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I'm going to disagree with you about the coffee, there's a lot of good coffee about. However, quality was irrelevant to the point, it was the experience of the cafe culture that was the object of the comparison.
As for building stuff, particularly roads and transport infrastructure, is that it isn't cheap and it isn't quick. It may look like that from the point of access but going through the scoping, tendering, design, planning, consultation and early implementation stages are both costly and long-winded. This is the reason we don't just whack stuff in and see what happens and then play about with it later. And we absolutely shouldn't. That, if anything, is the lesson that the whole country should be leaning from the tragic fiasco that was, and in some ways still is, Blackfriars Bridge.
The_Seldom_Killer-
The coffee thing was kind of a joke. And it depends on what you class as good coffee :) I would imagine that if you just look at the pure amount of good coffee sold then yes - it is 'a lot' in the same way that 'a lot' of water is drunk each day and a 'a lot' of apples are eaten etc etc. The reality though is that if you don't class a coffee from the usual suspects / hotels /
Pubs etc as good, and you look at the amount of 'bad' coffee drunk in the UK vs 'good' you will see that most - as I wrote before - is ducking shite,
Which doesn't preclude some of it being good. Of course the grounds and or beans might have been 'good' to start with - I suspect most of it is ruined by poor technique and badly maintained equipment.In the same way, if you look at the cost of building something in isolation it looks pretty bloody pricey, but if you then compare it with, say, the cost and time required to change the driving habits and sense of entitlement of an entire nation or super city, an effort that would need to be maintained for a period of time and intensity, getting permission and smashing some concrete around starts to look like not such a bad idea.
Of course, that doesn't mean you can't try both, concurrently which is what I would like, I just suspect the permenance of concrete and it's ease of manipulation will trump the cash return of asking the dominant species to play nice, and convincing the authorities that there's value in it for them to correct that behaviour by punishment if asking nicely doesn't work.
Howard
I'm confused. Our roads and coffee are, mostly, shit.
There are a variety of tools in the box to encourage mass, safer cycling
The nice thing about building stuff is that a) it's cheap,
b) it's quick and c) it's really easy to tell if it's working - or not, and is easy to change.