To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
We really wouldn't.
Just as we don't notice the deaths in Sudan, Niger, Mali or Burkina Faso.
Black live don't matter in the Sahel countries.
Likewise that slavery is still endemic in the Sahel countries doesn't matter either.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
That's why VED needs to be replaced by an axle-weight tax - incentivise Renault 5s not massive electric pick-up trucks.
My main gripe with fuel duty is it hurts rural communities (even though overall it's progressive). We already have ULEZ and congestion charging - just extend that for an urban driving charge.
I do have to giggle about the EV per mile exclusive. In the Telegraph - which is the first sign that it isn’t true because so little they print as “news” is.
Comedy - it’s pay per mile. But no monitoring. Honest motorists will fill in EV bureaucrat paperwork each year and self declare how many miles they have driven.
What do Telegraph owners hate? Government bureaucrats and EVs. So of course they have magically conflated the two.
As you are around - have you seen Tesla's (lack of sales) in October
So the SMMT have published sales figures for October
Battery EV sales rose 24% compared to October 2024
TESLA however sold only 511 cars compared to 971 cars in October 2024 - that’s a 47% drop
So the new models were a very temporary boost and the reality is that a Tesla car is not something people seem to want.
Tesla sales in the first month of any given quarter are always shit. They deliver very few vehicles - never have. Which is why you need to look at the quarter
IIRC Tesla charters ships to deliver their cars from US to UK, so they arrive in batches of 5,000 rather than steadily as with most other manufacturers who rent space on existing shipping routes.
A slight "yes, but". About 2/3 of Tesla European sales are made in Berlin (Model Ys). YTD (Aug/Sept) approx sales figures:
Year-to-date (Jan-Sep) sales for the Model Y are 109,793, while the Model 3 has sold 49,524 units from Jan-Aug 2025.
That's enough for roughly one Model 3 transport from the USA every month at 5000 per.
(As an aside, that's not a lot to my eye for a place the size of their Berlin factory.)
As an aside, I take the flappage from the Telegraph yesterday as an attempt to create frightening narratives to wind up their Captain Mainwaring in his shed in Tunbridge Wells (it may be a posh shed).
Ah, I hadn't realised it was the Telegraph.
At this point, I need to scuttle away and make sure it *was* the Telegraph, to make sure I do not get hoist by my own petard.
(Checks: yes, according to Rochdale, it was:
@RochdalePioneers said: I do have to giggle about the EV per mile exclusive. In the Telegraph - which is the first sign that it isn’t true because so little they print as “news” is.
Comedy - it’s pay per mile. But no monitoring. Honest motorists will fill in EV bureaucrat paperwork each year and self declare how many miles they have driven.
What do Telegraph owners hate? Government bureaucrats and EVs. So of course they have magically conflated the two. )
I thought government sources have admitted they're talking about this ? (Reported on Today as "we'd be lying if we said we weren't discussing this.")
The mileage thing would require you to predict your mileage for the next year, and would be corrected each following year for actual mileage driven - ie you pay upfront.
The Telegraph isn't infallibly wrong. Just highly untrustworthy as a source.
Its laughable. Think how this would work. They'd be bringing endless people into self-assessment who aren't already there at huge cost. A "guess how many miles you do" form. With cash paid up front. Then correct it the following year. With I assume a load of tax inspectors to validate that the guesstimate mileage figures are correct. Perhaps using DVLA checkpoints to pull over all EVs and check their numbers.
"We'd be lying if we weren't discussing this" = we do not comment on budget speculation. And I bet they discussed it!
"Lets ask EV owners to guess how many miles they do and fill in a tax form to charge them per mile" YES AND HO "No you idiot that's Fucking Mental"
If they want to tax EVs it will be on VED. If they want to charge motorists per mile it will be all cars via ANPR.
Why not just charge on mileage at MOT (or, for the first three years at a new, otherwise free, non-inspection MOT)?
See my previous comments about fucking mental.
They cannot charge pence per mile without actually knowing how many miles. That means either a mandatory black box (paid for by the insurance industry via premiums?) or ANPR as we already have at Dartford and Tyne crossings.
The problem with either is the huge cost of setting them up. The latter works if you are doing road tolling - charge everyone 3p per mile to drive on a congested motorway as an example. For EVs only? Will drive people back into other cars.
Which leaves the existing taxes and the only obvious one is VED. We all pay it. Its easy to assign to a type of vehicle. People complain but pay up.
The political challenge is simple. Average annual mileage is 8k miles ish. At 3p thats £240 a year. So slap an EV premium onto VED of £240. That means that most EVs will pay £195 + £425 + £240 = £howmuch???
Making an EV the most expensive car to run is Reform's policy, not Labour's.
This plus the rejection of regional/nodal energy pricing is going to completely alienate me from Labour.
FPT: Per mile taxation is silly - does nothing to dis-incentivise short journeys while hurting rural communities. At least fuel duty penalises fuel-inefficient urban driving.
Far preferable is a per journey (or per day?) charge, or an urban driving charge. That could mean the tax on a journey between Aberdeen and Inverness would be the same as between your home and the local primary school. If per mile taxation is feasible then surely this is too.
How will the taxman know how many miles have been driven? Will all EV owners have to do a tax return with a report on mileage? Will the rest of us have to do a nil return?
AFAIKS, the idea is a supplement on VED. I would guess this will be banded, so you would pay (upfront) for (say) 0-5000m; 5-7500; 7.500 - 10k etc
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
4th power of axle weight is correct, so there should probably be a weight element to the tax going forward.
You’d need to separate cars and lorries though, as is the case at the moment, with the former subsidising the latter. Lorries are doing something economically productive most of the time, and increasing their costs feeds quickly into overall inflation.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Look at the comment to which I was replying, the second such saying it was fake news purely because Trump said it.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
Ok, just to close the loop on this one - I called Cunard and indeed they are willing to transfer my booking to a future cruise of the same or greater value, which seems fair enough to me. So thank-you to @Sandpit for that suggestion, I'm not sure if they'd have offered it if I hadn't asked - it's not enshrined in their booking conditions.
@Big_G_NorthWales: I absolutely agree, I would never travel abroad these days without travel insurance. Im sorry that it has become too expensive for you now, I'm glad for you that you did a lot of travelling when you could.
Don't delay - seize the day! is a great mantra.
Finally, thank you to those who wished me well - I am fine, but my leg break (femur) is unfortunately going to be a slow healing process. I am reminded that despite our political differences and often heated debates PB is a great collection of virtual friends.
Thanks all!
I would just comment that we have travelled extensively throughout our lifetime including across Europe with 3 children in the back seat wondering how we managed to drive into Venice, to worldwide following the emigration of our son to New Zealand in 2003 and since then we always followed the mantra we must do it while we can
Now we cannot travel anymore, but we are content that we have achieved so many 'bucket shop' experiences from Antarctica to Ayres Rock and the Great Wall of China, to Moscow and Vladivostok, Japan, Korea and South Africa, North and South America, Egypt and Israel, the Artic and Scandanavia, and of couse multiple trips to Canada
It is true travel broadens the mind and provides lifetime memories
All the best for your recovery and your next cruises
We WERE with esure for the car. No claims for many years BUT the premium went up massively this year. Result; we're no longer with esure. Pity, because when I wanted add another driver for a travel 'emergency' (long, irrelevant, story) they were very reasonable. But an increase from around £700 (in itself a lot) to well over £900 for a car driven about 5000 miles per year was, I thought, unreasonable.
I can drive a lot of cars (mine, the wife’s, the children’s, my parents) because putting a 50 year old man with maximum no claims as a (very occasional) driver on a policy seems to significantly knock down what the insurance costs
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
That's why VED needs to be replaced by an axle-weight tax - incentivise Renault 5s not massive electric pick-up trucks..
A pretty easy tweak to a tax which has been tweaked many times. (As would be EVs paying up front for next year's mileage.)
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Trump must have got bored with ending wars - I think his latest count was 8? - and they did get him Nobel Prize before his mind is so addled he has no idea what it is. So he's starting them instead. With Venezuela and Nigeria. South America and Africa. His military must be loving that idea.
Congress too. Not that they look like they are going to get a voice.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
All these changes tend to be phased in over time to mitigated the pain. EV taxes will probably rise as EV prices fall, and their market share increases. And I suspect fuel duty will rise a bit at the same time.
The transition would be a lot easier if the national finances weren't such a mess.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
They are absolute clowns. Just like the last lot. They have worked very hard to prove this - it would be rude to deny them the red noses and big shoes they have worked so very hard for.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Look at the comment to which I was replying, the second such saying it was fake news purely because Trump said it.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Well, sure. But arguing over the number of casualties is hardly TDS. And the issue isn't really about the precise number of casualties anyway, as I'm sure you're aware.
So research proves that X has become a right wing cesspit since Musk took over . The algorithm is designed to amplify right wing views . None of this will come as a surprise .
Long before Musk, the algorithm amplified posts that caused the most engagement, which were mainly right wing (often the engagement was people disagreeing but it all counts).
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
That's why VED needs to be replaced by an axle-weight tax - incentivise Renault 5s not massive electric pick-up trucks..
A pretty easy tweak to a tax which has been tweaked many times. (As would be EVs paying up front for next year's mileage.)
I think we just need a movement tax on people. We can use the microchips inserted with the Covid vaccine to see how far everyone moves each year and tax that.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
They are absolute clowns. Just like the last lot. They have worked very hard to prove this - it would be rude to deny them the red noses and big shoes they have worked so very hard for.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
Start from the assumption that they’re against the concept of private transport, and work backwards from there.
They’ll ban sales of new non-EV cars, and then start to ramp petrol by 25p/litre every year until it’s £10 and going for a Sunday morning drive in something fun costs £100/hour in petrol.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
They are absolute clowns. Just like the last lot. They have worked very hard to prove this - it would be rude to deny them the red noses and big shoes they have worked so very hard for.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
Against that, they have to do something about replacing dwindling fuel duty revenues, sooner or later.
It's hardly being a clown having discussions about that. What matters is how such changes are actually introduced - and so far their management of that is indeed poor.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
"A year of misplaced hopes regarding Trump" - Russian newspaper headline
Today one Russian paper claims that Donald Trump “behaves like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. But no. That’s being unfair to butterflies.”
Steve Rosenberg's review of the Russian press in three and a half minutes. President Trump has been unable to end the Ukraine war on terms acceptable to Moscow.
One paper laments the plight of pensioners who receive just a quarter of the average wage (it is a third in Britain).
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
Ok, just to close the loop on this one - I called Cunard and indeed they are willing to transfer my booking to a future cruise of the same or greater value, which seems fair enough to me. So thank-you to @Sandpit for that suggestion, I'm not sure if they'd have offered it if I hadn't asked - it's not enshrined in their booking conditions.
@Big_G_NorthWales: I absolutely agree, I would never travel abroad these days without travel insurance. Im sorry that it has become too expensive for you now, I'm glad for you that you did a lot of travelling when you could.
Don't delay - seize the day! is a great mantra.
Finally, thank you to those who wished me well - I am fine, but my leg break (femur) is unfortunately going to be a slow healing process. I am reminded that despite our political differences and often heated debates PB is a great collection of virtual friends.
We WERE with esure for the car. No claims for many years BUT the premium went up massively this year. Result; we're no longer with esure. Pity, because when I wanted add another driver for a travel 'emergency' (long, irrelevant, story) they were very reasonable. But an increase from around £700 (in itself a lot) to well over £900 for a car driven about 5000 miles per year was, I thought, unreasonable.
I can drive a lot of cars (mine, the wife’s, the children’s, my parents) because putting a 50 year old man with maximum no claims as a (very occasional) driver on a policy seems to significantly knock down what the insurance costs
I was advised....... someone in a pub, a sure source of useful information ...... to add a younger driver to ours, as it would have the effect you describe. So I added our 37 year old granddaughter. Made no difference.
I must confess that I am sometimes puzzled by the economics of the car insurance industry.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
They are absolute clowns. Just like the last lot. They have worked very hard to prove this - it would be rude to deny them the red noses and big shoes they have worked so very hard for.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
Against that, they have to do something about replacing dwindling fuel duty revenues, sooner or later.
It's hardly being a clown having discussions about that. What matters is how such changes are actually introduced - and so far their management of that is indeed poor.
Also, the hardworking British taxpayer is writing subsidy cheques to Elon Musk and the People's Republic of China.
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
They are absolute clowns. Just like the last lot. They have worked very hard to prove this - it would be rude to deny them the red noses and big shoes they have worked so very hard for.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
Start from the assumption that they’re against the concept of private transport, and work backwards from there.
They’ll ban sales of new non-EV cars, and then start to ramp petrol by 25p/litre every year until it’s £10 and going for a Sunday morning drive in something fun costs £100/hour in petrol.
Then wonder why the economy is doing a bit poorly. After all, the correlation between economic performance and transport costs has only been known for..... centuries?
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Look at the comment to which I was replying, the second such saying it was fake news purely because Trump said it.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Well, sure. But arguing over the number of casualties is hardly TDS. And the issue isn't really about the precise number of casualties anyway, as I'm sure you're aware.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
That's why VED needs to be replaced by an axle-weight tax - incentivise Renault 5s not massive electric pick-up trucks..
A pretty easy tweak to a tax which has been tweaked many times. (As would be EVs paying up front for next year's mileage.)
I think we just need a movement tax on people. We can use the microchips inserted with the Covid vaccine to see how far everyone moves each year and tax that.
Free your thinking.
Buy the Neuralink technology from Musk. Implant each citizen at birth, along with GPS etc. If they engage in Wrong Behaviour - including Wrong Think - auto deduct fines from their bank accounts.
Do this all with AI.
For terrorism* - command the citizens nervous system to shutdown. Or trigger the explosive implant in the brain.
All of this technology can't go wrong - it wold be a government project after all
*Any situation that feels like you could possibly use an anti-terrorism law, to a police officer
Well, for people who can't charge at home, the EV is already expensive to fuel.
It is worth considering that making transport, power etc expensive to discourage use has become so culturally embedded that the idea it should be cheap can induce shock.
The government needs to pay for the upkeep of the roads, but they would be absolute clowns if they did anything that makes it more expensive to get an EV, and adds to the net overall taxation of private vehicles. If anything they might want to hit non-EV a bit harder for a while until we can go for road pricing, which does seem like where we will obviously end up.
They are absolute clowns. Just like the last lot. They have worked very hard to prove this - it would be rude to deny them the red noses and big shoes they have worked so very hard for.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
Start from the assumption that they’re against the concept of private transport, and work backwards from there.
They’ll ban sales of new non-EV cars, and then start to ramp petrol by 25p/litre every year until it’s £10 and going for a Sunday morning drive in something fun costs £100/hour in petrol.
Then wonder why the economy is doing a bit poorly. After all, the correlation between economic performance and transport costs has only been known for..... centuries?
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
My take from Caerphilly and Runcorn is that voters on the Right will vote overwhelmingly for Reform, if they are best placed to win; and voters on the Left will vote overwhelmingly for the left wing party that is best placed to stop them.
At least in by-election conditions.
I don't believe that to be true. Forever Labour voters voted Johnson in 2019 to kick out the European foreigners. Now they will vote Farage to kick out "other" foreigners.
My late father always voted Labour but he was as socially right wing as they came. With Reform one can vote to kick out foreigners without vomiting as one votes Tory.
If he were still around, do you think he would be a Lab/Reform floater? That would be interesting - because popular wisdom - which I do not necessarily buy - says there aren't many of those.
Last night in Burnley by elections there was a clear move to sectarianism. In this environment you had a scenario where you vote Labour and get an Islamist candidate or vote Reform. I can imagine there will be a lot of pressure for the white working class men to vote Reform down the pub in the same way that those down at the mosque are pushed to vote the Islamist candidate.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
We WERE with esure for the car. No claims for many years BUT the premium went up massively this year. Result; we're no longer with esure. Pity, because when I wanted add another driver for a travel 'emergency' (long, irrelevant, story) they were very reasonable. But an increase from around £700 (in itself a lot) to well over £900 for a car driven about 5000 miles per year was, I thought, unreasonable.
I can drive a lot of cars (mine, the wife’s, the children’s, my parents) because putting a 50 year old man with maximum no claims as a (very occasional) driver on a policy seems to significantly knock down what the insurance costs
I was advised....... someone in a pub, a sure source of useful information ...... to add a younger driver to ours, as it would have the effect you describe. So I added our 37 year old granddaughter. Made no difference.
I must confess that I am sometimes puzzled by the economics of the car insurance industry.
If only PB had someone in the car insurance racket, albeit in America where the details are presumably different but the principles might be the same.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
Is the M6 toll optimally priced to maximise revenue? I suspect halving prices (particularly off peak) might more than double traffic - at over £10 a go it's currently too expensive for most private users, I'd certainly be much more likely to use it at £3-5 a pop. The other trick would be to raise the speed limit to 90mph or 100mph - I suspect that would make it's use more appealing, particularly to those in a hurry.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
Is the M6 toll optimally priced to maximise revenue? I suspect halving prices (particularly off peak) might more than double traffic - at over £10 a go it's currently too expensive for most private users, I'd certainly be much more likely to use it at £3-5 a pop. The other trick would be to raise the speed limit to 90mph or 100mph - I suspect that would make it's use more appealing, particularly to those in a hurry.
M6Toll is priced to ensure that it brings in enough revenue to make fat profits but not enough that the road surface wears out quickly so they have to pay money on repairs.
We WERE with esure for the car. No claims for many years BUT the premium went up massively this year. Result; we're no longer with esure. Pity, because when I wanted add another driver for a travel 'emergency' (long, irrelevant, story) they were very reasonable. But an increase from around £700 (in itself a lot) to well over £900 for a car driven about 5000 miles per year was, I thought, unreasonable.
I can drive a lot of cars (mine, the wife’s, the children’s, my parents) because putting a 50 year old man with maximum no claims as a (very occasional) driver on a policy seems to significantly knock down what the insurance costs
I was advised....... someone in a pub, a sure source of useful information ...... to add a younger driver to ours, as it would have the effect you describe. So I added our 37 year old granddaughter. Made no difference.
I must confess that I am sometimes puzzled by the economics of the car insurance industry.
If only PB had someone in the car insurance racket, albeit in America where the details are presumably different but the principles might be the same.
There are similar business models to Robert’s working in the UK.
I do have to giggle about the EV per mile exclusive. In the Telegraph - which is the first sign that it isn’t true because so little they print as “news” is.
Comedy - it’s pay per mile. But no monitoring. Honest motorists will fill in EV bureaucrat paperwork each year and self declare how many miles they have driven.
What do Telegraph owners hate? Government bureaucrats and EVs. So of course they have magically conflated the two.
As you are around - have you seen Tesla's (lack of sales) in October
So the SMMT have published sales figures for October
Battery EV sales rose 24% compared to October 2024
TESLA however sold only 511 cars compared to 971 cars in October 2024 - that’s a 47% drop
So the new models were a very temporary boost and the reality is that a Tesla car is not something people seem to want.
Tesla sales in the first month of any given quarter are always shit. They deliver very few vehicles - never have. Which is why you need to look at the quarter
IIRC Tesla charters ships to deliver their cars from US to UK, so they arrive in batches of 5,000 rather than steadily as with most other manufacturers who rent space on existing shipping routes.
A slight "yes, but". About 2/3 of Tesla European sales are made in Berlin (Model Ys). YTD (Aug/Sept) approx sales figures:
Year-to-date (Jan-Sep) sales for the Model Y are 109,793, while the Model 3 has sold 49,524 units from Jan-Aug 2025.
That's enough for roughly one Model 3 transport from the USA every month at 5000 per.
(As an aside, that's not a lot to my eye for a place the size of their Berlin factory.)
As an aside, I take the flappage from the Telegraph yesterday as an attempt to create frightening narratives to wind up their Captain Mainwaring in his shed in Tunbridge Wells (it may be a posh shed).
Ah, I hadn't realised it was the Telegraph.
At this point, I need to scuttle away and make sure it *was* the Telegraph, to make sure I do not get hoist by my own petard.
(Checks: yes, according to Rochdale, it was:
@RochdalePioneers said: I do have to giggle about the EV per mile exclusive. In the Telegraph - which is the first sign that it isn’t true because so little they print as “news” is.
Comedy - it’s pay per mile. But no monitoring. Honest motorists will fill in EV bureaucrat paperwork each year and self declare how many miles they have driven.
What do Telegraph owners hate? Government bureaucrats and EVs. So of course they have magically conflated the two. )
I thought government sources have admitted they're talking about this ? (Reported on Today as "we'd be lying if we said we weren't discussing this.")
The mileage thing would require you to predict your mileage for the next year, and would be corrected each following year for actual mileage driven - ie you pay upfront.
The Telegraph isn't infallibly wrong. Just highly untrustworthy as a source.
"discussing" could mean "this is a crock of shite and we're just setting out the multitudinous reasons why" ...
As well as a repeat visit to the Volgograd oil refinery (6th largest in Russia), there was also a fire at a refinery in Belarus and an ammunition storage depot hit at Donetsk airport. The word is that this was a large UAV warehouse that the Ukrainians have been trying to find for a long time.
Yes definitely a good night for Ukraine, lots of damage done. The smoking ammo dump near Pokrovsk should help ease the pressure that’s been building up there over the last couple of weeks.
Ukraine also hit a large (3.7GW) thermal power plant that supplies Moscow.
Ukraine's attacks on electricity substations appear to be focused on cutting off Moscow from electricity supply. This winter Ukraine is able to respond to attacks on its electricity infrastructure with attacks on the electricity supply to Moscow. It will be interesting to see whether this is successful enough to create a deterrent effect and how Muscovites will respond to experiencing the war more directly.
The video of the strike on the UAV warehouse at Donetsk Airport shows a very marked shockwave after the detonation - a very large explosion. Three oil depots were also hit in Crimea - one of which caused a blast that was heard over a distance spanning Simferopol and the south coast - a distance of more than 20 miles.
A very successful night for Ukraine in the strategic bombing war. This is the way to win the war.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
I've followed Emma for some time. She's a very encouragingly traditional British cheapskate.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
Hmm. Whilst there are people who can drive well at high speed whenever I drive in the UK I’m depressed how many arses driving at 80 plus don’t seem to have any concept of stopping distances and will be right up your backside to get you out of “their lane” even when you are over the speed limit yourself.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
There's another one in Derbyshire, too, reported this week, but I have not tracked the detailed history. It's personal capacity / health reasons given:
“It is with regret and a heavy heart that I have to resign my position as county councillor for the Horsley division due to health issues. I have tried very hard to cope as well as being a councillor and I have found it too difficult to fulfil my role and believe it is best for my own personal health and the public if I step away and allow someone else the opportunity to do the position justice. https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/derbyshire-reform-councillor-resigns-county-10624036
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
MAGA want to be victims, so they are calling this a "Christian genocide". Boko Haram are a jihadist militant group and have attacked Christians, Muslims and others in Nigeria. Boko Haram have been active for decades, including throughout Trump's first term, but he's just now decided they're a problem.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
That's Trump and his supporters demonising Islam, by emphasising "Christians like us" as victims of narratives to justify their sectarian politics.
It's the same schtick as Trump's "white genocide in South Africa" lie, based on claiming that a "field of crosses" at a demo was an actual graveyard of white victims of murder.
That lie was repeated by Charlie Kirk to the Oxford Union, after it had been comprehensively debunked.
That's not of course to say that there are not huge issues in Nigeria (that's what the Biafran War was partly about in the late 1960s, following on from decolonisation tensions). There are. But to have them used cynically as political footballs in simplistic USA politics will not help anyone, and eventually will prove a stumbling block for the MAGA.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
I've followed Emma for some time. She's a very encouragingly traditional British cheapskate.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
A friend of mine gets cheap deals, mainly on Norwegian as they have cheap single person studios and will hence have other solo travellers to hang out with. I presume they are last minute deals to fill the ship, but the last one he got was three weeks ahead so time to get your shit together and even take time off work if you are working. Starts from Lisbon so plenty of cheap flights.
I hadn't really considered cruising until I'm much older, other than maybe a couple of niche routes (Rhine/Danube river cruise and Norwegian coast) but might look for a short, cheap one to see if I like it.
I called out Caerphilly as peak Farage and I am sticking with it - their numbers have at best plateaued and at worst have started to shrink back a little. They're now being exposed on policy and that exposure is damaging to them.
Here is the simple truth - there is no solution to our current mess that voters will accept. We can't raise taxes. We can't slash public services which have already been slashed, so all that's left is removing provision of things like adult social care completely which will have its own gargantuan costs as chaos follows. We can't apparently challenge the status quo - treasury orthodoxy, faux-market complex costly structures, investment, taxation.
Reform won all this support because they offered a Change. A Solution. Making MY life better for once. But they can't do that - and as council after council is taken by Reform, beset by wazzockry and does little other than cut services and increase council tax, people will continue to shrink back from them.
As always, the trend is your friend, and this particular survey is very useful. Most voters hate Farage and everything he stands for. They'll swing vote all over the shop to stop him. So Reform need to nail their vote down to counter this, and it's just going to slide away from them.
Leaving aside the effect of voters seeing Reform in action, what's the effect on the activists?
There's a type of politician who is very effective while in opposition. Asking difficult questions, throwing effective bricks, but also standing up for their patch. Nothing shameful in any of that, the system doesn't work without that degree of piss and vinegar.
But it's a blooming disaster if such people end up running the show. To govern is to choose, and populism is often about denial that choices is necessary. Havering Council is currently run by the Residents' Association, who are another version of that archetype, and they're not particularly enjoying the experience. Some Labour MPs are also hating being the ones in the big chair.
Why should Reform be any different?
"There's a type of politician who is very effective while in opposition. Asking difficult questions, throwing effective bricks, but also standing up for their patch. Nothing shameful in any of that, the system doesn't work without that degree of piss and vinegar.
But it's a blooming disaster if such people end up running the show. "
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
I think HGVs, buses etc should have a much lower tax because of the additional utility or economic value they provide (though a nudge towards lighter vehicles is still a good idea).
HGVs are only 44 tonnes when fully laden, and split across 6 axles - that should be reflected in the tax too.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
I've followed Emma for some time. She's a very encouragingly traditional British cheapskate.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
A friend of mine gets cheap deals, mainly on Norwegian as they have cheap single person studios and will hence have other solo travellers to hang out with. I presume they are last minute deals to fill the shop, but the last one he got was three weeks ahead so time to get your shit together and even take time off work if you are working. Starts from Lisbon so plenty of cheap flights.
I hadn't really considered cruising until I'm much older, other than maybe a couple of niche routes (Rhine/Danube river cruise and Norwegian coast) but might look for a short, cheap one to see if I like it.
The river cruises are going to be a rather different experience as a much smaller boat!
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
Hmm. Whilst there are people who can drive well at high speed whenever I drive in the UK I’m depressed how many arses driving at 80 plus don’t seem to have any concept of stopping distances and will be right up your backside to get you out of “their lane” even when you are over the speed limit yourself.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
A lot of the quieter bits of UK motorway run at 90mph in practice now, without much problem.
The trick to letting the m6 toll run that fast officially would be half decent enforcement that kicks in not much past the speed limit - maybe put the limit at 90mph, but being nicked at over 100mph is still a day out in court to explain yourself.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
Hmm. Whilst there are people who can drive well at high speed whenever I drive in the UK I’m depressed how many arses driving at 80 plus don’t seem to have any concept of stopping distances and will be right up your backside to get you out of “their lane” even when you are over the speed limit yourself.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
That’s an awesome idea, unlimited speed roads but only for those that pass an advanced driving test.
M6 Toll used to be seriously empty once they cleared the huge roadworks on the main M6 viaduct, but haven’t been on it for a decade and a half myself. Lots of online complaints about sneaky speed policing though.
100mph is perfectly safe in a modern car, so long as one understands that stopping distances are proportional to the speed squared. 100mph car has almost exactly twice the potential energy of 70mph car.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I disagree with @theProle on this. If there is not enough resource to repaint Zebra crossings, where on earth will it come from to repaint yellow lines, which are far more extensive.
The Welsh 20mph default limit project, and the Scottish pavement parking ban are shining examples.
The problem is what it always is - entitled people in motor vehicles assuming it is OK for them to do whatever they think they need to do regardless of rules, law, Highway Code, or the interests of vulnerable road users. "But I need to ... because of XYZ ... waah waah waah". FUCK OFF. It's a motor vehicle - put in in the carriageway.
If pavements, mobility tracks and all the rest are left alone, they are cheap and will last 30 or 40 years.
But the entitlement assumed motorists drive and park all over them and destroy them, then we have cracked pavers, trip hazards and all the rest.
The further issue we have is random crowds of cowboys wandering everywhere allowed to dig holes wheverever they want, with no repair to equivalent quality of local authorities with capacity properly to regulate. That iirc is one of Mrs Thatchers' ideas, that failed because the regulatory side required to make it work failed, so we are left with a wild west populated by gangsters.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I'd argue that drivers are allowed to park on the pavement if wheelchair users and those pushing buggies or pushchairs are allowed to scrape the paint off down the side if they struggle to get through.
Seems a fair trade.
Many many years ago when Dad was a young policeman in Swindon the fire brigade needed to drive down a very narrow road with cars on both sides. Dad authorised the fire engine to go down irrespective of how much damage was caused... Fighting the fire was more important.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
Hmm. Whilst there are people who can drive well at high speed whenever I drive in the UK I’m depressed how many arses driving at 80 plus don’t seem to have any concept of stopping distances and will be right up your backside to get you out of “their lane” even when you are over the speed limit yourself.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
That’s an awesome idea, unlimited speed roads but only for those that pass an advanced driving test.
M6 Toll used to be seriously empty once they cleared the huge roadworks on the main M6 viaduct, but haven’t been on it for a decade and a half myself. Lots of online complaints about sneaky speed policing though.
100mph is perfectly safe in a modern car, so long as one understands that stopping distances are proportional to the speed squared. 100mph car has almost exactly twice the potential energy of 70mph car.
Motorways are exceptionally safe compared with urban roads. Self-driving cars will probably see us see speeds well in excess of 100mph considering the lack of pedestrians/cyclists.
(That physics is also why dropping from 30mph to 20mph has such a dramatic impact on injuries, and that's before you take into account increased reaction times)
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
I've followed Emma for some time. She's a very encouragingly traditional British cheapskate.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
I came across her when doing some research for a holiday that never happened, she has a very British sense of humour and goes out of her way to show that cruising isn’t just for the retired and wealthy.
IIRC you can live on a cruise liner for something like $50k or $60k a year in a standard balcony room, which isn’t bad given that it includes most food and drink.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
If anyone on PB has Trump Derangement Syndrome it's you.
Most of right wingers on PB can see what's staring us in the face. You are thankfully one of the very few Trump apologists left on PB . How you can support Trump and Ukraine and keep a straight face is quite a feat.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
Not necessarily. Completely new section of dual carriageway locally that's taken over three years to complete, with all the nightmare traffic queues that entailed. Lovely new bit of road.
Almost as soon as it was done, literally within a few weeks, it was closed and dug up again to replace old gas mains. And of course the road repair after reinstating that is greatly inferior to the brand new surface just dug up again, and will deteriorate rapidly.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
I'd say it's more likely because they were engineered for X usage, and have been used for Y usage. It's about joined up management, which does not exist here.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
I've followed Emma for some time. She's a very encouragingly traditional British cheapskate.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
I came across her when doing some research for a holiday that never happened, she has a very British sense of humour and goes out of her way to show that cruising isn’t just for the retired and wealthy.
IIRC you can live on a cruise liner for something like $50k or $60k a year in a standard balcony room, which isn’t bad given that it includes most food and drink.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
Not necessarily. Completely new section of dual carriageway locally that's taken over three years to complete, with all the nightmare traffic queues that entailed. Lovely new bit of road.
Almost as soon as it was done, literally within a few weeks, it was closed and dug up again to replace old gas mains. And of course the road repair after reinstating that is greatly inferior to the brand new surface just dug up again, and will deteriorate rapidly.
The usual lack of joined-up thinking.
If you’re building a new road, get all of the utilities to pro-actively upgrade all infrastructure that crosses it. In fact, put the budget for the utility upgrades as part of the road-building cost.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
Hmm. Whilst there are people who can drive well at high speed whenever I drive in the UK I’m depressed how many arses driving at 80 plus don’t seem to have any concept of stopping distances and will be right up your backside to get you out of “their lane” even when you are over the speed limit yourself.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
A lot of the quieter bits of UK motorway run at 90mph in practice now, without much problem.
The trick to letting the m6 toll run that fast officially would be half decent enforcement that kicks in not much past the speed limit - maybe put the limit at 90mph, but being nicked at over 100mph is still a day out in court to explain yourself.
Traffic control cameras do monitor speed but are not used to enforce limits. They indicate that In normal driving conditions most motorway drivers are travelling at around 85mph. This is generally perfectly safe, although you will of course get done if the police snap you.
It has always astonished me that I continue to be allowed to drive on the basis of a single short examination I passed in 1966 (disregarding my triennial visits to Speed Awareness courses.)
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
Not necessarily. Completely new section of dual carriageway locally that's taken over three years to complete, with all the nightmare traffic queues that entailed. Lovely new bit of road.
Almost as soon as it was done, literally within a few weeks, it was closed and dug up again to replace old gas mains. And of course the road repair after reinstating that is greatly inferior to the brand new surface just dug up again, and will deteriorate rapidly.
If manholes and pipes are collapsing on a new road, then it hasn't been engineered to take the actual loads.
HGVs are not new. The loads they create are known and the engineering solutions to those loads are known. Non-collapsing manholes and pipes have been achieved nearly everywhere else, around the world.
To step back from the Reformgraph story into reality for a minute, the government has a big problem. It taxes this Bad Thing to stop people using it. Tax revenues drop. Shit, better tax people doing the thing we just encouraged you to do.
Road pricing is inevitable - always has been - as fuel duty rolls back. The furore will be how they replace it. Pence per mile on busy roads is the obvious solution - though the people whose suburban roads become rat runs to avoid motorways will be outraged. Or they go all vehicles all trips, and rural voters go mad pointing out there is little to no public transport and school is 9 miles away.
Like replacing Council Tax, its easier not to.
You probably wouldn't tax motorways. That's where you want the traffic to be. You'd tax city centres and minor suburban roads the highest, busy urban arterial roads in the middle, and motorways and quiet rural roads not at all. Tax by externality. I was all in favour of this approach before covid. (Now, its information I wouldn't trust the state with.)
Motorways are the really expensive roads to provide though. Charging for them (as the French do) is entirely reasonable.
That's a fair point and a perfectly valid point of vieelw, but my personal view is that that's not relevant: externalities should be the only consideration. Motorways should be where you want the traffic to be. (And people respond to this: look at the emptiness (and unprofitability) of the M6 toll compared to the M6.) I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
The M6 Toll is now £10.50 for a car, and has unmarked police cars and speed cameras all over it.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
Hmm. Whilst there are people who can drive well at high speed whenever I drive in the UK I’m depressed how many arses driving at 80 plus don’t seem to have any concept of stopping distances and will be right up your backside to get you out of “their lane” even when you are over the speed limit yourself.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
I think road pricing should be done on a system that mirrors RFL with an increase on the annual cost of RFL to fill some of the hole from fuel duty. Cost based on the weight of the car, which tends mirrors size, value etc Payable either monthly of quarterly People who say 'I don't drive much' will have to console themselves that the roads are are thee is they decide to use them Petrol and diesel become cheaper? I think not, the escalator will be revived, probably on steroids to change behaviour People who drive electric will pay more as the cars are heavier.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
Not necessarily. Completely new section of dual carriageway locally that's taken over three years to complete, with all the nightmare traffic queues that entailed. Lovely new bit of road.
Almost as soon as it was done, literally within a few weeks, it was closed and dug up again to replace old gas mains. And of course the road repair after reinstating that is greatly inferior to the brand new surface just dug up again, and will deteriorate rapidly.
The usual lack of joined-up thinking.
If you’re building a new road, get all of the utilities to pro-actively upgrade all infrastructure that crosses it. In fact, put the budget for the utility upgrades as part of the road-building cost.
Last winter in Bath the main A36 route in from the south was closed for around 6 months for essential repairs. No issue with that - needed doing.
What didn't need doing were the constant minor roadwork on the only other viable route to Claverton Down and the university. This often turned a 40 minute commute into a 1.5-2h commute. Complete lack of joined up thinking.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
If anyone on PB has Trump Derangement Syndrome it's you.
Most of right wingers on PB can see what's staring us in the face. You are thankfully one of the very few Trump apologists left on PB . How you can support Trump and Ukraine and keep a straight face is quite a feat.
You’ve clearly not noticed several critisisms of Trump over Ukraine.
And no, I don’t support the president, I don’t particularly like him at all, but do go to the effort of following both sides of the US political debate and try to present the other point of view compared to most, on what’s a betting site after all.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
MAGA want to be victims, so they are calling this a "Christian genocide". Boko Haram are a jihadist militant group and have attacked Christians, Muslims and others in Nigeria. Boko Haram have been active for decades, including throughout Trump's first term, but he's just now decided they're a problem.
I'd want to be convinced Trump's interest in combating Boko Haram has much to do with MAGA per se. MAGA has traditionally been isolationist. The causes of White South Africans and Nigerian Christians might be championed by other influencers, such as Elon Musk, but maybe he caught a documentary last week.
In any case, the United States did put Nigeria on its watch list during Trump's first term but Joe Biden removed it.
One irony is that Trump's USAID cuts probably help Boko Haram. Another is that Nigeria is swimming in oil so there ought to be more than enough money to go round.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. In addition to simple blocking, we cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line, and all the rest.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
Part of the solution is what the Dutch call unbundling of modes ... that is separate networks as we see now in eg London and Manchester, and these networks need to go everywhere. But as soon as investment is implemented it is choked off 3 years later, or funding not finalised until half way through the period when it should have been spent, or there arises an enormous populist whining noise.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The BBC do not reckon it might only be 3000. The BBC looked at the NGO's numbers and saw 3 problems (numbers don't add up, duplicate reports, numbers aren't of Christians but all deaths). Correcting one of them (numbers added up) brings the number down to 3000, but they weren't able to correct for the other 3000, so the true number is probably below 3000.
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Going back to the original post, what has their professed religion got to do with anything?
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
It does at least incentivise more fuel-efficient vehicles and disincentivise urban driving (where you are likely to get worse mileage). HGVs pay much more road tax, although not I presume 3000x.
That's ridiculous, local roads in my area need repairing every few months because they are smashed up by construction HGVs (manhole and pipe collapses), that's even at a notional 20mph limit.
That's quite probably because the roads have never been properly engineered.
I'd say it's more likely because they were engineered for X usage, and have been used for Y usage. It's about joined up management, which does not exist here.
The joined up management would require acknowledgement that we're growing the population far faster than we can cope.
There's another one in Derbyshire, too, reported this week, but I have not tracked the detailed history. It's personal capacity / health reasons given:
“It is with regret and a heavy heart that I have to resign my position as county councillor for the Horsley division due to health issues. I have tried very hard to cope as well as being a councillor and I have found it too difficult to fulfil my role and believe it is best for my own personal health and the public if I step away and allow someone else the opportunity to do the position justice. https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/derbyshire-reform-councillor-resigns-county-10624036
It's worth noting that defections to Reform, and by-election gains, are running well ahead of defections from Reform.
Reform are up 108 since May 1st, the Conservatives down 148, and Labour down 166, in net terms.
On topic, we don't know what the Green/Your Party voters will be doing in three years time.
Right now, most would vote Labour to keep out Reform. But, these are people who want revenge socialism, and who hate Israel and NATO. Three years of having to endure "red Tories" in power might leave them indifferent. And, if Labour move towards their position, they'll lost centrist voters to the Conservatives.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. We cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
It is certainly true that pavement surfaces are often appalling, I tripped and went flying running the other day, although it was tree roots this time. Drivers wonder why runners are in the road, well although as drivers we all complain about road surfaces they are generally much smoother than pavements.
When I complain about this in any forum, I am told that my requirements as a runner are not the norm, and pavements are safe enough. However, I think actually I'm a reasonable proxy for someone less able, as it can be harder to spot hazards when you move faster, have less time to make corrections and the consequences of a fall are greater if you are moving faster.
I think that things like tree roots and utilities are a bigger problem than cars driving on pavements, although I hadn't realised about the kerb edge thing which means just putting a wheel up on the kerb is a problem. I do, however, mostly park completely in the road.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. We cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
The problem is that in some places, especially outside London, roads are too narrow and pavements are too narrow and there is no off-street parking. I've no idea what can be done about it because absolutely no-one is up for knocking down rows of houses to create more space, or compulsorily purchasing strips of farmland. Perhaps more could be done with new developments.
There's another one in Derbyshire, too, reported this week, but I have not tracked the detailed history. It's personal capacity / health reasons given:
“It is with regret and a heavy heart that I have to resign my position as county councillor for the Horsley division due to health issues. I have tried very hard to cope as well as being a councillor and I have found it too difficult to fulfil my role and believe it is best for my own personal health and the public if I step away and allow someone else the opportunity to do the position justice. https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/derbyshire-reform-councillor-resigns-county-10624036
It's worth noting that defections to Reform, and by-election gains, are running well ahead of defections from Reform.
Reform are up 108 since May 1st, the Conservatives down 148, and Labour down 166, in net terms.
I think the upshot of a quick analysis of Open Council Data someone did last week (was it you?) was the chum rate of resignations/defections/losing the whip was similar for all parties
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Look at the comment to which I was replying, the second such saying it was fake news purely because Trump said it.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Well, sure. But arguing over the number of casualties is hardly TDS. And the issue isn't really about the precise number of casualties anyway, as I'm sure you're aware.
I disagree with @sandpit about just everything in life and the universe, but on this he was accused of falling down an alt-right fact free rabbit hole for repeating 'fake news' that 'we might have noticed' if it was real.
It is real (though perhaps inflated). I'd perhaps have used Sandpit Derangement Syndrome rather than TDS, but it's a bit less catchy.
What about the 100 or so constituencies where it will be Lib Dem or Reform. Once again positivity for the Lib Dems is ignored
LDs will win most of those.
Realistically, I think there about 15 or so seats in the West Country, where Reform and the Lib Dems are in contention. Elsewhere, they are strongest in entirely different types of seat.
And now Ukraine's HUR intelligence agency is claiming an attack by Russian partisans on locomotives used for military logistics.
There is also this amazing video of a Shahed drone on terminal approach to a block of residential flats being destroyed by an interceptor drone. https://t.me/noel_reports/36605
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Look at the comment to which I was replying, the second such saying it was fake news purely because Trump said it.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Well, sure. But arguing over the number of casualties is hardly TDS. And the issue isn't really about the precise number of casualties anyway, as I'm sure you're aware.
I disagree with @sandpit about just everything in life and the universe, but on this he was accused of falling down an alt-right fact free rabbit hole for repeating 'fake news' that 'we might have noticed' if it was real.
It is real (though perhaps inflated). I'd perhaps have used Sandpit Derangement Syndrome rather than TDS, but it's a bit less catchy.
Thanks. There’s too few of us here who actually look at what Trump’s supporters are saying, and trying to dismiss anything the president says as being fake doesn’t help the discussion.
There is something approaching a civil war going on in Nigeria at the moment, with thousands dead. That should be concerning, even if we don’t like the US president.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. We cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
It is certainly true that pavement surfaces are often appalling, I tripped and went flying running the other day, although it was tree roots this time. Drivers wonder why runners are in the road, well although as drivers we all complain about road surfaces they are generally much smoother than pavements.
When I complain about this in any forum, I am told that my requirements as a runner are not the norm, and pavements are safe enough. However, I think actually I'm a reasonable proxy for someone less able, as it can be harder to spot hazards when you move faster, have less time to make corrections and the consequences of a fall are greater if you are moving faster.
I think that things like tree roots and utilities are a bigger problem than cars driving on pavements, although I hadn't realised about the kerb edge thing which means just putting a wheel up on the kerb is a problem. I do, however, mostly park completely in the road.
I typically run in the road too. And many runners have worked out cycle lanes are much better than pavements...
It does drive me mad that the surfaces afforded to pedestrians and cyclists are so much worse than for people sat inside a car with plush seats and suspension.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. We cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
It is certainly true that pavement surfaces are often appalling, I tripped and went flying running the other day, although it was tree roots this time. Drivers wonder why runners are in the road, well although as drivers we all complain about road surfaces they are generally much smoother than pavements.
When I complain about this in any forum, I am told that my requirements as a runner are not the norm, and pavements are safe enough. However, I think actually I'm a reasonable proxy for someone less able, as it can be harder to spot hazards when you move faster, have less time to make corrections and the consequences of a fall are greater if you are moving faster.
I think that things like tree roots and utilities are a bigger problem than cars driving on pavements, although I hadn't realised about the kerb edge thing which means just putting a wheel up on the kerb is a problem. I do, however, mostly park completely in the road.
I typically run in the road too. And many runners have worked out cycle lanes are much better than pavements...
It does drive me mad that the surfaces afforded to pedestrians and cyclists are so much worse than for people sat inside a car with plush seats and suspension.
That is because the cyclists have moved to the middle of the road because cycle lanes are full of fallen leaves and joggers.
Looks like we will have to cancel a cruise booked for Feb as I have broken my leg and my orthopaedic consultant is not confident it will be fixed well enough in time for me to travel safely. Due to pay the balance on Monday so now is the time to cancel.
Cunard won't give me back the deposit (c. £2k) but I could claim it off my travel insurance.
Question: do any PBers have experience of what impact claiming on travel insurance might have on future premiums? Just wondering if it's like pet insurance - claim once and the insurers bump up future premiums massively. The thing is with travel insurance, I feel it's non-negotiable as the costs if uninsured could be huge.
Any views?
Can't tell you about the insurance, but can tell you the holiday companies love cancellations. And they can claim the VAT back too.
Yeah, I bet. It's an accessible cabin too and there's always a wait list for those as cruises approach so they will haave no issue reselling it. I'll ask them is they'll give me a future cruise credit for the deposit but I know the answer :-(
It’s always worth asking about credit for the deposit if they resell the cabin, especially if there’s likely to be demand for it. Say that you’ll rebook straight away.
I follow this lady who blogs about cruises, there’s a load of useful information on her website. https://emmacruises.com/
Good luck and get well soon!
I've followed Emma for some time. She's a very encouragingly traditional British cheapskate.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
I came across her when doing some research for a holiday that never happened, she has a very British sense of humour and goes out of her way to show that cruising isn’t just for the retired and wealthy.
IIRC you can live on a cruise liner for something like $50k or $60k a year in a standard balcony room, which isn’t bad given that it includes most food and drink.
Cheaper than a care home. And there are medics on board, and two morgues in the case of Cunard. I checked.
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. We cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
It is certainly true that pavement surfaces are often appalling, I tripped and went flying running the other day, although it was tree roots this time. Drivers wonder why runners are in the road, well although as drivers we all complain about road surfaces they are generally much smoother than pavements.
When I complain about this in any forum, I am told that my requirements as a runner are not the norm, and pavements are safe enough. However, I think actually I'm a reasonable proxy for someone less able, as it can be harder to spot hazards when you move faster, have less time to make corrections and the consequences of a fall are greater if you are moving faster.
I think that things like tree roots and utilities are a bigger problem than cars driving on pavements, although I hadn't realised about the kerb edge thing which means just putting a wheel up on the kerb is a problem. I do, however, mostly park completely in the road.
I typically run in the road too. And many runners have worked out cycle lanes are much better than pavements...
It does drive me mad that the surfaces afforded to pedestrians and cyclists are so much worse than for people sat inside a car with plush seats and suspension.
That's been true forever. Back in the eighties when I first used to go running in my local village I ran in the road rather than the rubbish pavement. Its also true now when pushing pushchairs etc.
On pay per mile - the issue is that fuel duty is the perfect tax, so anything else is worse.
We then have the usual British logic that everything has to be invented afresh. HMRC does not look round the world and go hmm XYZ seem to do it this way let’s copy their solution
Fuel duty isn’t quite prefect - road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight IIRC, so a fully laden 6 axle 44 tonne artic does about 3000 times the damage to the road as a 2 tonne 2 axle ICE car, whilst only paying approx 20x as much in fuel taxes since rolling resistance is proportional to weight.
4th power of axle weight is correct, so there should probably be a weight element to the tax going forward.
You’d need to separate cars and lorries though, as is the case at the moment, with the former subsidising the latter. Lorries are doing something economically productive most of the time, and increasing their costs feeds quickly into overall inflation.
If we’re believers in market forces then lorries should be paying for the damage they cause though & the resultant one time pass through in inflation to consumers of lorry-transported goods would be a good thing.
At a broad level, car drivers should probably be paying whatever congestion charges are necessary to keep traffic flowing at max capacity whilst lorries & buses should be paying weight * mileage charges. Hard to achieve in practice though.
(Ironically, a fully loaded bus has a higher per axle weight than a fully-laden 44-tonne artic does. You do wonder if that’s fully factored into the costs of public transport! Buses don’t run full all the time of course - an unladen bus has about the same per axle weight as the artic does - 7 tonnes / axle.)
What happens when you can’t park outside your house because someone else’s car is there
Cones, but I do remember reading that some councils are offering you exclusive parking bays outside your property if you have these installed.
You cannot use cones to try and steal a public parking space for yourself. And I don't see Councils having the resource to faff about with individual parking spaces until they have recovered from being gutted for 15-20 years.
The bigger problem with these is endangerment of pedestrians. From my pov, the footway is a pedestrian space and no obstructions whatsoever are acceptable.
Motor vehicles already dangerously infringe on pedestrian space willy-nilly, regularly destroying pavements, and questioning the assumed entitlement often results in insults or sometimes threats, as anyone who has tried knows. Movement needs to be in the other direction.
Chargers in lamp posts may be acceptable. When chargers block pedestrian space - no.
The pavement parking thing isn't quite as straightforward as you make out, and banning it is the wrong solution.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road. Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
The blanket ban has worked well here, primarily because of it's simplicity. I appreciate you get edge cases like yours but, from the council's perspective, universal rules (e.g. 20mph) are much cheaper to put in place and to enforce.
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
I think the obvious solution is a minimum with of pavement that must be left, enough for a double buggy or a wheelchair. Defined in mm. If the pavement is narrower than this, you can't park on it.
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
I think it's rather more complex than that. We cannot have pavement parking because it smashes up the surface eg slabs (trip hazards etc), because long cane users use the kerb as a guide line.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
It is certainly true that pavement surfaces are often appalling, I tripped and went flying running the other day, although it was tree roots this time. Drivers wonder why runners are in the road, well although as drivers we all complain about road surfaces they are generally much smoother than pavements.
When I complain about this in any forum, I am told that my requirements as a runner are not the norm, and pavements are safe enough. However, I think actually I'm a reasonable proxy for someone less able, as it can be harder to spot hazards when you move faster, have less time to make corrections and the consequences of a fall are greater if you are moving faster.
I think that things like tree roots and utilities are a bigger problem than cars driving on pavements, although I hadn't realised about the kerb edge thing which means just putting a wheel up on the kerb is a problem. I do, however, mostly park completely in the road.
I typically run in the road too. And many runners have worked out cycle lanes are much better than pavements...
It does drive me mad that the surfaces afforded to pedestrians and cyclists are so much worse than for people sat inside a car with plush seats and suspension.
That's been true forever. Back in the eighties when I first used to go running in my local village I ran in the road rather than the rubbish pavement. Its also true now when pushing pushchairs etc.
Round where I am, the pavements are rubbish because they've been torn up by trees planted stupidly. A plane tree in a 4 foot wide pavement. Strangely, this ends up with a tree occupying about 3 foot of the pavement, with room to clamber through the upheave. If you are agile.
No, getting rid of the trees is impossible. Because Tree Are Sacred.
I sneaked out, will a builder neighbour and fixed some particularly dangerous paving slabs - the tree had died, been chopped down. So they left a bloody great hole in the middle of upheave.... We undid the upheave and tidied up round the hole and filled it with earth. Leveled and bedded the paving slabs properly.
To be fair to him, at least he’s drawing attention to a situation that’s mostly been ignored by the international community, with more than 7,000 Christians killed in the country so far this year.
The latest sanctions on Russia appear to be doing a good job as well, just need to send the Tomahawks to Ukraine now so they can take out the Shahed drone factory.
I think we might have noticed 7,000 deaths. Once again you are spiralling down the alt-right fact free rabbit hole.
The BBC reckons it might only be 3,000, so just over one 9/11.
Trump derangement syndrome in full effect again.
The objections are to the idea that intervening in Nigeria would be easy - or effective. This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Look at the comment to which I was replying, the second such saying it was fake news purely because Trump said it.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Well, sure. But arguing over the number of casualties is hardly TDS. And the issue isn't really about the precise number of casualties anyway, as I'm sure you're aware.
I disagree with @sandpit about just everything in life and the universe, but on this he was accused of falling down an alt-right fact free rabbit hole for repeating 'fake news' that 'we might have noticed' if it was real.
It is real (though perhaps inflated). I'd perhaps have used Sandpit Derangement Syndrome rather than TDS, but it's a bit less catchy.
Thanks. There’s too few of us here who actually look at what Trump’s supporters are saying, and trying to dismiss anything the president says as being fake doesn’t help the discussion.
There is something approaching a civil war going on in Nigeria at the moment, with thousands dead. That should be concerning, even if we don’t like the US president.
How did it go last time we intervened military in a civil war ?
Comments
Just as we don't notice the deaths in Sudan, Niger, Mali or Burkina Faso.
Black live don't matter in the Sahel countries.
Likewise that slavery is still endemic in the Sahel countries doesn't matter either.
My main gripe with fuel duty is it hurts rural communities (even though overall it's progressive). We already have ULEZ and congestion charging - just extend that for an urban driving charge.
I would guess this will be banded, so you would pay (upfront) for (say) 0-5000m; 5-7500; 7.500 - 10k etc
You’d need to separate cars and lorries though, as is the case at the moment, with the former subsidising the latter. Lorries are doing something economically productive most of the time, and increasing their costs feeds quickly into overall inflation.
This isn't "drawing attention to" - it's a suggestion that large scale military intervention is a possibility.
"TDS" is just a stupid way of saying you don't want properly to engage in argument.
Outside my house, in a 1950s ex-council estate, is a fairly narrow road with a massive pavement each side. To give you an idea how wide the pavement is, I used to drive my Landrover pickup onto it, and stand in the back to cut my hedge (easier than using ladders, and most of the cuttings land straight in the Landrover ready to go to the tip). With the Landrover parked on the pavement, you could still walk past it without stepping into the road.
Because the road is narrow, everyone leaves their cars with one pair of wheels up on the curb, using maybe 2' out of the 15' width of one pavement. They all do this on the same side, which means that our street has one uninterrupted pavement at 15' wide, and one uninterrupted at 12' wide.
This poses a problem to zero people - you can and people (including me!) do, easily push prams and wheelchairs, ride scooters etc down the narrow side, never mind the wide side. Most of the estate is like this. If you banned pavement parking, half the houses would have no-where to park a car, without improving utility for anyone else.
If could of course be altered (at massive expense) to move all the curbs 2' on one side - but again, the end result is that no-one is better off.
I understand why some people want a ban on pavement parking, and I'm sure it is a problem in some places, but a blanket ban is completely the wrong solution. A much better fix would be just to put double yellow lines in problem spots - but that would require councils to do some actual work, rather than just inconvenience everybody.
I’m happy to call out the president when I disagree with him, such as over Ukraine, but in this case the figure came from a Nigerian NGO and has been widely published.
Now we cannot travel anymore, but we are content that we have achieved so many 'bucket shop' experiences from Antarctica to Ayres Rock and the Great Wall of China, to Moscow and Vladivostok, Japan, Korea and South Africa, North and South America, Egypt and Israel, the Artic and Scandanavia, and of couse multiple trips to Canada
It is true travel broadens the mind and provides lifetime memories
All the best for your recovery and your next cruises
(As would be EVs paying up front for next year's mileage.)
Congress too. Not that they look like they are going to get a voice.
EV taxes will probably rise as EV prices fall, and their market share increases. And I suspect fuel duty will rise a bit at the same time.
The transition would be a lot easier if the national finances weren't such a mess.
An apparently pro-EV government making EVs more expensive that ICE, is in their wheelhouse.
And the issue isn't really about the precise number of casualties anyway, as I'm sure you're aware.
They’ll ban sales of new non-EV cars, and then start to ramp petrol by 25p/litre every year until it’s £10 and going for a Sunday morning drive in something fun costs £100/hour in petrol.
It's hardly being a clown having discussions about that. What matters is how such changes are actually introduced - and so far their management of that is indeed poor.
I wonder if motorways are still the most expensive if divided by the number of vehicles carried?
Today one Russian paper claims that Donald Trump “behaves like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. But no. That’s being unfair to butterflies.”
Plus, the number of loss-making Russian companies goes up, freight loading volume on Russian Railways goes down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4YIbtIIbgI
Steve Rosenberg's review of the Russian press in three and a half minutes. President Trump has been unable to end the Ukraine war on terms acceptable to Moscow.
One paper laments the plight of pensioners who receive just a quarter of the average wage (it is a third in Britain).
Made no difference.
I must confess that I am sometimes puzzled by the economics of the car insurance industry.
When it first opened it was £5 a car and the few cars on it used to average 100mph or more.
They should have made it a proper Autobahn.
It looks like Reform has lost *another* councillor at Kent County Council.
Isabella Kemp now sits as an Independent, according to the council website.
Means that Kent has lost ***16%*** of its Reform councillors since May👀
https://x.com/matilda__martin/status/1986368024647958653
Trump: “We’re going to do things to Nigeria that Nigeria’s not gonna be happy about. Guns-a-blazin!”
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1986239292595753029
Your claim that the situation has "mostly been ignored by the international community" is nonsense.
Buy the Neuralink technology from Musk. Implant each citizen at birth, along with GPS etc. If they engage in Wrong Behaviour - including Wrong Think - auto deduct fines from their bank accounts.
Do this all with AI.
For terrorism* - command the citizens nervous system to shutdown. Or trigger the explosive implant in the brain.
All of this technology can't go wrong - it wold be a government project after all
*Any situation that feels like you could possibly use an anti-terrorism law, to a police officer
Last night in Burnley by elections there was a clear move to sectarianism. In this environment you had a scenario where you vote Labour and get an Islamist candidate or vote Reform. I can imagine there will be a lot of pressure for the white working class men to vote Reform down the pub in the same way that those down at the mosque are pushed to vote the Islamist candidate.
The other trick would be to raise the speed limit to 90mph or 100mph - I suspect that would make it's use more appealing, particularly to those in a hurry.
https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/pay-as-you-go/
You’re signing up to being tracked, as the companies need to understand the details of your use of the car, not just priced per mile in most cases.
Internal cabin. Choose your package very carefully. And the rest.
For the more gambling inclined, there are also pieces around on how to live aboard, subsidised by casino incentives.
To allow even faster speeds would be a recipe for disaster unless you only allow those with advanced driving test passes to use those roads. Can you imagine the number of absolute tools going faster than their brains can handle?
The UK road network is too busy and I don’t think even a toll road in the UK is going to be as empty as the autobahns yet alone the French tolled autoroutes.
“It is with regret and a heavy heart that I have to resign my position as county councillor for the Horsley division due to health issues. I have tried very hard to cope as well as being a councillor and I have found it too difficult to fulfil my role and believe it is best for my own personal health and the public if I step away and allow someone else the opportunity to do the position justice.
https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/derbyshire-reform-councillor-resigns-county-10624036
Ultimately cars are private property and it's a pretty sweet deal that we're allowed to use up public space to store them in the first place. In Japan there is no on-street parking at all.
It's the same schtick as Trump's "white genocide in South Africa" lie, based on claiming that a "field of crosses" at a demo was an actual graveyard of white victims of murder.
That lie was repeated by Charlie Kirk to the Oxford Union, after it had been comprehensively debunked.
That's not of course to say that there are not huge issues in Nigeria (that's what the Biafran War was partly about in the late 1960s, following on from decolonisation tensions). There are. But to have them used cynically as political footballs in simplistic USA politics will not help anyone, and eventually will prove a stumbling block for the MAGA.
I hadn't really considered cruising until I'm much older, other than maybe a couple of niche routes (Rhine/Danube river cruise and Norwegian coast) but might look for a short, cheap one to see if I like it.
"There's a type of politician who is very effective while in opposition. Asking difficult questions, throwing effective bricks, but also standing up for their patch. Nothing shameful in any of that, the system doesn't work without that degree of piss and vinegar.
But it's a blooming disaster if such people end up running the show. "
Sir Keir is surely the perfect example of this?
HGVs are only 44 tonnes when fully laden, and split across 6 axles - that should be reflected in the tax too.
The trick to letting the m6 toll run that fast officially would be half decent enforcement that kicks in not much past the speed limit - maybe put the limit at 90mph, but being nicked at over 100mph is still a day out in court to explain yourself.
M6 Toll used to be seriously empty once they cleared the huge roadworks on the main M6 viaduct, but haven’t been on it for a decade and a half myself. Lots of online complaints about sneaky speed policing though.
100mph is perfectly safe in a modern car, so long as one understands that stopping distances are proportional to the speed squared. 100mph car has almost exactly twice the potential energy of 70mph car.
The Welsh 20mph default limit project, and the Scottish pavement parking ban are shining examples.
The problem is what it always is - entitled people in motor vehicles assuming it is OK for them to do whatever they think they need to do regardless of rules, law, Highway Code, or the interests of vulnerable road users. "But I need to ... because of XYZ ... waah waah waah". FUCK OFF. It's a motor vehicle - put in in the carriageway.
If pavements, mobility tracks and all the rest are left alone, they are cheap and will last 30 or 40 years.
But the entitlement assumed motorists drive and park all over them and destroy them, then we have cracked pavers, trip hazards and all the rest.
The further issue we have is random crowds of cowboys wandering everywhere allowed to dig holes wheverever they want, with no repair to equivalent quality of local authorities with capacity properly to regulate. That iirc is one of Mrs Thatchers' ideas, that failed because the regulatory side required to make it work failed, so we are left with a wild west populated by gangsters.
Seems a fair trade.
Many many years ago when Dad was a young policeman in Swindon the fire brigade needed to drive down a very narrow road with cars on both sides. Dad authorised the fire engine to go down irrespective of how much damage was caused... Fighting the fire was more important.
(That physics is also why dropping from 30mph to 20mph has such a dramatic impact on injuries, and that's before you take into account increased reaction times)
The drivers that annoy me are the ones that block the pavement, but still don't leave enough room for two cars to park, thus blocking both pedestrians and drivers rather than just drivers.
IIRC you can live on a cruise liner for something like $50k or $60k a year in a standard balcony room, which isn’t bad given that it includes most food and drink.
Most of right wingers on PB can see what's staring us in the face. You are thankfully one of the very few Trump apologists left on PB . How you can support Trump and Ukraine and keep a straight face is quite a feat.
Completely new section of dual carriageway locally that's taken over three years to complete, with all the nightmare traffic queues that entailed.
Lovely new bit of road.
Almost as soon as it was done, literally within a few weeks, it was closed and dug up again to replace old gas mains.
And of course the road repair after reinstating that is greatly inferior to the brand new surface just dug up again, and will deteriorate rapidly.
If you’re building a new road, get all of the utilities to pro-actively upgrade all infrastructure that crosses it. In fact, put the budget for the utility upgrades as part of the road-building cost.
It has always astonished me that I continue to be allowed to drive on the basis of a single short examination I passed in 1966 (disregarding my triennial visits to Speed Awareness courses.)
HGVs are not new. The loads they create are known and the engineering solutions to those loads are known. Non-collapsing manholes and pipes have been achieved nearly everywhere else, around the world.
Cost based on the weight of the car, which tends mirrors size, value etc
Payable either monthly of quarterly
People who say 'I don't drive much' will have to console themselves that the roads are are thee is they decide to use them
Petrol and diesel become cheaper? I think not, the escalator will be revived, probably on steroids to change behaviour People who drive electric will pay more as the cars are heavier.
What didn't need doing were the constant minor roadwork on the only other viable route to Claverton Down and the university. This often turned a 40 minute commute into a 1.5-2h commute. Complete lack of joined up thinking.
And no, I don’t support the president, I don’t particularly like him at all, but do go to the effort of following both sides of the US political debate and try to present the other point of view compared to most, on what’s a betting site after all.
In any case, the United States did put Nigeria on its watch list during Trump's first term but Joe Biden removed it.
One irony is that Trump's USAID cuts probably help Boko Haram. Another is that Nigeria is swimming in oil so there ought to be more than enough money to go round.
It's about equality, and pedestrians not receiving it, and the consequences that flow from dealing with that issue.
The core issue is that we need to fix the screwy thinking in the heads of drivers, and if we can't do that completely to take measures necessary to control their behaviour.
And that needs a whole range of disciplines to put them in their proper place - such that everybody is safe - and keep them there.
The last Government were making good progress on things like guidelines for redesigning areas around decent traffic management, but (under Mark Harper I think) they went neanderthal and deliberately turned the whole arena into a culture war - going so far as to embrace values in their policy documents that were determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories.
Part of the solution is what the Dutch call unbundling of modes ... that is separate networks as we see now in eg London and Manchester, and these networks need to go everywhere. But as soon as investment is implemented it is choked off 3 years later, or funding not finalised until half way through the period when it should have been spent, or there arises an enormous populist whining noise.
We need to abolish short-termism.
Reform are up 108 since May 1st, the Conservatives down 148, and Labour down 166, in net terms.
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1986369290358939927
Right now, most would vote Labour to keep out Reform. But, these are people who want revenge socialism, and who hate Israel and NATO. Three years of having to endure "red Tories" in power might leave them indifferent. And, if Labour move towards their position, they'll lost centrist voters to the Conservatives.
When I complain about this in any forum, I am told that my requirements as a runner are not the norm, and pavements are safe enough. However, I think actually I'm a reasonable proxy for someone less able, as it can be harder to spot hazards when you move faster, have less time to make corrections and the consequences of a fall are greater if you are moving faster.
I think that things like tree roots and utilities are a bigger problem than cars driving on pavements, although I hadn't realised about the kerb edge thing which means just putting a wheel up on the kerb is a problem. I do, however, mostly park completely in the road.
It is real (though perhaps inflated). I'd perhaps have used Sandpit Derangement Syndrome rather than TDS, but it's a bit less catchy.
There is also this amazing video of a Shahed drone on terminal approach to a block of residential flats being destroyed by an interceptor drone. https://t.me/noel_reports/36605
https://news.sky.com/story/one-of-two-prisoners-mistakenly-released-hands-himself-in-sky-news-understands-13464924
Huzzah for David Lammy and his new suit.
https://x.com/timesradio/status/1986378778550124639
Fair to say he doesn’t think too much positive about Rachel.
There was no coffin at the funeral.
There is something approaching a civil war going on in Nigeria at the moment, with thousands dead. That should be concerning, even if we don’t like the US president.
So the Prison Service wasn't to blame? Nasty interview coming shortly for the person at Court who wrote. the letter/filled in the form.
It does drive me mad that the surfaces afforded to pedestrians and cyclists are so much worse than for people sat inside a car with plush seats and suspension.
At a broad level, car drivers should probably be paying whatever congestion charges are necessary to keep traffic flowing at max capacity whilst lorries & buses should be paying weight * mileage charges. Hard to achieve in practice though.
(Ironically, a fully loaded bus has a higher per axle weight than a fully-laden 44-tonne artic does. You do wonder if that’s fully factored into the costs of public transport! Buses don’t run full all the time of course - an unladen bus has about the same per axle weight as the artic does - 7 tonnes / axle.)
No, getting rid of the trees is impossible. Because Tree Are Sacred.
I sneaked out, will a builder neighbour and fixed some particularly dangerous paving slabs - the tree had died, been chopped down. So they left a bloody great hole in the middle of upheave.... We undid the upheave and tidied up round the hole and filled it with earth. Leveled and bedded the paving slabs properly.
Also, I quoted Trump directly.