Posts

Train Fares

The news this morning was once again all about train-fare rises. The 10th year, apparently of above-inflation rises. So I’m reposting, for the benefit of the BBC, what I wrote when they were announced in August.

I’ll declare an interest: I use the rail network, but not to commute. There has been an astonishing amount of bollocks being spoken about train-fare rises. Especially commuters, whose season tickets are rising by hundreds of pounds. “The trains are crowded” they complain. Yes, they are, and cutting rail fares will help that, how exactly? “It’s too expensive” Well move house, or change jobs. Or travel off-peak. This crowding is because more people try to use the network than is optimal at peak hours.
The effects are not just stress and misery on the journey. This underpriced peak-hour rail drives up house-prices along the rail corridors, and sucks life and employment out of the towns. It also makes people unhappy. People make bad decisions about what makes them happy. They overvalue big houses, and undervalue time not spent on an hour-long commute into town. They overvalue money, and undervalue social contact and family time. And they’re aided and abetted in this happiness-destroying cultural artefact by heavily subsidised commuting.

 If the crippling over-dependence of the country on London is to be addressed, the market must be allowed to do its work on rail fairs. Shifting economic activity out of London is to be desired. Britain does not benefit from shifting millions into town and out again every day, when with a bit of thought, much of this economic activity could happen in Reading, or Northampton or Brighton or Hull. Making it easy to live in Cambride and work in London doesn’t help Cambridge or its economy.

 You may FEEL you have no choice but to buy the season-ticket, and in the short-run you’re probably right. But in the longer term, every person deciding the commute isn’t worth it, and seeking a job locally helps the local economy. Every person moving nearer their place of work reduces stress at peak hours on the transport system. In the long run, people respond to economic incentives. It shouldn’t be the government’s role to insulate people from the reality of their choices.

So, you want to get into central London by 9am? Why not do what I did when I lived in London, and live in a grotty part of town instead, within cycling distance? OH! You want a big house out of London? So you want ME to subsidise your big house by keeping your rail-fare down? Is that fair? It’s not like you’re without choices: there are no solutions in economics, only trade-offs. Compromise on your house, or compromise on your job. Or accept the real cost of rail-fares. You want a seat, guaranteed? Buy a first-class ticket. Overcrowding in cattle-class in the carriages is merely evidence that the price is wrong.

If there was a free market, rather than fares being regulated, peak hour journeys would certainly be more expensive, and off-peak would probably be cheaper. Lower house-prices in the commuter-belt would offset this somewhat. So renegotiate your hours. Capacity-smoothing fares make sense. Ultimately the problem is one of mis-priced resources, especially space on the world’s second busiest rail network. Like the Roads, the Rail Network is overused at peak times and underused off peak. Prices reflecting this are a step in the right direction.

Sorry, rail commuters, your fares are not going down any time soon. I don’t mind paying for a rail ticket when I buy a ticket. I do mind paying for rail tickets I’m not using, subsidising people to drive up the price of a house I want where I live, when I fill in my tax-return. The fare rises are necessary, and will have positive economic effects, if you let them. It’s not all bad news. 

/12 Comments/by

Sleeping in The Car.

The RAC with Fair Fuel Tax have released a report this morning about the effect of high fuel taxes in the UK. Basically, taxes hurt, because they take money which could be used for other things. People have to make choices over how to spend their time and money. This is presented as a shattering observation. Bizarrely, this was most fully reported in the Canberra times.

Motorists in the UK are so desperate to avoid paying for fuel, they have resorted to sleeping in their cars, a report has found.

The study, conducted by automotive services company RAC in conjunction with fuel price lobby group FairFuelUK, found that one in 16 (or 6 per cent) regular commuters in the UK had resorted to spending a night in their car to save money on fuel costs.

6 per cent you say? Well, if that’s slept in their car ever, you can include me… As it is, I’ve no sympathy for people with 60-mile commutes. If you have to drive that far to work every day, move, or get another job, you stupid, masochistic dick-head. There is nothing short of bereavement or divorce quite as stress-inducing and misery-making as a long-commute. This has long been known.

Further to that, one in 32 motorists (3 per cent) had admitted to camping close to work to avoid the drive home.

That’s the same number of people who cycle to work, and we get absolutely no help from the Government, so… fuck ’em.

The report also found that 75 per cent of the 9000 motorists surveyed had used their car less in the past year because of rising fuel costs. 

Yes, that’s the point of high fuel taxes, demand slopes downward. This isn’t an earth-shattering observation. So people drive less on our congested roads. Without high fuel taxes, no-one would get anywhere. This is a good thing.

The survey also found that in the UK there are 2.9 million “ghost cars” that are used less than once a week.

They say that like it’s a bad thing. If you want to have a multi-thousand pound piece of depreciating metal you use once a week, that’s up to you. How many of these are hobbyists cars, classics or sports cars for use at the weekend? How many of those are owned by people who walk, cycle or use public transport to get to work, yet want to see their old mum at the weekend? This stat tells us nothing.

Quentin Willson, national spokesman for FairFuelUK, said the findings showed that the UK government needed to tackle the cost of fuel by lowering fuel duty.

“As a society we’ve never seen this sort of financial pressure put on personal mobility,” Willson said. 

It shows no such thing. Why should “society” subsidise a habit as sub-optimal as daily car use? The school run clogs roads, yet because of cars, it’s too dangerous to get kids to school any other way. Kids remain molly-coddled for longer being driven to work by anxious parents. Parents remain taxi-services until the 17th birthday, and kids don’t have the independence that Dutch children do of getting to the school or friends themselves.

Cars make us fat, miserable. Cars lead to soulless communities without local amenities. Cars kill the local pub. There is almost no social problem to which widespread sole-use car infrastructure has not contributed.  Motorists should pay their way.

The fuel duty raised by the government amounted to £26.8 billion ($41b) in the past financial year, down on the £27.2 raised in 2010/11. The drop, said RAC technical director David Bizley, showed just how much less people were willing to spend on fuel. 

Good. Motorists ARE paying their way. And in doing so, people are finding other ways to get about or are taking fewer journeys. This is a good thing. People deciding to walk to the local shop rather than drive to Tesco’s makes the local environment better.

“People are also telling us that they are facing tough choices about their careers with some now weighing up whether it is actually affordable to commute to work,” Bizley said. 

That’s economics: the study of the use of scarce resources, like road-space at 8-30 am. I’ve always moved to be close to work, because commuting long distances is for fucking idiots.

“And we had a significant number of pensioners telling us that with a fixed income there was nothing they can do but simply cut out social and non-essential trips altogether and even stop doing voluntary work.”

Of course, without the universal, sole-use car-infrastructure, we’d know our neighbors  local amenities would be within walking distance, and the loss of the ability to drive (which happens to all pensioners as they age) wouldn’t be the isolating disaster it is now. All this last paragraph shows is how dependent we are as a society on the car. This is something high fuel taxes are meant to address.

If Quentin Wilson gets his way, journey times will increase, daily gridlock will be inevitable, and he’ll be banging on about the need to build more roads. More roads, more demand and greater congestion at the choke-points (mainly near destinations) lead to greater congestion.

No. We’ve passed ‘peak car’. Society is moving on from the 70-year experiment of organising itself around a single means of transport. Young people are driving less. Company cars are being issued less. Motoring enthusiasts will wail and scream. A few chavs will continue to define themselves by the car they can afford. The rest of us will see the private motor car for what it is: a useful, but increasingly anachronistic tool for getting about, one of many, each one appropriate for different journeys.

This sort of report is the last great wail of a still-healthy industry which knows it’s nearly finished. The great car economy is coming to an end. My guess is the collapse is nigh, and will be occasioned by driverless cars. Once cars drive themselves, I suspect the incentive to own them will disappear. Fleets of autonomous taxis will circulate, to be summoned by mobile phone in a couple of minutes. You could specify the nearest, or if you needed a large vehicle to cope with objects and pay appropriately. As cars are currently in use less than 10% of the time, this would represent a far more efficient use of resources. Algorithms could ensure maximum occupancy, reducing bills for those willing to share. Vehicles, freed from the needs of human reaction time, could communicate allowing bumper-to-bumper travel on motorways, increasing capacity and reducing fuel use. Junctions will be safer, as the risk of motorists not seeing each other during saccades is eliminated. Cars, communicating with each other would be able to move into smaller gaps in the traffic, increasing capacity. Stop-start would be eliminated.

Country pubs will face a surge in business as driverless cars (with wipe-clean seats, probably) will pour you home, full of beer with no need to organize a dedicated driver.

It’s not just people: Reliable point to point courier services could be set up, facilitating a further refinement of just-in-time production. Deliveries, freed from the needs of people’s working capacity and the tachymetre could be arranged around the clock, at your convenience. And all this cheaper than the depreciation and fuel we waste now. This extra efficiency of use in transport infrastructure is where the next wave of economic growth is going to come from.

Soon we’ll be able to sleep in our cars while they’re moving. And you thought I was going to rant about bicycles, didn’t you?

/17 Comments/by

Cyclists’ Dark Clothing and No Lights.

In my last post, I thought I had dealt with all the boring Tropes about cycling. But no. Apparently not content with looking for red-lights to run and achieving the miraculous feat of being simultaneously “in the middle of the road” and “on the pavement” we also all delight in wearing dark clothing and never have lights.

On this I have some sympathy with the motorist. I drive, and I am hyper aware of cyclists. However when I see one in dark clothing, at dusk (it’s worse at dusk and dawn than in the dead of night) without lights, I think it’s barely sporting to not give the motorist a chance to see you. Most cyclists, however want to survive their commute to work, and so deck themselves in blinking lights, high viz & reflective rucksack covers, Tabards, Sam-Brownes, Rucksack and Helmet covers, stickers, projecting lasers and so forth.

There is a whole sub-industry of bicycle accessories which are designed to make sure you’re seen. A set of effective lights can cost less than a tenner. You need to spend more if you want to see where you’re going without street lights, but a tenner will get you seen by an approaching motorist.

For my part, my bag is reflective and apparently lights up like a Christmas tree in the headlights. I always have a seatpost blinker, one further on my bag, and one attached to my helmet. I pump out 300 lumens front.  I never go out without my lights. Of course, it is one of the few things the police can stop a cyclist for. And in my experience, they do, quite reasonably stop cyclists without lights.

Let’s also deal with cyclists being “in the way”. I was told to “get out the way” this morning. See the video below.

This also deals with the “red light jump”, which is a simple non-issue. I agree, blowing red lights at speed is dangerous. Rolling through them, after the pedestrians have gone just gets you out of the way of the traffic behind, to everyone’s benefit. Traffic lights are more about not allowing cars to block junctions, than they are about safety, and bicycles don’t block junctions.

/23 Comments/by

“I was almost knocked down!” and Other Journalistic Tropes About Cycling

There are a number of Journalistic tropes trotted out when cyclists are mentioned in the press. There’s the idiotic “They should pay road tax”, when, of course, road-tax was abolished in 1937, and cyclists are more likely to own a car than the general population. Furthermore many cars are 0%-rated for VED, smart-cars, or many old vehicles for example. These don’t pay “road-tax” either. Are these less entitled to the road than a Range-Rover.

There is the stupid idea that cyclists on the road should be compulsorily insured. Of course in an accident, the cost of wiping blood off a car is negligible.  And in any case, cyclists are to blame for serious accidents in around only 7% of cases (where someone, almost exclusively the cyclist himself) is killed or seriously injured. The chances of a cyclist killing or seriously injuring a motorist, or damaging their vehicle, are so low that it really isn’t worth the bother. Dragging a motorist out of its vehicle and beating it to death with your bare hands is covered by existing statute. Alas. Most regular cyclists are insured, for their own protection. The public liability cover is given away nearly free, as it is so rarely needed.

Licensing cyclists so they can be caught breaking the law is another silly idea given a regular airing by fuckwits in the press. This has never worked, anywhere, ever. Everywhere where it has been tried, it has been abandoned as a costly and intrusive failure. Red-light jumping by cyclists get wankers hot under the collar because they think as the mondeo-man is held up, everyone else should be too. If you find yourself whinging about red-light jumping cyclists, please repeat this phrase: “bicycles are not cars and cannot block junctions”. Red lights are to keep the traffic moving through junctions, and are not about safety.

Cyclists should be made to wear helmets? All that does is reduce the number of cyclists. Of course some would hail that as a victory, but given one of the tightest correlations between a city’s “livability” and quality of life is its bicycle modal share, this is idiotic. No-one wears a helmet for utility cycling in the Netherlands, because no-one needs to. Helmets and other individual protective equipment such as High-viz clothing is a sticking-plaster on the gunshot wound of unbelievably hostile roads.

Removing free on-street parking is always criticised by local businesses, especially if a cycle lane is put in its place, because people routinely over-estimate the importance of driving on custom, often by orders of magnitiude. Even now, cycling and walking play a much greater part in the short shopping trips to town than most people realise. Pedestrianising streets and protected bike lanes increase footfall, in New York’s case by up to 25%. Walkers and cyclists take up less space, stay longer, visit more shops more often.

Finally, there’s the “I was almost knocked over“. I have never met anyone who was actually knocked over by a cyclist, and in two decades of regular, urban cycling, I have never hit a pedestrian, nor seen one get hit by a cyclist. My guess is that “I was almost knocked over” actually means, “something fast-moving in my peripheral vision startled me, and I cannot tell the difference between an involuntary endocrine reaction and danger” As the number of cyclists increase, maybe pedestrians will start to look out for us, as they do currently, and without complaint, for the cars which do, far far more regularly ACTUALLY hit pedestrians. And of course the consequences of hitting a pedestrian on a bicycle are usually vastly less severe than doing so in a car. However special ire is reserved for cyclists.

If journalists are to be believed, all cyclists run red lights, get simultaneously in the way of motor vehicles, and ride on the pavement. They are all dangerous scofflaws while the saintly motorists obey the rules of the road. If a motorist makes a risky pass on a blind corner, this is justifiable in the face of provocation from “lycra louts” who deliberately get in the way. Did we mention that all motorists obey the rules of the road, well of course we meant apart from those silly rules about maximum speed and parking of course, which are part of the “war on the motorist”. And if a cyclist ends up crushed by a motor vehicle driven by a near-blind illiterate who hasn’t slept for 20 hours, then he’s only got himself to blame for not wearing high-viz and a helmet and riding “in the way” not in the gutter where he belongs.

/18 Comments/by

Some thoughts on Mountain Bikes

I am currently riding My brother’s Hard-tail, carbon fibre mountain bike to work, because driving to work was doing my head in. This is about as good as a trail-riding bike gets, and his pride and joy. However, it’s my belief that mountain bikes are the work of the devil, and put the cause of utility cycling back a two decades.

First, big, knobbly tyres are bloody hard work on roads. On a road-bike, my commute took 18 minutes. On a mountain bike, this morning it took 27 minutes. That’s 50% more over 4 miles. Even allowing for the fact I’ve not ridden for a few weeks, that’s a simply enormous difference. True, I could put slick MTB tyres on, but that’s like putting lipstick on a pig.
Second, the saddle it came with, a spongy number, was agony in seconds. I have put my Brooks on it, and it’s much better now. If you don’t like cycling because it’s uncomfortable, failure to buy a leather saddle is the cause.
Third, it’s muddy on the roads. With a road-bike, this isn’t much of a problem. You can either put full mud-guards on, like Crud Road-Racer IIs or a seat-post mounted filth prophylactic, and the vast majority of the mud remains on the bike. This morning, EVERYTHING was covered in splatter. Arms, legs, chest, face. A mountain bike spreads the muck so liberally, you cannot consider wearing street clothes if you want to ride it to work.
Fourth, it’s no use for carrying stuff at all. There is no rack, 
I am sure, though I’ve yet to try it, it’s great on the trails getting muddy and rattling downhill. I doubt it’s more effective (in terms of speed over ground) than a cyclocross bike. Where it will excel is the “technical” trails which litter woodland the country over. Over anything like a normal A-B route, even a muddy footpath, a mountain bike will not be the quickest or most efficient machine. The mountain-bike is a toy, not a means of transport. It’s something you put on a car to take somewhere. It’s a hobby. And since about 1985, it’s been the dominant form of the bike. Halfords and Argos are still selling cheap versions to people who don’t know better. Because these are so popular, to the uninitiated, the MTB, not a drop-handlebar road-bike, is what a bike should look like.
And because their first bike is a full-“suspension” number which is slow, heavy, tiresome and covers you in shit, rather than a cheaper, lighter, skinny-wheeled 10-speed, people reject the concept of cycling from A-B. The few who enjoy it, end up spending thousands on their hobby and enjoy it very much, at the weekend. You can see them in BMW X-5s with two mountain bikes on the roof, failing to understand why the be-lycra’d roadie is still slogging around in the traffic, rather than having FUN in the trails.
And that’s the Tragedy. Even people who’ve learned to love the bike still reject it as a means of transport, They’re putting it in a car to go and use it on a man-made obstacle course rather than getting their enjoyment in every day on the way to work. Riding a bike to work or the shops simply doesn’t occur to the moutain-biker, as their bike is not, to them a tool on which to get about. (Many of them also own road or utility bikes, this is not a post about N+1) This entrenches the abhorrent car-culture which makes British towns so unpleasant to be in. A carbon-fibre, suspension mountain bike: never in the field of human endeavor has so much technical accomplishment achieved so little.
/9 Comments/by

Train Fares

I’ll declare an interest: I use the rail network, but not to commute.

There has been an astonishing amount of bollocks being spoken about train-fare rises. Especially commuters, whose season tickets are rising by hundreds of pounds. “The trains are crowded” they complain. Yes, and cutting rail fares will help that, how exactly? “It’s too expensive” Well move house, or change jobs. Or travel off-peak.

This crowding is because more people try to use the network than is optimal at peak hours.

The effects are not just stress and misery on the journey.

This underpriced peak-hour rail drives up house-prices along the rail corridors, and sucks life and employment out of the towns. It also makes people unhappy. People make bad decisions about what makes them happy. They overvalue big houses, and undervalue time not spent on an hour-long commute into town. They overvalue money, and undervalue social contact and family time. And they’re aided and abetted in this happiness-destroying cultural artefact by heavily subsidised commuting.

 If the crippling over-dependence of the country on London is to be addressed, the market must be allowed to do its work on rail fairs. Shifting economic activity out of London is to be desired. Britain does not benefit from shifting millions into town and out again every day, when with a bit of thought, much of this economic activity could happen in Reading, or Northampton or Brighton or Hull. Making it easy to live in Cambride and work in London doesn’t help Cambridge or its economy.

 You may FEEL you have no choice but to buy the season-ticket, and in the short-run you’re probably right. But in the longer term, every person deciding the commute isn’t worth it, and seeking a job locally helps the local economy. Every person moving nearer their place of work reduces stress at peak hours on the transport system. In the long run, people respond to economic incentives. It shouldn’t be the government’s role to insulate people from the reality of their choices.

So, you want to get into central London by 9am? Why not do what I did when I lived in London, and live in a grotty part of town instead, within cycling distance? OH! You want a big house out of London? So you want ME to subsidise your big house by keeping your rail-fare down? Is that fair? It’s not like you’re without choices: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Compromise on your house, or compromise on your job. Or accept the real cost of rail-fares. You want a seat, guaranteed? Buy a first-class ticket. Overcrowding in the carriages is merely evidence that the price is wrong.

If there was a free market, rather than fares being regulated, peak hours would certainly be more expensive, and off-peak would probably be cheaper. So renegotiate your hours. Capacity-smoothing fares make sense. Ultimately the problem is one of mis-priced resources, especially space on the world’s second busiest rail network.

Like the Roads, the Rail Network is overused at peak times and underused off peak. Prices reflecting this are a step in the right direction.

Sorry, rail commuters, your fares are not going down any time soon. I don’t mind paying for a rail ticket when I buy a ticket. I do mind paying for rail tickets I’m not using, subsidising people to drive up the price of a house I want where I live, when I fill in my tax-return.

The fare rises are necessary, and will have positive economic effects, if you let them. It’s not all bad news.

/11 Comments/by

Pugeout 3008

Regular readers will know I don’t own a car, I hire one when I need one. Most of the time, I get a newish mid-range Ford or Vauxhall, and I think “this is an excellent piece of design and engineering which does the job of ferrying me about, efficiently and unobtrusively“. Occasionally, I get upgraded. Sometimes it’s a Bigger car, like the VW Passat, which was excellent. So good, I remember nothing about it except I’d have one over a Mercedes, so relaxing and comfortable was it to drive.

My most recent “upgrade” on my hire car however was another in the ‘Crossover’ class; this time a Pugeout 3008. I am not a fan of these cars, being neither fart nor shit. They’re supposed to look like a 4×4, but are rubbish off road. But with an elevated driving position, they aren’t as safe-handling as a hatchback or coupe, but give a feeling of safety to the people driving them nonetheless. This means you’re more likely to drive like an idiot, but less likely to be able to get out of it.

They’re marketed at mums for the school run because they feel safe, but they scream “my husband isn’t doing QUITE as well as he promised when I married him… I want a Range-Rover like that Bitch, Sandra. I bet her husband doesn’t have trouble keeping it up. The slut…“. Unlike the Qashqai, which grew on me, the 3008 was a piece of shit from the off, and did nothing to change my opinion. The radio didn’t scan properly and seemed to be set to the Local commercial station as a default, the AirConditioning wasn’t up to keeping the car cool, even in this anaemic summer, it was so bad, it made a little girl cry. 
The seating position seemed designed around the let’s-see-how-close-I-can-get-to-the-windscreen position occupied by the absolutely terrifying occasional female driver. The seat wouldn’t go back far enough, and the pedals were too close to the seat for my 6’3″ frame.
There was no hand-brake. Instead there was some silly fart-arsing button behind the gearstick, which wouldn’t release unless you had a foot on the brake, rendering a hill start nigh on impossible, unless you can heel-and-toe. I know terrifying occasional female drivers can’t do hill starts anyway, let alone heel-and-toe, but even if a man is driving, don’t get close behind one at the lights on a hill, unless you want a dented bumper. 
The seats were uncomfortable, the visibility to the side was poor, as my vision was blocked by the pillar. The cup-holders got in the way of the gear stick. The arm-rest was un-adjustible, and not very comfortable. The ride was mushy, the engine gutless at low revs but had a horrible step in the power delivery. You didn’t know whether it was going to lurch forward or wheeze astmatically when you put your foot down. I had NO inclination to take it off piste, onto the twisties. 
What’s more, it looks worse than the QashQai, as its wheels are too small. So it’s not even cool; quite what ‘what car’ were smoking, when they awarded it ‘Car of the Year‘ in 2010, is unclear as it’s a hateful, horrid, badly designed little car. About the only thing that was any good was a very easy to use Bluetooth hands-free system. This car only makes sense for blind people who don’t drive, but who like to use a steering-wheel to answer the phone. It’s a car for the dead inside and their hateful snotty infants. If you still care, they’re available from £15,000, though the one I drove was worth over £19,000. If you’re spending that on a car, and you think “This is the best car for me for that money”, I really pity your horizons and you should be euthanised before you add more piss to the shallow end of the gene-pool. 
/7 Comments/by

Build Cycle Lanes, the Motorist Benefits.

Most conservatives/libertarians/UKIPpers are viscerally pro-car and anti-bike. To the likes of regular commenters Simon Jester or Patrick the use of the car is natural, and facilitating anything else is a dastardly plot to subvert his way of life. This is a perverse and willful misreading of my position. I will try to deal with the commonest arguments of the Gin & Jag set in this post.

I shall refer to the first sentence of my last post.

…most journeys of longer than a few miles, and for moving goods about the country, the motor vehicle is simply the best tool for the job.

Pro-bike is not anti-car. MOST JOURNEYS even in Holland, are undertaken by car. even In Amsterdam & Copenhagen, Bicycles account for less than half of journeys. Even in the most bike-friendly countries on the planet, the car remains well provided for by infrastructure, and a popular transport choice. It’s just the bike is ALSO well provided for.

What’s that next to this Dutch cycle lane? That’s right, a dual carriageway.

The solution to congestion isn’t as most Libertarian/Tory/UKIP Internet wallahs think, “more roads” because the problem isn’t a lack of road space, it’s the fact that everyone wants to get to the same places at the same time. The Problem is a lack of road-space at key points. For example the hanger lane underpass, or the Blackwall tunnel in London become choked beyond their capacity every single morning. If you build bigger roads to these spots, you make congestion worse, not better. This is what the M4 Bus Lane was all about.

A cursory search on Google Scholar will quickly put pay to the “build more roads” argument. This is from the first to pop up.

“Our decisions provoke unforeseen reactions. The result is policy resistance, the tendency for interventions to be defeated by the response of the system to the intervention itself… road building programs that create suburban sprawl and actually increase traffic congestion…”

So, barring a few pinch points such as the M25 around Heathrow, and by-passes which sensibly route through-traffic round town centres, more road-building is not the answer.

Then there’s the money. Libertarians, UKIPpers and Tories regard themselves and economically literate, in contrast to Labour who think economics is about getting water to flow uphill. People who should know better, however lose all economic sense when discussing their favoured means of getting about. Just because one group is taxed, doesn’t mean the money should be spent on them. If it were, income tax would largely go on well-tended grouse moors for the ultra rich who pay a significant chunk of it, the NHS’s lung-cancer wards would be the envy of the world, and vomiting drunks would have their hair held back by liveried booze-tax-funded drunk-helpers every Saturday night. Instead the money is put into a pot and spent by the government as it sees fit.

Taxes levied on motorists are not therefore some sort of “road fund” for their exclusive use. They’re more akin to rent. You don’t live in a house for free; you pay for the capital cost as well as the running costs. You pay rent (or taxes) on the land. If the money spent on roads each year is the running cost of our road network, it’s akin to utility bills. The rest of the tax motorists pay covers the cost of building the road network and financing it – 2,000 years of capital investment. You’re also paying for the “externalities” of car use.

There’s the word “externality” which brings libertarians out in hives because they think it’s part of some ghastly plot to deprive them of their car. It isn’t. It’s about paying your way. Some externalities like Carbon are explicitly calculated, in the Stern review for example. And of course, we are paying several times more to drive a car than would be the case if that was the only externality in the price. There are other externalities too. Some are trivial: I don’t like seeing fat people, and cars cause obesity for example. Some externalities however have real economic effects: Congestion is an externality imposed on other motorists with real economic costs. To ensure those costs are borne by those who value roads most, you pay through the nose to drive. This is why it works. Other externalities merely affect quality of life. Noise, danger, stress, particulates damaging to health and so on. To these I would add the social costs in atomisation and fragmentation of society facilitated by car-based urban sprawl.

People who in any other facet of life think markets are great at providing solutions to problems utterly reject them in transport. There should be a market between competing means of transport. However at present, all the investment goes to road and rail, nothing to any other potential means of getting from A-B, which might take some (SOME – not ALL, idiots) pressure off the road network at peak times. At the moment the market is grotesquely skewed in favour of the car, even where a bike would otherwise make sense, crappy infrastructure and subjective feelings of danger put people off using it. And it is this we need to address.

A bike on a commute is one fewer car in your way. Encourage cycling, and motorists benefit.

The externalites of urban sprawl, lack of local amenities, dead town centres, noise, pollution, social atomisation and social division which accompany the total domination of the car are uncosted but paid for in the “rent” you pay in taxes over and above the road budget. These bills could be reduced by better, bike and pedestrian friendly urban design. Some argue the externalities are more than covered by the current motorists’ tax-burden. Others think not. But to deny the existence of externailites alltogether is anti-economics, a stupid rhetorical position normally occupied by the left.

The experience of the Netherlands is if you make a small (relative to the road budget) investment, over a long period of time in making the roads feel safe for cyclists, everyone (including motorists) benefits. Many People then DO choose the bike because it’s quick, cheap, convenient and fun for SOME journeys. In Amsterdam just under half of journeys are by bike. And this benefits motorists in less congestion. Getting kids to cycle to school in particular frees parents from the chore of acting as a taxi service, and massively reduces congestion at rush hour. It also gives kids a bit of much needed freedom. Proper cycle lanes would mean fewer cyclist holding you up, a “problem” existing only in the fevered minds of anti-bike nut-cases, but oft cited none-the-less. More cyclists means more local shops as people get back in the habit of making short journeys instead of reaching for the car keys every time you leave the house, so you can get your paper and irn bru when you have a hangover on a Sunday morning without having to drive anywhere. It means your local pub is more likely to stay open, giving you a chance to gain that hangover in a social environment instead of tossing yourself off alone to the x-factor with a can of supermarket lager. It’s no coincidence that towns and cities with the highest bicycle modal share feature regularly at the top of indices listing “livability” and happiness. Even in these, most people own, or have access to a car.

The point is a change in the build environment to favour the cyclist or pedestrian doesn’t mean the car becomes obsolete. Rather it becomes one tool in a quiver for getting about, one chosen when the journey is long, when the weather is bad, when the load is heavy, or when you just don’t feel like riding a bike that morning. Cyclists are drivers and drivers are cyclists, eliminating hostility. However, in the UK many people who wish to ride a bike are currently denied that opportunity, to the detriment of all by infrastructure entirely inappropriate for their needs.

Any comment which ultimately says “I need a car for some journeys, therefore you should use one for all” will be deleted, unanswered. Read the first paragraph of this post again before pressing submit.

To deny there are any problems caused by the total domination of the car of our built environment is perverse and willfully blind. To pretend there are no solutions is stupid and unbelievably ignorant and selfish. Even Jeremy Clarkson sees that a town with fewer cars is simply more pleasant to be in – that is he admits the benefits of car use are offset by costs largely borne by others. No-one wants to see the freedoms granted by the private car lost. But I do want to see a return of the freedoms it has taken away.

/12 Comments/by

The Great Car Economy.

I often get accused of being anti-car. I am not. For most journeys of longer than a few miles, and for moving goods about the country, the motor vehicle is simply the best tool for the job. I just accept the car is often not best tool for the job, and universal car use has a number of negative effects. This leaves an enormous number of journeys for which the car shouldn’t be the first choice. My problem is that people are forced into cars, as other options have been, effectively, denied through short-sightedness and poor urban design.

Would you use this? More Rubbish Infrastructure here.

Margret Thatcher hailed in 1989, the “Great Car Economy”, embarking on a grand scheme of road-building, which like so much the Tories do, brings out the crusties in vicious and bitter protest. A decade of Swampies living up trees led to the abandonment of “the biggest road-building scheme since the Romans”.

More recently the claim is often made that petrol taxes “hurt the economy”. Of course they do, but the question should be whether fuel duties hurt more, or less than other taxes. I argue they don’t hurt any more than income taxes. The Conservative-led government faces protests by drivers who don’t want to pay & feel there should be more roads, that road-building will be the key to stimulating the economy. This is one of the few areas of expenditure, along with the provision of free-parking, that the tax-payer’s alliance can be relied upon to support. It ignores the costs of motoring.

Let’s go through the hidden costs of “the Great Car Economy”.

Cars make towns noisy and stressful. You can estimate the cost of this by looking at houses on main roads, which often cost 30-40% less than those in quiet cul-de-sacs less than a hundred yards away. There’s an economic externality of car use, costed for you, right there.

Every 40 cars, roughly, represents £1,000,000 in capital expenditure. For much of the country, that’s £2,500 per year, per car. For 95%of the time, this capital is sitting, unused in parking lots. Is this not a colossal waste of resources on a scale equivalent to the Great wall of China? Those parking lots are unsightly, and represent an enormous waste of potentially valuable land, which reduces the value of the area around it. This too is a waste of resources.

Cars facilitate harmful behaviour. People under-estimate how much a long commute makes them miserable, and over-estimate how much a big house makes them happy. People therefore live a sub-optimal distance from work, a long way from family and friends. People are less happy than they would otherwise be.

Cars have changed the built environment, brought about urban sprawl, which atomises society. Cars have driven other options – bicycles and walking out of the picture, by making them so unpleasant. It is simply not enjoyable to share space with tons of speeding metal. As a result, there are few ‘local shops’. The car encourages big-box shopping, ripping the heart out of town centres.

Once you have spent 60% of an annual salary on a car, you tend to use it for every journey even ones where (once you’ve parked) would be quicker to walk. This leads to obesity and ill health. Driving, especially in heavy traffic, is stressful. Adrenaline and Cortisol, when not accompanied by exercise, is hard on the heart and encourages fat deposits. Even if you go to the gym, the damage done by stress hormones while driving is difficult to burn off.

The problem, ultimately is that overuse and over reliance on one transport technology has created a sub-optimal equilibrium. People cannot see beyond THEIR car and the need for it. Blinded by a set of cognitive biases and perverse incentives, the car is used for every journey. And of course, as we’ve organised society completely around it since the mid-70’s, people feel they’ve no choice. They’re probably right. At present, there is no alternative to having £30,000 worth of depreciating metal on your drive. Public transport is simply nasty, as I laid out in detail in this post, a while ago, and we now live too far from everything to consider any other solution.

Ultimately the conclusion is that more roads and more cars isn’t the answer. Cars simply fill any extra space, and if you build “enough” space, you get Milton Keynes. We must do things more cleverly.

So, the experiment in the great motoring society has gone as far as it can go. Any further increases in the number or use of cars are likely to generate negative returns to human happiness. It is Government’s role therefore to provide infrastructure to other alternatives: a network of cycle tracks and city infrastructure – not to exclude the car, but to provide an alternative, to both tribes’ benefit. Motorists should remember the most tireless campaigners for smooth roads are cyclists for whom a pot-hole is not only a punctured tyre, but potentially a broken collar bone. The infrastructure can and should be built with all road-users in mind.

The solution to these problems, is to organise a system where there are fewer cars, used more intensively.

Technological change will help. Nevada has just issued a license for Google’s automatous car. This will, in time, enable fleets of driver-free vehicles to act as taxis. It doesn’t take much imagination to see this working very much more cheaply and efficiently than a situation where everyone has their own depreciating asset, though this is several years away. Fewer cars, not being driven by people, means a safer and less threatening road environment for other users. Although the total cost of hiring a self-driving car for each journey may in time become lower than owning a private car, the fact you’re making a marginal decision for each journey, rather than the costs being concentrated in one enormous sunk cost of purchase, will tend to make people consider alternatives in a way they currently don’t. Even if the volume of vehicular journeys increases, driverless cars will be more efficient users of fuel and road-space. They will also be safer.

People are simply not designed to drive. Our lizard-brains simply can’t cope. The road environment and the cars on it have been made forgiving to the inadequacies of people driving cars, but it is something no-one can do successfully. Don’t believe me? Ask the insurance industry. Racing drivers, those who ACTUALLY can control a car better than anyone else are not considered a good risk. People tend to compensate for extra safety features in their car or any extra skill, by taking more risks. The risks are most keenly felt by people without a ton and a half of steel wrapped around them.

In time, insurance costs will dictate that cars will not be allowed to be owner-driven on the public roads. At present, the only tool with which you can, by recklessness kill someone and escape gaol, is the car. This will change and machines will make better drivers than us.

I am not anti-car. I accept the benefits, and the necessity for widespread car ownership at present. It’s just that it’s used for over 90% of journeys. People don’t walk to the pub anymore, neither do kids cycle to school. And the reason is that the car has changed towns – there are no local services in suburbs any more; ourselves – most of us are fat, and feel the need to change into special clothes to walk a mile; and the environment – the roads are simply too hostile to allow your kids to cycle to school.

If you can address the inappropriate journeys – in particular the school run, much of the congestion motorists currently suffer, would vanish. Kids SHOULD enjoy the independence of making their own way to school, as they do on the continent. This requires investment in infrastructure to separate the cyclist from the motorist. Many (not all, obviously) people would like to cycle to work, but feel it’s too unsafe. Investment in infrastructure would take a few of these cars off the roads at peak times too. And if we can encourage delivery driving overnight though a fuel tax rebate, we can have smoothly running roads for everyone, all day.

Every cyclist commuting to work, is one fewer in other motorist’s way. But the the entire national cycling infrastructure budget is less than that to widen 4 miles of the M25. Even footpaths are often sub-standard and blocked by (what else?) parked cars. Ultimately, those who want to walk and cycle shouldn’t be put off by crappy infrastructure because the car enjoys 99.99% of the spending and an absurdly privileged place in society. If we can change this, then those who still want to drive will have a more enjoyable time too.

/18 Comments/by

Why do cyclists “Hog the road”

Have a look at this video (1-minute, safe for work)

My reward for getting out of the way of the considerate driver of the Merc (the reason he took a while to pass as I moved accross was that he was giving plenty of room behind – thanks) was a near left-hook from the John Lewis lorry following him. The problem is, once you let one car through, everyone else thinks they can pile past, even when there is no room. This is why it’s often safer to “hog the lane”.

Sorry.

I’d rather annoy you than be killed to death by the arsehole behind. And if I’m annoying you, at least that means you’ve seen me.

The answer to any question about why cyclists do something which appears irritating or selfish, the answer is usually “because some drivers are arseholes”.

/19 Comments/by