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.
Lockdown was wrong because young people had to put their lives on hold despite little risk of having serious complications from the disease but instead to protect the elderly.
In response to this, young people had their taxes raised to the highest level ever, had the student loan conditions changed so they will never pay off their debt, are persistently called "thick", "woke", "entitled" and have literally nothing given to them at all and instead all money is funnelled to the elderly.
I got lockdown wrong.
Well said. So did I.
You asked yesterday where have I changed my mind (and accepted my list) this is another big one. I supported lockdown at the time, I have subsequently accepted that I was wrong to do so.
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.
That's because you're tilting at windmills.
Nobody has suggested "you must keep living your lives normally" as a solution.
If you're confused, try reading what people actually wrote.
OK, earlier you posted this:
"Controlling" the virus did what it was supposed to which was flatten the curve, so that the NHS handled nothing but Covid ICU for longer.
Not controlling the virus would have meant a bigger peak, more deaths, but a faster come down of the peak and return to normal too.
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?
You are - correct me if I am wrong - arguing that we should have not controlled the virus and had that higher peak with more deaths early? No? And not controlling it means what? Leaving schools open to not harm the education of the young and healthy?
I won't post any response to that, I just want you to confirm that is your argument.
Its what I said isn't it? Yes my argument is what I said.
If people voluntarily wanted to stay at home because they're vulnerable etc, then that should be their choice. Free will.
If people didn't, then that should be their choice. Free will again.
Deaths happen. Life happens too, and shutting down life to prevent death was a horrendous mistake.
Good. So in this scenario "people voluntarily stay at home". Not because they are vulnerable, because they are scared. In the "let the virus do its thing" scenario you advocate, people are not going to work normally and socialising normally. They're doing the least they can with increasing reluctance. We don't save the economy by having much of the leisure, tourism and hospitality industries bankrupted by a lack of customers and no government support.
I'm not saying your scenario is callous or wrong. Just that it wasn't a magic wand solution that would have been much better. To go back to education for a minute, we get a scenario with an awful lot of teachers off sick and worse, and a rapidly-increasing numbers of schools actually closed. OK they would likely have reopened sooner, but we could have made reopen education choices differently after the first lockdown in the prime timeline as well...
Yes. Having scared people voluntarily stay at home > having scared + non-scared people compulsorily staying at home.
Nobody is saying normality was an option, so stop arguing against it.
So Boris does a "carry on for Blighty" speech. There is no government scare tactics. No stay at home orders. But people would get scared as significant numbers of people got very sick and died.
It wouldn't be government scare tactics. It would be natural human behaviour. That you don't seem to recognise this is why I keep pointing out that you sound a bit sociopathic on this one.
It wouldn't just be the people sick staying home for a few weeks. A lot of people wouldn't be living their lives as they were because they would be sick, friends, colleagues or immediate family would be sick, or they just watch the news as the NHS is swamped and think "I'd better not go to the pub".
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!)
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.
That's because it's exceedingly unlikely, though not impossible, that you are killed or injured by a cyclist.
There was that lad a few years ago that was convicted and jailed for running down and killing a lady after being charged with "wanton and furious cycling".
Yes cyclists can be prosecuted under the OAPA if they hit a pedestrian causing bodily harm and were at fault. They can also be charged with dangerous or careless cycling
Lockdown was wrong because young people had to put their lives on hold despite little risk of having serious complications from the disease but instead to protect the elderly.
In response to this, young people had their taxes raised to the highest level ever, had the student loan conditions changed so they will never pay off their debt, are persistently called "thick", "woke", "entitled" and have literally nothing given to them at all and instead all money is funnelled to the elderly.
I got lockdown wrong.
Well said. So did I.
You asked yesterday where have I changed my mind (and accepted my list) this is another big one. I supported lockdown at the time, I have subsequently accepted that I was wrong to do so.
We need to stop living for the gerontocracy.
I've said my POV before and been accused countless times of hating the elderly and being ageist.
And yet they're allowed to call me thick and woke whenever they wish.
I've got no issue with the elderly, I loved and miss my grandmother dearly but they are incredibly entitled on the whole from my experience with them and have literally all the benefits handed to them and young people get nothing.
In the last 13 years, young people have been given materially worse conditions every year. Elderly get protected.
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 read the other day that air travel is now 80 times less dangerous than 50 years ago. It is an astonishing drop in risk.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
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.
The extra weight of EV batteries might have an effect too.
"Something has started to go awry with life expectancy trends in Britain. After decades of rapid improvement, progress has slowed to a crawl since 2011. In the poorest parts of England, it has actually started to fall."
"According to an analysis published in The Lancet of the trends in 6,791 communities in England, female life expectancy fell in 18.7 per cent of communities between 2014 and 2019 and male life expectancy fell in 11.5 per cent of them."
"Life expectancy is a vital measure of health and human progress. When it starts to go backwards, everyone should pay attention."
Has this not been the situation in the US for some time now? We seem to be following their path, albeit a decade or so behind. I also suspect that the easy win of people giving up smoking has now fully worked through with little further gains to come (overall, of course smokers would benefit enormously individually).
David Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
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.
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.
That's because you're tilting at windmills.
Nobody has suggested "you must keep living your lives normally" as a solution.
If you're confused, try reading what people actually wrote.
OK, earlier you posted this:
"Controlling" the virus did what it was supposed to which was flatten the curve, so that the NHS handled nothing but Covid ICU for longer.
Not controlling the virus would have meant a bigger peak, more deaths, but a faster come down of the peak and return to normal too.
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?
You are - correct me if I am wrong - arguing that we should have not controlled the virus and had that higher peak with more deaths early? No? And not controlling it means what? Leaving schools open to not harm the education of the young and healthy?
I won't post any response to that, I just want you to confirm that is your argument.
Its what I said isn't it? Yes my argument is what I said.
If people voluntarily wanted to stay at home because they're vulnerable etc, then that should be their choice. Free will.
If people didn't, then that should be their choice. Free will again.
Deaths happen. Life happens too, and shutting down life to prevent death was a horrendous mistake.
Good. So in this scenario "people voluntarily stay at home". Not because they are vulnerable, because they are scared. In the "let the virus do its thing" scenario you advocate, people are not going to work normally and socialising normally. They're doing the least they can with increasing reluctance. We don't save the economy by having much of the leisure, tourism and hospitality industries bankrupted by a lack of customers and no government support.
I'm not saying your scenario is callous or wrong. Just that it wasn't a magic wand solution that would have been much better. To go back to education for a minute, we get a scenario with an awful lot of teachers off sick and worse, and a rapidly-increasing numbers of schools actually closed. OK they would likely have reopened sooner, but we could have made reopen education choices differently after the first lockdown in the prime timeline as well...
Yes. Having scared people voluntarily stay at home > having scared + non-scared people compulsorily staying at home.
Nobody is saying normality was an option, so stop arguing against it.
So Boris does a "carry on for Blighty" speech. There is no government scare tactics. No stay at home orders. But people would get scared as significant numbers of people got very sick and died.
It wouldn't be government scare tactics. It would be natural human behaviour. That you don't seem to recognise this is why I keep pointing out that you sound a bit sociopathic on this one.
It wouldn't just be the people sick staying home for a few weeks. A lot of people wouldn't be living their lives as they were because they would be sick, friends, colleagues or immediate family would be sick, or they just watch the news as the NHS is swamped and think "I'd better not go to the pub".
I never said there should be a "carry on for Blighty" speech, I said there should be a "do what you think is best" approach.
If people choose to stay home, then they choose to stay home, and furlough then should be available as a choice, not mandatory.
So some people wouldn't want to live their lives? That's fine, that's their choice then. Whereas others who do can do - again their choice.
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.
Depends if they actually stop at pedestrian lights! I was inches away from being hit by a cyclist at a pedestrian crossing a few years ago.
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 read the other day that air travel is now 80 times less dangerous than 50 years ago. It is an astonishing drop in risk.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
Yes it’s astonishing.
Don’t start me on the 737 Max, I’ll be here all day (and I’m currently two hours into what’s expected to be a 7-hour wait at the Ukraine-Poland border). Let’s just say that there was a massive regulatory and management failure at the FAA and Boeing, that led to a very sub-standard design of a key system being approved.
"Something has started to go awry with life expectancy trends in Britain. After decades of rapid improvement, progress has slowed to a crawl since 2011. In the poorest parts of England, it has actually started to fall."
"According to an analysis published in The Lancet of the trends in 6,791 communities in England, female life expectancy fell in 18.7 per cent of communities between 2014 and 2019 and male life expectancy fell in 11.5 per cent of them."
"Life expectancy is a vital measure of health and human progress. When it starts to go backwards, everyone should pay attention."
Has this not been the situation in the US for some time now? We seem to be following their path, albeit a decade or so behind. I also suspect that the easy win of people giving up smoking has now fully worked through with little further gains to come (overall, of course smokers would benefit enormously individually).
David Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
Life expectancy has gone up under the Tories not down.
That its fallen in a small minority of communities means its stayed the same or risen (and average is risen) in the overwhelming majority of communities.
The reality is as David said, the "easy win" of cutting smoking has worked through the system now.
Lockdown was wrong because young people had to put their lives on hold despite little risk of having serious complications from the disease but instead to protect the elderly.
In response to this, young people had their taxes raised to the highest level ever, had the student loan conditions changed so they will never pay off their debt, are persistently called "thick", "woke", "entitled" and have literally nothing given to them at all and instead all money is funnelled to the elderly.
I got lockdown wrong.
Well said. So did I.
You asked yesterday where have I changed my mind (and accepted my list) this is another big one. I supported lockdown at the time, I have subsequently accepted that I was wrong to do so.
We need to stop living for the gerontocracy.
I've said my POV before and been accused countless times of hating the elderly and being ageist.
And yet they're allowed to call me thick and woke whenever they wish.
I've got no issue with the elderly, I loved and miss my grandmother dearly but they are incredibly entitled on the whole from my experience with them and have literally all the benefits handed to them and young people get nothing.
In the last 13 years, young people have been given materially worse conditions every year. Elderly get protected.
There is so much revisionist guff with regards to the pandemic and lockdowns. We had a choice - a controlled shut down, or an uncontrolled shut down. In no scenario was the government going to say "business as usual" and that actually happen.
You cannot operate business critical functions when significant numbers of workers are not just off sick but seriously ill or dying. So I don't get the point BR and others make, other than "wouldn't it have been good not to have had a pandemic".
Very, very few workers were dying. Deaths were largely a factor of age and pre existing conditions. But millions of workers were forced to self isolate. Did that work? Was it the best way to protect the truly vulnerable? I don’t know but I agree with @foxy that that is what the inquiries should be looking at.
A not insignificant number of workers did die.
During 2020 expected annual mortality pretty much doubled at all ages. Obviously baseline mortality at age 80 is a lot higher than 60 or 40, but the effect was there at all ages.
That is before you consider numbers of workers in households that also include vulnerable people with diabetes, respiratory disease, obesity, elderly family members. It just isn't possible to ring fence a third of the population.
How was I supposed to ringfence my diabetic patients and carry on working normally in a hospital full of covid?
There are lessons to study and learn, but wishing away a deadly virus has never been an effective control measure.
Having a year and a half of lockdown restrictions, to prevent a year of deaths, is not worthwhile.
Better to have that year of deaths, and have that year and a half of life.
Nobody is proposing wishing away the virus, except those who still believe in lockdown. I am saying we should have lived with the virus.
Can you set out exactly how we would have lived with the virus? What measures, if any, would you have used? What support for people choosing to isolate? Who does their job? You also seem entirely focussed on deaths. What of the hundreds of thousands with long covid (I believe more an issue prior to vaccination, the time you suggest living with it)?
Lockdown was wrong because young people had to put their lives on hold despite little risk of having serious complications from the disease but instead to protect the elderly.
In response to this, young people had their taxes raised to the highest level ever, had the student loan conditions changed so they will never pay off their debt, are persistently called "thick", "woke", "entitled" and have literally nothing given to them at all and instead all money is funnelled to the elderly.
I got lockdown wrong.
Lockdown was horrendous in almost every conceivable way and some additional ones I hadn't even considered were possible. But some version of it was inevitable because of human behaviour.
4th March 2020 I was at a trade expo at the ExCel. Tesco sent an email cancelling my meeting there the day after and it was baffling - why are they locking down their campus?
Lets assume the expo was booked for 4th April instead and Boris had told everyone to Keep Calm and Carry On instead of declaring lockdown. No forced closures or cancellations. I'm very confident that the expo would have been cancelled anyway. Why?
Because human nature. As soon as a public health disaster like this runs away with itself, people make their own decisions. Formula One didn't cancel the Australian Grand Prix, the McLaren team did by voluntarily withdrawing and forcing the organisers' hand. The same would have happened with football and other sports. As people fall ill in larger numbers things slow to a stop.
The one thing the government got absolutely right was furlough and CBILS and other support. The no lockdown scenario still has a lot of business either shut down due to operationally being unable to function or because of a lack of custom. And no government support. And thus bankruptcy.
So many businesses remain teetering on the brink of collapse due to the debts they ran up during Covid, and that is with support. Lets assume no support and a period of some revenues but full staff costs. They would have folded. So we avoid mandatory lock down, get effective shut down anyway, and absolutely bugger the economy regardless.
There was no winning scenario. All we can do is understand the thing in detail and try and plan for the future where we avoid getting into the thing in the first place.
"Something has started to go awry with life expectancy trends in Britain. After decades of rapid improvement, progress has slowed to a crawl since 2011. In the poorest parts of England, it has actually started to fall."
"According to an analysis published in The Lancet of the trends in 6,791 communities in England, female life expectancy fell in 18.7 per cent of communities between 2014 and 2019 and male life expectancy fell in 11.5 per cent of them."
"Life expectancy is a vital measure of health and human progress. When it starts to go backwards, everyone should pay attention."
Has this not been the situation in the US for some time now? We seem to be following their path, albeit a decade or so behind. I also suspect that the easy win of people giving up smoking has now fully worked through with little further gains to come (overall, of course smokers would benefit enormously individually).
David Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
Life expectancy has gone up under the Tories not down.
That its fallen in a small minority of communities means its stayed the same or risen (and average is risen) in the overwhelming majority of communities.
The reality is as David said, the "easy win" of cutting smoking has worked through the system now.
I suspect that the next big move will come if some of the very hopeful trials for Alzheimer's prove a success.
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.
Hard to prove. Anecdotally, driver behaviour seems to have declined since COVID, but you can't back that up with data easily as driving rates fell significantly in 2020/21/22 due to the lockdowns.
Having been in Rome for the end of last month, and Athens for a lot of this month, the UK is still a haven of pedestrian-friendliness compared to both cities.
If there are too many cameras in London, there are too few in central and southern Italy and Greece. They could do with a lot of cameras above the traffic lights, for instance, but there is an ultra-libertarian attitude against anything like that here, which just happens to conveniently align with the already existing latin and greek mindset about following many day-to-day rules.
Saying "if you don't want to breathe it in, stay at home" isn't an honourable answer.
Why?
I suspect we're not going to have a meeting of minds here- ultimately it's a value thing and our mental maps of the world are too different.
But very roughly, something like this. With an infectious disease around, there is going to be a reduction in human freedom for a while. At least, there is provided you aren't going for the "let it wash over us" approach.
How do you distribute those freedoms? You can go for an unpleasantly hard lockdown of everyone. As I said unthread, that's not a trivial thing. As bad for society as participation in WW2. The alternative is to go for an even harder lockdown for a smaller (but not easy to define) group of people.
As it happens, I don't think the second approach can be made to work on a practical level; our lives are too entangled to create an isolation group like that. And there's the whole asymptomatic transmission thing. But I'm also not keen distributing freedom like that.
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.
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.
There is so much revisionist guff with regards to the pandemic and lockdowns. We had a choice - a controlled shut down, or an uncontrolled shut down. In no scenario was the government going to say "business as usual" and that actually happen.
You cannot operate business critical functions when significant numbers of workers are not just off sick but seriously ill or dying. So I don't get the point BR and others make, other than "wouldn't it have been good not to have had a pandemic".
Very, very few workers were dying. Deaths were largely a factor of age and pre existing conditions. But millions of workers were forced to self isolate. Did that work? Was it the best way to protect the truly vulnerable? I don’t know but I agree with @foxy that that is what the inquiries should be looking at.
A not insignificant number of workers did die.
During 2020 expected annual mortality pretty much doubled at all ages. Obviously baseline mortality at age 80 is a lot higher than 60 or 40, but the effect was there at all ages.
That is before you consider numbers of workers in households that also include vulnerable people with diabetes, respiratory disease, obesity, elderly family members. It just isn't possible to ring fence a third of the population.
How was I supposed to ringfence my diabetic patients and carry on working normally in a hospital full of covid?
There are lessons to study and learn, but wishing away a deadly virus has never been an effective control measure.
Having a year and a half of lockdown restrictions, to prevent a year of deaths, is not worthwhile.
Better to have that year of deaths, and have that year and a half of life.
Nobody is proposing wishing away the virus, except those who still believe in lockdown. I am saying we should have lived with the virus.
Can you set out exactly how we would have lived with the virus? What measures, if any, would you have used? What support for people choosing to isolate? Who does their job? You also seem entirely focussed on deaths. What of the hundreds of thousands with long covid (I believe more an issue prior to vaccination, the time you suggest living with it)?
I think the Swedes called this right and we should have done what the Swedes did:
Educate people, warn people about the risks, offer furlough as an option [not mandatory] if people want to isolate, then let people decide for themselves what they want to do.
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.
"Something has started to go awry with life expectancy trends in Britain. After decades of rapid improvement, progress has slowed to a crawl since 2011. In the poorest parts of England, it has actually started to fall."
"According to an analysis published in The Lancet of the trends in 6,791 communities in England, female life expectancy fell in 18.7 per cent of communities between 2014 and 2019 and male life expectancy fell in 11.5 per cent of them."
"Life expectancy is a vital measure of health and human progress. When it starts to go backwards, everyone should pay attention."
Has this not been the situation in the US for some time now? We seem to be following their path, albeit a decade or so behind. I also suspect that the easy win of people giving up smoking has now fully worked through with little further gains to come (overall, of course smokers would benefit enormously individually).
David Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
Life expectancy has gone up under the Tories not down.
That its fallen in a small minority of communities means its stayed the same or risen (and average is risen) in the overwhelming majority of communities.
The reality is as David said, the "easy win" of cutting smoking has worked through the system now.
I suspect that the next big move will come if some of the very hopeful trials for Alzheimer's prove a success.
Even if that doesn't improve life expectancy, it could dramatically improve quality of life, which is much more important.
"Something has started to go awry with life expectancy trends in Britain. After decades of rapid improvement, progress has slowed to a crawl since 2011. In the poorest parts of England, it has actually started to fall."
"According to an analysis published in The Lancet of the trends in 6,791 communities in England, female life expectancy fell in 18.7 per cent of communities between 2014 and 2019 and male life expectancy fell in 11.5 per cent of them."
"Life expectancy is a vital measure of health and human progress. When it starts to go backwards, everyone should pay attention."
Has this not been the situation in the US for some time now? We seem to be following their path, albeit a decade or so behind. I also suspect that the easy win of people giving up smoking has now fully worked through with little further gains to come (overall, of course smokers would benefit enormously individually).
David Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
Life expectancy has gone up under the Tories not down.
That its fallen in a small minority of communities means its stayed the same or risen (and average is risen) in the overwhelming majority of communities.
The reality is as David said, the "easy win" of cutting smoking has worked through the system now.
Bart
Your posts are always interesting and normally well thought out. You seem to be very clever.
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.
They aren't remotely the same. And the Good News is that technology is proceeding at pace. You can't get 5* NCAP without things like autonomous braking, and those systems will only get smarter.
How do we make the streets safe for pedestrians? 1. Road Safety awareness for pedestrians. If you're walking along with noise-cancelling headphones looking at your phone you're in danger 2. Better street design. It isn't mandatory barriers or humps or any of that prescriptive nonsense - streets are different to other streets. But design layouts that remove the stupid 3. More tech on cars. My Tesla has more cameras than I have eyeballs pointing in all directions all the time. I may not see the danger but the car will. Have cars which don't hit people as the new safety standard - we're already rapidly heading in that direction.
The size of weight of the vehicle isn't the issue. You can design a big vehicle to be pedestrian friendly.
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.
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.
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.
It turned into a bloody farce. A 5 step scale where they opened on 3.5. Local and regional lockdown steps at various degrees of stupid. Some areas had months of L4 semi-lockdown even when there was no formal lockdown.
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.
They aren't remotely the same. And the Good News is that technology is proceeding at pace. You can't get 5* NCAP without things like autonomous braking, and those systems will only get smarter.
How do we make the streets safe for pedestrians? 1. Road Safety awareness for pedestrians. If you're walking along with noise-cancelling headphones looking at your phone you're in danger 2. Better street design. It isn't mandatory barriers or humps or any of that prescriptive nonsense - streets are different to other streets. But design layouts that remove the stupid 3. More tech on cars. My Tesla has more cameras than I have eyeballs pointing in all directions all the time. I may not see the danger but the car will. Have cars which don't hit people as the new safety standard - we're already rapidly heading in that direction.
The size of weight of the vehicle isn't the issue. You can design a big vehicle to be pedestrian friendly.
Indeed.
We should also look at removing any barriers that prevent people from being in safer vehicles, with seat belts, brakes, 5* safety, air bags etc
Instead for some reason people want to go the other way and put barriers on safer equipment up and have more people on more dangerous vehicles that are exposed to the elements with no seat belts, no air bags, no crumple zones, no automatic brakes etc
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 read the other day that air travel is now 80 times less dangerous than 50 years ago. It is an astonishing drop in risk.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
Yes it’s astonishing.
Don’t start me on the 737 Max, I’ll be here all day (and I’m currently two hours into what’s expected to be a 7-hour wait at the Ukraine-Poland border). Let’s just say that there was a massive regulatory and management failure at the FAA and Boeing, that led to a very sub-standard design of a key system being approved.
To add, aviation is an industry from which so many other industries can learn.
They generally balance technology and innovation with reliability and efficiency, work with a no-blame culture, are assiduous in talking about mistakes, and report in detail on even relatively minor incidents, in order to try and prevent accidents.
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.
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.
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.
It turned into a bloody farce. A 5 step scale where they opened on 3.5. Local and regional lockdown steps at various degrees of stupid. Some areas had months of L4 semi-lockdown even when there was no formal lockdown.
I think that was the epitome of the madness absolutely. Look at what it unleashed. Shop your neighbour and being started for walking while holding a cup of coffee in proximity to someone else.
Bloody hell @contrarian was a whole lot more right than he was ever wrong. And if you read back at the posts at the time look at the abuse he received. He was just about bang on the money.
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 read the other day that air travel is now 80 times less dangerous than 50 years ago. It is an astonishing drop in risk.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
Go back another 20 or 30 years, and it would be an order of magnitude or two more dangerous again.
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.
They certainly aren't. A Tahoe is a body on frame vehicle and the Evoque is unibody/subframes. Chevy Blazer is the appropriate comparison to the Evoque.
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.
Cycling sounds dangerous, perhaps we need to discourage it?
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.
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.
They aren't remotely the same. And the Good News is that technology is proceeding at pace. You can't get 5* NCAP without things like autonomous braking, and those systems will only get smarter.
How do we make the streets safe for pedestrians? 1. Road Safety awareness for pedestrians. If you're walking along with noise-cancelling headphones looking at your phone you're in danger 2. Better street design. It isn't mandatory barriers or humps or any of that prescriptive nonsense - streets are different to other streets. But design layouts that remove the stupid 3. More tech on cars. My Tesla has more cameras than I have eyeballs pointing in all directions all the time. I may not see the danger but the car will. Have cars which don't hit people as the new safety standard - we're already rapidly heading in that direction.
The size of weight of the vehicle isn't the issue. You can design a big vehicle to be pedestrian friendly.
Indeed.
We should also look at removing any barriers that prevent people from being in safer vehicles, with seat belts, brakes, 5* safety, air bags etc
Instead for some reason people want to go the other way and put barriers on safer equipment up and have more people on more dangerous vehicles that are exposed to the elements with no seat belts, no air bags, no crumple zones, no automatic brakes etc
I am a little confused though. People in old cars tend to replace them with newer cars as they get more expensive to keep running or break completely.
ULEZ, EURO emissions ratings etc etc are drivers of accelerating those changes into newer safer cars. Yet the right have decided that poor people should be in older more dangerous cars because freedom or some bullshit.
Policy has done a very good job in driving both manufacturers to build safer vehicles and punters to switch to driving them. We need to advance those changes, not try and retard them as the Tories are now doing.
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.
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.
And I don't understand why some people refuse to accept that reality.
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. Your point about remote learning is valid, but. That was on a government who blithely announced every child who needed one would be provided with a laptop. Then did bugger all about it. It
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 read the other day that air travel is now 80 times less dangerous than 50 years ago. It is an astonishing drop in risk.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
Yes it’s astonishing.
Don’t start me on the 737 Max, I’ll be here all day (and I’m currently two hours into what’s expected to be a 7-hour wait at the Ukraine-Poland border). Let’s just say that there was a massive regulatory and management failure at the FAA and Boeing, that led to a very sub-standard design of a key system being approved.
To add, aviation is an industry from which so many other industries can learn.
They generally balance technology and innovation with reliability and efficiency, work with a no-blame culture, are assiduous in talking about mistakes, and report in detail on even relatively minor incidents, in order to try and prevent accidents.
Indeed and yet for some reason the media often portray it as the polar opposite.
Greys Anatomy (like many US dramas) had a plane crash as a storyline and then the doctors chose to sue in order to ensure the crash was investigated because otherwise it would be brushed under the carpet.
Derek: We can't do this. I saw the plane. I went to the hangar and I saw the pieces of our plane laid out on the floor like a jigsaw puzzle. If we agree to settle, they do the investigation, and we can't do anything with the results. Airline Rep: Bayview Aeronautics will take the results and act accordingly. Derek: Oh, I'm sure you'll be very thorough. Big companies are always very good about self-policing. Callie: Mistakes happen, Derek. Accidents happen. We make mistakes that can cost lives, too. Derek: Yes, we do. But when we do, we have M&Ms, we pore over the files, we make sure it never happens again. And we try to make sure future patients never have to go through that grief. They don't have to sleep with the lights on every night because the darkness is too much. We just can't stand by and let this happen to other people's Lexies and Marks. We have to do something about it. We have to make this right.
As if the medical community is unique for poring over the files, and airlines will just do what "big companies" do and brush it under the carpet. No air accident is ever dismissed like that, not unless it happens in Russia.
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.
Cycling sounds dangerous, perhaps we need to discourage it?
On the contrary: 0% of driver and pedestrian fatalities over the last 20 years in Edinburgh involved a cyclist.
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).
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.
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.
They aren't remotely the same. And the Good News is that technology is proceeding at pace. You can't get 5* NCAP without things like autonomous braking, and those systems will only get smarter.
How do we make the streets safe for pedestrians? 1. Road Safety awareness for pedestrians. If you're walking along with noise-cancelling headphones looking at your phone you're in danger 2. Better street design. It isn't mandatory barriers or humps or any of that prescriptive nonsense - streets are different to other streets. But design layouts that remove the stupid 3. More tech on cars. My Tesla has more cameras than I have eyeballs pointing in all directions all the time. I may not see the danger but the car will. Have cars which don't hit people as the new safety standard - we're already rapidly heading in that direction.
The size of weight of the vehicle isn't the issue. You can design a big vehicle to be pedestrian friendly.
Indeed.
We should also look at removing any barriers that prevent people from being in safer vehicles, with seat belts, brakes, 5* safety, air bags etc
Instead for some reason people want to go the other way and put barriers on safer equipment up and have more people on more dangerous vehicles that are exposed to the elements with no seat belts, no air bags, no crumple zones, no automatic brakes etc
I am a little confused though. People in old cars tend to replace them with newer cars as they get more expensive to keep running or break completely.
ULEZ, EURO emissions ratings etc etc are drivers of accelerating those changes into newer safer cars. Yet the right have decided that poor people should be in older more dangerous cars because freedom or some bullshit.
Policy has done a very good job in driving both manufacturers to build safer vehicles and punters to switch to driving them. We need to advance those changes, not try and retard them as the Tories are now doing.
Speaking personally I've said we should assist poor people into being able to change their car.
That means having inducements like scrappage incentives for old vehicles, or cutting taxes to make newer vehicles more affordable.
That does not mean putting a punitive and regressive tax on old vehicles for those who can't afford to make the switch yet.
"Something has started to go awry with life expectancy trends in Britain. After decades of rapid improvement, progress has slowed to a crawl since 2011. In the poorest parts of England, it has actually started to fall."
"According to an analysis published in The Lancet of the trends in 6,791 communities in England, female life expectancy fell in 18.7 per cent of communities between 2014 and 2019 and male life expectancy fell in 11.5 per cent of them."
"Life expectancy is a vital measure of health and human progress. When it starts to go backwards, everyone should pay attention."
Has this not been the situation in the US for some time now? We seem to be following their path, albeit a decade or so behind. I also suspect that the easy win of people giving up smoking has now fully worked through with little further gains to come (overall, of course smokers would benefit enormously individually).
David Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
Life expectancy has gone up under the Tories not down.
That its fallen in a small minority of communities means its stayed the same or risen (and average is risen) in the overwhelming majority of communities.
The reality is as David said, the "easy win" of cutting smoking has worked through the system now.
Bart
Your posts are always interesting and normally well thought out. You seem to be very clever.
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.
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.
It was a damn sight more than 2% this particular twat taught in person.
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 read the other day that air travel is now 80 times less dangerous than 50 years ago. It is an astonishing drop in risk.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
Go back another 20 or 30 years, and it would be an order of magnitude or two more dangerous again.
Ukrainians claiming to have conducted a special forces raid into Crimea. This follows months of raids across the Dnipro. Their confidence and capability is increasing. I don't see them being tied down in a stalemate indefinitely. It's about 100 miles from the coast currently under Ukrainian control.
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.
Not quite right, surely? Death rate would depend on whether hospitals were saturated - remember Italy in early 2020. And the UK hospitals and their staff did have a grim time of it, even so.
Also:with infectious diseases and exponential increases, it's simply not possible to fine tune to the degree retrospective critics would like. You're talking about margins in absolute ratios of ordinary numbers, effectively, when the true metric/function is a logarithmic conversion of that ratio.
I accepted the first lockdown was necessary. We didn’t know what we were dealing with and Italy was indeed alarming.
I also accept that it was rational to use lockdown measures when a vaccination program was being run out.
But, in Scotland, we were in various levels of lockdown from 5th January 21 to 1st July. That was largely unnecessary and I would be confident that the costs, economic, social and educational, far outweighed any benefits.
I really don’t say this to make a party political point. We need to learn from this and find better ways of assessing cost benefit analysis for such a thing. I very much fear that the inquiries will be a blame game with 20:20 hindsight. That is an utter waste of time and money. We need to learn the right lessons going forward and then hope that that proves to be a waste of time too because it doesn’t happen again.
One thing that gets confusing is the very meaning of lockdown. The Omicron wave for example in Dec 2021 hardly constituted lockdown. These were the restrictions across the land, broadly mask up, and otherwise voluntary work from home:
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.
They certainly aren't. A Tahoe is a body on frame vehicle and the Evoque is unibody/subframes. Chevy Blazer is the appropriate comparison to the Evoque.
It's the market equivalent, though. We don't have anything like the Tahoe selling in any numbers in the UK.
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.
It was a rather callous remark about getting a "Darwin Award". You get a sense from your posts that you don't really care about people who cycle and walk, which I'm sure is untrue.
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.
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.
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.
They certainly aren't. A Tahoe is a body on frame vehicle and the Evoque is unibody/subframes. Chevy Blazer is the appropriate comparison to the Evoque.
It's the market equivalent, though. We don't have anything like the Tahoe selling in any numbers in the UK.
You're right, but this is a strawman argument. There are many more SUV sales in the UK than previously, these cars tend to be heavier, higher and with lower pedestrian visibility (particularly children), even if they aren't as bad as the US equivalents.
There is no data to support my idea that casualties will increase as a result, but I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption.
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.
It was a damn sight more than 2% this particular twat taught in person.
As did my wife. The kids were in overcoats, as all the windows were open through the winter.
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.
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.
It was a rather callous remark about getting a "Darwin Award". You get a sense from your posts that you don't really care about people who cycle and walk, which I'm sure is untrue.
I'd say the same about idiots who drive without a seat belt.
I cycle. I always wear my helmet. Cycling was my first independent mode of transportation as a teenager, I always wore my helmet. My kids cycle. They'd be grounded if I ever saw them out without a helmet.
I do care about people who cycle. Its why I think they should wear a helmet.
I think anyone who goes out on a bike without protecting their noggin is bloody moronic. Where I grew up, in Australia, it is a legal requirement to wear a helmet if cycling.
I think there is no logic or justification for having to wear a seat belt while driving, but not having to wear a helmet while cycling. Cycling is more dangerous than driving, the least you can do is protect your head and put your helmet on, just as if in a car put your seat belt on.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed so. The effectiveness of the 1994 NZ compulsory all age bicycle helmet law was to reduce the amount of injuries, but this was achieved mostly by reducing the numbers of cyclists. Cycle hours dropped by nearly a half as a result. Fewer cyclists equals fewer injuries cycling. Paradoxically the risk for those continuing to cycle went 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
The extra weight of EV batteries might have an effect too.
The difference isn’t vast and is getting smaller as EV builders optimise during the battery as structure etc.
In the U.K., most “SUVs” are a replacement for estate cars. Same volume, shorter and higher.
The difference between them and the American P-1000 type vehicles…
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.
Indeed so. The effectiveness of the 1994 NZ compulsory all age bicycle helmet law was to reduce the amount of injuries, but this was achieved mostly by reducing the numbers of cyclists. Cycle hours dropped by nearly a half as a result. Fewer cyclists equals fewer injuries cycling. Paradoxically the risk for those continuing to cycle went up:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure if the super rich want it, they can get a van licence to get it.
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.
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.
Because there's traffic already on our current roads, it needs to be alleviated by having an alternative route.
That's what the Dutch have done and it works.
Don't try to cut corners. If you want to copy the Dutch, then copy the Dutch. Build roads.
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?
Not quite. Nad wanted a peerage; it was Boris who wanted it deferred, and like a fool, she believed him when he said he'd sorted this out. That is why, on being told HOLAC would not swallow deferment, she offered to resign immediately in order to take the peerage. When HOLAC said that ship had sailed, there was no point in Dorries resigning so she hasn't followed through on her offer.
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.
The fact that he bangs on about "Judeo-Christian values" and believing in One God* whilst being a practising Hindu, may be more widely notes.
*Am aware many Hindus see Brahma as the One God, but the distinction is a little fine for most of the GOP base, I suspect.
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.
Because there's traffic already on our current roads, it needs to be alleviated by having an alternative route.
That's what the Dutch have done and it works.
Don't try to cut corners. If you want to copy the Dutch, then copy the Dutch. Build roads.
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.
Because there's traffic already on our current roads, it needs to be alleviated by having an alternative route.
That's what the Dutch have done and it works.
Don't try to cut corners. If you want to copy the Dutch, then copy the Dutch. Build roads.
Cyclists are traffic too!
Yes, and unless extra road space is built in order to have segregated cyclists then they'll be mixed in with the rest of the traffic.
The Dutch solution, build more roads and have segregated cyclists, is safer for cyclists. It works.
Cycling is not an alternative to building roads. Building roads helps cycling. We have 50 years of the Dutch doing this in action to show it works.
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.
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.
Because there's traffic already on our current roads, it needs to be alleviated by having an alternative route.
That's what the Dutch have done and it works.
Don't try to cut corners. If you want to copy the Dutch, then copy the Dutch. Build roads.
Cyclists are traffic too!
Yes, and unless extra road space is built in order to have segregated cyclists then they'll be mixed in with the rest of the traffic.
The Dutch solution, build more roads and have segregated cyclists, is safer for cyclists. It works.
Cycling is not an alternative to building roads. Building roads helps cycling. We have 50 years of the Dutch doing this in action to show it works.
Why would you need more roads if cycling reduces the number of people driving?
Ukrainians claiming to have conducted a special forces raid into Crimea. This follows months of raids across the Dnipro. Their confidence and capability is increasing. I don't see them being tied down in a stalemate indefinitely. It's about 100 miles from the coast currently under Ukrainian control.
It looks like the only areas Russia seems capable of defending are those which they have extensively pre-prepared with mines. Unfortunately there are a lot of those! Ukraine does seem to be making some good progress in the South having breached the first and most heavily defended line.
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.
Because there's traffic already on our current roads, it needs to be alleviated by having an alternative route.
That's what the Dutch have done and it works.
Don't try to cut corners. If you want to copy the Dutch, then copy the Dutch. Build roads.
Cyclists are traffic too!
Yes, and unless extra road space is built in order to have segregated cyclists then they'll be mixed in with the rest of the traffic.
The Dutch solution, build more roads and have segregated cyclists, is safer for cyclists. It works.
Cycling is not an alternative to building roads. Building roads helps cycling. We have 50 years of the Dutch doing this in action to show it works.
Why would you need more roads if cycling reduces the number of people driving?
Because it doesn't.
The Dutch show this. They have the road space, they have the cycling infrastructure, but they still have most of their transportation via cars, but anyone can cycle safely if they want to. Which is because they've built roads.
Building roads and cycling aren't alternatives. Driving and cycling aren't alternatives. Drivers can be cyclists and vice-versa.
If you want Dutch lifestyle, follow Dutch policy, and build the bloody roads they've been building which come with cycling infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure if the super rich want it, they can get a van licence to get it.
Yes you’ll need to do a driving test to get a truck licence. Grey imports of American cars have been going on forever, it’s easy to get something registered in the UK if it’s capable of being registered elsewhere.
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.
Why should anyone else keep Boris’s promises? He doesn’t!
Scientists release the first complete sequence of a human Y chromosome
https://news.ucsc.edu/2023/08/t2t-y-chromosome.html ..The structure of the Y chromosome has been challenging to decode because some of the DNA is organized in palindromes – long sequences that are the same forward and backward — spanning up to more than a million base pairs. Moreover, a very large part of the Y chromosome that was missing from the previous version of the Y reference is satellite DNA – large, highly repetitive regions of non-protein-coding DNA. On the Y chromosome, two satellites are interlinked with each other, further complicating the sequencing process. ..
..An unexpected finding from this paper was that Y chromosome DNA has been repeatedly mistaken to be bacterial DNA in past studies due to the incomplete removal of human contamination in bacterial DNA. This discovery promises to improve the study of bacterial species’ genomes.
Human DNA can appear as a contaminant in the genomic samples of bacterial species because the bacterial DNA is often taken from swipes off of human skin. Scientists use the current human genome reference to identify which sequences come from human contamination and remove those, leaving just the bacterial DNA for their study. But, because large parts of the human Y chromosome were missing from the past human reference, scientists were not able to identify them as human and thus mistook them to be part of the DNA of the species they were studying. ..
Comments
Rishi Sunak inadvertently failed to declare childcare interest, rules MPs watchdog
Stupid Sunak
You asked yesterday where have I changed my mind (and accepted my list) this is another big one. I supported lockdown at the time, I have subsequently accepted that I was wrong to do so.
We need to stop living for the gerontocracy.
It wouldn't be government scare tactics. It would be natural human behaviour. That you don't seem to recognise this is why I keep pointing out that you sound a bit sociopathic on this one.
It wouldn't just be the people sick staying home for a few weeks. A lot of people wouldn't be living their lives as they were because they would be sick, friends, colleagues or immediate family would be sick, or they just watch the news as the NHS is swamped and think "I'd better not go to the pub".
prosecuted under the OAPA if they hit a pedestrian causing bodily harm and were at fault.
They can also be charged with dangerous or careless cycling
"Dangerous Cycling UK Road Traffic Offence Guide - Motor Defence Solicitors" https://www.motordefencesolicitors.co.uk/offence-guides/dangerous-cycling/amp/
And yet they're allowed to call me thick and woke whenever they wish.
I've got no issue with the elderly, I loved and miss my grandmother dearly but they are incredibly entitled on the whole from my experience with them and have literally all the benefits handed to them and young people get nothing.
In the last 13 years, young people have been given materially worse conditions every year. Elderly get protected.
Scrap the triple lock.
It would have been better still without the 737 Max
Life Expectancy in the UK was doing OK until we elected Conservative governments
US Chevrolet Tahoe weighs 2541 kg
They're not the same.
If people choose to stay home, then they choose to stay home, and furlough then should be available as a choice, not mandatory.
So some people wouldn't want to live their lives? That's fine, that's their choice then. Whereas others who do can do - again their choice.
I have no problems with free choice.
Don’t start me on the 737 Max, I’ll be here all day (and I’m currently two hours into what’s expected to be a 7-hour wait at the Ukraine-Poland border). Let’s just say that there was a massive regulatory and management failure at the FAA and Boeing, that led to a very sub-standard design of a key system being approved.
That its fallen in a small minority of communities means its stayed the same or risen (and average is risen) in the overwhelming majority of communities.
The reality is as David said, the "easy win" of cutting smoking has worked through the system now.
You also seem entirely focussed on deaths. What of the hundreds of thousands with long covid (I believe more an issue prior to vaccination, the time you suggest living with it)?
4th March 2020 I was at a trade expo at the ExCel. Tesco sent an email cancelling my meeting there the day after and it was baffling - why are they locking down their campus?
Lets assume the expo was booked for 4th April instead and Boris had told everyone to Keep Calm and Carry On instead of declaring lockdown. No forced closures or cancellations. I'm very confident that the expo would have been cancelled anyway. Why?
Because human nature. As soon as a public health disaster like this runs away with itself, people make their own decisions. Formula One didn't cancel the Australian Grand Prix, the McLaren team did by voluntarily withdrawing and forcing the organisers' hand. The same would have happened with football and other sports. As people fall ill in larger numbers things slow to a stop.
The one thing the government got absolutely right was furlough and CBILS and other support. The no lockdown scenario still has a lot of business either shut down due to operationally being unable to function or because of a lack of custom. And no government support. And thus bankruptcy.
So many businesses remain teetering on the brink of collapse due to the debts they ran up during Covid, and that is with support. Lets assume no support and a period of some revenues but full staff costs. They would have folded. So we avoid mandatory lock down, get effective shut down anyway, and absolutely bugger the economy regardless.
There was no winning scenario. All we can do is understand the thing in detail and try and plan for the future where we avoid getting into the thing in the first place.
If there are too many cameras in London, there are too few in central and southern Italy and Greece. They could do with a lot of cameras above the traffic lights, for instance, but there is an ultra-libertarian attitude against anything like that here, which just happens to conveniently align with the already existing latin and greek mindset about following many day-to-day rules.
But very roughly, something like this. With an infectious disease around, there is going to be a reduction in human freedom for a while. At least, there is provided you aren't going for the "let it wash over us" approach.
How do you distribute those freedoms? You can go for an unpleasantly hard lockdown of everyone. As I said unthread, that's not a trivial thing. As bad for society as participation in WW2. The alternative is to go for an even harder lockdown for a smaller (but not easy to define) group of people.
As it happens, I don't think the second approach can be made to work on a practical level; our lives are too entangled to create an isolation group like that. And there's the whole asymptomatic transmission thing. But I'm also not keen distributing freedom like that.
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.
Educate people, warn people about the risks, offer furlough as an option [not mandatory] if people want to isolate, then let people decide for themselves what they want to do.
As for long covid, same answer. Live with it.
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.
Your posts are always interesting and normally well thought out. You seem to be very clever.
But this is just rubbish.
Read the FT article.
https://www.ft.com/content/3d25b1c9-33bf-448a-bb07-6a0fc3a8a603
The UK has done badly on Life Expectancy in the last few years.
Spain, France and the USA also listed as owing trillions in reparations
"UK’s £18tn slavery debt is an underestimation, UN judge says - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790
How do we make the streets safe for pedestrians?
1. Road Safety awareness for pedestrians. If you're walking along with noise-cancelling headphones looking at your phone you're in danger
2. Better street design. It isn't mandatory barriers or humps or any of that prescriptive nonsense - streets are different to other streets. But design layouts that remove the stupid
3. More tech on cars. My Tesla has more cameras than I have eyeballs pointing in all directions all the time. I may not see the danger but the car will. Have cars which don't hit people as the new safety standard - we're already rapidly heading in that direction.
The size of weight of the vehicle isn't the issue. You can design a big vehicle to be pedestrian friendly.
Darwin award winners shouldn't really be included in statistics.
"GCSE results 2023: Passes fall to pre-Covid levels as England sees steepest drop - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/education-66575574
Wife and I will help look after grandchildren. 4 months and 2 years old
We should also look at removing any barriers that prevent people from being in safer vehicles, with seat belts, brakes, 5* safety, air bags etc
Instead for some reason people want to go the other way and put barriers on safer equipment up and have more people on more dangerous vehicles that are exposed to the elements with no seat belts, no air bags, no crumple zones, no automatic brakes etc
They generally balance technology and innovation with reliability and efficiency, work with a no-blame culture, are assiduous in talking about mistakes, and report in detail on even relatively minor incidents, in order to try and prevent accidents.
Very few people wear a helmet in the Netherlands, and they have some of the lowest fatality rates.
Bloody hell @contrarian was a whole lot more right than he was ever wrong. And if you read back at the posts at the time look at the abuse he received. He was just about bang on the money.
My favourite is the iconic French flying boat, the Latécoère 631. Out of ten built, five crashed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latécoère_631
ULEZ, EURO emissions ratings etc etc are drivers of accelerating those changes into newer safer cars. Yet the right have decided that poor people should be in older more dangerous cars because freedom or some bullshit.
Policy has done a very good job in driving both manufacturers to build safer vehicles and punters to switch to driving them. We need to advance those changes, not try and retard them as the Tories are now doing.
Your point about remote learning is valid, but. That was on a government who blithely announced every child who needed one would be provided with a laptop.
Then did bugger all about it. It
Greys Anatomy (like many US dramas) had a plane crash as a storyline and then the doctors chose to sue in order to ensure the crash was investigated because otherwise it would be brushed under the carpet.
Derek: We can't do this. I saw the plane. I went to the hangar and I saw the pieces of our plane laid out on the floor like a jigsaw puzzle. If we agree to settle, they do the investigation, and we can't do anything with the results.
Airline Rep: Bayview Aeronautics will take the results and act accordingly.
Derek: Oh, I'm sure you'll be very thorough. Big companies are always very good about self-policing.
Callie: Mistakes happen, Derek. Accidents happen. We make mistakes that can cost lives, too.
Derek: Yes, we do. But when we do, we have M&Ms, we pore over the files, we make sure it never happens again. And we try to make sure future patients never have to go through that grief. They don't have to sleep with the lights on every night because the darkness is too much. We just can't stand by and let this happen to other people's Lexies and Marks. We have to do something about it. We have to make this right.
As if the medical community is unique for poring over the files, and airlines will just do what "big companies" do and brush it under the carpet. No air accident is ever dismissed like that, not unless it happens in Russia.
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).
That means having inducements like scrappage incentives for old vehicles, or cutting taxes to make newer vehicles more affordable.
That does not mean putting a punitive and regressive tax on old vehicles for those who can't afford to make the switch yet.
Carrot not stick.
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.
2% this particular twat taught
in person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Vickers_Viscount
Similarly, the Lockheed Constellation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Lockheed_Constellation
It's about 100 miles from the coast currently under Ukrainian control.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/09/what-are-the-covid-rules-and-guidelines-in-the-four-nations-of-the-uk
Unnecessary perhaps, because Omicron was so much less dangerous than delta, but that wasn't clear at the time.
We don't have anything like the Tahoe selling in any numbers in the UK.
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.
There is no data to support my idea that casualties will increase as a result, but I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption.
The kids were in overcoats, as all the windows were open through the winter.
I cycle. I always wear my helmet.
Cycling was my first independent mode of transportation as a teenager, I always wore my helmet.
My kids cycle. They'd be grounded if I ever saw them out without a helmet.
I do care about people who cycle. Its why I think they should wear a helmet.
I think anyone who goes out on a bike without protecting their noggin is bloody moronic. Where I grew up, in Australia, it is a legal requirement to wear a helmet if cycling.
I think there is no logic or justification for having to wear a seat belt while driving, but not having to wear a helmet while cycling. Cycling is more dangerous than driving, the least you can do is protect your head and put your helmet on, just as if in a car put your seat belt on.
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.
http://www.cycle-helmets.com/zealand_helmets.html
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.
In the U.K., most “SUVs” are a replacement for estate cars. Same volume, shorter and higher.
The difference between them and the American P-1000 type vehicles…
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.
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.
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.
That's what the Dutch have done and it works.
Don't try to cut corners. If you want to copy the Dutch, then copy the Dutch. Build roads.
*Am aware many Hindus see Brahma as the One God, but the distinction is a little fine for most of the GOP base, I suspect.
The Dutch solution, build more roads and have segregated cyclists, is safer for cyclists. It works.
Cycling is not an alternative to building roads. Building roads helps cycling. We have 50 years of the Dutch doing this in action to show it works.
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 Dutch show this. They have the road space, they have the cycling infrastructure, but they still have most of their transportation via cars, but anyone can cycle safely if they want to. Which is because they've built roads.
Building roads and cycling aren't alternatives. Driving and cycling aren't alternatives. Drivers can be cyclists and vice-versa.
If you want Dutch lifestyle, follow Dutch policy, and build the bloody roads they've been building which come with cycling infrastructure.
Scientists release the first complete sequence of a human Y chromosome
https://news.ucsc.edu/2023/08/t2t-y-chromosome.html
..The structure of the Y chromosome has been challenging to decode because some of the DNA is organized in palindromes – long sequences that are the same forward and backward — spanning up to more than a million base pairs. Moreover, a very large part of the Y chromosome that was missing from the previous version of the Y reference is satellite DNA – large, highly repetitive regions of non-protein-coding DNA. On the Y chromosome, two satellites are interlinked with each other, further complicating the sequencing process. ..
..An unexpected finding from this paper was that Y chromosome DNA has been repeatedly mistaken to be bacterial DNA in past studies due to the incomplete removal of human contamination in bacterial DNA. This discovery promises to improve the study of bacterial species’ genomes.
Human DNA can appear as a contaminant in the genomic samples of bacterial species because the bacterial DNA is often taken from swipes off of human skin. Scientists use the current human genome reference to identify which sequences come from human contamination and remove those, leaving just the bacterial DNA for their study. But, because large parts of the human Y chromosome were missing from the past human reference, scientists were not able to identify them as human and thus mistook them to be part of the DNA of the species they were studying. ..