Blood on the streets

I suggest that the thousands of deaths on the roads do have a considerable cost

Where did I suggest otherwise?

Perhaps this thread should be merged into the helmet thread, since the arguments are essentially the same and the inability of some people to read through their blinkers is about the same too.

Oh yes, of course. The lonely voice of reason, drowned out by the hysterical shrieking of the lunatics.

Well, you said it.

If you have answers, bring them. I certainly don't pretend to have any, but I clearly have questions you are unwilling or unable to address.

mdcc is keith peat aicmfp.

Well, you said it.

If you have answers, bring them. I certainly don't pretend to have any, but I clearly have questions you are unwilling or unable to address.

I think you'll find that the tone of your posts discourages any interaction, as they are tendentious, patronising, rhetorical, and laden with innuendo and offensive remarks. Even where there is agreement, you manage to dress it up as your interlocutor finally acceding to your long-standing beliefs, which is a little much for me to take on this particular topic, with which I have more than a passing acquaintance.

Accusing me of wanting to take us back the Stone Age is not only historically wrong (the Steam Age came before the Petrol Age), it is actually wrong, as I value the benefits of modern industrial society. Just because I think that we need to re-organise our transport system somewhat for greater efficiency doesn't mean I want be Head Druid at Stonehenge, and such rhetoric doesn't make me want debate with you, it just makes me want to respond in kind, i.e. with cheap debating tricks.

Bring freight into London via barge, then distribute from logistics centres on either bank.

We could replace a certain number of major roads with canals to reach areas not served by the Regents canal etc.

I am (so far) unaware of a cyclist ever having been in a collision with a barge- apart from Hippy, but he collided with it.

http://m.bikeradar.com/road/news/article/london-cyclists-urged-to-protest-after-fourth-death-in-eight-days-38997

And
http://m.bikeradar.com/news/article/london-cycle-safety-petition-hits-18000-in-two-days-39014

On phone so links are probs broken I just came across there and thought they tied in well

Elsewhere, on New Change, a van sat at the lights full of towels and tablecloths that it had collected from restaurants to be cleaned on an industrial estate on the north circular. On Exhibition Road they delivered paper cups and single-use wooden spatulas to the museum cafés. On Great Queen Street a lorry swapped around the furniture between conferences at a hotel. All over Soho, bars took deliveries of ice cubes.

Everywhere people were delivering blank paper and printer cartridges, stepping over the bags of paper recycling strewn across the pavements. Everywhere people were delivering disposable cutlery while the council swept up the disposed of cutlery. And everywhere people were delivering water. Water. A substance that is available on tap in every London building for a negligible cost.

Whenever one suggests that the price of the congestion charge should be vastly greater than it is, that there should be stricter limits on the vehicles that are allowed into city centres, or that a significant proportion of zone 1 roads should be closed to vehicles entirely, one is asked what one would do about all the people who simply have no choice but to drive into Central London: the businesses who need things delivering. Vans are essential and the costs they’re already asked to bear are hurting, we’re told.

Well if businesses in the centre of the city are choosing to have ice cubes and water driven to them in vans instead of turning on a tap and buying a £200 ice machine, having contract cleaners cart mops around instead of investing in a broom cupboard, and sending their laundry to a barn on the orbital instead of putting it in the washing machine, I say the costs aren’t hurting enough. Or rather, businesses are not paying their bills. Because, as is amply evident on any journey through central London, the main reason such ludicrous operations manage to survive is by breaking the rules and dumping the consequences on the rest of us.

Business is one of those fields that I’m really not competent to begin to comment on — and christ can I think of nothing I’d like less than to be so. But I’m happy to speculate wildly anyway — content that on this topic I don’t really care if I’m spouting embarrassingly simplistic crap — about how Britain, and London especially, built itself into its unhappy van dependency. This situation appears to be the outcome of the pursuit of an extreme outsourcing. The vans of companies specialised in simple everyday tasks, like freezing water and washing tablecloths, serve asset light and asset stripped “enterprises” — owners of nothing, investors in little, employers of nobody, constructing products and services entirely out of the leased and the subcontracted.

Whether that’s clever responsible responsive flexible capitalism or dangerous short termist profiteering that contributes nothing of any real value to the lives of our cities is too far outside of my field even for my wild speculation.

All I know is that it only works by dumping its costs on society in the form of the traffic in our towns: the vans that we are reminded are so essential.

http://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2013/09/

Put bluntly, we don't need all these vans clogging up London. Alternatives exist.

Put bluntly, we don't need all these vans clogging up London. Alternatives exist.

Alternative cement mixers?

Its not just about lorries.
its about drivers accepting cyclists. Their attitude.

I think you'll find that the tone of your posts discourages any interaction, as they are tendentious, patronising, rhetorical, and laden with innuendo and offensive remarks. Even where there is agreement, you manage to dress it up as your interlocutor finally acceding to your long-standing beliefs, which is a little much for me to take on this particular topic, with which I have more than a passing acquaintance.

Accusing me of wanting to take us back the Stone Age is not only historically wrong (the Steam Age came before the Petrol Age), it is actually wrong, as I value the benefits of modern industrial society. Just because I think that we need to re-organise our transport system somewhat for greater efficiency doesn't mean I want be Head Druid at Stonehenge, and such rhetoric doesn't make me want debate with you, it just makes me want to respond in kind, i.e. with cheap debating tricks.

Sorry for OT but is this your blog ? http://buffalobillbikeblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/bullitt-cargo-bikes-3-years-on/

Alternative cement mixers?

Its not just about lorries.
its about drivers accepting cyclists. Their attitude.

Yeah, a large number of HGVs are involved in construction, I've no idea how they could be replaced unless by river barges or something. Often sub-contracted with an incentive to cut corners, like the lorry that killed Svetlana Tereschenko at Bow. No additional safety features, no mirrors, driver chatting on a mobile and not indicating and the police charge the driver with.. nothing.

A possible way to improve the situation would be to enforce field of vision in the MOT of vehicles so correct mirrors which reduce blind spots would have to be installed sighing 12 months and liability is tracable on all vehicles that don't have said mirrors

Sorry for OT but is this your blog ? http://buffalobillbikeblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/bullitt-cargo-bikes-3-years-on/

Yes.

Yes.

I like it a lot been reading it recently big thanks for putting the time into writing something as interesting as that

A possible way to improve the situation would be to enforce field of vision in the MOT of vehicles so correct mirrors which reduce blind spots would have to be installed sighing 12 months and liability is traceable on all vehicles that don't have said mirrors

Won't make any difference if the vehicles is being driven poorly.

^ How many collisions are due to poor driving though, really?

Quite a lots, but often never convinced of poor driving, such as Dr Helen Measures.

But it does stop drivers hiding behind the excuse 'the company gave me a vehicle that had blind spots' which is where accountability becomes difficult to trace

A possible way to improve the situation would be to enforce field of vision in the MOT of vehicles so correct mirrors which reduce blind spots would have to be installed sighing 12 months and liability is tracable on all vehicles that don't have said mirrors

All HGVs built since 2000 should have so-called 4th mirror (which covers the area immediately front left of driver's cab) fitted, either at time of sale or retroactively.

Legislation has been in force since 2008.

^ How many collisions are due to poor driving though, really?

Almost all, depending on how you define 'poor'. Very rarely is a collision caused by anything other than an error by one of the parties.

^ How many collisions are due to poor driving though, really?

Would poor driving not include driving a vehicle that you know doesn't have all the safety stuff that it really should though ?

Would poor driving not include driving a vehicle that you know doesn't have all the safety stuff that it really should though ?

Yup, plus the vehicle owner needs a slap.

If you want to know what effect any intervention in London would have, you need first to design the intervention (people on this thread are talking about a much bigger change than getting only the biggest trucks out of the city centre during the day) and then to ask the vehicle operators and their customers what they would do in order to comply with the intervention, either maintaining the current level of economic activity or reducing it in the face of such an intervention.
.

It's funny, this is exactly the kind of logic that the banks and the oil/gas sector use when they're trying to fight new regulation. Thus far, we seem still to have banks in the City and people are still investing in new production capacity in the North Sea. We might have lost a few trading shops to Switzerland and have not developed a couple of the smaller, more complex fields, but on the other hand we don't have the financial risks associated with potentially having to bail out the trading shops, and if an oil field isn't viable at over $100/bl maybe we would do better to deploy the cash elsewhere. Like energy efficiency.

Generally, when demand for a good or service is relatively inelastic, a slight increase in the marginal cost because of a heavier regulatory burden doesn't actually kill off the activity, although it may make the most marginal instances of its use economically unviable. In the context we're talking about, that most marginal use would be driving lorries around in central London that are loaded to well below their carrying capacity. Which most people here would think to be a good thing to lose. But the world wouldn't end, and it's cod-economic bullshit to pretend it would.

(Not wishing to prolong the lorry focus but...)
As well as additional lorries underloaded that could possible be lost, I believe a major issue is skip/tipper lorries whose drivers get paid per drop. Losing that economic model through heavier regulatory burden would have major benefits in the change of the driver mentality and therefore their conduct

^^ Interesting thoughts.

^ No, let's prolong it a little :)

As well as pay-per-load, you've got contractors driving their own vehicles and sometimes, such as for the construction of The Shard, a continuous concrete pour takes place requiring multiple trucks to travel at speed for prolonged periods (24 continuous hours in the Shard's case!) to and from the site. A delay could jeopardise the whole operation and cost a vast amount of money.

Want to know something spooky? I read a blog post that suggested lorries involved with The Shard had been involved in 3 cyclist fatalities. I emailed it to The Shard press office and asked if it was accurate, I got a friendly call from a gentlemen in the office who reassured me it was not true and they had strict controls on sub-contractors and the blog post was inaccurate, all very cordial. I thanked him and hung up, then realised my mobile number wasn't in the email and is unlisted, anywhere.