like it, others don't)
And yes, some provision for cars is going to be necessary for the foreseeable future. But that provision does make life worse for everyone else, and cars do have a habit of swallowing any provision provided and then some. So we do have to consider when there are better ways of achieving the things we use cars to do.
A great day for walking. Dry and bright, but not hot.
I don't understand Ascension btw - I thought one of HMG's favourite attack lines was that asylum seekers are a security hazard?
Have the Americans been consulted?