There seems to be a disconnect between punditry and punters after the GOP debate. Ramaswamy stole the show. Ramaswamy has drifted in the betting.
That's not necessarily inconsistent if punters believe (accurately) that winning this debate will result in attention being focussed on him, which will in turn cause his campaign to falter - a 'peaking too early' syndrome.
However, I don't really think that is the case here and the market may well be getting it wrong; he seems to be well-placed in terms of skills, shamelessness and policy to sweep up the Trumpism-without-Trump vote and what were disqualifying attributes before 2016 aren't necessarily so any longer.
You're assuming that 'without Trump' means those voters carry on enthusiastically in favour of the next least rational candidate, whoever that might be.
I'm not sure he has Trump's genius for crowd manipulation.
The audience often cheered the attacks on him, in a manner which just doesn't happen with Trump.
The Trumpism-without-Trump vote splits into two, and how that plays out depends on whether Trump is in the race or not, and if not, why he's out of it. Most of that potential vote is still with Trump as first preference so the scenario only comes into play once he's out. Even so, the rest - disillusioned with Trump as a person or wary of his polling nationally - is still big enough to see a candidate to make the final two or three but, crucially, not to get anywhere close to winning.
But Trump *could* fall, in one of three ways. Least likely is that the public just turns against him. The 'public' here is GOP primary voters, and he has a huge proportion of that base locked up. Even with the court cases against him, he can afford considerable slippage before he even starts to look vulnerable - and as Mike posted the other day, well over half say they would still support him even if jailed (whether they actually would is another matter but we can reasonably assume a fair few would - and in any case, the primaries will be over before any sentencing is done). But both a health event and/or a criminal conviction could do for his chances, and both are realistic enough for candidates to play for Trump's vote on the off-chance that it falls into play. However, that's a mighty big punt because if it doesn't come off, it's handing Trump the nomination unchallenged.
If cycling = less road space needed, then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?
More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.
Its not rocket science. Its not cheap, but investing in critical infrastructure isn't cheap and we have the taxes on transport to more than cover the expense.
And controlling the virus damaged kids education, which is a price not worth paying.
Yes there's no easy answers. In that situation where there's no easy answers, why is it beyond the pale to suggest the answer with more deaths of the vulnerable and sick might be the better answer than harming the education of the young and healthy?
Have snipped your post (sorry) to the crux of it. Kids education was harmed, that isn't up for debate. But you seem to be suggesting an alternative where it wasn't harmed. And that is a fantasy.
Lets assume that Shagger decided to ignore the scientists and do a bluster "Keep Going For Blighty" policy. His fateful "you must stay at home" speech instead being "you must keep living your lives normally".
The pox was still spreading like wildfire - even faster this time. Which means more teachers falling sick, and more parents falling sick. Once you get past a tipping point of staff absence you cannot open the school - you need to close some years or the whole thing.
Instead of a controlled closure, you get an uncontrolled closure. Instead of the schools being able to remain open throughout so that key workers could continue to work, you'd have seen schools properly shut. And a whole load of key businesses also shut as the pox tore through them harder than it did in the prime timeline.
You can't just wish away Covid. And I honestly don't understand why you even try to.
It is the reason why we need a proper enquiry, rather than one where conclusions are written first, then evidence made to fit.
Absolutely! Any choice any government would have made can be proven to be in error in hindsight when all the facts are known and the scenario has played out. We need to understand what happened, what the alternatives were, and how we could do it better next time.
Like most sane people I'll give the government the first lockdown. Was it right or wrong who knows. We all have our views but it was understandable (Northern Italy, blah blah).
After that no. No lockdowns. Keep schools open, take precautions for eg bus drivers, give advice, compensate businesses, individuals, and let those who are willing and able live their lives. More deaths? For sure. But a 20 mph speed limit on motorways would result in fewer deaths but we don't do that, do we.
You say 'keep schools open'. How do you do that when, say, 15% of the staff are off, either actually ill or isolating - and if you wouldn't have isolating measures, you'd then have epidemics running rampant through schools, so dropping available staff below safe levels anyway.
But the main reason was to protect the capacity in the NHS, which was close to breaking point and had it gone past it, would have had exponentially greater knock-on effects. Ultimately, despite the five-tier system, the only thing that actually brought case numbers down was indefinite lockdowns - and prior to the vaccine, high case numbers inevitably led to high levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
In the end (or the beginning), the formal lockdown was necessary to mandate and regulate because it was happening organically anyway, as people either fell sick or had to isolate (and remember that for the first 3-4 months, there wasn't the capacity for general testing so either you adopt the precautionary principle or again you let the virus run riot), meaning businesses and services didn't have a safe capacity to operate.
Yes, lockdown was a pigs ear in many respects but pre-vaccine it was the only way to prevent a catastrophe. Covid spreads via the infected getting too close to others and passing it on, so you had to find a quick and dirty way of enforcing distancing between people. That's what lockdown did.
The biggest learning in my view from Covid is that you should not base every decision purely on the short-term health benefits. There have been many economic, social and long-term health issues that have resulted from decisions made then. These were barely considered it seemed at the time. There needs to be a more balanced analysis made if something similar were to happen in the future.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
This is where the data is rather interesting. The number of collisions and slight injuries, particularly for drivers, has fallen significantly over the last 20 years or so, while serious injuries and fatalities for other road users had been steady (or increased a bit for cyclists).
It's tricky interpreting it all. Increasing cycling rates will almost certainly increase fatalities with current street design, and SUVs haven't shown up in the data yet (maybe because of COVID?), but will likely follow the US pattern for pedestrian fatalities.
Another instance where comparisons with America doesn't work. The reason they don't show in the data is that British "SUVs" are nothing like US SUVs. British ones would be small to mid-sized cars over there.
American ones would be considered like trucks here.
We shall see. I'd be surprised the additional height, weight and reduced visibility doesn't have an effect.
UK Range Rover Evoque weighs 1787 kg
US Chevrolet Tahoe weighs 2541 kg
They're not the same.
The new Hummer EV won’t be coming to the UK - because it’s so heavy, anyone aged under 45 can’t drive it on a car licence.
It won't be coming to the UK but not because it's heavy. GM have quit all RHD markets.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
Tories told to scrap cheap foreign labour loophole and 'get a grip' on immigration
Labour says it will 'end the licence to undercut pay' by employing staff from abroad and focus on training UK workers ahead of the latest immigration figures being published
Fascinating to see Labour's positioning on immigration.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
How much damage is Dorries doing to the Tory brand? Very little. Very few people can remember the story, most of those who do are already engaged and have alignment one way or another, and even for the switched-on-floating-voter, there are much bigger issues in play.
However, it's odd that the Tories have done nothing. They should withdraw the whip given her failure to follow through on her resignation. Personally, were I the Mid Beds Association Chairman, I'd suspend her membership and take a resolution to expel her to the Association Executive (which would then get kicked upstairs to the Party Board, but would at least force a decision one way or the other).
And what would be the point of all this? Dorries would still be an MP and the technicalities of not taking the whip would be lost on most voters (and her since she is not in the Commons to vote in any case).
If the government wants an early by-election — perhaps the Chancellor took OGH's betting advice — then it should find Dorries some quid pro quo, a quango or industry body she can chair. If it does not want a by-election, it should do nothing.
It makes a statement about values. Dorries is trying to blackmail the govt into giving her a high honour at the expense of her constituents. Justice alone demands that she be punished for her willful refusal to do her job. She can't be sacked as an MP but she can be expelled from her party, which could, at least, then credibly claim it'd done all it could.
By contrast, buying her off would be a shameful outcome, expose Sunak as weak and encourage more MPs to game-play for baubles.
There seems to be a disconnect between punditry and punters after the GOP debate. Ramaswamy stole the show. Ramaswamy has drifted in the betting.
Did he steal the show ? He certainly made an impression, but not necessarily a good one.
It's an open question for now.
The losers were DeSantis and Tim Scott.
The reports I've read seem to think he did. Although the price of making a good impression on the GOP base is making an awful impression on everyone else.
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
I don't think comparisons with the UK as a whole are correct, England is far closer to the Netherlands in terms of population density which is what Bart was comparing.
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
The only people talking bollocks are those who are saying "but schools never closed what's the big problem".
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
According to the numbers I found for the UK as a whole, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. However, because the definition of a road isn't fixed, estimates of road density vary. Broadly speaking, the UK and the Netherlands have similarly developed road networks, but the Netherlands has a far more developed cycling network.
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
The only people talking bollocks are those who are saying "but schools never closed what's the big problem".
If that includes you then so be it
No, you’re talking more shite.
No option in March 2020 we had no good options, lockdowns was the least worst option.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
Given the Netherlands has been putting cycle infrastructure on the roads since the 1970s, would you agree that in order to replicate them, we would need to do the same for every road we have built over the same time period? Not just new ones?
That's exactly what I've suggested, we should aim to do so by building new roads (with cycling infrastructure from the start) to alleviate car traffic on the old roads, in order to free space to build cycling infrastructure on the old roads too. Two birds, one stone.
Unless we widen the road by knocking down buildings, we can't magically fix the mistakes of the past, so we need to invest in new roads in order to do so.
Why not start by just putting segregated cycle lanes on our current roads? Much cheaper, and that's what the Dutch did.
Where would you put the segregated cycle line on the A40 in the link I've shown you. Surely better to build a dedicated cycle/walkway in the field (Now sold for housing) next door ?
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
This is very unfair, they’re really fighting to save a beloved local *checks notes* ………car park.
A pensioner day trip to Edgware to protest against young people owning a home
This is the sort of thing the Government should just overrule as a policy, it is utterly pathetic that young people are prevented from owning a home because some elderly nutjobs want to protect a car park and disused industrial site.
If Labour don't get a grip on this they've lost my vote after the next GE and I will resign as a member.
And controlling the virus damaged kids education, which is a price not worth paying.
Yes there's no easy answers. In that situation where there's no easy answers, why is it beyond the pale to suggest the answer with more deaths of the vulnerable and sick might be the better answer than harming the education of the young and healthy?
Have snipped your post (sorry) to the crux of it. Kids education was harmed, that isn't up for debate. But you seem to be suggesting an alternative where it wasn't harmed. And that is a fantasy.
Lets assume that Shagger decided to ignore the scientists and do a bluster "Keep Going For Blighty" policy. His fateful "you must stay at home" speech instead being "you must keep living your lives normally".
The pox was still spreading like wildfire - even faster this time. Which means more teachers falling sick, and more parents falling sick. Once you get past a tipping point of staff absence you cannot open the school - you need to close some years or the whole thing.
Instead of a controlled closure, you get an uncontrolled closure. Instead of the schools being able to remain open throughout so that key workers could continue to work, you'd have seen schools properly shut. And a whole load of key businesses also shut as the pox tore through them harder than it did in the prime timeline.
You can't just wish away Covid. And I honestly don't understand why you even try to.
It is the reason why we need a proper enquiry, rather than one where conclusions are written first, then evidence made to fit.
Absolutely! Any choice any government would have made can be proven to be in error in hindsight when all the facts are known and the scenario has played out. We need to understand what happened, what the alternatives were, and how we could do it better next time.
Like most sane people I'll give the government the first lockdown. Was it right or wrong who knows. We all have our views but it was understandable (Northern Italy, blah blah).
After that no. No lockdowns. Keep schools open, take precautions for eg bus drivers, give advice, compensate businesses, individuals, and let those who are willing and able live their lives. More deaths? For sure. But a 20 mph speed limit on motorways would result in fewer deaths but we don't do that, do we.
You say 'keep schools open'. How do you do that when, say, 15% of the staff are off, either actually ill or isolating - and if you wouldn't have isolating measures, you'd then have epidemics running rampant through schools, so dropping available staff below safe levels anyway.
But the main reason was to protect the capacity in the NHS, which was close to breaking point and had it gone past it, would have had exponentially greater knock-on effects. Ultimately, despite the five-tier system, the only thing that actually brought case numbers down was indefinite lockdowns - and prior to the vaccine, high case numbers inevitably led to high levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
In the end (or the beginning), the formal lockdown was necessary to mandate and regulate because it was happening organically anyway, as people either fell sick or had to isolate (and remember that for the first 3-4 months, there wasn't the capacity for general testing so either you adopt the precautionary principle or again you let the virus run riot), meaning businesses and services didn't have a safe capacity to operate.
Yes, lockdown was a pigs ear in many respects but pre-vaccine it was the only way to prevent a catastrophe. Covid spreads via the infected getting too close to others and passing it on, so you had to find a quick and dirty way of enforcing distancing between people. That's what lockdown did.
The biggest learning in my view from Covid is that you should not base every decision purely on the short-term health benefits. There have been many economic, social and long-term health issues that have resulted from decisions made then. These were barely considered it seemed at the time. There needs to be a more balanced analysis made if something similar were to happen in the future.
Yes. There wasn't time for all that as Covid was sweeping in but you'd hope for a bit better next time.
Thank goodness for traditional passport stamps. I don't like it when you visit somewhere and there's no record of it because it's all done electronically.
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
The only people talking bollocks are those who are saying "but schools never closed what's the big problem".
If that includes you then so be it
No, you’re talking more shite.
No option in March 2020 we had no good options, lockdowns was the least worst option.
Now you're changing the subject. I said I understand the first lockdown. Not that it was right or wrong but I understand it.
You said "lockdowns" were the least worst option. Which is bollocks squared. After the first one there should have been no more mandated lockdowns.
But of course you are part of the doing very comfortably PB group who can't imagine what hell lockdowns inflicted upon those less fortunate.
So your response is no surprise whatsoever. Tell us about your last and next bonus again why don't you.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
I don't think comparisons with the UK as a whole are correct, England is far closer to the Netherlands in terms of population density which is what Bart was comparing.
Well let's see the calculation repeated for England, then.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
According to the numbers I found for the UK as a whole, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. However, because the definition of a road isn't fixed, estimates of road density vary. Broadly speaking, the UK and the Netherlands have similarly developed road networks, but the Netherlands has a far more developed cycling network.
Dutch cycling networks are better because the Dutch have spent 50 years building roads with cycling networks.
The UK stopped major road building 26 years ago and has been trying to build cycling that entire time on a shoestring budget cannibalising old roads rather than building new ones.
The UK has spent nearly 3 decades trying to get cycling up as a matter of policy, without building roads, and the outcome is that cycling provision is still nowhere near good enough.
If you want Dutch policy, implement Dutch policy. It works. Build roads, build cycling infrastructure, the two go hand in hand which is what the Dutch know and do so well.
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
The only people talking bollocks are those who are saying "but schools never closed what's the big problem".
If that includes you then so be it
No, you’re talking more shite.
No option in March 2020 we had no good options, lockdowns was the least worst option.
Now you're changing the subject. I said I understand the first lockdown. Not that it was right or wrong but I understand it.
You said "lockdowns" were the least worst option. Which is bollocks squared. After the first one there should have been no more mandated lockdowns.
But of course you are part of the doing very comfortably PB group who can't imagine what hell lockdowns inflicted upon those less fortunate.
So your response is no surprise whatsoever. Tell us about your last and next bonus again why don't you.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
If I've got it right, most of those roads are municipal roads, streets in towns, cities and villages.
Checks Wikipedia...
About 5,200 km of national roads (rijkswegen) are controlled by the Rijkswaterstaat, and the country's twelve provinces control about 7,800 km of provincial roads. Most motorways are national roads, and the remaining national roads are mostly expressways. Only a few motorways are provincial, and these are generally shorter and serve regional traffic.
Municipal roads make up the bulk of the Dutch road network, totalling 120,000 km.
So that's a manifestation of Dutch settlements being pretty dense and fine-grained. It's not really about building new roads between places or around them.
And for those roads in urban areas, there absolutely has been a move towards making them less convenient for cars- "cars are guests" and all that. It has to be that way, because the amount of demolition needed to make existing urban areas have more space for cars isn't a goer.
From 1998 through 2007, more than 41,000 km of city streets have been converted to local access roads with a speed limit of 30 km/h, for the purpose of traffic calming.
Depending on how individual municipalities interpreted the 1997 Sustainable Safety policy guidelines, woonerven have come under pressure from a drive to implement continuous zones of 30 km/h (19 mph) on local access streets. In some towns, this has led to residents protesting against the doubling of local speed limits from 15 km/h to 30 km/h. Woonerven are still widespread and new ones are still built, sometimes because of space restrictions. In 2011, 20% of all Dutch homes were still located in woonerf areas, and around 2 million people (over 10% of the country) were living in woonerven.
This is very unfair, they’re really fighting to save a beloved local *checks notes* ………car park.
A pensioner day trip to Edgware to protest against young people owning a home
This is the sort of thing the Government should just overrule as a policy, it is utterly pathetic that young people are prevented from owning a home because some elderly nutjobs want to protect a car park and disused industrial site.
If Labour don't get a grip on this they've lost my vote after the next GE and I will resign as a member.
I see Bob Blackman MP is leading the charge. Despite it not being in his constituency.
And controlling the virus damaged kids education, which is a price not worth paying.
Yes there's no easy answers. In that situation where there's no easy answers, why is it beyond the pale to suggest the answer with more deaths of the vulnerable and sick might be the better answer than harming the education of the young and healthy?
Have snipped your post (sorry) to the crux of it. Kids education was harmed, that isn't up for debate. But you seem to be suggesting an alternative where it wasn't harmed. And that is a fantasy.
Lets assume that Shagger decided to ignore the scientists and do a bluster "Keep Going For Blighty" policy. His fateful "you must stay at home" speech instead being "you must keep living your lives normally".
The pox was still spreading like wildfire - even faster this time. Which means more teachers falling sick, and more parents falling sick. Once you get past a tipping point of staff absence you cannot open the school - you need to close some years or the whole thing.
Instead of a controlled closure, you get an uncontrolled closure. Instead of the schools being able to remain open throughout so that key workers could continue to work, you'd have seen schools properly shut. And a whole load of key businesses also shut as the pox tore through them harder than it did in the prime timeline.
You can't just wish away Covid. And I honestly don't understand why you even try to.
It is the reason why we need a proper enquiry, rather than one where conclusions are written first, then evidence made to fit.
Absolutely! Any choice any government would have made can be proven to be in error in hindsight when all the facts are known and the scenario has played out. We need to understand what happened, what the alternatives were, and how we could do it better next time.
Like most sane people I'll give the government the first lockdown. Was it right or wrong who knows. We all have our views but it was understandable (Northern Italy, blah blah).
After that no. No lockdowns. Keep schools open, take precautions for eg bus drivers, give advice, compensate businesses, individuals, and let those who are willing and able live their lives. More deaths? For sure. But a 20 mph speed limit on motorways would result in fewer deaths but we don't do that, do we.
You say 'keep schools open'. How do you do that when, say, 15% of the staff are off, either actually ill or isolating - and if you wouldn't have isolating measures, you'd then have epidemics running rampant through schools, so dropping available staff below safe levels anyway.
But the main reason was to protect the capacity in the NHS, which was close to breaking point and had it gone past it, would have had exponentially greater knock-on effects. Ultimately, despite the five-tier system, the only thing that actually brought case numbers down was indefinite lockdowns - and prior to the vaccine, high case numbers inevitably led to high levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
In the end (or the beginning), the formal lockdown was necessary to mandate and regulate because it was happening organically anyway, as people either fell sick or had to isolate (and remember that for the first 3-4 months, there wasn't the capacity for general testing so either you adopt the precautionary principle or again you let the virus run riot), meaning businesses and services didn't have a safe capacity to operate.
Yes, lockdown was a pigs ear in many respects but pre-vaccine it was the only way to prevent a catastrophe. Covid spreads via the infected getting too close to others and passing it on, so you had to find a quick and dirty way of enforcing distancing between people. That's what lockdown did.
The biggest learning in my view from Covid is that you should not base every decision purely on the short-term health benefits. There have been many economic, social and long-term health issues that have resulted from decisions made then. These were barely considered it seemed at the time. There needs to be a more balanced analysis made if something similar were to happen in the future.
Yes. There wasn't time for all that as Covid was sweeping in but you'd hope for a bit better next time.
The key problem was that they didn't learn lessons from previous lockdowns for future ones.
If they'd issued every child with laptops over September we could have mitigated some of the more serious impacts of remote learning. If they'd considered how to get everybody onto a shared Wifi network using some form of hotspot sharing, we could have supported them better. If they'd had the sense to realise in October 2021 that the 2022 exams were simply not happening, rather than threatening dismissal to those who pointed out what was likely, then we could have had proper contingency plans in place and running smoothly rather than the bizarre free-for-all that eventuated.
And why did they not do this?
Because they insisted lockdowns would never happen again.
And why did they think that?
Because they had decided it was so.
I'd have a lot more sympathy with that view if they'd taken proper steps to make them less likely, but they just reopened and kept their fingers crossed.
The whole process reflects very badly on every aspect of government, not just the Government but the civil service too.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
Does the southern two-thirds of England have a higher population density than the Netherlands?
Henry Hill, News Editor of Conservative Home, says (in effect) that Starmer should arrange for the tabling of an Opposition motion to be put to the Commons—“That Nadine Dorries be expelled this House.”. I don’t doubt that such a motion would be carried. BUT the outcomes of votes on opposition day motions are “not considered legally binding”; and Dorries for her part would think it as nothing that Parliament had expressed its will that she not remain a Member, so that Sunak would still somehow have to arrange that she resign. It must be Sunak who arranges for Dorries to leave the Commons. Sunak and his Party must be shamed for having allowed Dorries to carry on. For more than a month it has been widely thought that it is high time Dorries resigned. It is is now high time that the leader of her wretched Party, the Prime Minister, should kick her out.
Rishi could have avoided this whole mess simply by giving Nadine Dorries the peerage Boris had promised her.
Wasn't the problem that she wanted a deferred peerage?
I think the problem is that there is hardly a single person in the Commons less suited to being given a peerage.
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
The only people talking bollocks are those who are saying "but schools never closed what's the big problem".
If that includes you then so be it
No, you’re talking more shite.
No option in March 2020 we had no good options, lockdowns was the least worst option.
Now you're changing the subject. I said I understand the first lockdown. Not that it was right or wrong but I understand it.
You said "lockdowns" were the least worst option. Which is bollocks squared. After the first one there should have been no more mandated lockdowns.
But of course you are part of the doing very comfortably PB group who can't imagine what hell lockdowns inflicted upon those less fortunate.
So your response is no surprise whatsoever. Tell us about your last and next bonus again why don't you.
And controlling the virus damaged kids education, which is a price not worth paying.
Yes there's no easy answers. In that situation where there's no easy answers, why is it beyond the pale to suggest the answer with more deaths of the vulnerable and sick might be the better answer than harming the education of the young and healthy?
Have snipped your post (sorry) to the crux of it. Kids education was harmed, that isn't up for debate. But you seem to be suggesting an alternative where it wasn't harmed. And that is a fantasy.
Lets assume that Shagger decided to ignore the scientists and do a bluster "Keep Going For Blighty" policy. His fateful "you must stay at home" speech instead being "you must keep living your lives normally".
The pox was still spreading like wildfire - even faster this time. Which means more teachers falling sick, and more parents falling sick. Once you get past a tipping point of staff absence you cannot open the school - you need to close some years or the whole thing.
Instead of a controlled closure, you get an uncontrolled closure. Instead of the schools being able to remain open throughout so that key workers could continue to work, you'd have seen schools properly shut. And a whole load of key businesses also shut as the pox tore through them harder than it did in the prime timeline.
You can't just wish away Covid. And I honestly don't understand why you even try to.
It is the reason why we need a proper enquiry, rather than one where conclusions are written first, then evidence made to fit.
Absolutely! Any choice any government would have made can be proven to be in error in hindsight when all the facts are known and the scenario has played out. We need to understand what happened, what the alternatives were, and how we could do it better next time.
Like most sane people I'll give the government the first lockdown. Was it right or wrong who knows. We all have our views but it was understandable (Northern Italy, blah blah).
After that no. No lockdowns. Keep schools open, take precautions for eg bus drivers, give advice, compensate businesses, individuals, and let those who are willing and able live their lives. More deaths? For sure. But a 20 mph speed limit on motorways would result in fewer deaths but we don't do that, do we.
You say 'keep schools open'. How do you do that when, say, 15% of the staff are off, either actually ill or isolating - and if you wouldn't have isolating measures, you'd then have epidemics running rampant through schools, so dropping available staff below safe levels anyway.
But the main reason was to protect the capacity in the NHS, which was close to breaking point and had it gone past it, would have had exponentially greater knock-on effects. Ultimately, despite the five-tier system, the only thing that actually brought case numbers down was indefinite lockdowns - and prior to the vaccine, high case numbers inevitably led to high levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
In the end (or the beginning), the formal lockdown was necessary to mandate and regulate because it was happening organically anyway, as people either fell sick or had to isolate (and remember that for the first 3-4 months, there wasn't the capacity for general testing so either you adopt the precautionary principle or again you let the virus run riot), meaning businesses and services didn't have a safe capacity to operate.
Yes, lockdown was a pigs ear in many respects but pre-vaccine it was the only way to prevent a catastrophe. Covid spreads via the infected getting too close to others and passing it on, so you had to find a quick and dirty way of enforcing distancing between people. That's what lockdown did.
The biggest learning in my view from Covid is that you should not base every decision purely on the short-term health benefits. There have been many economic, social and long-term health issues that have resulted from decisions made then. These were barely considered it seemed at the time. There needs to be a more balanced analysis made if something similar were to happen in the future.
Yes. There wasn't time for all that as Covid was sweeping in but you'd hope for a bit better next time.
The key problem was that they didn't learn lessons from previous lockdowns for future ones.
If they'd issued every child with laptops over September we could have mitigated some of the more serious impacts of remote learning. If they'd considered how to get everybody onto a shared Wifi network using some form of hotspot sharing, we could have supported them better. If they'd had the sense to realise in October 2021 that the 2022 exams were simply not happening, rather than threatening dismissal to those who pointed out what was likely, then we could have had proper contingency plans in place and running smoothly rather than the bizarre free-for-all that eventuated.
And why did they not do this?
Because they insisted lockdowns would never happen again.
And why did they think that?
Because they had decided it was so.
I'd have a lot more sympathy with that view if they'd taken proper steps to make them less likely, but they just reopened and kept their fingers crossed.
The whole process reflects very badly on every aspect of government, not just the Government but the civil service too.
Government by op-ed and pamphlet writer, where writing an essay saying that something should/must happen is as good as making it happen.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
If I've got it right, most of those roads are municipal roads, streets in towns, cities and villages.
Checks Wikipedia...
About 5,200 km of national roads (rijkswegen) are controlled by the Rijkswaterstaat, and the country's twelve provinces control about 7,800 km of provincial roads. Most motorways are national roads, and the remaining national roads are mostly expressways. Only a few motorways are provincial, and these are generally shorter and serve regional traffic.
Municipal roads make up the bulk of the Dutch road network, totalling 120,000 km.
So that's a manifestation of Dutch settlements being pretty dense and fine-grained. It's not really about building new roads between places or around them.
And for those roads in urban areas, there absolutely has been a move towards making them less convenient for cars- "cars are guests" and all that. It has to be that way, because the amount of demolition needed to make existing urban areas have more space for cars isn't a goer.
From 1998 through 2007, more than 41,000 km of city streets have been converted to local access roads with a speed limit of 30 km/h, for the purpose of traffic calming.
Depending on how individual municipalities interpreted the 1997 Sustainable Safety policy guidelines, woonerven have come under pressure from a drive to implement continuous zones of 30 km/h (19 mph) on local access streets. In some towns, this has led to residents protesting against the doubling of local speed limits from 15 km/h to 30 km/h. Woonerven are still widespread and new ones are still built, sometimes because of space restrictions. In 2011, 20% of all Dutch homes were still located in woonerf areas, and around 2 million people (over 10% of the country) were living in woonerven.
Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.
So the fact the Dutch have been doing what I said they've been doing, which we should be doing, should not be a shock.
Build new roads to carry through traffic and you can convert old roads to calmer (LTN) roads. Everybody wins.
To do this though, you need to invest in building roads. Which the Dutch have done.
Have I got the anti-lockdown, schools must stay open, people right?
1. Schools must stay open. 2. Individuals, particularly the old and vulnerable, can choose whether they wish to work or not, and can get furlough if they isolate. 3. Teachers, in vast numbers, choose to avoid infectious children, either because they are vulnerable, over 50, or live with/care for people who are. 4. Parents, in vast numbers, choose not to send their kids to school, fearing that they will return home with the virus. 5. Schools cannot operate safely due to shortage of staff. 6. Schools close.
In reality, schools stayed open for vulnerable kids and the kids of key workers. Probably the best that could be achieved.
And controlling the virus damaged kids education, which is a price not worth paying.
Yes there's no easy answers. In that situation where there's no easy answers, why is it beyond the pale to suggest the answer with more deaths of the vulnerable and sick might be the better answer than harming the education of the young and healthy?
Have snipped your post (sorry) to the crux of it. Kids education was harmed, that isn't up for debate. But you seem to be suggesting an alternative where it wasn't harmed. And that is a fantasy.
Lets assume that Shagger decided to ignore the scientists and do a bluster "Keep Going For Blighty" policy. His fateful "you must stay at home" speech instead being "you must keep living your lives normally".
The pox was still spreading like wildfire - even faster this time. Which means more teachers falling sick, and more parents falling sick. Once you get past a tipping point of staff absence you cannot open the school - you need to close some years or the whole thing.
Instead of a controlled closure, you get an uncontrolled closure. Instead of the schools being able to remain open throughout so that key workers could continue to work, you'd have seen schools properly shut. And a whole load of key businesses also shut as the pox tore through them harder than it did in the prime timeline.
You can't just wish away Covid. And I honestly don't understand why you even try to.
It is the reason why we need a proper enquiry, rather than one where conclusions are written first, then evidence made to fit.
Absolutely! Any choice any government would have made can be proven to be in error in hindsight when all the facts are known and the scenario has played out. We need to understand what happened, what the alternatives were, and how we could do it better next time.
Like most sane people I'll give the government the first lockdown. Was it right or wrong who knows. We all have our views but it was understandable (Northern Italy, blah blah).
After that no. No lockdowns. Keep schools open, take precautions for eg bus drivers, give advice, compensate businesses, individuals, and let those who are willing and able live their lives. More deaths? For sure. But a 20 mph speed limit on motorways would result in fewer deaths but we don't do that, do we.
You say 'keep schools open'. How do you do that when, say, 15% of the staff are off, either actually ill or isolating - and if you wouldn't have isolating measures, you'd then have epidemics running rampant through schools, so dropping available staff below safe levels anyway.
But the main reason was to protect the capacity in the NHS, which was close to breaking point and had it gone past it, would have had exponentially greater knock-on effects. Ultimately, despite the five-tier system, the only thing that actually brought case numbers down was indefinite lockdowns - and prior to the vaccine, high case numbers inevitably led to high levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
In the end (or the beginning), the formal lockdown was necessary to mandate and regulate because it was happening organically anyway, as people either fell sick or had to isolate (and remember that for the first 3-4 months, there wasn't the capacity for general testing so either you adopt the precautionary principle or again you let the virus run riot), meaning businesses and services didn't have a safe capacity to operate.
Yes, lockdown was a pigs ear in many respects but pre-vaccine it was the only way to prevent a catastrophe. Covid spreads via the infected getting too close to others and passing it on, so you had to find a quick and dirty way of enforcing distancing between people. That's what lockdown did.
The biggest learning in my view from Covid is that you should not base every decision purely on the short-term health benefits. There have been many economic, social and long-term health issues that have resulted from decisions made then. These were barely considered it seemed at the time. There needs to be a more balanced analysis made if something similar were to happen in the future.
Yes. There wasn't time for all that as Covid was sweeping in but you'd hope for a bit better next time.
The key problem was that they didn't learn lessons from previous lockdowns for future ones.
If they'd issued every child with laptops over September we could have mitigated some of the more serious impacts of remote learning. If they'd considered how to get everybody onto a shared Wifi network using some form of hotspot sharing, we could have supported them better. If they'd had the sense to realise in October 2021 that the 2022 exams were simply not happening, rather than threatening dismissal to those who pointed out what was likely, then we could have had proper contingency plans in place and running smoothly rather than the bizarre free-for-all that eventuated.
And why did they not do this?
Because they insisted lockdowns would never happen again.
And why did they think that?
Because they had decided it was so.
I'd have a lot more sympathy with that view if they'd taken proper steps to make them less likely, but they just reopened and kept their fingers crossed.
The whole process reflects very badly on every aspect of government, not just the Government but the civil service too.
Government by op-ed and pamphlet writer, where writing an essay saying that something should/must happen is as good as making it happen.
I am irresistibly reminded of my Gilbert and Sullivan:
KO-KO: It’s like this: When your Majesty says, ‘Let a thing be done,’ it’s as good as done – practically, it is done – because your Majesty’s will is law. Your Majesty says, ‘Kill a gentleman,’ and a gentleman is told off to be killed. Consequently, that gentleman is as good as dead – practically, he is dead – and if he is dead, why not say so?
MIKADO. I see. Nothing could possibly be more satisfactory!
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
I am glad that we have established that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland don't matter.
Eh ? Of course they matter but their population density isn't really comparable to the Netherlands. It's a nonsense comparison. I don't think we particularly need more roads for cars in England unlike Bart.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
If I've got it right, most of those roads are municipal roads, streets in towns, cities and villages.
Checks Wikipedia...
About 5,200 km of national roads (rijkswegen) are controlled by the Rijkswaterstaat, and the country's twelve provinces control about 7,800 km of provincial roads. Most motorways are national roads, and the remaining national roads are mostly expressways. Only a few motorways are provincial, and these are generally shorter and serve regional traffic.
Municipal roads make up the bulk of the Dutch road network, totalling 120,000 km.
So that's a manifestation of Dutch settlements being pretty dense and fine-grained. It's not really about building new roads between places or around them.
And for those roads in urban areas, there absolutely has been a move towards making them less convenient for cars- "cars are guests" and all that. It has to be that way, because the amount of demolition needed to make existing urban areas have more space for cars isn't a goer.
From 1998 through 2007, more than 41,000 km of city streets have been converted to local access roads with a speed limit of 30 km/h, for the purpose of traffic calming.
Depending on how individual municipalities interpreted the 1997 Sustainable Safety policy guidelines, woonerven have come under pressure from a drive to implement continuous zones of 30 km/h (19 mph) on local access streets. In some towns, this has led to residents protesting against the doubling of local speed limits from 15 km/h to 30 km/h. Woonerven are still widespread and new ones are still built, sometimes because of space restrictions. In 2011, 20% of all Dutch homes were still located in woonerf areas, and around 2 million people (over 10% of the country) were living in woonerven.
But I'm baffled by the suggestion that you can only put in new cycle infrastructure if you build new roads. It's not like the Dutch knocked down Amsterdam and started again.
I'm not against new roads at all but it just doesn't seem very cost-effiective. Or practical in most places.
Have I got the anti-lockdown, schools must stay open, people right?
1. Schools must stay open. 2. Individuals, particularly the old and vulnerable, can choose whether they wish to work or not, and can get furlough if they isolate. 3. Teachers, in vast numbers, choose to avoid infectious children, either because they are vulnerable, over 50, or live with/care for people who are. 4. Parents, in vast numbers, choose not to send their kids to school, fearing that they will return home with the virus. 5. Schools cannot operate safely due to shortage of staff. 6. Schools close.
In reality, schools stayed open for vulnerable kids and the kids of key workers. Probably the best that could be achieved.
Except that in December 2021 the DfE threatened a school that was at stage 5 with severe sanctions if it didn't find a way to stay open.
What makes it worse is three days earlier that tool Acland-Hood had a boozy party to celebrate her confirmation in post...
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
Do the calculation if you want, for England. I did both yesterday and Pulpstar just did density again today and matched my numbers, because those are the numbers.
The Netherlands categorically has both more road density, and more roads per capita, than England.
Scotland has long roads with little population so of course that's not comparable. England is comparable to the Netherlands, as you said until you didn't like the numbers so reverted back to UK.
Building roads allows building cycling infrastructure, which is why the Dutch did it, which is why cycling is safer there. We've spent nearly thirty years trying to push cycling in this country as a matter of government policy without the same success as the Dutch have achieved by building roads with cycling infrastructure as their policy.
There isn't enough fab capacity worldwide for meeting SiC chip demand (it has somewhat more challenging requirements than silicon), but that is changing.
Have I got the anti-lockdown, schools must stay open, people right?
1. Schools must stay open. 2. Individuals, particularly the old and vulnerable, can choose whether they wish to work or not, and can get furlough if they isolate. 3. Teachers, in vast numbers, choose to avoid infectious children, either because they are vulnerable, over 50, or live with/care for people who are. 4. Parents, in vast numbers, choose not to send their kids to school, fearing that they will return home with the virus. 5. Schools cannot operate safely due to shortage of staff. 6. Schools close.
In reality, schools stayed open for vulnerable kids and the kids of key workers. Probably the best that could be achieved.
Except that in December 2021 the DfE threatened a school that was at stage 5 with severe sanctions if it didn't find a way to stay open.
What makes it worse is three days earlier that tool Acland-Hood had a boozy party to celebrate her confirmation in post...
I thought it was Greenwich council as a whole with evidence to back up why they wanted to do so - but all it did was show how incompetent a lot of people in No 10 / DoH / DoE were..
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
Do the calculation if you want, for England. I did both yesterday and Pulpstar just did density again today and matched my numbers, because those are the numbers.
The Netherlands categorically has both more road density, and more roads per capita, than England.
Scotland has long roads with little population so of course that's not comparable. England is comparable to the Netherlands, as you said until you didn't like the numbers so reverted back to UK.
Building roads allows building cycling infrastructure, which is why the Dutch did it, which is why cycling is safer there. We've spent nearly thirty years trying to push cycling in this country as a matter of government policy without the same success as the Dutch have achieved by building roads with cycling infrastructure as their policy.
But we've been building roads like the Dutch since the 1970s, right? Loads of motorways, bypasses etc.
I don't disagree with your general idea but why not get our current roads up to Dutch standards before putting even more in.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I agree. Better side visibility from HGVs and SUVs is a big one too. More consistency in sentences would be good though.
What you often find is that the driver involved had something of a history when it comes to driving offences. See the recent horrible case near Tyndrum. And fines are a deeply unfair penalty.
I'd go for more driving bans. Mandatory life ban for death by dangerous, 10 years for careless, 6 months for 6 points, or 2 years for 12, life ban if caught driving while banned etc.
No "exceptional hardship" excuses, and cars are seized and auctioned if used by a disqualified driver. That would focus minds.
Of course you can get careless or even dangerous cyclists too
Not in law you can't (at least for causing death).
That's because it's exceedingly unlikely, though not impossible, that you are killed or injured by a cyclist.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
Have I got the anti-lockdown, schools must stay open, people right?
1. Schools must stay open. 2. Individuals, particularly the old and vulnerable, can choose whether they wish to work or not, and can get furlough if they isolate. 3. Teachers, in vast numbers, choose to avoid infectious children, either because they are vulnerable, over 50, or live with/care for people who are. 4. Parents, in vast numbers, choose not to send their kids to school, fearing that they will return home with the virus. 5. Schools cannot operate safely due to shortage of staff. 6. Schools close.
In reality, schools stayed open for vulnerable kids and the kids of key workers. Probably the best that could be achieved.
Except that in December 2021 the DfE threatened a school that was at stage 5 with severe sanctions if it didn't find a way to stay open.
What makes it worse is three days earlier that tool Acland-Hood had a boozy party to celebrate her confirmation in post...
Yes, I know that. But do you accept that many teachers, and parents, would have voted with their feet even if government hadn't mandated the 'stay at home' policy (assuming furlough of some sort available)?
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
I am glad that we have established that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland don't matter.
Eh ? Of course they matter but their population density isn't really comparable to the Netherlands. It's a nonsense comparison. I don't think we particularly need more roads for cars in England unlike Bart.
We need more roads for cars for two reasons.
1: Our population has grown and continues to grow. So there'll always be more infrastructure needed (of all types) as long as that is true. Roads, cycling, public transport - however you want to handle transport, population growth needs more of it.
2: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too. Net change is little extra capacity for cars, but much greater capacity for cycling, and cars and cycling are separated from each other.
You can't build one without the other. We've tried and failed for nearly 3 decades now.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
Does the southern two-thirds of England have a higher population density than the Netherlands?
Since for ‘reasons’ you’re doing regions v.countries, does the central western quarter of the Netherlands have a higher population density than the southern 2/3 of England?
Have I got the anti-lockdown, schools must stay open, people right?
1. Schools must stay open. 2. Individuals, particularly the old and vulnerable, can choose whether they wish to work or not, and can get furlough if they isolate. 3. Teachers, in vast numbers, choose to avoid infectious children, either because they are vulnerable, over 50, or live with/care for people who are. 4. Parents, in vast numbers, choose not to send their kids to school, fearing that they will return home with the virus. 5. Schools cannot operate safely due to shortage of staff. 6. Schools close.
In reality, schools stayed open for vulnerable kids and the kids of key workers. Probably the best that could be achieved.
Except that in December 2021 the DfE threatened a school that was at stage 5 with severe sanctions if it didn't find a way to stay open.
What makes it worse is three days earlier that tool Acland-Hood had a boozy party to celebrate her confirmation in post...
Yes, I know that. But do you accept that many teachers, and parents, would have voted with their feet even if government hadn't mandated the 'stay at home' policy (assuming furlough of some sort available)?
I don't think they would have had much choice. By December 2021 we had so many staff ordered to isolate on medical grounds we couldn't get supply in. What saved us from closing completely was that several classes were off sick as well so we could rotate cover, but in turn that meant we couldn't provide remote learning.
The whole situation was utterly farcical and completely impossible.
What was worse was when we raised the possibility of rotated learning where we would have some year groups in some weeks and others in other weeks to at least try and keep the whole system from collapsing we were slapped down with some pretty nasty threats.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
Do the calculation if you want, for England. I did both yesterday and Pulpstar just did density again today and matched my numbers, because those are the numbers.
The Netherlands categorically has both more road density, and more roads per capita, than England.
Scotland has long roads with little population so of course that's not comparable. England is comparable to the Netherlands, as you said until you didn't like the numbers so reverted back to UK.
Building roads allows building cycling infrastructure, which is why the Dutch did it, which is why cycling is safer there. We've spent nearly thirty years trying to push cycling in this country as a matter of government policy without the same success as the Dutch have achieved by building roads with cycling infrastructure as their policy.
But we've been building roads like the Dutch since the 1970s, right? Loads of motorways, bypasses etc.
I don't disagree with your general idea but why not get our current roads up to Dutch standards before putting even more in.
No, we haven't.
We stopped investing in new roads and new motorways in the 1990s. Its been deliberate policy since 1997 not to invest in roads and its been an abject failure.
We can only get our current roads upto Dutch standards by putting more in, like the Dutch have. That's how they got theirs to their standards, by building them.
Lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions were “unequivocally” effective in cutting the transmission of Covid-19 globally, according to a review by the Royal Society.
However, the authors of the report, which considered hundreds of studies into the use of masks, stay at home orders, test and trace, and border controls, said that future work should also quantify the social and economic costs of such measures.
The report involving more than 50 scientists from around the world, found that the strongest impact on coronavirus infections came from a full lockdown. Of 151 studies they considered that estimated an effect of stay at home orders, 119 found a substantial benefit, corresponding to a reduction in the “r number” — the rate of spread of the virus — by about 50 per cent.
I don’t find that remotely surprising but did they reduce the number of infections overall or simply flatten the curve to protect hospitals etc? I suspect the latter and if that is right they won’t have reduced the death rate overall. And this is the key question when considering the economic and social impacts.
Clearly governments need to act if health services are endangered. But we never got very close to that point. That might be good management, it might be an excess of caution.
One the arguments I've seen that the lockdowns, particularly the last two, saved lots of lives due to buying time for the vaccine rollout.
That would make sense. If you have a game changer like the vaccines it makes sense to buy time. But by the last lockdown we were all on our second or third dose. It was way past time to stop as Boris correctly concluded.
It was a speech at City Hall, not "Sadiq Khan's Office". His office is in the building admittedly but I somehow doubt they could fit a speech in.
Presumably this was just a small part of the speech in which he ran through all the injustices in history, starting with what the Macedonians did under that sod Alexander, and putting a monetary value on the reparations necessary to square things up.
In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that.
We might even be in pocket rather than out of it at the end of the day, especially if you work out the compound interest.
The complete ledger will be very interesting. Has it been published yet?
A rather unusual set of local by-elections today. Apart from a Con defence in Dudley there is a Green defence in Bristol and a Vectis defence in Isle of Wight.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
Do the calculation if you want, for England. I did both yesterday and Pulpstar just did density again today and matched my numbers, because those are the numbers.
The Netherlands categorically has both more road density, and more roads per capita, than England.
Scotland has long roads with little population so of course that's not comparable. England is comparable to the Netherlands, as you said until you didn't like the numbers so reverted back to UK.
Building roads allows building cycling infrastructure, which is why the Dutch did it, which is why cycling is safer there. We've spent nearly thirty years trying to push cycling in this country as a matter of government policy without the same success as the Dutch have achieved by building roads with cycling infrastructure as their policy.
But we've been building roads like the Dutch since the 1970s, right? Loads of motorways, bypasses etc.
I don't disagree with your general idea but why not get our current roads up to Dutch standards before putting even more in.
No, we haven't.
We stopped investing in new roads and new motorways in the 1990s. Its been deliberate policy since 1997 not to invest in roads and its been an abject failure.
We can only get our current roads upto Dutch standards by putting more in, like the Dutch have. That's how they got theirs to their standards, by building them.
I reckon we can do it anyway. London is doing a good job, and they haven't put in lots of new roads. Edinburgh is catching up.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
Do the calculation if you want, for England. I did both yesterday and Pulpstar just did density again today and matched my numbers, because those are the numbers.
The Netherlands categorically has both more road density, and more roads per capita, than England.
Scotland has long roads with little population so of course that's not comparable. England is comparable to the Netherlands, as you said until you didn't like the numbers so reverted back to UK.
Building roads allows building cycling infrastructure, which is why the Dutch did it, which is why cycling is safer there. We've spent nearly thirty years trying to push cycling in this country as a matter of government policy without the same success as the Dutch have achieved by building roads with cycling infrastructure as their policy.
But we've been building roads like the Dutch since the 1970s, right? Loads of motorways, bypasses etc.
I don't disagree with your general idea but why not get our current roads up to Dutch standards before putting even more in.
No, we haven't.
We stopped investing in new roads and new motorways in the 1990s. Its been deliberate policy since 1997 not to invest in roads and its been an abject failure.
We can only get our current roads upto Dutch standards by putting more in, like the Dutch have. That's how they got theirs to their standards, by building them.
I reckon we can do it anyway. London is doing a good job, and they haven't put in lots of new roads. Edinburgh is catching up.
So you don't want Dutch policy, you want something different? Then say so.
I want the Dutch policy. The Dutch system works better.
A rather unusual set of local by-elections today. Apart from a Con defence in Dudley there is a Green defence in Bristol and a Vectis defence in Isle of Wight.
Intrigued as to the policies of Vectis.
Something to do with aarly cretaceous fossil-bearing geological formations?
The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.
We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.
Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.
Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.
We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.
Can anyone help answer this question - or better yet, these questions?
About a week ago, there was a fascinating, but unsourced, chart someone showed here about changes in home tenure in England over the past more or less century (I think 1918-2021 or 2022). Googling the issue finds lots of rough approximations - but usually starting only around 1980, finishing in 2011, only at ten-year intervals or conflating State-owned and quango-owned social housing.
Can anyone post a link to the PB subject that caused the chart to be posted? And is there any possibility anyone may remember where the data comes from? It's the history of what we'd now call housing associations I'm particularly chasing today.
Looking at Scotland, Wales and NI on the measure of persons/km it appears they have 96, 89 and 73 so there appears to be plenty of road to go round there compared to England.
The odd thing about England - and parochially I don't need any more car roads near me but others mileage may vary is that our pop density is lower than the Netherlands but we have a lower road density per person. It normally seems to be the other way. France has ~ a million km of road for their 67.75 million people.
The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.
We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.
Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.
Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.
We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.
Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
As everyone notes England's more comparable to the Netherlands than the UK as a whole due to not greatly dissimilar pop density.
Netherlands Pop density 505/sq kilometre 41543 km^2 139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England Pop density 426/sq kilometre 130279 km^2 301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen .
According to the numbers I found for the UK as a whole, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. However, because the definition of a road isn't fixed, estimates of road density vary. Broadly speaking, the UK and the Netherlands have similarly developed road networks, but the Netherlands has a far more developed cycling network.
Particularly if you compare the Netherlands to South East England, rather than the more rural bits, which is a rather more level playing field.
Whistlindiesel is anything but dumb. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Until the insurance company denies the claim, and the bank sues his arse for the outstanding finance on the car.
I highly doubt he'll do an insurance claim. He has a long and highly profitable track record of destroying vehicles for views. The G-Wagen one was a banger.
It was a speech at City Hall, not "Sadiq Khan's Office". His office is in the building admittedly but I somehow doubt they could fit a speech in.
Presumably this was just a small part of the speech in which he ran through all the injustices in history, starting with what the Macedonians did under that sod Alexander, and putting a monetary value on the reparations necessary to square things up.
In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that.
We might even be in pocket rather than out of it at the end of the day, especially if you work out the compound interest.
The complete ledger will be very interesting. Has it been published yet?
The net wealth of the UK is £10.7 trn. These hucksters think that every household in the country should be fined twice what they own because of what some people did hundreds of years ago.
There is , as you imply, not a country in the world that would not be paying out vast sums of money on this basis. The Middle East and North Africa would presumably owe a shedload of money to Mediterranean and Balkan Europe.
Can anyone help answer this question - or better yet, these questions?
About a week ago, there was a fascinating, but unsourced, chart someone showed here about changes in home tenure in England over the past more or less century (I think 1918-2021 or 2022). Googling the issue finds lots of rough approximations - but usually starting only around 1980, finishing in 2011, only at ten-year intervals or conflating State-owned and quango-owned social housing.
Can anyone post a link to the PB subject that caused the chart to be posted? And is there any possibility anyone may remember where the data comes from? It's the history of what we'd now call housing associations I'm particularly chasing today.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
Whistlindiesel is anything but dumb. He knows exactly what he's doing.
I was going by the almost invariably correct wearing a cowboy hat in a car metric. The crew member pouring what looks like a mini can of San Pellegrino on the conflagration was particularly good.
Can anyone help answer this question - or better yet, these questions?
About a week ago, there was a fascinating, but unsourced, chart someone showed here about changes in home tenure in England over the past more or less century (I think 1918-2021 or 2022). Googling the issue finds lots of rough approximations - but usually starting only around 1980, finishing in 2011, only at ten-year intervals or conflating State-owned and quango-owned social housing.
Can anyone post a link to the PB subject that caused the chart to be posted? And is there any possibility anyone may remember where the data comes from? It's the history of what we'd now call housing associations I'm particularly chasing today.
The former SNP spin doctor who described the police investigation into party finances as a “grotesque circus” has been appointed as the party’s chief executive.
The new role for Murray Foote, the former editor of the Daily Record, has been revealed to the SNP’s ruling national executive committee after a five-month hunt to fill the vacant post.
Foote was the catalyst for Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, quitting as SNP chief executive in a row over false membership figures.
After leaving newspapers, he was appointed head of press for the SNP at Holyrood but resigned after unwittingly misleading the media.
The party provided inaccurate membership figures during its leadership election in March. Foote, a respected figure within the media, who masterminded “The Vow” front page on which unionist leaders promised more powers for Holyrood in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum, said he had robustly defended the inaccurate numbers in “good faith”.
It was a speech at City Hall, not "Sadiq Khan's Office". His office is in the building admittedly but I somehow doubt they could fit a speech in.
Presumably this was just a small part of the speech in which he ran through all the injustices in history, starting with what the Macedonians did under that sod Alexander, and putting a monetary value on the reparations necessary to square things up.
In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that.
We might even be in pocket rather than out of it at the end of the day, especially if you work out the compound interest.
The complete ledger will be very interesting. Has it been published yet?
The net wealth of the UK is £10.7 trn. These hucksters think that every household in the country should be fined twice what they own because of what some people did hundreds of years ago.
There is , as you imply, not a country in the world that would not be paying out vast sums of money on this basis. The Middle East and North Africa would presumably owe a shedload of money to Mediterranean and Balkan Europe.
I hate to think what Tanzania would owe given Zanzibar's record...
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
On one level, trivial, but on another, more likely to damage MPs' brand than Nadine's no-show.
Why on earth are MPs accepting these gifts ?
In a few cases, I suppose they may be legitimately connected with the MP's interests - e.g. in gambling or hortoculture on a Committee. Yet they have expenses to claim for that sort of thing. And remember what Which do - they never accept freebies whether washing machines or holidays when they are testing. Independence is all.
There is no way you could claim a ticket to the Chelsea Flower Show on MPs' expenses. I also don't really understand why you think charging such things to the public purse would be better than taking a free ticket.
The comparison with "Which?" magazine is also a bit ludicrous. Nobody is relying on Oliver Dowden for recommendations over whether or not to go to the Chelsea Flower Show.
Independence. Rather than being beholden to the donor.
If you take bribes from everyone you are beholden to no one?
A rather unusual set of local by-elections today. Apart from a Con defence in Dudley there is a Green defence in Bristol and a Vectis defence in Isle of Wight.
Intrigued as to the policies of Vectis.
Something to do with aarly cretaceous fossil-bearing geological formations?
Nah, Class 485 and Class 486 converted "Standard" Tube stock in use on the Isle of Wight railway until the 1990s. Class 485 was 5-VEC (also 4-VEC), and the 486 was 2-TIS (also 3-TIS).
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
That's really good. If only more roads in the UK were similarly equipped!
Also, if the ones that were there didn't stop randomly in the middle of nowhere.
You can cycle from Brownhills to the M6 Toll no a beautiful grade separated lane next to the A5, but then you're faced with a really tricky crossing of three roundabouts to get on the Cannock route...
I quite literally said an uncontrolled shut down is better than a controlled one, and now Rochdale just keeps repeating that if we hadn't had a controlled shut down we'd have had uncontrolled ones as if that's a killer argument. Yes, if we hadn't had a controlled shut down, we'd have had what is better. That's a better choice.
If the choice is scenario (A) shut down all schools, all the time, for months, or scenario (B) shut down individual classes in individual schools for a week if the teacher is off sick and no cover is available that week, then return back afterwards - then I prefer scenario B.
I'm not pretending that you could 'wish away' the pandemic, just live with it. And if the vulnerable choose to isolate, then let them choose that, free choice.
Thanks for the clarification. How does an uncontrolled shut down of education serve kids education better than a controlled one?
The piece you seem to be missing is that (1) it isn't that odd teachers are off for a few weeks then return - its a lot of teachers off an awful lot as the virus tears through schools as super spreader nodes, and (2) kids being off means working parents can't work. And then get sick from their kids anyway. I assume your argument is that business should also have carried on as normal?
We could have let the thing rip through us. Perhaps that would have been a shorter disruption to the economy and education. But the disruption would have been harder and deeper than we had.
At least with "you must stay at home" we had furlough and CBILS and other support. "people die so what" just means empty cinemas and pubs and no support and mass bankruptcies. I know that as a libertarian you support businesses going bankrupt as a sign of a market economy doing its job, but it isn't good when a lot fail within a short space of time. Does tend to have a very negative effect on the economy.
The independent enquiry needs to get into all of this. But the "it would have been fine" scenario still feels like wishful thinking on your part.
Yes a lot of teachers might be off for a few days while they're actually sick.
That does not equate to months of shutdown of all classes in all schools.
You keep saying this thing. It did not happen. Schools remained open throughout.
Remote learning, children trying to share one laptop on the kitchen table between three, if they had laptops. Eton moved seamlessly to remote learning and I'm not sure anyone there noticed the difference (although developmentally I'm sure they suffered like everyone else). Hartlepool High? Less so.
Schools remained open in person.
Only for vulnerable children.
So. They weren't shut then.
Don't be a twat. They were effectively closed to 98% of children. Parents home schooled their offspring.
I think in the winter wave of 2020-21 close to half of pupils were attending in person, at least in England.
So over half not in school and all suffering one way or another.
So you’ve admitted you’re talking utter bollocks oh this as you’ve gone from 2% to 50% in an hour.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
The only people talking bollocks are those who are saying "but schools never closed what's the big problem".
If that includes you then so be it
No, you’re talking more shite.
No option in March 2020 we had no good options, lockdowns was the least worst option.
Now you're changing the subject. I said I understand the first lockdown. Not that it was right or wrong but I understand it.
You said "lockdowns" were the least worst option. Which is bollocks squared. After the first one there should have been no more mandated lockdowns.
But of course you are part of the doing very comfortably PB group who can't imagine what hell lockdowns inflicted upon those less fortunate.
So your response is no surprise whatsoever. Tell us about your last and next bonus again why don't you.
Lockdowns were terrible for me.
I saw my other half once in 13 months.
Then you of all people should appreciate that they are a horrible tool which likely inflicts more harm than good.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
That's really good. If only more roads in the UK were similarly equipped!
I think this was actually the case for quite a few of the new A roads built in the UK in the 1970s? I can't find the link anymore, but the cycle lanes weren't integrated with any cycle provision in town centres, and basically fell into disrepair.
That's why an integrated cycle network is so important. It can't just end when it gets to the town centre.
Can anyone help answer this question - or better yet, these questions?
About a week ago, there was a fascinating, but unsourced, chart someone showed here about changes in home tenure in England over the past more or less century (I think 1918-2021 or 2022). Googling the issue finds lots of rough approximations - but usually starting only around 1980, finishing in 2011, only at ten-year intervals or conflating State-owned and quango-owned social housing.
Can anyone post a link to the PB subject that caused the chart to be posted? And is there any possibility anyone may remember where the data comes from? It's the history of what we'd now call housing associations I'm particularly chasing today.
Thanks
I just searched for the word "tenure" in threads from 15th to 22nd August and it didn't appear in a way connected with what you're looking for.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
That's really good. If only more roads in the UK were similarly equipped!
I think this was actually the case for quite a few of the new A roads built in the UK in the 1970s? I can't find the link anymore, but the cycle lanes weren't integrated with any cycle provision in town centres, and basically fell into disrepair.
That's why an integrated cycle network is so important. It can't just end when it gets to the town centre.
The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.
We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.
Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.
Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.
We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.
Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.
What are you talking about?
I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.
On this page alone
Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.
Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.
Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.
I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.
The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.
A rather unusual set of local by-elections today. Apart from a Con defence in Dudley there is a Green defence in Bristol and a Vectis defence in Isle of Wight.
Intrigued as to the policies of Vectis.
Something to do with aarly cretaceous fossil-bearing geological formations?
Nah, Class 485 and Class 486 converted "Standard" Tube stock in use on the Isle of Wight railway until the 1990s. Class 485 was 5-VEC (also 4-VEC), and the 486 was 2-TIS (also 3-TIS).
Oh right. Thanks Sunil, but can't see that swinging the Party into power at the next GE, however badly the Government does.
England is probably just as densely populated as the Netherlands if you exclude areas in England where it's difficult to build larger-than-village settlements, like the Lake District.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
Although this seems to fly in the face of the idea in Scotland that younger people are less responsible for their actions?
Well, they take away the sentence reduction for being an inexperienced young driver, add an aggravating factor of killing a vulnerable road user. Then add a sentence reduction for being a twenty something and not fully competent.
Bet that ends up with the same sentence as before.
Yes Minister lives!
The hypothesis behind this is that more severe penalties will influence behaviour. I have yet to see any evidence of that. It may make the bereaved family feel better but I don’t believe it does anything for road safety.
We need more traffic calming measures, black boxes for drivers under 25 and less but better signage. But there’s probably fewer votes in that.
I'd agree deterrence is the wrong approach but what has happened to road safety education? Pedestrians step into the road without looking; drivers see red lights as advisory; cyclists do whatever the hell they like.
The onus is on the driver of the two-tonne steel box to look out for everyone else, even if they aren't entirely at fault in collision. The tweaks to the emphasis of the Highway Code make that clear.
Yes, but avoiding accidents is surely better than systematising the assignment of blame. As I said, from casual observation it does seem that all classes of road users are getting worse, and as DavidL suggested, maybe the streets are too.
But deaths and accidents are long-term trending down.
So how is that getting worse?
People do need to take more responsibility for themselves though, and not step onto the road if there's a red light without looking. We can't achieve, nor should we, zero deaths though. Just like with Covid, death isn't the end of the world, life goes on even if some people die.
People's behaviour seems to be getting worse, as drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Cars are getting safer, at least for passengers but that is a separate issue.
Transport in general has got much safer in the last few decades. Road fatalities are half what they were when I first studied this nearly three decades ago, and the graph of plane crash deaths is really insane when you consider at the increase in flight numbers and passenger numbers over time. (Russian enemies excepted, of course, they have a habit of cars and planes randomly crashing!)
I think that's broadly true, but there is some devil in the detail. Edinburgh over the last twenty years:
All road casualties decreased from 2002 to 2008. It then plateaud until the rollout of 20mph, and we have had a very significant decrease since then.
Cyclist injuries were trending up pre-20mph, and have dropped since then. There has been a huge drop in bus passenger injuries throughout.
However, total serious injuries and fatalities are broadly flat. Cyclist serious injuries doubled during COVID years, and almost all of those were hit by a driver.
When analysing cyclist injuries or fatalities do you control for discounting those who weren't wearing a helmet?
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
They wouldn't need to wear a helmet if they didn't keep getting hit by drivers. 100% of cyclist fatalities in Edinburgh over the last twenty years involved a driver.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
As we discussed yesterday, the Netherlands have achieved this by building more roads, in order to ensure cars and cyclists have separated paths to be able to travel down.
We should do the same. 👍
They have dramatically more roads than we do, since we made the mistake of falling for the myth of induced demand and stopping road construction.
The Netherlands does not have dramatically more roads than we do. The mistakes in your calculation were already pointed out to you yesterday, so you have no excuse for repeating this fallacy. While its road network (like its rail network) may be somewhat more developed than ours, what it most obviously has is a far, far better cycling infrastructure. If you want people to cycle in safety, what you primarily need is better cycling infrastructure.
You what? We did the numbers, and they do have dramatically more roads than we do. 36% more road density in the Netherlands than England, that was the calculation.
Building cycling infrastructure and building road infrastructure go hand-in-hand. New roads can come with new segregated cycling infrastructure - that's a win for cycling and a win for driving. New roads to alleviate traffic on old roads can come with cycling infrastructure on the new road and allow segregated cycling infrastructure on the now-quieter old road too - that's 2 wins for cycling and a win for driving.
Cutting out road construction hurts cycling it doesn't help it. That's why the Netherlands have done the opposite, to great success.
No, we didn't "do the numbers". You did some sums based on erroneous assumptions to get meaningless results.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2 NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
🤦♂️
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
No, he hasn't. He has calculated the road density of England, not the length of road per capita, which takes population density into account.
NL 139124 km roads 17.53 mill 126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG 301269 km roads 55.98 mill 185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
The fact that you get a different answer depending on whether you consider the UK as a whole or just England tells us that population density is a significant factor. And while the population density of England may be comparable to that of the Netherlands, the distribution of population within those countries also differs, with a very England having a very high population density in its south eastern corner.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
My focus is more rural than perhaps others here. Next to the large A roads in the Netherlands there seems to be a cycle path. Interestingly the "Kenilworth Road" (Coventry) near my parent's house has had a dedicated cycle-path for eons but I agree they're too few.
That's really good. If only more roads in the UK were similarly equipped!
I think this was actually the case for quite a few of the new A roads built in the UK in the 1970s? I can't find the link anymore, but the cycle lanes weren't integrated with any cycle provision in town centres, and basically fell into disrepair.
That's why an integrated cycle network is so important. It can't just end when it gets to the town centre.
The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.
We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.
Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.
Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.
We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.
Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.
What are you talking about?
I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.
On this page alone
Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.
Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.
Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.
I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.
The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.
Comments
But Trump *could* fall, in one of three ways. Least likely is that the public just turns against him. The 'public' here is GOP primary voters, and he has a huge proportion of that base locked up. Even with the court cases against him, he can afford considerable slippage before he even starts to look vulnerable - and as Mike posted the other day, well over half say they would still support him even if jailed (whether they actually would is another matter but we can reasonably assume a fair few would - and in any case, the primaries will be over before any sentencing is done). But both a health event and/or a criminal conviction could do for his chances, and both are realistic enough for candidates to play for Trump's vote on the off-chance that it falls into play. However, that's a mighty big punt because if it doesn't come off, it's handing Trump the nomination unchallenged.
More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.
Its not rocket science. Its not cheap, but investing in critical infrastructure isn't cheap and we have the taxes on transport to more than cover the expense.
Build roads. Cyclists win, drivers win, nobody loses.
Or stop trying to be Dutch, without a Dutch budget and expenditure.
Netherlands
Pop density 505/sq kilometre
41543 km^2
139124 km roads
Road density 3.34 km/km^2
England
Pop density 426/sq kilometre
130279 km^2
301269 km roads
Road density 2.31 km/km^2
So Bart's claim that the Netherlands has a greater road density is correct. I note the Netherlands has 35,000 km of cyclepaths.
On a more granular level this
https://tinyurl.com/t2cua6rf will be the road my daughter would face in a few years time when she goes to primary school if she cycled (To me it looks a bit intimidating for a perhaps 7 year old). Note the field to the right is being developed for housing - a cycleway to Langold there would be ideal tbh.
In the Netherlands, https://tinyurl.com/mr3vxzn6 is from a small village, Jistrum - note though it's not an exact analogue to my situation there's a dedicated cycle path seperate to the road.
So though Bart's assertion that there's proportionately more roads in the Netherlands is correct, at least for rural areas the provision of roads in England is broadly adequate (Though the potholes should be sorted more frequently for everyone's sake - drivers and cyclists) and investment in dedicated cycle paths would be a good idea not simply painting an orange strip down the side of the A40 which is what I fear would happen
Tories told to scrap cheap foreign labour loophole and 'get a grip' on immigration
Labour says it will 'end the licence to undercut pay' by employing staff from abroad and focus on training UK workers ahead of the latest immigration figures being published
Fascinating to see Labour's positioning on immigration.
Let's do the sums properly.
UK road density: 175 km / 100 km^2
NL road density: 332 km / 100 km^2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size
UK population density: 272 people / km^2
NL population density: 532 people / km^2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_European_countries
UK road length per capita: 175 / 272 / 100 = 0.643 km / capita
NL road length per capita: 332 / 532 / 100 = 0.624 km / capita
Ergo, the Netherlands actually has slightly less road per capita than the UK. Not more.
But the Netherlands certainly does have a much more widespread cycling infrastructure.
By contrast, buying her off would be a shameful outcome, expose Sunak as weak and encourage more MPs to game-play for baubles.
I’d stop hiking up Mount Wrong any further.
If that includes you then so be it.
No option in March 2020 we had no good options, lockdowns was the least worst option.
Pulpstar (10:45am) has done the numbers properly for you. You are wrong. Netherlands road density is significantly more than Englands.
This is very unfair, they’re really fighting to save a beloved local *checks notes* ………car park.
A pensioner day trip to Edgware to protest against young people owning a home
This is the sort of thing the Government should just overrule as a policy, it is utterly pathetic that young people are prevented from owning a home because some elderly nutjobs want to protect a car park and disused industrial site.
If Labour don't get a grip on this they've lost my vote after the next GE and I will resign as a member.
You said "lockdowns" were the least worst option. Which is bollocks squared. After the first one there should have been no more mandated lockdowns.
But of course you are part of the doing very comfortably PB group who can't imagine what hell lockdowns inflicted upon those less fortunate.
So your response is no surprise whatsoever. Tell us about your last and next bonus again why don't you.
The UK stopped major road building 26 years ago and has been trying to build cycling that entire time on a shoestring budget cannibalising old roads rather than building new ones.
The UK has spent nearly 3 decades trying to get cycling up as a matter of policy, without building roads, and the outcome is that cycling provision is still nowhere near good enough.
If you want Dutch policy, implement Dutch policy. It works. Build roads, build cycling infrastructure, the two go hand in hand which is what the Dutch know and do so well.
I saw my other half once in 13 months.
Checks Wikipedia...
About 5,200 km of national roads (rijkswegen) are controlled by the Rijkswaterstaat, and the country's twelve provinces control about 7,800 km of provincial roads. Most motorways are national roads, and the remaining national roads are mostly expressways. Only a few motorways are provincial, and these are generally shorter and serve regional traffic.
Municipal roads make up the bulk of the Dutch road network, totalling 120,000 km.
So that's a manifestation of Dutch settlements being pretty dense and fine-grained. It's not really about building new roads between places or around them.
And for those roads in urban areas, there absolutely has been a move towards making them less convenient for cars- "cars are guests" and all that. It has to be that way, because the amount of demolition needed to make existing urban areas have more space for cars isn't a goer.
From 1998 through 2007, more than 41,000 km of city streets have been converted to local access roads with a speed limit of 30 km/h, for the purpose of traffic calming.
Depending on how individual municipalities interpreted the 1997 Sustainable Safety policy guidelines, woonerven have come under pressure from a drive to implement continuous zones of 30 km/h (19 mph) on local access streets. In some towns, this has led to residents protesting against the doubling of local speed limits from 15 km/h to 30 km/h. Woonerven are still widespread and new ones are still built, sometimes because of space restrictions. In 2011, 20% of all Dutch homes were still located in woonerf areas, and around 2 million people (over 10% of the country) were living in woonerven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_Netherlands
Despite it not being in his constituency.
If they'd issued every child with laptops over September we could have mitigated some of the more serious impacts of remote learning. If they'd considered how to get everybody onto a shared Wifi network using some form of hotspot sharing, we could have supported them better. If they'd had the sense to realise in October 2021 that the 2022 exams were simply not happening, rather than threatening dismissal to those who pointed out what was likely, then we could have had proper contingency plans in place and running smoothly rather than the bizarre free-for-all that eventuated.
And why did they not do this?
Because they insisted lockdowns would never happen again.
And why did they think that?
Because they had decided it was so.
I'd have a lot more sympathy with that view if they'd taken proper steps to make them less likely, but they just reopened and kept their fingers crossed.
The whole process reflects very badly on every aspect of government, not just the Government but the civil service too.
MrsTSE writes “I miss lockdown”.
Sorry!
I'm still looking for her now, longest game of hide and seek I've ever played.
So the fact the Dutch have been doing what I said they've been doing, which we should be doing, should not be a shock.
Build new roads to carry through traffic and you can convert old roads to calmer (LTN) roads. Everybody wins.
To do this though, you need to invest in building roads. Which the Dutch have done.
1. Schools must stay open.
2. Individuals, particularly the old and vulnerable, can choose whether they wish to work or not, and can get furlough if they isolate.
3. Teachers, in vast numbers, choose to avoid infectious children, either because they are vulnerable, over 50, or live with/care for people who are.
4. Parents, in vast numbers, choose not to send their kids to school, fearing that they will return home with the virus.
5. Schools cannot operate safely due to shortage of staff.
6. Schools close.
In reality, schools stayed open for vulnerable kids and the kids of key workers. Probably the best that could be achieved.
KO-KO: It’s like this:
When your Majesty says, ‘Let a thing be done,’ it’s as good as done – practically, it is done – because your Majesty’s will is law. Your Majesty says, ‘Kill a gentleman,’ and a gentleman is told off to be killed. Consequently, that gentleman is as good as dead – practically, he is dead – and if he is dead, why not say so?
MIKADO. I see. Nothing could possibly be more satisfactory!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2643123
But I'm baffled by the suggestion that you can only put in new cycle infrastructure if you build new roads. It's not like the Dutch knocked down Amsterdam and started again.
I'm not against new roads at all but it just doesn't seem very cost-effiective. Or practical in most places.
What makes it worse is three days earlier that tool Acland-Hood had a boozy party to celebrate her confirmation in post...
The Netherlands categorically has both more road density, and more roads per capita, than England.
Scotland has long roads with little population so of course that's not comparable. England is comparable to the Netherlands, as you said until you didn't like the numbers so reverted back to UK.
Building roads allows building cycling infrastructure, which is why the Dutch did it, which is why cycling is safer there. We've spent nearly thirty years trying to push cycling in this country as a matter of government policy without the same success as the Dutch have achieved by building roads with cycling infrastructure as their policy.
https://www.eetimes.com/why-all-the-buzz-around-silicon-carbide-sic/
There isn't enough fab capacity worldwide for meeting SiC chip demand (it has somewhat more challenging requirements than silicon), but that is changing.
I don't disagree with your general idea but why not get our current roads up to Dutch standards before putting even more in.
https://roadlawbarristers.co.uk/wanton-and-furious-cycling-a-guide-to-the-road-traffic-laws-that-apply-to-cyclists/
139124 km roads
17.53 mill
126 persons/kilometre of road
ENG
301269 km roads
55.98 mill
185 persons/kilometre of road
Netherlands is more "roaded" per person than England.
1: Our population has grown and continues to grow. So there'll always be more infrastructure needed (of all types) as long as that is true. Roads, cycling, public transport - however you want to handle transport, population growth needs more of it.
2: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too. Net change is little extra capacity for cars, but much greater capacity for cycling, and cars and cycling are separated from each other.
You can't build one without the other. We've tried and failed for nearly 3 decades now.
The whole situation was utterly farcical and completely impossible.
What was worse was when we raised the possibility of rotated learning where we would have some year groups in some weeks and others in other weeks to at least try and keep the whole system from collapsing we were slapped down with some pretty nasty threats.
We stopped investing in new roads and new motorways in the 1990s. Its been deliberate policy since 1997 not to invest in roads and its been an abject failure.
We can only get our current roads upto Dutch standards by putting more in, like the Dutch have. That's how they got theirs to their standards, by building them.
In January 2021?
I'm not sure the dates tie up.
In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that.
We might even be in pocket rather than out of it at the end of the day, especially if you work out the compound interest.
The complete ledger will be very interesting. Has it been published yet?
I want the Dutch policy. The Dutch system works better.
Dumbocracy, your time has come.
https://x.com/v_of_europe/status/1693962860513124863?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Something to do with aarly cretaceous fossil-bearing geological formations?
We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.
Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.
Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.
We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.
Interesting fact: in 1978 there were already 3,264 car phones in London, and 6,052 in the UK as a whole.
https://sites.google.com/site/616cellnet/carphone-1981
About a week ago, there was a fascinating, but unsourced, chart someone showed here about changes in home tenure in England over the past more or less century (I think 1918-2021 or 2022). Googling the issue finds lots of rough approximations - but usually starting only around 1980, finishing in 2011, only at ten-year intervals or conflating State-owned and quango-owned social housing.
Can anyone post a link to the PB subject that caused the chart to be posted? And is there any possibility anyone may remember where the data comes from? It's the history of what we'd now call housing associations I'm particularly chasing today.
Thanks
The odd thing about England - and parochially I don't need any more car roads near me but others mileage may vary is that our pop density is lower than the Netherlands but we have a lower road density per person. It normally seems to be the other way. France has ~ a million km of road for their 67.75 million people.
Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.
This is all a distraction from the main point, though, which is that the prevalence of cycling has a direct relationship with the quality of the cycling infrastructure, and if we want people in the UK to cycle as much as they do in the Netherlands, we need cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands. Of course, that's not to say that our road and rail networks don't also need improvement.
There is , as you imply, not a country in the world that would not be paying out vast sums of money on this basis. The Middle East and North Africa would presumably owe a shedload of money to Mediterranean and Balkan Europe.
Link to comment: https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4514174#Comment_4514174
Discussion was in response to a (false) claim that there was a fall in home ownership in the 90s, there wasn't, the 90s saw home ownership reach a record high.
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/uk-rental-housing-markets/
https://tinyurl.com/4dhu494u
And I'm sure the party machine will do well with someone who spouted a lie because he follows orders without question.
You can cycle from Brownhills to the M6 Toll no a beautiful grade separated lane next to the A5, but then you're faced with a really tricky crossing of three roundabouts to get on the Cannock route...
That's why an integrated cycle network is so important. It can't just end when it gets to the town centre.
I found this article though.
https://www.whatmortgage.co.uk/feature/evolution-housing-past-100-years/
300 miles of segregated cycle provision built in the 1930s!
What are you talking about?
I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.
On this page alone
Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.
Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.
Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.
I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.
The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.
Quite common in the 1930s, though a lot of them are sadly decayed, or have been repurposed for parking now;
https://www.bikeboom.info/cycletracks1930s/
Precisely what the Dutch do and I'm advocating. It works.