Chesterton’s Fence is, at heart, the observation that until we know why the past did the things they did we should not change those things the past did. Because if we don’t understand why they did them then we’ll not be able to know whether we should still be doing them.
Seems a fair piece of logic to us.
Which brings us to transport systems. No one has to look far to see those insisting we must have many more railways, much more cycling, recreate tram systems and so on. Because, you know, the car is just so, well, yuck, see?
Which is the thing that needs to be Chesterton’s Fence’d. The car is a later technology than those three – and many more, the horse, canal boat and so on. The car, when left alone to get on with it, largely but not completely replaced those three – and the others, canal boat, horse, carriage and so on. So, why? For if we don’t know why then we cannot know why the car did outcompete. Nor can we know whether that reason still avails or has itself been surpassed?
With the footnote:
This point revealed to us by the former keyboard player in Billy Ocean’s touring band. Just to remind of how far we go in our research into interesting points which illuminate.
One of the joys of public writing is that the audience, readership, usually knows more than the writer.
Lordy, I’m immortalised…
I have a feeling that the videos of you playing are going to last longer than a blog post but, you know….
Yes, that’s what I’m worried about…
ROFL!!
That’s what you get for sticking your neck out in the 80’s music scene… 😛
Deservedly so. You are wise.
Thank you, Theo. It takes one to know one but wise is a very big word when I consider its relation to me. Sowell and Hayek, mind…
People keep ignoring my suggestion that we all go to work by skating along frozen canals and rivers. (The cult of Global Boiling must surely mean that the next Little Ice Age is almost upon us?)
But sherioushly, the only recent, interesting advance in transport is the electric bike. If only it weren’t such a fire starter.
P.S. I have identified a new, sustainable, renewable fuel. We should return to burning witches.
I agree about the electric bike but only in areas in which some cunt isn’t going to steal or trash it within minutes. We’re planning to spend a week in Wells next Spring and will probably hire electric bikes to look around the place thoroughly. I wouldn’t have considered pushbikes for that. We’re too out of practice, have always been crap cyclists, and it’s a bit hilly.
For Wells, or the villages and towns around? Wells is rather compact.
Wells street by street, and some of the surroundings.
Just walk?
Probably a bit slow. Wife has short legs 🙂
You could get a horse
You should at least roll out to Holkham Hall and the estate, which has its own tree lined avenue (one of many) almost to the town.
Thanks for that, PJF. Will do.
Wells, Somerset? Holkham Hall is nearer Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk.
That’s embarrassing. I’ve picked up a bit of local gab there; nobody says that in Norfolk, it’s just Wells. Oh well, Norman didn’t specify and he did say it was a bit hilly, whereas Somerset is well hilly. Should’ve realised that nobody sensible could spend a week looking round a wretchedly bucket’n’spaded village. Shall we visit the Co-op today, dear?
It’s not a *legal* mod, but the theft problem is already more or less sorted.
Given that the batteries are, for modern e-bikes, integrated in the frame…….
You can overload the batteries by remote ( phone) control, most likely igniting them.
*You* won’t have a bike. The person stealing the thing also won’t… and with a bit of luck.. a headline and scorched nethers…
Britain didn’t burn witches. That was a Continental thing. We hanged them.
Good for us but that rather undermines the joke.
Joke restored:
We should return to burning Lutherans.
Not Lutherans, but lefties…
The biggest advances for me in public transport is contactless payments on buses and transport apps. Contactless payment takes away the “shit forgot to get cash out” problem. Transport apps let me figure out a route. Can I reasonably do it by bus, or do I need to hire a car, take a taxi? Also, if the bus is late, I can see it on the tracker so I’ll stay in a warm cafe for longer rather than going out in the pissing rain.
I couldn’t have ditched my car without these.
Public transport is OK: the problem is the public!
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m actually saying that some innovation tipped me to using public transport more. And not particularly expensive innovation.
We run lots of empty trains at night with high ticket prices. It would be an absolute win-win for rail to make those cheap, fill seats. get £10 instead of £0. Why doesn’t this happen? Mostly because the whole thing is micromanaged by government bureaucrats who don’t really care if more people use the trains. National Express have some ridiculously cheap tickets because they do this. £6 from Swindon to London, if you pick your time right.
National Express don’t have ticket offices. There’s apps and there’s convenience stores on PayPoint that act as agents. Nearly everyone is on the app but for everyone else, go see Mr Singh.
And it doesn’t work for everyone. Nothing wrong with cars, but for some people the alternative can work better.
Don’t know about anyone else but I’d be very nervous about using a UK train at night. In general, UK public transport’s a self preservation no go zone.
I’ve just spent the weekend visiting a mate in Peterborough, and found the ability to use a card on the buses very useful. And also when using PT in that there London.
Uber is a wonder for me in the sticks. Sure, I could drive, but 10 minutes wait for a taxi is much easier.
Amen to those apps. I wonder if having an encyclopedia on your mobile helps to while away the hour between cancelled buses, certainly does for me.
You missed the bus, Timmer.
It’s not about transportation.
One of the comments under that piece says:“We know, for example, that the transport modal share of cycling is around 2% here but in countries and cities (such as the Netherlands and Copenhagen) it is above 30% because there they have safe facilities.”
We also know that the Netherlands and Copenhagen are remarkably flat and have lots of space, including the tops of dykes and canal towpaths, that can be turned into cycle paths. Hilly North London, where I live, on the other hand… and that’s before we start on the road-use culture here compared to there, and also Tokyo.
Yes, flat, but it’s more than that. It’s about kids cycling, students cycling and MILFs cycling. You can see it from this chart. Women start cycling a lot more 30-50. Because Dutch women work less (something like 70% are part-time) they have the time to ride the kids to school, maybe pop into a shop for something on the bike.
Women work a lot more in the UK so don’t have time to ride kids to school. So they do the school run by car. This also doesn’t really get kids into the habit of cycling to school, and carrying that forward into adult life for a while. There isn’t the security in numbers if only a few kids are doing it.
And sure, there’s cycle paths everywhere but the same can be said about a lot of Swindon. As they built the Western and Northern parts of the town, they built pretty good cycle paths. Hardly anyone uses them. Oxford has lots of cycling because car use is a nightmare.
Oxford has lots of cycling because car use is a nightmare.
And has lots of students (as does Cambridge) who need to get around a scattered campus fairly quickly.
Yes, that too.
Milton Keynes was built with a wondrous set of cycle (and foot) paths completely segregated from the road network, that are now the haunt of rapists and robbers. But it has had its share of diversity.
Also, the Germans handily cleared all the pesky buildings out of the way 80 years ago.
Back when I was a semi serious cyclist, for exercise not transport although it worked for both, there were very few bike lanes in my home city. And those that existed were too dangerous (basically here’s a couple of feet alongside parked cars, no thanks). So I rode in traffic regularly. You hold your lane, move over when you can and when it’s safe. Obviously that doesn’t work on arterial roads and the like. But in general I don’t like cycle lanes as a concept for inner city. They encourage people to see cyclists as not road users.
So now we have all these “shared paths” which are pedestrians and cyclists. Yeah, great mix.
I agree. Cycle paths that are seperate from the roads or on disused railway lines are mostly OK. those that are painted on the roads are terrible, usually drawn on the most dangerous part of the road for cyclists to be.
When I was small I used to live in a small village, back when only a handful of people had a car. How did people get around? They didn’t. People just didn’t go anywhere. A big highlight of the year was an annual coach trip to the seaside. There was a small post office and shop. We had a series of vans that came around, fish van, butcher’s van, bread van, and so on.
I’ve mentioned this before…..several times….
The Netherlands is only *relatively* flat. It very much is not when considering all the ramps up and down dikes, bridges and other assorted crossings.
And the bits that *are* flat, are at the mercy of the wind…. Of which we happen to have a lot….
Stop comparing cycling in Amsterdam Canal Belt with actually cycling in Clogland..
It’s one of the best ways of showing you’re a bloody furriner…. Prolly one who’s only ever sniffed at a bicycle, in the showroom.
Yeah, the wind was what I remember about cycling in Flanders. Which is as flat as Holland. Anything past October you get winds can cut you in half. And when you do get a rise in the ground it takes about 5 km’s doing it
Apart from the obvious points such as security, theft, parking, exposure to the weather, etc. people seem to forget that the primary characteristic of cycling is that it is strenuous exercise, not transport.
It first became popular, particularly in France, because it enabled people to travel much further than walking could in the same time, and this was a positive trade-off for the effort required, notably for rural folk who were already in shape. The moment ICE vehicles including mopeds appeared the bicycle was overshadowed, not least because as well as being faster and less effort they could carry more load, especially up hills.
This is the central point about cycling. It’s all about energy conservation and management. It takes effort to get up to speed and few cyclists are willing to sacrifice their energy and momentum unless they absolutely have to, which is why they ride blithely through pedestrian crossings and red lights, and why it is both fatuous and self-defeating to write laws commanding them to stop. They just won’t.
They would if doing so permitted the pedestrians to shoot them without legal repercussion.
It’s all about incentives, as Bruce Schneier observed back in 2009: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/08/people_understand_ri.html
“Liking going fast but not actually liking cycling” is a pretty strong incentive, but you could actually enact one of those laws if you paired it with strong and likely enough enforcement that it trumped the incentive of not wanting to pedal.
I’m not saying it’s practical to do this, but people don’t run red lights in cars because of the twin incentives of “you might die in a car accident” and “you will likely be identified by your number plate and fined”. So you probably could have mandatory number plates on bikes, coupled with big fines for antisocial driving and not having a plate, and that would sort the incentives out. AI might tip the balance: if the public is willing to accept a surveillance state for cars, it would be simple enough to extend it to bicycles.
In my experience drivers are pretty much as likely to stop at red lights where there is obviously no camera as where there is an obvious camera and warning signs, so potential fines are not a significant incentive. I think the main incentive is the recognition that driving through a red light is quite dangerous and if done routinely will almost certainly result in a crash of some kind. Even a minor collision is highly undesireable as repairs are expensive whether paid for directly, via loss of no claims discount, or via higher insurance premiums.
Cyclists know that not only are crashes less likely for them (as bicycles are smaller), but consequences are almost inevitably much lower than car crashes.
Until the cyclist meets a car coming the other way…
No, it’s that the cyclist just knows he’s in the right. Until the universe tells him the contrary.
Here lies the body of Joshua Grey
Who died defending his right of way.
He was right as could be as he rode along,
But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.
It’s all about energy conservation and management
The same applies to 40-ton artics, which is why they are pissed off at the elderly plonkers doing 40-50mph in their elderly vehicles, and why they’ll spend hours in the fast lane overtaking slightly slower lorries at a speed delta of mm/sec.
They stop pretty damn sharpish when someone bigger than them (eg, me!) steps out in front of them when the green man lights up.
Try that around here in front of the Young Diversity and you’ll get knifed. And don’t get me started on swarthy Deliveroo riders on their fucking motor scooters, overtaking stopped vehicles at pedestrian crossings whilst bawling into their phones in hideous, guttural languages.
One thing I learned about living round there was don’t expect cars to stop at pedestrian crossings. Even those controlled by traffic lights. And the car you just managed to not be run over by will usually have a brown or black face at the wheel. Most of them drive exactly the same as where they came from.
Same here actually…
You take your life in your hands at a Zebra Crossing.
And if you are driving and don’t pull away from a light controlled crossing the moment the pedestrian has reached the far pavement (no matter the state of the lights), a severe tooting from the car behind can be expected.
When I served in Cyprus in the mid ’70s the definition of a micro second was the time it took from a traffic light going to green to the first car horn being hit.
It hadn’t changed when I last visited 20 years ago.
Same now… But made worse by those that think the red light doesn’t apply to them going the other way.
They’ve started fitting traffic light cameras to reduce the accidents so caused.
A lot of the people live around the area in question are from either side of your disputed frontier. Actually I do like Greek Cyps. For various reasons I was pretty well part of the community. But they do go on as if laws are something happen to other people.
I don’t know about Spain, but I’ve been told* that in France** ‘zebra’ crossings are suggestions of the best place for pedestrians to cross, and motorists are under no obligation to stop for them.
* I’ve never read Le Code de la Route
** or maybe it was just Paris 🙂
In France, you just excude “Grievous Bodily Harm” at approaching cars at a zebra crossing.
Works well enough outside of Paris.
And no-one sane would ever be caught within the bounds of Paris.
Move out of London…East Anglia is lovely…wide sky, beautiful coast…and nearly all of the few darkies are middle-class professionals, not criminals, robbers or pimps…
Missus doesn’t fancy it. Being a Tokyo girl she needs access to big cities, and given that she came here for me I have a duty to defer to her wishes: I can adapt more easily that her. So the South-West, with access to Bath and Bristol, it looks like it will have to be. Even if we live in a camper van. Plus, I like the accent.
It’s just over the hour by train from Ipswich to London. You could drive to Shenfield which gets you on the Elizabeth Line.
I know. We’ve looked around the East and may look again but she doesn’t really fancy it. I liked Northallerton. “We’re not moving North.” OK.
Northallerton: Lewis-&-Cooperland. I’m glad to think it’s still OK given how long it is since we lived nearby.
It’s still there, DM, and apparently thriving. As is Betty’s. Nice high st, noticeably few empty shops: only a couple. Lacking in charity shops and Turkish barbers, too. Plenty of pubs. And a restored railway to play with.
As a Yorkshireman who does love the county, well most of it, the thought of moving back to those long, cold, dark nights when I retired didn’t appeal to either of us.
There is that. Can’t win ’em all.
Where would you park at Shenfield? It was difficult enough 30 years ago. They must have yellow lined it out to Buttsbury ford by now. Using underwater paint.
You can live cheaply in the South West but you have to be a bit away from those places.
I live in Swindon and I always say that I never feel like I miss out on anything. Town centre is an utter dump but I never go there. Old Town is quite nice, villages around are nice. It has all the supermarkets, gyms, some good pubs. And when I want a bit of culture, Bath is 25 minutes by train, Bristol around 40. I’ll go and have evenings in Bath seeing a Korean movie or tasting wine.
If you want a bit more of a character place, but don’t mind some driving, Devizes is nice, not much more expensive than Swindon.
I liked Devizes when I went and will probably have another look, but have unwisely fallen for Wells, which we may not be able to afford. Shaftesbury was interesting, too.
Wells is pricey, but nice. A mate of mine lives there. Personally, it’s the sort of place I view as nice for a visit, but how often am I going to want to see the cathedral or Bishop’s Palace? For a place to live, I’d be happy with Devizes. Bradford-on-Avon is nice too, but I don’t know prices. B-o-A also gets you a train service to Bath and Bristol.
Maybe worth a look at Corsham? I don’t know it much. I’m more in the pig farming area, Timmy’s better around Bath.
When we used the motorhome site in Bath a lot to visit our son at the uni there appeared to be a few semi permanent residents.
I wouldn’t use it unless I had to a thoroughly miserable site.
But Normal for Norfolk
“The car wins over all of those communal forms of transport because the car is not communal. As such it is point to point, from desired point to desired point that is, not from the one defined terminus to another defined terminus. A car will take you to where you actually want to go, from where you start out, in a way that those communal forms simply do not.”
The trade-offs come with costs and density, and frequency of travel. Public transport really works in London because the density supports frequent services. If I want to go from Swindon to Liverpool Street, that works by train. Congestion is awful after Chiswick, and the thing with the train is that when you get to Paddington, you are only waiting 5 minutes for a Liverpool St train.
If you’re going from an Oxfordshire village to go and see Lacock, you’ll spend a lot longer by public transport. It’s not that the public transport itself is that much slower, it’s the changeover. You’ll spend up to 30 minutes waiting for a bus to Swindon, then up to 20 minutes waiting for a train to Chippenham, then up to 30 minutes waiting for a bus to Lacock. And there’s no avoiding this. You can’t go running treble the number of buses because they’ll be empty which makes them less efficient than cars.
Frequency of travel is, if you don’t do a lot of mileage, it’s still worth using a bus or train, accepting some time delays, as it’s more economic than owning a car that sits doing nothing most of the week.
In a word, freedom. Commie actions are to destroy freedom. With commies, the issue is never the issue.
The only logical reason for considering all that and coming up with the answer “robotaxis” is owning Tesla stock.
I don’t think that self-driving is the future because improvement is miniscule. But there’s lots of things that could be done. Having people sharing taxis, airport cars might be a big one. Someone is going Heathrow to Swindon, someone else Heathrow to Wootton Bassett, you can put both in a car.
I also quite like these pocket EVs like the Citroen Ami. If you’re a little old lady, that’ll work for you. 2 seats, 45 mile range, 30mph, £8K. It’ll get you to shops, hairdressers, going to see friends. Cheap because the small range and size means you don’t need a huge battery. The odd time you have to go to somewhere far away you take a train, coach or hire a car. It’s probably the best improvement for people in rural areas.
A lot of improvement is marginal revolution. An EV won’t work for my wife as she has to go do long journeys. The batteries get a bit cheaper and she’ll switch.
The sharing thing has been attempted. Legislation in the UK makes is harder than it should be (e.g. you need a different class of insurance if you are making a profit on giving someone a lift), but it doesn’t seem to be popular anywhere. Lyft started out as a rideshare service, but now is pretty much just another type of taxi service as that is what people want.
I guess the end-point envisioned, though, is some kind of self-driving minibus that is just constantly ridesharing and driving a route that’s centrally planned by a server that knows where all the busses and passengers are and want to be going , essentially solving the “public transport takes you from where you’re not to where you don’t want to be” problem.
It would probably have to be self-driving because no human driver would put up with having to drive for hours on end with no breaks and not knowing where he’s going beyond the next few turns.
Flexibly Routed Bus Services.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a807f28ed915d74e33fac46/registration-flexibly-routed-local-bus-services-guide-for-operators.pdf
https://www.eastsussex.gov.uk/roads-transport/public/buses/flexibus
Been a thing for a while.
But, Charles is largely right, legislation gets screwy, users still have to get to a pick-up point, and largely have to put up with a delay, sometimes significant, effectively still planning around the not-a-timetable.
Not convinced AV will solve that.
The East Sussex scheme seems to charge a flat rate, which suggests it is subsidised, probably heavily.
Rideshare falls down on “who owns the vehicles?”
Either you’re pooling, so everyone owns one and they take turns (which falls down if not everyone is good at tracking).
Or money or favors are changing hands. At that point you might as well set up something taxi-adjacent.
An obvious improvement of self-driving vehicles is that there’s no such thing as antisocial hours. You want a taxi at 4am, well there actually is one, because the computer doesn’t mind sleeping in a parking space for 90 minutes between rides.
The Ami etc are even better in France because you don’t need a full driving licence.