Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
Their jobs are there of course, but they’ve also made the decision to stay in the inner city rather than commute from the suburbs.
Those without cars generally say they don’t miss them but it must cause issues when it comes to taking rubbish to the tip or picking up furniture from IKEA.
The carless parent cohort are a cross section from poor and on benefits to pretty wealthy and working in the city.
The walking and cycling parents in Bristol, at least the ones the BBC found, are the very lucky few who can both afford to live around the corner from the good school, and have a parent without a tight morning schedule.
Once upon a time, kids would've walked or cycled to school on their lonesome. Then parents started to get risk averse and thus the school run started, making the roads more dangerous for those who continued to walk - a vicious cycle until there is a huge increase in congestion during school term and people won't let their kids out on the road.
I find that very sad, and count myself lucky that I had the freedom of my neighbourhood from about age 8.
Oh indeed, kids should be allowed to be kids, but today’s parents are much more worried about the massively rare safety issues, than they are about letting them be kids and explore the world.
It tells you a lot about the BBC though, that they choose to venerate the yummy mummies and WFHers in the million-pound houses with six grand bikes, and softly demonise the hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam outside the school on the other side of town.
“demonise” Really? Can you show me an article that “demonise[s]” a “hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam”. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening.
It’s the same thing as the Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages, showing the 1%er lifestyle to the 10%ers, and suggesting that we should all be doing the same. The ‘demonisation’ is implicit rather than explicit, and while it’s acceptable for the likes of the Sunday Times, it should be criticised when the organisation that gives criminal records to tens of thousands of the poorest in society does it.
I’m not familiar with BBC News articles that look like Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages. Can you show me a specific article demonstrating this demonisation?
I’m not saying that’s a great article, but I don’t think it “demonise[s]” hardworking secretaries who are 5 minutes late because of a traffic jam.
It’s a very soft and indirect demonisation, by saying how lovely it is that the yummy mummies take their kids to school by bike. The actual problem is that these sort of articles feed into public policy, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to be that mum who needs to get her kids to school and then to work on time.
It’s as soft and indirect as a kitten. And if more yummy mummies bike to school, the hardworking secretary is less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam.
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
Their jobs are there of course, but they’ve also made the decision to stay in the inner city rather than commute from the suburbs.
Those without cars generally say they don’t miss them but it must cause issues when it comes to taking rubbish to the tip or picking up furniture from IKEA.
The carless parent cohort are a cross section from poor and on benefits to pretty wealthy and working in the city.
The walking and cycling parents in Bristol, at least the ones the BBC found, are the very lucky few who can both afford to live around the corner from the good school, and have a parent without a tight morning schedule.
Once upon a time, kids would've walked or cycled to school on their lonesome. Then parents started to get risk averse and thus the school run started, making the roads more dangerous for those who continued to walk - a vicious cycle until there is a huge increase in congestion during school term and people won't let their kids out on the road.
I find that very sad, and count myself lucky that I had the freedom of my neighbourhood from about age 8.
Oh indeed, kids should be allowed to be kids, but today’s parents are much more worried about the massively rare safety issues, than they are about letting them be kids and explore the world.
It tells you a lot about the BBC though, that they choose to venerate the yummy mummies and WFHers in the million-pound houses with six grand bikes, and softly demonise the hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam outside the school on the other side of town.
“demonise” Really? Can you show me an article that “demonise[s]” a “hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam”. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening.
It’s the same thing as the Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages, showing the 1%er lifestyle to the 10%ers, and suggesting that we should all be doing the same. The ‘demonisation’ is implicit rather than explicit, and while it’s acceptable for the likes of the Sunday Times, it should be criticised when the organisation that gives criminal records to tens of thousands of the poorest in society does it.
I’m not familiar with BBC News articles that look like Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages. Can you show me a specific article demonstrating this demonisation?
I’m not saying that’s a great article, but I don’t think it “demonise[s]” hardworking secretaries who are 5 minutes late because of a traffic jam.
It’s a very soft and indirect demonisation, by saying how lovely it is that the yummy mummies take their kids to school by bike. The actual problem is that these sort of articles feed into public policy, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to be that mum who needs to get her kids to school and then to work on time.
It’s as soft and indirect as a kitten. And if more yummy mummies bike to school, the hardworking secretary is less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam.
Surely more likely, as the boss will have more free time away from the wi...
Oh, sorry, 'stuck in a traffic jam' wasn't a euphemism.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
Their jobs are there of course, but they’ve also made the decision to stay in the inner city rather than commute from the suburbs.
Those without cars generally say they don’t miss them but it must cause issues when it comes to taking rubbish to the tip or picking up furniture from IKEA.
The carless parent cohort are a cross section from poor and on benefits to pretty wealthy and working in the city.
The walking and cycling parents in Bristol, at least the ones the BBC found, are the very lucky few who can both afford to live around the corner from the good school, and have a parent without a tight morning schedule.
Once upon a time, kids would've walked or cycled to school on their lonesome. Then parents started to get risk averse and thus the school run started, making the roads more dangerous for those who continued to walk - a vicious cycle until there is a huge increase in congestion during school term and people won't let their kids out on the road.
I find that very sad, and count myself lucky that I had the freedom of my neighbourhood from about age 8.
Oh indeed, kids should be allowed to be kids, but today’s parents are much more worried about the massively rare safety issues, than they are about letting them be kids and explore the world.
It tells you a lot about the BBC though, that they choose to venerate the yummy mummies and WFHers in the million-pound houses with six grand bikes, and softly demonise the hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam outside the school on the other side of town.
“demonise” Really? Can you show me an article that “demonise[s]” a “hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam”. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening.
It’s the same thing as the Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages, showing the 1%er lifestyle to the 10%ers, and suggesting that we should all be doing the same. The ‘demonisation’ is implicit rather than explicit, and while it’s acceptable for the likes of the Sunday Times, it should be criticised when the organisation that gives criminal records to tens of thousands of the poorest in society does it.
I’m not familiar with BBC News articles that look like Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages. Can you show me a specific article demonstrating this demonisation?
I’m not saying that’s a great article, but I don’t think it “demonise[s]” hardworking secretaries who are 5 minutes late because of a traffic jam.
It’s a very soft and indirect demonisation, by saying how lovely it is that the yummy mummies take their kids to school by bike. The actual problem is that these sort of articles feed into public policy, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to be that mum who needs to get her kids to school and then to work on time.
It’s as soft and indirect as a kitten. And if more yummy mummies bike to school, the hardworking secretary is less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam.
Where the fuck has this notional "hard working secretary" come from? The 1970s? There is no mention of it in the article.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
Their jobs are there of course, but they’ve also made the decision to stay in the inner city rather than commute from the suburbs.
Those without cars generally say they don’t miss them but it must cause issues when it comes to taking rubbish to the tip or picking up furniture from IKEA.
The carless parent cohort are a cross section from poor and on benefits to pretty wealthy and working in the city.
The walking and cycling parents in Bristol, at least the ones the BBC found, are the very lucky few who can both afford to live around the corner from the good school, and have a parent without a tight morning schedule.
Once upon a time, kids would've walked or cycled to school on their lonesome. Then parents started to get risk averse and thus the school run started, making the roads more dangerous for those who continued to walk - a vicious cycle until there is a huge increase in congestion during school term and people won't let their kids out on the road.
I find that very sad, and count myself lucky that I had the freedom of my neighbourhood from about age 8.
Oh indeed, kids should be allowed to be kids, but today’s parents are much more worried about the massively rare safety issues, than they are about letting them be kids and explore the world.
It tells you a lot about the BBC though, that they choose to venerate the yummy mummies and WFHers in the million-pound houses with six grand bikes, and softly demonise the hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam outside the school on the other side of town.
“demonise” Really? Can you show me an article that “demonise[s]” a “hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam”. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening.
It’s the same thing as the Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages, showing the 1%er lifestyle to the 10%ers, and suggesting that we should all be doing the same. The ‘demonisation’ is implicit rather than explicit, and while it’s acceptable for the likes of the Sunday Times, it should be criticised when the organisation that gives criminal records to tens of thousands of the poorest in society does it.
I’m not familiar with BBC News articles that look like Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages. Can you show me a specific article demonstrating this demonisation?
I’m not saying that’s a great article, but I don’t think it “demonise[s]” hardworking secretaries who are 5 minutes late because of a traffic jam.
It’s a very soft and indirect demonisation, by saying how lovely it is that the yummy mummies take their kids to school by bike. The actual problem is that these sort of articles feed into public policy, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to be that mum who needs to get her kids to school and then to work on time.
It’s as soft and indirect as a kitten. And if more yummy mummies bike to school, the hardworking secretary is less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam.
Where the fuck has this notional "hard working secretary" come from? The 1970s? There is no mention of it in the article.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
Thirdly, it would be more than somewhat surprising if Universities had built their financial planning on numbers that were so clearly distorted in this way and, very likely, unsustainable for the medium term.
Having worked in three of them - it really, really wouldn't.
In fact, planning in this way is in my experience both normal and has been positively encouraged by performance management targets that seems to have at best a nodding acquaintance with reality.
I did hesitate over my third proposition. But, after all, Vice Chancellors of Universities are some of the best paid people in the country so presumably they can get something right.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
We're going to get a completely unplanned restructuring, whether we like it or not. The market absolutists will love it.
Thirdly, it would be more than somewhat surprising if Universities had built their financial planning on numbers that were so clearly distorted in this way and, very likely, unsustainable for the medium term.
Having worked in three of them - it really, really wouldn't.
In fact, planning in this way is in my experience both normal and has been positively encouraged by performance management targets that seems to have at best a nodding acquaintance with reality.
I did hesitate over my third proposition. But, after all, Vice Chancellors of Universities are some of the best paid people in the country so presumably they can get something right.
(I've done it again, haven't I? Damn)
I worked for one Vice Chancellor who spent something crazy like £5 million doing up the VC's residence while moaning that there needed to be savings of £1 million a year.
I worked for another who tore out £750,000 worth of technical equipment installed just two years before as he wanted to divert the money from running that highly profitable course to his pet project (which ran at a loss).
At the same uni, over a mile from a station (with no connecting footpath) and without a dedicated bus service, he sold all the car parks for office space and announced he wanted us to go 'car free.'
At the third, they spent millions on a new city centre campus then found they had no money to staff it.
The scary thing is that those universities were considered quite well run. They're not among the three likely to go bust under these conditions.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
This isn’t about “degrees for all”. This is about who pays. At the moment, home undergrad teaching and most research is carried out at a loss, cross-subsidised by higher fees from overseas students.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
FE/HE is all very well, but this article if anything seriously understates the issues in SENDMH, where the Law is being breached daily and tens of thousands of kids failed.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
FE/HE is all very well, but this article if anything seriously understates the issues in SENDMH, where the Law is being breached daily and tens of thousands of kids failed.
It gets further breached on Thursday, of course, where every 16 year old has to sit English Language and dyslexics (no matter how dyslexic they are) may not have readers.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
This isn’t about “degrees for all”. This is about who pays. At the moment, home undergrad teaching and most research is carried out at a loss, cross-subsidised by higher fees from overseas students.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Presumably it is only at a loss if the researches do not find any source of funds other than HMG? And if they can't does this not raise questions about the utility of the research? I would be astonished if a University could not get support for research into medical AI. There are any number of players in the market who would have a vested interest in regulation which kept annoying competitors out of the market and gave them the inside track on what was likely to be required of their systems.
The underfunding of under graduates with the current caps is a different question and I have no doubt that cross subsidy from overseas students who do not benefit from the cap is going to be essential there.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
This isn’t about “degrees for all”. This is about who pays. At the moment, home undergrad teaching and most research is carried out at a loss, cross-subsidised by higher fees from overseas students.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Presumably it is only at a loss if the researches do not find any source of funds other than HMG? And if they can't does this not raise questions about the utility of the research? I would be astonished if a University could not get support for research into medical AI. There are any number of players in the market who would have a vested interest in regulation which kept annoying competitors out of the market and gave them the inside track on what was likely to be required of their systems.
The underfunding of under graduates with the current caps is a different question and I have no doubt that cross subsidy from overseas students who do not benefit from the cap is going to be essential there.
Government funding is usually at 80%. Industrial funding is, yes, usually at 100%. It would not be usual to mix in industrial funding for this sort of project. There would be concerns about conflicts of interest, for starters… as you hint at. Do you want regulatory policy for medical AI in the UK to be what works best for patients and the economy, or what works best for certain companies?
Industry funding is much, much smaller than government funding of research. There are lots of things industry isn’t interested in funding. I’ve worked on projects to improve cancer patients’ quality of life, for example, but there’s no industry interest in something they can’t monetise. We did an evaluation that showed AI wasn’t helpful in screening mammography. That didn’t make the companies who made that tech happy, but it meant we could advise the NHS to save their money.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
This isn’t about “degrees for all”. This is about who pays. At the moment, home undergrad teaching and most research is carried out at a loss, cross-subsidised by higher fees from overseas students.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Presumably it is only at a loss if the researches do not find any source of funds other than HMG? And if they can't does this not raise questions about the utility of the research? I would be astonished if a University could not get support for research into medical AI. There are any number of players in the market who would have a vested interest in regulation which kept annoying competitors out of the market and gave them the inside track on what was likely to be required of their systems.
The underfunding of under graduates with the current caps is a different question and I have no doubt that cross subsidy from overseas students who do not benefit from the cap is going to be essential there.
Research with a plausible near term prospect of making money is the kind of thing usually better done by industry, where there are likely closer connections to making the jump from research to product. But we still need to be doing the kind of research whose connections to financial return are more long term and/or more diffused across an entire industry. I think the state is the entity which should have that long term vision.
On medical AI regulation research, I'm sure there are plenty of companies who would love to be in the driving seat for defining AI regulations. As a citizen I absolutely do *not* want the commercial interests to be the only ones looking at that area -- I think the state has an interest here too in sponsoring research that is independent and looks at what is needed for a fair market and to protect individuals.
Ay-up! Back late last night after 6 days in Yorkshire, staying in Scarborough, visiting Whitby and York. York was a nice sunny day, went inside the Minster, which I think has a better ambiance than Durham (visited last October). Whitby was very foggy, two days in a row! But visited the Abbey on the second day, ruins in the mist seemed rather atmospheric really. North Yorks Moor Railway will have to wait for another opportunity!
Anyway, added the North Bay Railway (20 inch gauge) and both the Central Tramway (actually a cliff lift), and the Scarborough Spa Cliff Lift.
Robin Hood's Bay?
Also fog-bound! Having said that, Scarborough South Bay was actually lovely in the sun yesterday.
Perhaps Blinken should have gone to see instead of playing guitar.
The Russians are now moving on Kharkiv and have retaken a number of villages making the city vulnerable to conventional artillery fire. Things are not going well for Ukraine, mainly because of the disruptions of weapon flows caused by Republicans in Congress. They still have to endure several months before the shortfalls are made good and they are back to fighting on a level playing field. It is, frankly, appalling that we have not made making good these shortfalls a far higher priority.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
We can't do a Dutch Cycling Dictator, because the Dutch system is far more comprehensive. So we need a Dutch "Redesign the Network and transfer traffic from *this* major road to *that* road, so we make *this* into a living space not a traffic sewer" Dictator as well for example ie network configuration.
And imo we - when following standards - often do Bus Stop Bypasses and Design Features for Disabled rather better than the Dutch do, partly because some of their now-culturally-bound-in practices are up to 40 or 50 years old.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
This isn’t about “degrees for all”. This is about who pays. At the moment, home undergrad teaching and most research is carried out at a loss, cross-subsidised by higher fees from overseas students.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Presumably it is only at a loss if the researches do not find any source of funds other than HMG? And if they can't does this not raise questions about the utility of the research? I would be astonished if a University could not get support for research into medical AI. There are any number of players in the market who would have a vested interest in regulation which kept annoying competitors out of the market and gave them the inside track on what was likely to be required of their systems.
The underfunding of under graduates with the current caps is a different question and I have no doubt that cross subsidy from overseas students who do not benefit from the cap is going to be essential there.
Government funding is usually at 80%. Industrial funding is, yes, usually at 100%. It would not be usual to mix in industrial funding for this sort of project. There would be concerns about conflicts of interest, for starters… as you hint at. Do you want regulatory policy for medical AI in the UK to be what works best for patients and the economy, or what works best for certain companies?
Industry funding is much, much smaller than government funding of research. There are lots of things industry isn’t interested in funding. I’ve worked on projects to improve cancer patients’ quality of life, for example, but there’s no industry interest in something they can’t monetise. We did an evaluation that showed AI wasn’t helpful in screening mammography. That didn’t make the companies who made that tech happy, but it meant we could advise the NHS to save their money.
There are also a very large number of very well funded charities in the sector. I'm not sure I agree that the simple answer is that HMG/the taxpayer simply picks up the tab.
Thirdly, it would be more than somewhat surprising if Universities had built their financial planning on numbers that were so clearly distorted in this way and, very likely, unsustainable for the medium term.
Having worked in three of them - it really, really wouldn't.
In fact, planning in this way is in my experience both normal and has been positively encouraged by performance management targets that seems to have at best a nodding acquaintance with reality.
Many universities have bet their arses on property speculation, financed by a stream of students who seemed willing to pay any silly number asked.
Some of them found soul mates in the kind of property developers who set up a ltd for every single thing they do.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
Their jobs are there of course, but they’ve also made the decision to stay in the inner city rather than commute from the suburbs.
Those without cars generally say they don’t miss them but it must cause issues when it comes to taking rubbish to the tip or picking up furniture from IKEA.
The carless parent cohort are a cross section from poor and on benefits to pretty wealthy and working in the city.
The walking and cycling parents in Bristol, at least the ones the BBC found, are the very lucky few who can both afford to live around the corner from the good school, and have a parent without a tight morning schedule.
Once upon a time, kids would've walked or cycled to school on their lonesome. Then parents started to get risk averse and thus the school run started, making the roads more dangerous for those who continued to walk - a vicious cycle until there is a huge increase in congestion during school term and people won't let their kids out on the road.
I find that very sad, and count myself lucky that I had the freedom of my neighbourhood from about age 8.
Oh indeed, kids should be allowed to be kids, but today’s parents are much more worried about the massively rare safety issues, than they are about letting them be kids and explore the world.
It tells you a lot about the BBC though, that they choose to venerate the yummy mummies and WFHers in the million-pound houses with six grand bikes, and softly demonise the hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam outside the school on the other side of town.
“demonise” Really? Can you show me an article that “demonise[s]” a “hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam”. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening.
It’s the same thing as the Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages, showing the 1%er lifestyle to the 10%ers, and suggesting that we should all be doing the same. The ‘demonisation’ is implicit rather than explicit, and while it’s acceptable for the likes of the Sunday Times, it should be criticised when the organisation that gives criminal records to tens of thousands of the poorest in society does it.
I’m not familiar with BBC News articles that look like Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages. Can you show me a specific article demonstrating this demonisation?
I’m not saying that’s a great article, but I don’t think it “demonise[s]” hardworking secretaries who are 5 minutes late because of a traffic jam.
It’s a very soft and indirect demonisation, by saying how lovely it is that the yummy mummies take their kids to school by bike. The actual problem is that these sort of articles feed into public policy, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to be that mum who needs to get her kids to school and then to work on time.
It’s as soft and indirect as a kitten. And if more yummy mummies bike to school, the hardworking secretary is less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam.
Where the fuck has this notional "hard working secretary" come from? The 1970s? There is no mention of it in the article.
What's this crisis, Mr Perrin? There is no crisis, Joan.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
I have my eye on Jenrick. I think he might be The One.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
I have my eye on Jenrick. I think he might be The One.
Perhaps Blinken should have gone to see instead of playing guitar.
The Russians are now moving on Kharkiv and have retaken a number of villages making the city vulnerable to conventional artillery fire. Things are not going well for Ukraine, mainly because of the disruptions of weapon flows caused by Republicans in Congress. They still have to endure several months before the shortfalls are made good and they are back to fighting on a level playing field. It is, frankly, appalling that we have not made making good these shortfalls a far higher priority.
Oddly, the other day Zelenskyy said that for the first time in the war so far, Ukraine had enough artillery shells. So I think some of the US weapons, along with the Czech initiative, are there.
Perhaps Blinken should have gone to see instead of playing guitar.
The Russians are now moving on Kharkiv and have retaken a number of villages making the city vulnerable to conventional artillery fire. Things are not going well for Ukraine, mainly because of the disruptions of weapon flows caused by Republicans in Congress. They still have to endure several months before the shortfalls are made good and they are back to fighting on a level playing field. It is, frankly, appalling that we have not made making good these shortfalls a far higher priority.
Oddly, the other day Zelenskyy said that for the first time in the war so far, Ukraine had enough artillery shells. So I think some of the US weapons, along with the Czech initiative, are there.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Careful with statistics like that, it's not as simple as you imply. The type of roads matter hugely, and the Netherlands is a significantly more urban country than the UK.
Also, the type of fatalities matter. It's not clear which categories of road death drive the different between the two countries. If everyone is driving around with no seatbelts, in older cars, drunk, then it's hardly an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure matters, of course, but don't attribute differences without granular data to back that attribution up.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
On topic - I noted the same poll found more people thought the defection showed the Cons in a bad light than thought it showed Lab in a bad one. I think the impact inside the 'bubble' (which is important) has been rather more mixed.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
This isn’t about “degrees for all”. This is about who pays. At the moment, home undergrad teaching and most research is carried out at a loss, cross-subsidised by higher fees from overseas students.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Presumably it is only at a loss if the researches do not find any source of funds other than HMG? And if they can't does this not raise questions about the utility of the research? I would be astonished if a University could not get support for research into medical AI. There are any number of players in the market who would have a vested interest in regulation which kept annoying competitors out of the market and gave them the inside track on what was likely to be required of their systems.
The underfunding of under graduates with the current caps is a different question and I have no doubt that cross subsidy from overseas students who do not benefit from the cap is going to be essential there.
Government funding is usually at 80%. Industrial funding is, yes, usually at 100%. It would not be usual to mix in industrial funding for this sort of project. There would be concerns about conflicts of interest, for starters… as you hint at. Do you want regulatory policy for medical AI in the UK to be what works best for patients and the economy, or what works best for certain companies?
Industry funding is much, much smaller than government funding of research. There are lots of things industry isn’t interested in funding. I’ve worked on projects to improve cancer patients’ quality of life, for example, but there’s no industry interest in something they can’t monetise. We did an evaluation that showed AI wasn’t helpful in screening mammography. That didn’t make the companies who made that tech happy, but it meant we could advise the NHS to save their money.
There are also a very large number of very well funded charities in the sector. I'm not sure I agree that the simple answer is that HMG/the taxpayer simply picks up the tab.
Yes, there are lots of charities. Charity funding of universities in healthcare is higher than industry funding, I believe. I've had chunks of my career funded by charity (particularly Cancer Research UK). But it's less than government funding. Charities have their own foci: they aren't interested in funding research on the regulation of medical AI by and large, for example.
And none of that changes the central fact that overseas student fees is subsidising research. If overseas student numbers fall, less research happens. The charities aren't going to make up that deficit. That's my point. People don't realise how much university research is supported by overseas students' money.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
Perhaps Blinken should have gone to see instead of playing guitar.
The Russians are now moving on Kharkiv and have retaken a number of villages making the city vulnerable to conventional artillery fire. Things are not going well for Ukraine, mainly because of the disruptions of weapon flows caused by Republicans in Congress. They still have to endure several months before the shortfalls are made good and they are back to fighting on a level playing field. It is, frankly, appalling that we have not made making good these shortfalls a far higher priority.
Oddly, the other day Zelenskyy said that for the first time in the war so far, Ukraine had enough artillery shells. So I think some of the US weapons, along with the Czech initiative, are there.
They still need more though, along with more long-range weapons.
That comment was interpreted by some Ukrainians as a sign that Zelensky is no longer receiving accurate information from the front.
I reckon you'll get shortages in any war, at a tactical level in places. And a glut in other places. My own view on the comment was a query about the number of artillery pieces they had, and localised 'shortages' might not just be shells, but also the things to fire them.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Careful with statistics like that, it's not as simple as you imply. The type of roads matter hugely, and the Netherlands is a significantly more urban country than the UK.
Also, the type of fatalities matter. It's not clear which categories of road death drive the different between the two countries. If everyone is driving around with no seatbelts, in older cars, drunk, then it's hardly an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure matters, of course, but don't attribute differences without granular data to back that attribution up.
Britain is not far behind in the urbanisation stakes, around 80 per cent to 90 per cent. Don't be fooled by vast tracts of empty land in between. In any case, while what you say is right, it also misses the point if we are comparing road and traffic engineering. We should not fetishise Dutch practices if they fail overall to keep the population safe.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's the same approach to that taken at road junctions, where you place the bus stop some distance away so that people aren't exiting straight into traffic.
You do need enough room to do it - if there's too little then, yes, using bus shelter placement to force an offset crossing will make things unnecessarily awkward for people with pushchairs etc.
But that's not an argument for trying to force buses and cyclists to share the same space, which is what the govt seem to want.
FE/HE is all very well, but this article if anything seriously understates the issues in SENDMH, where the Law is being breached daily and tens of thousands of kids failed.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Careful with statistics like that, it's not as simple as you imply. The type of roads matter hugely, and the Netherlands is a significantly more urban country than the UK.
Also, the type of fatalities matter. It's not clear which categories of road death drive the different between the two countries. If everyone is driving around with no seatbelts, in older cars, drunk, then it's hardly an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure matters, of course, but don't attribute differences without granular data to back that attribution up.
Britain is not far behind in the urbanisation stakes, around 80 per cent to 90 per cent. Don't be fooled by vast tracts of empty land in between. In any case, while what you say is right, it also misses the point if we are comparing road and traffic engineering. We should not fetishise Dutch practices if they fail overall to keep the population safe.
“vast tracts of empty land” only look that way because all the castles fell over in the swamps.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
The problems they cause are weirdly inconsistent. Here's one that's been in Hammersmith and Fulham for I reckon 60 or 70 years. But it seems to have caused no problems throughout all that time, and no one demands its removal. I wonder why .
It's amazing how many ways UK councils can mess it up. I think we should appoint a Dutch Cycling Dictator for 10 years and leave them to it.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Careful with statistics like that, it's not as simple as you imply. The type of roads matter hugely, and the Netherlands is a significantly more urban country than the UK.
Also, the type of fatalities matter. It's not clear which categories of road death drive the different between the two countries. If everyone is driving around with no seatbelts, in older cars, drunk, then it's hardly an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure matters, of course, but don't attribute differences without granular data to back that attribution up.
Britain is not far behind in the urbanisation stakes, around 80 per cent to 90 per cent. Don't be fooled by vast tracts of empty land in between. In any case, while what you say is right, it also misses the point if we are comparing road and traffic engineering. We should not fetishise Dutch practices if they fail overall to keep the population safe.
You're right, we shouldn't, but the bit after the "if" is important and not established by those figures. It could be that Dutch infrastructure is safer but other factors pull the Dutch figures down. Or it could be that Dutch infrastructure is more dangerous. We should look both ways before crossing the road to any firm conclusions.
As a general comment I would say that road safety issues are potentially politically explosive. There are around 30,000 deaths or serious injuries on the road network per year. Historically this has just been accepted as a cost associated with economic growth and individual freedom. But I think this perspective will not hold and a far more cautious and risk averse approach will become normal over time.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
From other reports it sounds like the president and foreign minister are both in a bad way.
Still early days; but looking at the alleged weather at the time, and the mountainous location, I'm going to hesitantly suggest controlled flight into terrain.
Apparently returning from a meeting in the border area with Azerbaijan.
The whole "fuck universities" thing reminds me of The Twits:
Here is a picture of Mr and Mrs Twit's house and garden. Some house! It looks like a prison. And not a window anywhere. 'Who wants windows?' Mr Twit had said when they were building it. 'Who wants every Tom, Dick and Harry peeping in to see what you're doing?' It didn't occur to Mr Twit that windows were meant mainly for looking out of, not for looking into.
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
I have my eye on Jenrick. I think he might be The One.
Yes, Government by shape shifting lizards looms ever closer.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
From other reports it sounds like the president and foreign minister are both in a bad way.
Still early days; but looking at the alleged weather at the time, and the mountainous location, I'm going to hesitantly suggest controlled flight into terrain.
Apparently returning from a meeting in the border area with Azerbaijan.
Potentially very significant as the Supreme Leader is said not to be in the best of health and Raisi is/was seen as a potential successor. Another potential successor is Khamenei's son Mojtaba, who is supposed to be close to the Revolutionary Guards
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
I have my eye on Jenrick. I think he might be The One.
Yes, Government by shape shifting lizards looms ever closer.
Shape-shifting lizards sound to me much more skilled than the current Cabinet.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
If the government specifically target post graduates from countries where people get married and start a family around 20 years old, what did they expect?
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
When the future archbishop Desmond Tutu came to the UK from South Africa to study at King’s College London to train as a theology teacher, he brought his family with him.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
When the future archbishop Desmond Tutu came to the UK from South Africa to study at King’s College London to train as a theology teacher, he brought his family with him.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
If the government specifically target post graduates from countries where people get married and start a family around 20 years old, what did they expect?
The government haven't been thinking two steps ahead for ages. One of the profoundly unconservative things about them is their attitude to delayed gratification.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
When the future archbishop Desmond Tutu came to the UK from South Africa to study at King’s College London to train as a theology teacher, he brought his family with him.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
So what?
I said, “People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.” You denied this, but I have now provided two examples of well-known people doing just this, one coming into the UK, one from the UK studying elsewhere. This proves me right and you wrong.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
When the future archbishop Desmond Tutu came to the UK from South Africa to study at King’s College London to train as a theology teacher, he brought his family with him.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
On topic, more or less: Ronald Reagan explained his switch from the Democratic Party by saying that he didn't leave the party, the party left him. (There was some truth to that.)
Robert "Mugabe" Jenrick is beating to quarters in the Telegraph with some facile logorrhea, ostensibly on the subject of foreign policy, that either puts the boot into Tel Aviv Keith or Big Rish. It's hard to say which.
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
I have my eye on Jenrick. I think he might be The One.
Yes, Government by shape shifting lizards looms ever closer.
Shape-shifting lizards sound to me much more skilled than the current Cabinet.
Incompetent shape shifting lizards might explain how some of them look ?
On topic, more or less: Ronald Reagan explained his switch from the Democratic Party by saying that he didn't leave the party, the party left him. (There was some truth to that.)
Not toooo much, though, considering that Reagan morphed from left-wing Democrat to right-wing Republican.
In part to make sure he was NOT blacklisted during Joe McCarthy era.
In this area, I've been seeing an occasional electric unicycle. (All the riders I've seen have been young males.)
Liquid Death has been for sale at the closest grocery store for some time, and I have seen it elsewhere, too.
In may urban areas in the US, coyotes are useful for the control of the cat population, feral and otherwise. (They also take a few small dogs from time to time.)
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
If the government specifically target post graduates from countries where people get married and start a family around 20 years old, what did they expect?
Ben Ansell @benwansell · May 18 Here is why many of us in UK HE are upset. A year or 2 ago the current govt asked unis to increase foreign students. Now with 6 months to an election, where change is likely, members of the same govt are asking for precisely the reverse policy to be suddenly implemented.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
If the government specifically target post graduates from countries where people get married and start a family around 20 years old, what did they expect?
Ben Ansell @benwansell · May 18 Here is why many of us in UK HE are upset. A year or 2 ago the current govt asked unis to increase foreign students. Now with 6 months to an election, where change is likely, members of the same govt are asking for precisely the reverse policy to be suddenly implemented.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
NY Daily News (via Seattle Times) - Rudy Giuliani served Arizona indictment papers for election fraud scheme at 80th birthday party
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was served a patriotic-themed birthday cake during his 80th birthday party in Palm Springs, California, on Friday night — then served with a notice of indictment related to an alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona.
Giuliani was indicted last month alongside 18 other allies of former President Donald Trump in connection with their unsuccessful bid to award the state’s 11 presidential electoral votes to Trump instead of Joe Biden, who went on to win the election. All of the defendants had been legally served aside from Giuliani, but that changed Friday evening, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes confirmed.
“The final defendant was served moments ago,” she wrote on social platform X around 11:20 p.m. “@RudyGiuliani No one is above the law.”
Mayes social media post came shortly after Giuliani himself took to social media, where he shared a since-deleted message taunting officials in Arizona.
“If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow, they: 1. Must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes,” he wrote. The post also featured a photo of a grinning Giuliani surrounded by a group of people at what appeared to be his birthday celebrations. Gold and black balloons can be seen floating in the background. . . .
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
When the future archbishop Desmond Tutu came to the UK from South Africa to study at King’s College London to train as a theology teacher, he brought his family with him.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
So what?
I said, “People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.” You denied this, but I have now provided two examples of well-known people doing just this, one coming into the UK, one from the UK studying elsewhere. This proves me right and you wrong.
Certainly applies in other countries; one set of my grandchildren attend an international school in Thailand with a bewildering number of other nationalities. Many of those children are the offspring of workers in multinational businesses doing a tour of duty in Bangkok. Admittedly others are the children of diplomatic staff.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
But when pushed they can't actual name one of those none "elite institutions". and the irony is it's going to be the old universities who have the biggest problems...
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
The ‘dependents of students’ phenomena, is literally one year from 2023. An undoing of that isn’t going to be the end of the world for dozens of universities. The more likely issue is the economic recession in China.
The dependents can stay at home. Just like people working or studying abroad on a temporary basis since time immemorial.
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
No, I don't think so. And that certainly wouldn't be the case if I worked overseas either - one of the reasons I wouldn't.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
When the future archbishop Desmond Tutu came to the UK from South Africa to study at King’s College London to train as a theology teacher, he brought his family with him.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
So what?
I said, “People working or studying abroad on a temporary basis brought their families with them since time immemorial.” You denied this, but I have now provided two examples of well-known people doing just this, one coming into the UK, one from the UK studying elsewhere. This proves me right and you wrong.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
Pretty well all universities have a particular strength. Apart from those which have some sort of ‘social’ cachet!
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
Do you really think the Tories want those universities to fail for those reasons? I know it fits a left wing student narrative about baby eating Tories who want to crush the poor but, as one of those baby eating Tories, I want universities to survive if they are doing something that improves the country and if they don’t then maybe they could be repurposed as huge vocational centres where we can train people to fill skills shortages, propped up by the state,where people might decide that rather than getting debt and a pointless degree they get a qualification and skill for life they can earn from. Maybe call them something like polytechnics.
I don’t want the “uppity working classes” to miss out on good degrees where they will benefit and I don’t want them being fed bullshit stories about getting degrees which won’t help them. I want everyone to do well but the lie of degrees for all needs to be stopped.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
Do you really think the Tories want those universities to fail for those reasons? I know it fits a left wing student narrative about baby eating Tories who want to crush the poor but, as one of those baby eating Tories, I want universities to survive if they are doing something that improves the country and if they don’t then maybe they could be repurposed as huge vocational centres where we can train people to fill skills shortages, propped up by the state,where people might decide that rather than getting debt and a pointless degree they get a qualification and skill for life they can earn from. Maybe call them something like polytechnics.
I don’t want the “uppity working classes” to miss out on good degrees where they will benefit and I don’t want them being fed bullshit stories about getting degrees which won’t help them. I want everyone to do well but the lie of degrees for all needs to be stopped.
Indeed, perhaps if more people had been trained as builders than in e.g. media studies, we’d be in less of a mess wrt house building.
Comments
The tory leadership hopefuls are definitely on the sighting lap. What a cavalcade of macabre filth the competition promises to be.
Oh, sorry, 'stuck in a traffic jam' wasn't a euphemism.
Most of their artillery (2S19 and 2S43) are located in Belgorod region, Russia.
And, unfortunately, we cannot fire them with American HIMARS (for example).
So we just suffer, resist and bite. If we only could fire Russian targets at their territory…..
https://x.com/OSINTua/status/1792113730693542040
Rest of the thread is worth reading.
(I've done it again, haven't I? Damn)
The market absolutists will love it.
I worked for another who tore out £750,000 worth of technical equipment installed just two years before as he wanted to divert the money from running that highly profitable course to his pet project (which ran at a loss).
At the same uni, over a mile from a station (with no connecting footpath) and without a dedicated bus service, he sold all the car parks for office space and announced he wanted us to go 'car free.'
At the third, they spent millions on a new city centre campus then found they had no money to staff it.
The scary thing is that those universities were considered quite well run. They're not among the three likely to go bust under these conditions.
We got a grant recently to do research to inform the regulation of medical AI. Only a small grant, £50k. When working out the budget, the standard rules for UK Govt funding is that you calculate the cost of doing the research and then the funding body gives you 80% of that.
You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that 80% is less than 100%. Now, there’s some game playing around the numbers and there is some Govt funding for research that’s not associated with specific projects, but basically the university does research at a loss, but keeps going on overseas students.
Although that's true as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/19/education-westminster-cuts-sex-education-special-needs
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
The underfunding of under graduates with the current caps is a different question and I have no doubt that cross subsidy from overseas students who do not benefit from the cap is going to be essential there.
The other thing we should do is just plant loads of trees every time we dig up a road to add cycle infrastructure. Would get more people onside and associate the change with general improvement. This is what they've done in Paris, to glorious effect.
Industry funding is much, much smaller than government funding of research. There are lots of things industry isn’t interested in funding. I’ve worked on projects to improve cancer patients’ quality of life, for example, but there’s no industry interest in something they can’t monetise. We did an evaluation that showed AI wasn’t helpful in screening mammography. That didn’t make the companies who made that tech happy, but it meant we could advise the NHS to save their money.
Those fucking Americans and their paltry $175,000,000,000 contribution.
On medical AI regulation research, I'm sure there are plenty of companies who would love to be in the driving seat for defining AI regulations. As a citizen I absolutely do *not* want the commercial interests to be the only ones looking at that area -- I think the state has an interest here too in sponsoring research that is independent and looks at what is needed for a fair market and to protect individuals.
If you are not aware (you may be) DFT (ie England) Guidelines for these Bus Stop Bypasses are in Section 6.6 of *this* document:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5ffa1f96d3bf7f65d9e35825/cycle-infrastructure-design-ltn-1-20.pdf
And imo we - when following standards - often do Bus Stop Bypasses and Design Features for Disabled rather better than the Dutch do, partly because some of their now-culturally-bound-in practices are up to 40 or 50 years old.
Some of them found soul mates in the kind of property developers who set up a ltd for every single thing they do.
What's this crisis, Mr Perrin?
There is no crisis, Joan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-progress-made-on-artillery-shortage/
They still need more though, along with more long-range weapons.
Also, the type of fatalities matter. It's not clear which categories of road death drive the different between the two countries. If everyone is driving around with no seatbelts, in older cars, drunk, then it's hardly an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure matters, of course, but don't attribute differences without granular data to back that attribution up.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
And none of that changes the central fact that overseas student fees is subsidising research. If overseas student numbers fall, less research happens. The charities aren't going to make up that deficit. That's my point. People don't realise how much university research is supported by overseas students' money.
You do need enough room to do it - if there's too little then, yes, using bus shelter placement to force an offset crossing will make things unnecessarily awkward for people with pushchairs etc.
But that's not an argument for trying to force buses and cyclists to share the same space, which is what the govt seem to want.
It is currently unclear whether Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was on board the helicopter that state media say experienced a hard landing."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv22311qx21o
Senior Government figures fear polarising online narratives about Israel-Hamas conflict being spread using fake social media accounts
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/18/russia-china-manipulate-uk-public-opinion-pro-palestine/ (£££)
It can't be a back door for whole families to slip into the UK, as it is at the moment.
Apparently returning from a meeting in the border area with Azerbaijan.
Here is a picture of Mr and Mrs Twit's house and garden. Some house! It looks like a prison. And not a window anywhere.
'Who wants windows?' Mr Twit had said when they were building it. 'Who wants every Tom, Dick and Harry peeping in to see what you're doing?' It didn't occur to Mr Twit that windows were meant mainly for looking out of, not for looking into.
The government’s own report showed the system is not being abused.
I don't take the government's report as gospel either - plenty on migration have been wrong before.
Stanley Johnson took his wife with him when he went to study economics at Columbia, which is why Boris was born in the US.
So, there you go, two examples of people taking their families with them when they studied abroad.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
In part to make sure he was NOT blacklisted during Joe McCarthy era.
In this area, I've been seeing an occasional electric unicycle. (All the riders I've seen have been young males.)
Liquid Death has been for sale at the closest grocery store for some time, and I have seen it elsewhere, too.
In may urban areas in the US, coyotes are useful for the control of the cat population, feral and otherwise. (They also take a few small dogs from time to time.)
Ben Ansell
@benwansell
·
May 18
Here is why many of us in UK HE are upset. A year or 2 ago the current govt asked unis to increase foreign students. Now with 6 months to an election, where change is likely, members of the same govt are asking for precisely the reverse policy to be suddenly implemented.
https://x.com/benwansell/status/1791828446127009808
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was served a patriotic-themed birthday cake during his 80th birthday party in Palm Springs, California, on Friday night — then served with a notice of indictment related to an alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona.
Giuliani was indicted last month alongside 18 other allies of former President Donald Trump in connection with their unsuccessful bid to award the state’s 11 presidential electoral votes to Trump instead of Joe Biden, who went on to win the election. All of the defendants had been legally served aside from Giuliani, but that changed Friday evening, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes confirmed.
“The final defendant was served moments ago,” she wrote on social platform X around 11:20 p.m. “@RudyGiuliani No one is above the law.”
Mayes social media post came shortly after Giuliani himself took to social media, where he shared a since-deleted message taunting officials in Arizona.
“If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow, they: 1. Must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes,” he wrote. The post also featured a photo of a grinning Giuliani surrounded by a group of people at what appeared to be his birthday celebrations. Gold and black balloons can be seen floating in the background. . . .
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
I don’t want the “uppity working classes” to miss out on good degrees where they will benefit and I don’t want them being fed bullshit stories about getting degrees which won’t help them. I want everyone to do well but the lie of degrees for all needs to be stopped.