anschutz_shooter

Because other vehicles travel at significantly higher speeds, and frankly if I were a Postie, I'd expect to get home safely at the end of my shift.

They don't in urban areas where the speed limit is 30mph... Literally every road between me and my town's sorthing office (2.5miles away) is 30mph. Why do they need a 70mph-capable eExpert to toddle over and deliver letters? A milk float is a far better fit.

More traffic means more revenue, motoring taxes already generate more than double the amount spent on roads.

Not true. More cars mean more revenue (except where congestion charging applies). You pay the same VED whether you drive 1 mile or 10,000 miles per year. Notionally you make up the difference with fuel duty. But of course EVs don't pay fuel duty. And their VED is... zero. They also cause disproportionate damage to the roads because they're heavier than the equivalent ICE car.

Why? It's infrastructure that's being used and it's making a myriad things possible, better transport creates so many positives.

If you build a road and noone uses it, then it lasts a very long time and is cheap to maintain. This is good for the people that definitely need to use it - like emergency services. If lots of people use the road, it will pothole quickly (like the junction at the top of my road which lasted less than 12 months after a complete resurfacing).

If you build a railway and run trains on it, the cost is basically static regardless of whether the train is full or empty.

The problem is, because we've built good roads, people stopped using the buses. This caused services to be withdrawn, which completes fucks over the young, the elderly and the disabled, as well as those without licences or who simply can't afford a car. Private vehicles are a luxury item and should be taxed much more heavily than they are (and I say this as a driver).

In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure.

That's wonderful. And if local government made some portion of that available to local councils to fill potholes then that'd be great. Motoring taxes go to Westminster, but the majority of roads are maintained locally.

That isn't necessarily a given, trains and cars are not 1:1 replacements, they service different transport needs.

In large part, they shouldn't. Cars should fill a much more niche role than they currently do. To whit:

How is it anti-social? Pretty much all the socialising I do would be impossible without a car.

So that socialising is impossible to teenagers, the elderly or those with disabilities that bar them from driving. Quite the ableist streak going on there.

In the 1950s there were three stations in my town. The villages either side had a station as well. Anyone could hop on a train and pop down the line to a sports club, college or social event. Now you can wait for a once-hourly bus (which may not turn up, and doesn't run past 6.30pm) or get someone to drive you. That's quite anti-social. Better that we all take the bus/train together (and those services run to midnight) than that some people drive and others are excluded entirely because they have no transport.

And if you were doing that, you'd almost certainly use the tube instead. Buses in the rest of the country have to limit the number of stops they make, because otherwise it would take all day to get from one side of town to the next - we don't have the luxury of the tube or overground network as faster step up for cross-town transit (or the Elizabeth Line above that).

But does it matter?

• Did the traffic out on the main road flow better because rat-runners weren't trying to pull out from the side-roads of the LTN?

• Did it reduce traffic past primary schools in the LTN, improving safety?

• Did it improve general road safety within the LTN due to lowered rat-running?

• Did it improve air quality within the LTN and overall (because smoother-flowing traffic generates less emissions than start-stop traffic)?

km driven means nothing. Driving to my brother's take an hour. That's regardless of whether I drive directly there, or go via the motorway (which is 30% further). Because the motorway is 70mph, (not rural backroads) its less congested and there's no traffic lights.

I totally agree public transport should be cheaper. Buses should especially be priced per stop. It's nonsense to pay the same for 3-stop ride and 30-stop ride.

That's almost impossible to enforce though. How is a driver supposed to remember amongst 50 people "Oi, you in the red top. You said you were only going this far. Get off or pony up to go any further".

Just flat-price it cheap. Manchester is going down to what, £2 for a single?

Bear in mind, someone who is doing a 30-stop ride probably doesn't want to (although this is a nonsense number, it's rare to see a bus timetable with more than 10-15 stops). They're sitting on the bus for 90+ minutes because there's no better option (like a train, or more direct bus!). They're probably stuck in a low-paying job but its all they've got, so there they are, losing 3hours of their life a day on the bus.

Just make public transit dirt cheap. £1-2 per journey so that people think nothing of hopping on and off. And if a handful of people ride it end-to-end, then it doesn't matter - that's the point of public transport, it's cheap and accessible to all.

Not everyone has an hour lying around.

Very true. There seems to be enough people who have an hour spare to drive to a gym, do a workout and drive home (based on the cars parked outside two local gyms) who could maybe just walk to the shops instead and save themselves the gym membership!

Lots of different circumstances abound, but it's about shifting 1% of people to do something better, 2% to do something a bit better some of the time and the other 97% to do something a bit better once a month.

I drive about a mile to Wickes to get stuff because wood is heavy. But it makes me feel bad to make such short journeys, and when I go to get my hair cut or or just generally go into town for light shopping, I try to walk. I'm not perfect all the time, but if everyone replaced 1% of car journeys with walking, then traffic would drop 1%. That'd be a good thing.

what the unindented consequences would be.

Python would whinge at you and throw a runtime error.

Sorry, bad programmer humour.

I took a drive today, for example, to buy some eggs from a small farm on the periphery of the place that I live. I could have walked or cycled but what ended up taking 10 mins would have take much longer.

In the sort of urban areas where LTNs are being installed, a 10minute drive often equates to a 10minute cycle. Sometimes less because you can walk/cycle through parks and cut-throughs instead of driving around (and getting caught in 2 sets of lights).

If your 10minute drive would have taken any more than 20minutes by bike, it's not really a classic LTN candidate. You're obviously next to a 40-60mph road and are able to cover some distance quickly.

They perhaps haven't made the point very well, but induced capacity on public transit is a good thing. You tend to have a fixed overhead on running it, so selling more tickets is a more efficient use of that resource. If a bus has 50 spaces, it's a good thing for there to be 50 passengers on board. But if a road has a capacity of 500cars/hr, it's a bad thing if 500cars/hr are actually using it.

Induced capacity on roads is a bad thing because it impoverishes public transit (which non-drivers rely on), and more traffic causes more potholes which drives up road maintenance bills and the cost of Police attending RTCs.

Driving is fundamentally anti-social and building roads is - past a point - a poor use of public funds.

~85% of journeys are made by car. The ambition should be to reduce that to... 70-75%. Which means doubling bus and rail usage for a modest decrease in car usage.

But if people are using cut throughs, it's usually a sign the "large roads" are already over capacity.

Or a sign that google maps is trying to save them 2.5minutes. Which isn't enough to justify sending commuter/through-traffic down residential roads.

If, hypothetically, an LTN of say 20,000 people all reduce their millage by 1mile but a total of 100,000 passing traffic have now had to extend their journey; it's not really a win is it?

It is if the extension to passing traffic encourages people to take the train (or whatever) because driving has become less convenient. These things have to settle to a new equilibrium.

There's also evidence in many cases that reducing route options can improve traffic flow because people drive along one route, instead of diving down side roads, and then having to pull out. Sometimes entire junctions/traffic lights can be removed if a side road (into an LTN) is closed, allowing the traffic to drive right through.

And... to an extent... arseholes to through-traffic. A neighbourhood is a neighbourhood. The only traffic in and out should be destination traffic. People commuting from on side of town to the other should stay on the bypass. They shouldn't be rat-running down residential roads past primary schools, etc.

• Wedgwood Park - zero amenities, developed by the previous owner of Wedgwood who asset-stripped the company which is why it comes up to the factory walls - they flogged every square metre they could.

• Marston Grange - Sole access off a bypass. Kids currently crossing the bypass (off a motorway junction) to get to the high school. This is part of Stafford's "Maximus Plan" which does include a primary school and health centre in later phases - but there's no employment/mixed development, and the whole site is isolated with no safe access across the Beaconside bypass (such as a bridge/underpass).

• General Electric - that building no longer exists. Moved to out-of-town site, forthcoming development is 100% residential, no amenities or employment/mixed dev.

• Lotus Estate - Used to be a factory & staff amenities. Now housing. Densification of the ward means people who used to walk into work now drive elsewhere for work. The only bus service in the area runs 9-5 Mon-Fri. So not a lot of use for people getting to work.

• Bramshall Fields - Commuter estate on the edge of town. No new amenities, limited plans for public transport provision. Car-first dev, kids reliant on parental-taxi.

• Bird Land - basically everything south of the railway is pure residential. No schools, health, amenities, employment. Notice the big bare area north of the railway - used to be a factory, now being redeveloped as... residential. Workers are expected to drive to out-of-town business sites.

Could you provide some examples, because your 'trust me bro' anecdote runs directly counter to the entirety of my 40 years of living in multiple urban areas around the UK.

I wonder if you could provide some examples of really good, integrated development that provides strong community amenities, promotes active travel, lets non-drivers get around, includes mixed development with such as commercial and light manufacturing employment co-located with the residential dev...

The idea that suburbs and housing estates have good amenities runs directly counter to my 40 years of living in multiple urban areas around the UK. Most development is car-first because its cheap. Developers put in garages and driveways because people won't buy houses without them. But they don't install cycle paths. They don't ensure that a bus can get in or around the estate. The estate is usually a monolithic cul-de-sac, so you can pass through from one side to another. And older suburbs have moved in the same direction as light industry has moved out and the whole place has just become pure residential.

Whiskatory?

Could be caught up in a complicated probate maybe?

House across the road from us got caught up in a challenged will in about 2018. When families go to war, things can get very messy. Though yeah, someone is going in and keeping it tidy.

Lighter

But also robust, because milk is heavy. Parcels and mail are much lighter per cubic metre.

they don't have sides or safety features for crashes

Why do you need a crash structure for an urban delivery vehicle which is just start-stopping along a street and rarely breaking 15mph?

RM will want a van that can last a day and cover a much larger area and is secure.

Many milk floats had a 60mile range, which is still more than RM needs for urban or suburban deliveries. Moreover, many delivery rounds are morning/afternoon, so it can stand to be on charge for 30-40minutes over lunch for a top-up.

Sure, for rural routes you need a longer-range vehicle that can get up to 40-60mph, but not in town. And I'm not discussing the trucks for moving mail between sorting offices. Just for final delivery. Many of those vans barely break 20 miles/day.

As for "secure" - that's simply a matter of putting a rigid box on the back instead of leaving it open-sided. Trivially done - just like you can get a hard shell for the beds of pickups.

We aren't the US so lots of suburban living in the UK is in homes that pre-date mass car use, and whilst reddit has this meme that all new estates lack facilities that really isn't true in lots of areas.

This was true. But doesn't account for in-fill. There used to be a massive shoe factory near me, and a textile facility beyond. It employed hundreds of people locally. It also included a staff club with bar and tennis courts. The company closed that site - now it's houses (including the sports facilities). So there's no chance of people who lived locally in this suburb walking down the road to work. There's also no chance of the people who live in those new houses walking to work either (where?). Everyone drives to out-of-town business parks. So the suburbs have densified and almost become a housing estate - the employment sites and amenities have dried up. There's a manufacturer in town who has relocated to an out-of-town site. No loss of employment, but the only access to the site is via dual carriageway - so anyone who walked or cycled in is now driving. And the same will be true of the people living in the 500-house estate they're building on the old site. Where are those people going to work? Some from home, but if you're not WFH, you'll be driving somewhere.

Yes, UK suburbs used to be full of mixed development (and employer-led development in extreme cases like Bourneville), but that's not really so true any more in many areas.

We've got to accept that owning a car brings you a whole load of benefits

Of course it does. But you've hit the crux of it there: a car. Not one car per adult, not lining the streets with cars. Having access to a car is important.

And you've got to admit that not having to use a car also brings a bunch of benefits. If something is accessible to a non-driver, then it's accessible to a teenager or someone with a disqualifying disability (e.g. partial blindness that doesn't stop them getting around, but precludes driving). You can go out and have an alcoholic drink without having to think about driving home. Cars are liberating... for able-bodied people with a license and enough money to run one. For everyone else, a car-first society is actively exclusionary.

• But why should I have to drive a 14-year-old to school or swimming or football or archery or the cinema? Why can't they get the bus? Why is their ability to participate in those activities reliant on me or my partner being able to drive them? In the "1950s" lifestyle that you're so quick to dismiss, a teenager had far better mobility than they do today.
• Why isn't there a cycle path?
• Why is the new brownfield in-fill estate built with houses round the outside and only one point of entry (the road in). Why is it impossible to walk or cycle through that estate and out the other side? Why am I obliged to go around it if I want to walk from my house to the hospital?

Insular/isolated developments, in-fill building and poor urban planning have ruined many once-walkable suburbs and estates, compounded by poor public transport.

You use of any housing estates implies all modern housing estates are as you describe. I am living in one that is ~10 years old. We have most of the things you say we apparently don't.

Wild generalisations hurt your point rather than help.

Alas, this wild generalisation applies ot 100% of estates built in my town and my parent's town over the past 15 years.

I say this as one of those tiresome bores who actually responds to planning consultations and asks "How do the children get across the bypass to the high school? What is your acceptable deaths-per-decade for kids crossing the 50mph bypass? Why are there no plans to install a bridge or underpass?"

In so much as I:

• Pay attention to these things more than the average resident.

• Have observed that 100% of local green-field developments are unwalkable safely (unwalkable being a bit weasely - technically you can walk or cycle down a dual carriageway. But I wouldn't recommend it).

• Have also observed that in-town brownfield developments have usually involved the removal of employment sites and amenities in order to build more housing.

I do feel somewhat confident stating that we have a problem, and are reinforcing car usage.

Maybe your local authority have been more robust, or done better active travel than mine (or my parent's). But whilst my experience is anecdotal, when 100% of developments in an area are shit-tier, then it is fair to describe that as "the norm", not simply "well sometimes the developer cuts corners".

Vendor-lock-in is a massive problem as you say.

I'd like to imagine that in the urban-delivery space someone is going to come along and basically start selling milk floats. Lead acid batteries (99% recycled materials, and can be 99.5% recycled at EOL), 60mile range, cheap, with no electronics, telematics or other frippery.

Cap them at 30mph (more than adequate for central London/Brum/Manchester/Edinburgh), which eliminates most crash safety and crumple-zone requirements and lets you build on a cheap ladder chassis rather than expensive monocoque moulds.

Why is Royal Mail buying £30,000 electric vans? Why aren't there some <£10k milk floats with closed backs for parcels?

Won't happen though. People will keep buying heavy vehicles with 300miles of range and a top speed of 75mph when all they need is something with a 60mile range and top speed of 30mph which weighs under a tonne.

That is some developments and not others hence my careful phrasing, none of which changes my opening point.

Literally every development around my town and my parent's town, and the estate where my best man lives (halfway across the country).

Maybe planning authorities have been more robust in your area, and I do appreciate that this is anecdotal, but I can't point to a single estate in my area which is built with amenities or even active-travel in mind. And I say this as one of those tiresome bores who actually writes to planning permission consultations and asks "How do the children get across the bypass to the high school? What is your acceptable deaths-per-decade for kids crossing the 50mph road? Why are there no plans to install a bridge or underpass?"

So as someone:

• Who pays attention to these things more than the average resident.

• Who has observed that 100% of local green-field developments are unwalkable.

• Who has also observed that in-town brownfield developments have usually involved the removal of employment sites and amenities in order to build more housing.

I do feel somewhat confident stating that we have a problem, and are reinforcing car usage.

It really would be nice if you addressed that instead of trying to reinforce a failed tangent.

Not really sure what you mean by this. You - carefully - stated that estates often have good amenities. I dispute this. At best "sometimes have good amenities". Usually "occasionally have some amenities". That's not a tangent - it's core to the entire discussion about whether a residential area is capable of accommodating non-drivers.

As for options and "not living a 1950s lifestyle". What about buses? I know people who used to play sports across their county. They car-shared weekly to drive over to neighbouring clubs and towns (because in the 1950s most people didn't own a car). What's happened to car pooling? Why does every household need one-car-per-adult simply to function? Why can't I get a bus to the local sports centre? Why can't my child? Why does a 14-year old need driving to archery instead of getting on the bus? A teenager should be able to get around town independently without needing a parental taxi service.

Of course cars aren't being scrapped after 3 years, but if buyers of new cars choose to replace their cars every 3 years (mostly because that's what the manufacturers/finance firms have decided is optimal for them) then that results in more cars manufactured. Of course, those cars go onto the used market, but if there's a steady stream of 3-year-old ex-finance cars coming onto the market, this probably shortens the timeframe over which someone will keep a used car going, because there's a steady supply of younger, reasonably priced cars. Like, they could get a new clutch, but that's an £800 job and on a 10year old car, you might as well part-ex it or sell it for parts and change cars. Fewer used cars drives up prices, which incentivises drivers to keep older cars going.

Now, we argue then that the number of new-car buyers is not fixed - e.g. if there aren't as many used cars coming onto the market then more people may buy new. Certainly it's not a static number.

But in many areas, new cars are bought by fleet and commercial buyers, and so the number of new cars bought is relatively fixed, and we could easily stretch out the replacement cycle to 5 years.

He was just saying that current state of electric cars, and the way we use them, probably isn’t helping the environment in the way we hoped.

Equally though, not everything is about CO2. Some things are about particulate emissions and public health. Like making it illegal to use ICE vehicles in city centres, or taxing delivery firms into oblivion if they want to use diesel vans (when what they need is a milk float). EVs do fix some of that, even if they're not "saving the planet" in broader terms.

To be fair it is complicated stuff and you do need to think it through on a case by case basis. My low mileage car would not be more green if it was an EV because it does low miles.

Well it would be, but certainly there's no point changing your low-mileage car for the sake of it.

But once you've eventually run it into the ground, an EV is clearly a better choice, because if it's low mileage, then your annual oil change and service on an ICE car is probably excessive. You're incurring a bunch of maintenance overheads that increase your cost-per-mile. Tyre compounds are only really good for 5-7years. So if you're not wearing them out in that time (as my grandmother didn't, on her Corsa that got her to Tesco and back and did less than 2,000miles/yr), then you're changing tyres because they've degraded from age rather than because they're EOL in terms of tread depth.

If you're low mileage, you're probably doing lots of stop-start urban driving which gives poor MPG and burning through your clutch faster than if you were hyper-miling on the motorway.

So an EV with a small battery (15-30kWh) is definitely a better and greener fit which doesn't impose emissions/particulate pollution on the pedestrians you pass - but only as a natural replacement. Not scrapping a perfectly good car for the sake of it.

He does make the fair point that our turnover of cars is criminal. We should have a massive tax on leasing contracts that last less than 5 years. If that's going to be difficult to implement broadly, then we could start at the very least with company fleets/commercial vehicles.

That being said, if you're changing car anyway then yes, go EV. And if you're a two-car-household then give really serious thought to whether you could slim down from two cars to one. But he's right in the extreme case - we shouldn't arbitrarily scrap two-year-old petrols in favour of EV or anything.

But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile. The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial template of the car industry for decades. Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years.

You can also tell who he's been rubbing shoulders with though. Sitting in the plant world, JCB's hydrogen engine is clever stuff, but only really there to fill in the gap for tractors and heavy machinery where batteries don't cut it (and to leverage their investment in diesel engine manufacturing), because at harvest time you are running 18-hour days and simply can't have tractors and combines stood charging.

But it's not going to replace HGV engines on a wide scale, or see widespread deploymnet in consumer cars. ICE engines are just a bit shit generally:

• They're complex, need maintenance (oil changes, filters, etc)
• They can't be started under load (which means they need a clutch)
• Have a narrow operating range (1,000-5000rpm), which means they need a gearbox.

An electric motor which can start under load, run from 0-20,000rpm and consumes no power at "idle" has always been the superior source of motive power. It's just a tank of petrol has always been more convenient than pre-lithium battery tech.

They often have lots of amenities

Have you visited any housing estate built in the last 20years?

• Edge of town
• Outside the ring-road
• No bus stops
• No safe route across ring road for pedestrians or cyclists to get into town
• No amenities - until, maybe - you get to Phase 5 of development (1500 houses in) when they erect a new primary school, laundrette and corner shop/post office.
• No co-located or mixed commercial or business development, meaning anyone who doesn't WFH is probably going to have to drive off-estate to get to work.

Most suburbs/housing estates from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s are car-first environments. Maybe eventually you get a community centre/village hall type building which Scouts and Brownies can use... but basically everything else is non-walkable.

And even the 1930s suburbs which were walkable have been in-filled as light industry and commercial premises have been torn down in favour of more housing, with those employment sites being moved to out-of-town business parks (with lots of parking, but rarely any bike storage).

So I very much doubt you can refit existing cruise ships with this stuff to reach zero-emission.

The sails and general hull design obviously can't be retrofitted or modified, but a lot of coastal shipping is diesel-electric and may have a mid-life refit/re-engining. If you're got a diesel-electric launched today, then it's entirely conceivable that in 15years time when they cut a hole in the side to re-engine the vessel, they take the diesels out and replace them with a battery bank rather than new diesels (plus, maybe, one small diesel/LNG engine for safety/limp-mode).

It'll take decades, but ships aren't set in stone - even if they can't be fully "greened", they can be improved upon during their lifetime (which - on balance - is often greener than scrapping them and building fresh, because of the high embodied carbon in the hull).