How much damage is Dorries doing to the Tory brand? – politicalbetting.com

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

Foxy said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

One reason is that we live in a much more 24 hour world. Do we need a rush hour anymore? Staggered office times and flexible working offer potential to absorb traffic in existing infrastructure.

Sandpit said:

Pulpstar said:

Sean_F said:

HYUFD said:

CorrectHorseBat said:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/poll-two-thirds-of-public-back-death-penalty-for-letby/

Poll: two thirds of public back death penalty for Letby

So we know where the Tories will go next. Utterly despicable.

'Half the public (49 per cent) would support reinstating the death penalty for ‘any murder’, a figure that has risen by eight points since February. More than half (52 per cent) back capital punishment for anyone who assassinates a Royal, a figure that rises to 54 per cent for those who kill a police officer, 59 per cent for a multiple murderer and 63 per cent for a child murderer. This last figure is up by six points since February. Other crimes have also been affected by this surge in support for the noose, with 59 per cent of the public saying they back the death penalty for those convicted of terrorism or multiple rapes.'

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/poll-two-thirds-of-public-back-death-penalty-for-letby/

The Tories however despite 13 years in government have not reintroduced the death penalty for any crime and likely will not have a manifesto commitment to restore it either and nor will Labour make a promise to do so in their manifesto.

Just be grateful we have representative not direct democracy, with only RefUK perhaps likely to even consider restoring the death penalty for some crimes. If we went to a referendum on it it certainly would be back for some crimes. Another reason we don't need more referendums

Support for the death penalty usually rises, once some heinous crime gets reported.

Letby deserves to be put to death, but bring back hanging, and you run into all kinds of practical difficulties. The jury spent days poring over the evidence. Would they have given her the benefit of the doubt, had they known she'd be hanged?

It's easy enough to agree that the Letbys of this world deserve to be hanged, but do all murderers deserve to be hanged? In most cases, if we examined the evidence, we would probably say no. Most murders take place in a terrible moment of madness, rather than the kind of ruthless cold-blooded killing that Letby practised. So, we'd be left arguing over which murderers deserved death and which didn't, since we're obviously not going to hang 6-700 people a year.

Then, you get the miscarriages of justice.

Hanging probably lasted a generation longer in this country than it would otherwise, because of the Nuremberg trials. No one disputed that leading Nazis deserved the rope (and most of them got away with their crimes).

The start point of 6-700 can be immediately discounted, as people currently receiving a whole life tariff might get the death penalty. That's 68 people right now.

I quite like that there’s only 68 people who will never get out of prison. I suspect that this forum can probably name most of them pretty quickly as well. They’re generally terrorists, child murderers, and serial killers. And Wayne Couzens.

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.

But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.

Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

Carnyx said:

Theuniondivvie said:

HYUFD said:

Peter_the_Punter said:

Nigelb said:

Peter_the_Punter said:

DougSeal said:

HYUFD said:

UN judge in speech at Sadiq Khan's office says the UK owes £18 trillion in reparations for slavery.

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

It was a speech at City Hall, not "Sadiq Khan's Office". His office is in the building admittedly but I somehow doubt they could fit a speech in.

Presumably this was just a small part of the speech in which he ran through all the injustices in history, starting with what the Macedonians did under that sod Alexander, and putting a monetary value on the reparations necessary to square things up.

In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that..

The North in particular is owed on that score.
Add in the Tudor depredations, and it's time for some serious levelling up.

Though if course if the UK is on the hook for a trillion a year (as claimed) for the next decade, we're all going to be living in grinding poverty.

Not a bit of it, Nigel.

Those wealthy Yanks must owe us a ton for the War of Independence, The French for the Napoleonic Wars, the Germans for u know what, and of course the Japanese.

We'll be quids in, mate, by the time it's all reckoned up. We'll be able to afford a few trillion a year, and then some.

Can't wait to see the figures. When's the UN publishing them?

Plus the Turks and Moroccans for the slaves taken by the Barbary Corsairs, the Danes for the slaves the Vikings took and the Italians for the slaves the Romans took

I think I can safely say that whoever thought up the reparations wheeze which inspires exactly the same defensive, lazy banalities every time from the same people has created the perfect pwning the rightards vehicle. Sir (or madam), I salute you.

Pretty much what I was thinking re the Males Online. It sure has supercharged the whole slavery thing in that airt; one would almost think it had got cross-wired with the EXECUTE MASS MURDERERS NOW BEFORE THE DODGY EVIDENCE GETS FOUND OUT! stuff. It will be very interesting to see what KCIII and the C of E have to say.

Malmesbury said:

Nigelb said:

Sean_F said:

Peter_the_Punter said:

DougSeal said:

HYUFD said:

UN judge in speech at Sadiq Khan's office says the UK owes £18 trillion in reparations for slavery.

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

It was a speech at City Hall, not "Sadiq Khan's Office". His office is in the building admittedly but I somehow doubt they could fit a speech in.

Presumably this was just a small part of the speech in which he ran through all the injustices in history, starting with what the Macedonians did under that sod Alexander, and putting a monetary value on the reparations necessary to square things up.

In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that.

We might even be in pocket rather than out of it at the end of the day, especially if you work out the compound interest.

The complete ledger will be very interesting. Has it been published yet?

The net wealth of the UK is £10.7 trn. These hucksters think that every household in the country should be fined twice what they own because of what some people did hundreds of years ago.

There is , as you imply, not a country in the world that would not be paying out vast sums of money on this basis. The Middle East and North Africa would presumably owe a shedload of money to Mediterranean and Balkan Europe.

Maybe we could just sell the population into slavery ?

Didn’t Cassius (Caesar assassin), during the Civil War, go round demanding money, at sword point, from cities to the point that they had to sell their own citizens into slavery to pay him

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.

But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.

Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.

No, you didn't. You said:

"But yes, our population has grown by nearly 20% in a generation, our road capacity should have grown by 20% too accordingly. Building a 12 mile bypass and a few other piddly things here and there is nothing to shout home about, there should be much more than that done."

Implying the need for a 1-to-1 increase in road capacity because of an increase in population.

Sorry, I said roughly in another post. A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Yes maybe 19% or 21% would be better, its an approximation, it needn't be exactly 1:1, 0.9:1 may work.

0.1:1 does not though.

Pulpstar said:

What nickname will Trump come up with for Vivek Ramaswamy ?

RamaSMARMY perhaps ?

Dura_Ace said:

Pulpstar said:

What nickname will Trump come up with for Vivek Ramaswamy ?

RamaSMARMY perhaps ?

Ramaswampy obvs.

DJT's veep selection will be a fascinating inflexion point. MAGAKaren, Kari Lake, would be #classictrump

Sandpit said:

Six hours at this border so far, and we are still technically in Ukraine. Rumours that the Polish customs officers are on strike.

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.

But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.

Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.

No, you didn't. You said:

"But yes, our population has grown by nearly 20% in a generation, our road capacity should have grown by 20% too accordingly. Building a 12 mile bypass and a few other piddly things here and there is nothing to shout home about, there should be much more than that done."

Implying the need for a 1-to-1 increase in road capacity because of an increase in population.

Sorry, I said roughly in another post. A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Yes maybe 19% or 21% would be better, its an approximation, it needn't be exactly 1:1, 0.9:1 may work.

0.1:1 does not though.

Eabhal said:

a

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.

But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.

Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.

No, you didn't. You said:

"But yes, our population has grown by nearly 20% in a generation, our road capacity should have grown by 20% too accordingly. Building a 12 mile bypass and a few other piddly things here and there is nothing to shout home about, there should be much more than that done."

Implying the need for a 1-to-1 increase in road capacity because of an increase in population.

Sorry, I said roughly in another post. A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Yes maybe 19% or 21% would be better, its an approximation, it needn't be exactly 1:1, 0.9:1 may work.

0.1:1 does not though.

What level of road building would you want to achieve before you started putting cycle infrastructure on existing roads? Can you provide a rough cost estimate for that road building?

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

rottenborough said:

All of 38 years old, Ramaswamy is like Trump in the larva stage, molting toward the full MAGA wingspan but not quite there yet. His narcissism, though, is fully evolved.

ny times

They’re seriously worried about him.

He denies climate change exists and has dabbled in 9/11 and Jan 6 conspiracy theories. So… your kind of guy?

Sandpit said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

The BBC's verdict on the GOP debate:-

WINNERS: Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley
MIDDLE OF THE PACK: Tim Scott and Chris Christie
LOSERS: Ron DeSantis, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66601291

Meanwhile, 150m hits on the Trump interview with Tucker Carlson.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1694513603251241143

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

a

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.

But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.

Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.

No, you didn't. You said:

"But yes, our population has grown by nearly 20% in a generation, our road capacity should have grown by 20% too accordingly. Building a 12 mile bypass and a few other piddly things here and there is nothing to shout home about, there should be much more than that done."

Implying the need for a 1-to-1 increase in road capacity because of an increase in population.

Sorry, I said roughly in another post. A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Yes maybe 19% or 21% would be better, its an approximation, it needn't be exactly 1:1, 0.9:1 may work.

0.1:1 does not though.

What level of road building would you want to achieve before you started putting cycle infrastructure on existing roads? Can you provide a rough cost estimate for that road building?

Before there was an example of the 12 mile A14 road built which has unlocked 24 miles of cycling routes.

I think as a general rule 2:1 or 3:1 of new cycling for new roads could be entirely reasonable on average. Apart from motorways all new roads in my view should have cycling provision as standard, so that's automatically 1:1, and then relieving old roads of traffic allows them to be converted too, so 2:1 or 3:1.

The Dutch have been doing this for 50 years, so its not an overnight project, but my rough estimate is I think over a decade maybe we should be considering investing a trillion into our roads and cycle network to boost our infrastructure and improve economic growth and unlock the potential for entirely new towns too. We're investing hundreds of billions into new rail lines and roads represent more than 10x the economic activity of rails.

Anabobazina said:

We are in danger of focusing on the wrong things re: the lockdown debate.

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

a

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?

Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.

We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.

And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.

I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.

I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.

But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.

After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.

And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.

I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.

Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.

But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.

Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.

No, you didn't. You said:

"But yes, our population has grown by nearly 20% in a generation, our road capacity should have grown by 20% too accordingly. Building a 12 mile bypass and a few other piddly things here and there is nothing to shout home about, there should be much more than that done."

Implying the need for a 1-to-1 increase in road capacity because of an increase in population.

Sorry, I said roughly in another post. A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Yes maybe 19% or 21% would be better, its an approximation, it needn't be exactly 1:1, 0.9:1 may work.

0.1:1 does not though.

What level of road building would you want to achieve before you started putting cycle infrastructure on existing roads? Can you provide a rough cost estimate for that road building?

Before there was an example of the 12 mile A14 road built which has unlocked 24 miles of cycling routes.

I think as a general rule 2:1 or 3:1 of new cycling for new roads could be entirely reasonable on average. Apart from motorways all new roads in my view should have cycling provision as standard, so that's automatically 1:1, and then relieving old roads of traffic allows them to be converted too, so 2:1 or 3:1.

The Dutch have been doing this for 50 years, so its not an overnight project, but my rough estimate is I think over a decade maybe we should be considering investing a trillion into our roads and cycle network to boost our infrastructure and improve economic growth and unlock the potential for entirely new towns too. We're investing hundreds of billions into new rail lines and roads represent more than 10x the economic activity of rails.

Not the question I asked. You have repeatedly suggested that space cannot be taken away from cars until we have the same level of roads as the Dutch.

With your dubious 36% figure, that 90,000 additional miles. At £10 million a mile (not sure if that is correct?), that's £900 billion before you will even consider putting cycle lanes on existing roads.

Pulpstar said:

Foxy said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RobD said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.

Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.

A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.

Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.

Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.

One reason is that we live in a much more 24 hour world. Do we need a rush hour anymore? Staggered office times and flexible working offer potential to absorb traffic in existing infrastructure.

Are the schools going to stagger open and closing times ?

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

The big thing that stops so many road schemes is where does the traffic to / from that new road go? New roads drive traffic growth, so if we add an M580 then we need options at either end. At the west you can't just stop at the M57, so its then onwards likely towards Bootle - which practically speaking is impossible to build. At the east? M60 already at capacity, M62 bypass through Worsley and Prestwich cancelled as impossible.

Manchester to Sheffield is terrible to drive, with horrendous queues through places like Mottram most of the day. You can bypass those, but the previous M67 motorway across the top can't go ahead because again what do you do with the traffic it generates?

At the Manchester end there will not be a Hyde Road motorway or inner ring motorway - both dead. Which leaves the M60 which is at capacity. And at the eastern end the M1 is full and if you keep going to the A1 that is already at crush loading.

We would need to spend a vast fortune doing compulsory purchases before we could even think about building these roads, and people simply do not want that. Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

You are coming from the myth that new roads add pressure rather than relieve it.

Again building more alternative routes doesn't increase demand on other routes, it can actually reduce it. Yes the M60 is at capacity which is precisely why alternative routes like an M580 I propose as an example should be built, because that would relieve the M60 of traffic that has no reason to be there.

As well building new motorways allows building alternative destinations and new towns. Not everything has to be going to or located in Manchester if you people more new towns for people to put their home and business instead, a reluctance to build new towns is part of the reason why existing towns and cities are becoming overpopulated and overcrowded - because as you say people have to go somewhere.

Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

We need as a country to tell NIMBYs to f*** off.

If its a myth then its one validated by huge amounts of data from road engineers and planners. Your M580 cannot be built as there is nowhere for the traffic it generates to go. You say it won't, but you are wrong. Which is why they can't build it.

We can and do build new roads for new developments, and I want to see more Milton Keynes developments built. There's bags of room at the eastern end of the M62 corridor and that would have a stack of new roads. That we can do. A motorway past your house? No.

Because here is the truth. You want NIMBYs to fuck off. But if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms. You want the right to smash roads through places that *other people* live. Its easy to draw fantasy motorways - fun even. But it isn't going to happen. The political will is not there because we all learned from the hell that are American cities.

CatMan said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

rottenborough said:

All of 38 years old, Ramaswamy is like Trump in the larva stage, molting toward the full MAGA wingspan but not quite there yet. His narcissism, though, is fully evolved.

ny times

They’re seriously worried about him.

He denies climate change exists and has dabbled in 9/11 and Jan 6 conspiracy theories. So… your kind of guy?

There's also his views on Ukraine

Stuartinromford said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

The big thing that stops so many road schemes is where does the traffic to / from that new road go? New roads drive traffic growth, so if we add an M580 then we need options at either end. At the west you can't just stop at the M57, so its then onwards likely towards Bootle - which practically speaking is impossible to build. At the east? M60 already at capacity, M62 bypass through Worsley and Prestwich cancelled as impossible.

Manchester to Sheffield is terrible to drive, with horrendous queues through places like Mottram most of the day. You can bypass those, but the previous M67 motorway across the top can't go ahead because again what do you do with the traffic it generates?

At the Manchester end there will not be a Hyde Road motorway or inner ring motorway - both dead. Which leaves the M60 which is at capacity. And at the eastern end the M1 is full and if you keep going to the A1 that is already at crush loading.

We would need to spend a vast fortune doing compulsory purchases before we could even think about building these roads, and people simply do not want that. Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

You are coming from the myth that new roads add pressure rather than relieve it.

Again building more alternative routes doesn't increase demand on other routes, it can actually reduce it. Yes the M60 is at capacity which is precisely why alternative routes like an M580 I propose as an example should be built, because that would relieve the M60 of traffic that has no reason to be there.

As well building new motorways allows building alternative destinations and new towns. Not everything has to be going to or located in Manchester if you people more new towns for people to put their home and business instead, a reluctance to build new towns is part of the reason why existing towns and cities are becoming overpopulated and overcrowded - because as you say people have to go somewhere.

Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

We need as a country to tell NIMBYs to f*** off.

If its a myth then its one validated by huge amounts of data from road engineers and planners. Your M580 cannot be built as there is nowhere for the traffic it generates to go. You say it won't, but you are wrong. Which is why they can't build it.

We can and do build new roads for new developments, and I want to see more Milton Keynes developments built. There's bags of room at the eastern end of the M62 corridor and that would have a stack of new roads. That we can do. A motorway past your house? No.

Because here is the truth. You want NIMBYs to fuck off. But if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms. You want the right to smash roads through places that *other people* live. Its easy to draw fantasy motorways - fun even. But it isn't going to happen. The political will is not there because we all learned from the hell that are American cities.

Besides, isn't "new roads induce new demand" just an example of supply side economics? If you make travel "cheaper" (in broad, not just cash, terms) by increasing the availability of roads, people travel more.

Question for me is how much extra travel is a good thing in itself, and how much it's only good to the extent the travel is going somewhere. And whether it's more fruitful to bring more of those somewheres closer to where people are.

kjh said:

Tres said:

re Dutch v English road densities and cycling propensity. This can also be explained by geography - the Netherlands is flat, even parts of England that we think of as relatively flat like Essex are far hillier than the Netherlands.

I did a cycling holiday in Norfolk. It's bloody mountainous. Who knew?

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

The big thing that stops so many road schemes is where does the traffic to / from that new road go? New roads drive traffic growth, so if we add an M580 then we need options at either end. At the west you can't just stop at the M57, so its then onwards likely towards Bootle - which practically speaking is impossible to build. At the east? M60 already at capacity, M62 bypass through Worsley and Prestwich cancelled as impossible.

Manchester to Sheffield is terrible to drive, with horrendous queues through places like Mottram most of the day. You can bypass those, but the previous M67 motorway across the top can't go ahead because again what do you do with the traffic it generates?

At the Manchester end there will not be a Hyde Road motorway or inner ring motorway - both dead. Which leaves the M60 which is at capacity. And at the eastern end the M1 is full and if you keep going to the A1 that is already at crush loading.

We would need to spend a vast fortune doing compulsory purchases before we could even think about building these roads, and people simply do not want that. Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

You are coming from the myth that new roads add pressure rather than relieve it.

Again building more alternative routes doesn't increase demand on other routes, it can actually reduce it. Yes the M60 is at capacity which is precisely why alternative routes like an M580 I propose as an example should be built, because that would relieve the M60 of traffic that has no reason to be there.

As well building new motorways allows building alternative destinations and new towns. Not everything has to be going to or located in Manchester if you people more new towns for people to put their home and business instead, a reluctance to build new towns is part of the reason why existing towns and cities are becoming overpopulated and overcrowded - because as you say people have to go somewhere.

Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

We need as a country to tell NIMBYs to f*** off.

If its a myth then its one validated by huge amounts of data from road engineers and planners. Your M580 cannot be built as there is nowhere for the traffic it generates to go. You say it won't, but you are wrong. Which is why they can't build it.

We can and do build new roads for new developments, and I want to see more Milton Keynes developments built. There's bags of room at the eastern end of the M62 corridor and that would have a stack of new roads. That we can do. A motorway past your house? No.

Because here is the truth. You want NIMBYs to fuck off. But if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms. You want the right to smash roads through places that *other people* live. Its easy to draw fantasy motorways - fun even. But it isn't going to happen. The political will is not there because we all learned from the hell that are American cities.

if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms

Excuse me, but I would and I do and I did.

I stand by my principles. I have lived next to motorways in the past and I live next to a new expressway now - there aren't anywhere near enough of them, but yes one was built next to my house and I am delighted and I enjoy being able to use it, its much better than having to use old congested roads which I no longer use, so it has relieved the traffic on those and I can now travel on a free moving expressway easily accessed right from by my house, we should have much more of it.

And it is a myth. The Dutch have been building roads for decades and far from making their existing roads more congested, its meant they suffer less from congestion (and have more cycling) than we do.

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

The big thing that stops so many road schemes is where does the traffic to / from that new road go? New roads drive traffic growth, so if we add an M580 then we need options at either end. At the west you can't just stop at the M57, so its then onwards likely towards Bootle - which practically speaking is impossible to build. At the east? M60 already at capacity, M62 bypass through Worsley and Prestwich cancelled as impossible.

Manchester to Sheffield is terrible to drive, with horrendous queues through places like Mottram most of the day. You can bypass those, but the previous M67 motorway across the top can't go ahead because again what do you do with the traffic it generates?

At the Manchester end there will not be a Hyde Road motorway or inner ring motorway - both dead. Which leaves the M60 which is at capacity. And at the eastern end the M1 is full and if you keep going to the A1 that is already at crush loading.

We would need to spend a vast fortune doing compulsory purchases before we could even think about building these roads, and people simply do not want that. Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

You are coming from the myth that new roads add pressure rather than relieve it.

Again building more alternative routes doesn't increase demand on other routes, it can actually reduce it. Yes the M60 is at capacity which is precisely why alternative routes like an M580 I propose as an example should be built, because that would relieve the M60 of traffic that has no reason to be there.

As well building new motorways allows building alternative destinations and new towns. Not everything has to be going to or located in Manchester if you people more new towns for people to put their home and business instead, a reluctance to build new towns is part of the reason why existing towns and cities are becoming overpopulated and overcrowded - because as you say people have to go somewhere.

Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

We need as a country to tell NIMBYs to f*** off.

If its a myth then its one validated by huge amounts of data from road engineers and planners. Your M580 cannot be built as there is nowhere for the traffic it generates to go. You say it won't, but you are wrong. Which is why they can't build it.

We can and do build new roads for new developments, and I want to see more Milton Keynes developments built. There's bags of room at the eastern end of the M62 corridor and that would have a stack of new roads. That we can do. A motorway past your house? No.

Because here is the truth. You want NIMBYs to fuck off. But if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms. You want the right to smash roads through places that *other people* live. Its easy to draw fantasy motorways - fun even. But it isn't going to happen. The political will is not there because we all learned from the hell that are American cities.

if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms

Excuse me, but I would and I do and I did.

I stand by my principles. I have lived next to motorways in the past and I live next to a new expressway now - there aren't anywhere near enough of them, but yes one was built next to my house and I am delighted and I enjoy being able to use it, its much better than having to use old congested roads which I no longer use, so it has relieved the traffic on those and I can now travel on a free moving expressway easily accessed right from by my house, we should have much more of it.

And it is a myth. The Dutch have been building roads for decades and far from making their existing roads more congested, its meant they suffer less from congestion (and have more cycling) than we do.

The reason the Dutch have more cycling is because they have more cycle paths, not because they have more roads!

Pulpstar said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

The big thing that stops so many road schemes is where does the traffic to / from that new road go? New roads drive traffic growth, so if we add an M580 then we need options at either end. At the west you can't just stop at the M57, so its then onwards likely towards Bootle - which practically speaking is impossible to build. At the east? M60 already at capacity, M62 bypass through Worsley and Prestwich cancelled as impossible.

Manchester to Sheffield is terrible to drive, with horrendous queues through places like Mottram most of the day. You can bypass those, but the previous M67 motorway across the top can't go ahead because again what do you do with the traffic it generates?

At the Manchester end there will not be a Hyde Road motorway or inner ring motorway - both dead. Which leaves the M60 which is at capacity. And at the eastern end the M1 is full and if you keep going to the A1 that is already at crush loading.

We would need to spend a vast fortune doing compulsory purchases before we could even think about building these roads, and people simply do not want that. Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

You are coming from the myth that new roads add pressure rather than relieve it.

Again building more alternative routes doesn't increase demand on other routes, it can actually reduce it. Yes the M60 is at capacity which is precisely why alternative routes like an M580 I propose as an example should be built, because that would relieve the M60 of traffic that has no reason to be there.

As well building new motorways allows building alternative destinations and new towns. Not everything has to be going to or located in Manchester if you people more new towns for people to put their home and business instead, a reluctance to build new towns is part of the reason why existing towns and cities are becoming overpopulated and overcrowded - because as you say people have to go somewhere.

Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

We need as a country to tell NIMBYs to f*** off.

If its a myth then its one validated by huge amounts of data from road engineers and planners. Your M580 cannot be built as there is nowhere for the traffic it generates to go. You say it won't, but you are wrong. Which is why they can't build it.

We can and do build new roads for new developments, and I want to see more Milton Keynes developments built. There's bags of room at the eastern end of the M62 corridor and that would have a stack of new roads. That we can do. A motorway past your house? No.

Because here is the truth. You want NIMBYs to fuck off. But if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms. You want the right to smash roads through places that *other people* live. Its easy to draw fantasy motorways - fun even. But it isn't going to happen. The political will is not there because we all learned from the hell that are American cities.

To be fair, Barty probably is close to a motorway - the NW is the most motorway dense part of the entire UK.

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

RochdalePioneers said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

El_Capitano said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Eabhal said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.

We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.

Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.

Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.

We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.

Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.

You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.

What are you talking about?

I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.

On this page alone

Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.

Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.

Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.

I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.

The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.

But we've already built the new roads?

Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.

The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.

What new roads?

We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.

The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.

Not so.

There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.

Lincoln Eastern ring road
A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass
A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark
A6 to Manchester Airport relief road
Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass
Congleton Link road
Norwich Northern Distributor Road

And being built at the moment

Inverness Trunk Road Link
Silvertown Tunnel
Stubbington bypass
A585 Little Singleton bypass
A120 Little Hadham bypass
Preston Western Distributor Road
Heyhouses Link Road
Wichelstowe Southern Access
Grantham Southern Bypass
Etruria Valley Link Road
North Northallerton Link Road
Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link
Larne Distributor (South)
Ballyclare Western Relief Road
M6-M54 Link road

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.

For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.

And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.

Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.

Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.

You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.

We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.

We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.

We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.

Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.

Why? We build and upgrade roads where there is a need and where it is possible. Sadly the places where we most ned to build more roads - on the approaches to and in the centre of towns and cities - it usually isn't practical. Outside of cities I very rarely if ever run into traffic jams and those which I did all now seem to be the subject of planned or completed upgrades.

Of course it's practical, it's just not done as a matter of policy and because investment is expensive.

A lot of traffic in cities is because of throughout being driven there rather than it needing to be there. Most of the North West motorways converge in Manchester meaning even if you don't want to go to Manchester, realistically you have to drive through Manchester as there's no alternative.

Take the M62/M60 for instance. If you want to go from North Liverpool to Rochdale (which is further North) the route is start by going South, the complete wrong direction, then East on the M62, North through Manchester at the M60, then East again.

Build an "M580" motorway and a lot of cars currently on the M62 or M60 would no longer need to be on that route.

And that's just one random example. And of course the terrible lack of redundancy and alternative routes on our roads means in the event that the M62 is closed due to an accident then there is no alternative motorway to be used and people use towns as rat runs.

The big thing that stops so many road schemes is where does the traffic to / from that new road go? New roads drive traffic growth, so if we add an M580 then we need options at either end. At the west you can't just stop at the M57, so its then onwards likely towards Bootle - which practically speaking is impossible to build. At the east? M60 already at capacity, M62 bypass through Worsley and Prestwich cancelled as impossible.

Manchester to Sheffield is terrible to drive, with horrendous queues through places like Mottram most of the day. You can bypass those, but the previous M67 motorway across the top can't go ahead because again what do you do with the traffic it generates?

At the Manchester end there will not be a Hyde Road motorway or inner ring motorway - both dead. Which leaves the M60 which is at capacity. And at the eastern end the M1 is full and if you keep going to the A1 that is already at crush loading.

We would need to spend a vast fortune doing compulsory purchases before we could even think about building these roads, and people simply do not want that. Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

You are coming from the myth that new roads add pressure rather than relieve it.

Again building more alternative routes doesn't increase demand on other routes, it can actually reduce it. Yes the M60 is at capacity which is precisely why alternative routes like an M580 I propose as an example should be built, because that would relieve the M60 of traffic that has no reason to be there.

As well building new motorways allows building alternative destinations and new towns. Not everything has to be going to or located in Manchester if you people more new towns for people to put their home and business instead, a reluctance to build new towns is part of the reason why existing towns and cities are becoming overpopulated and overcrowded - because as you say people have to go somewhere.

Motorways past people's houses are seen as a Bad Thing.

We need as a country to tell NIMBYs to f*** off.

If its a myth then its one validated by huge amounts of data from road engineers and planners. Your M580 cannot be built as there is nowhere for the traffic it generates to go. You say it won't, but you are wrong. Which is why they can't build it.

We can and do build new roads for new developments, and I want to see more Milton Keynes developments built. There's bags of room at the eastern end of the M62 corridor and that would have a stack of new roads. That we can do. A motorway past your house? No.

Because here is the truth. You want NIMBYs to fuck off. But if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms. You want the right to smash roads through places that *other people* live. Its easy to draw fantasy motorways - fun even. But it isn't going to happen. The political will is not there because we all learned from the hell that are American cities.

if they decide to build a new expressway next to you then you wouldn't be there welcoming it with open arms

Excuse me, but I would and I do and I did.

I stand by my principles. I have lived next to motorways in the past and I live next to a new expressway now - there aren't anywhere near enough of them, but yes one was built next to my house and I am delighted and I enjoy being able to use it, its much better than having to use old congested roads which I no longer use, so it has relieved the traffic on those and I can now travel on a free moving expressway easily accessed right from by my house, we should have much more of it.

And it is a myth. The Dutch have been building roads for decades and far from making their existing roads more congested, its meant they suffer less from congestion (and have more cycling) than we do.