More harm than good or so says Lawrence Solomon. Reads more like a right wing puff piece to generate clicks from the anti bike brigade to me, but does he have a point?

No

It is a valid point that restricting the lanes for vehicles whilst not reducing the amount of vehicles on those lanes by the same proportion is of course going to lead to more congestion.

Likeside, I think there is some merit in his comments around the holier than thou attitude of some cyclists.

That being said, it doesn’t ask the question of why the vehicles on the roads are not being reduced.

I think it’s going to be decades for cities to sort themselves out. I can see the future being more lightweight small electric transport to be honest. You. Ebikes etc.

Wow a website that has more weird resizing shite going on than this one. Didnt think that was possible.

Where it’s done properly it is proven to reduce congestion – here’s the alternative viewpoint, based on factual evidence rather than opinion:-

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2017/dec/01/bike-lanes-dont-clog-up-our-roads-they-keep-london-moving

Reads more like a right wing puff piece to generate clicks from the anti bike brigade to me, but does he have a point?

Correct, and no he doesn’t.

Statistics used out of context, hyperbolic soundbites used as if they were gospel, and in amongst it sits links to articles proclaiming that electrical power is “evil” (juxtaposed nicely with his argument that cycling is bad because of exhaust fumes) and advocating coal power. He doesn’t get his economics right, either: given his focus on London, the idea that cycling deprives cities of public transport revenue is bobbins, because the Tube is subsidised by government cash and is bursting at the seams.

All quite consciously done, though, I’m sure: Mr Solomon is an established writer.

It’s transparent pro-motoring flannelwank. It’s quite amusing reading it in the middle of reading Fighting Traffic because it’s an absolutely perfect example of the rhetoric described in the book which was used to convert social attitudes to the roads in the 1920s. I mean, practically every sentence can be mapped back to a paragraph in Norton’s book. It’s Second Road War propaganda and nothing more.

As I’ve mentioned in another thread, if I was the leader of the world, I would seriously restrict cars in all densely-populated areas.

In some ways, though what the article writer’s sophistry around the development of cycling infrastructure, I still think that the GIF at the very beginning of this thread says more than many of the arguments against cycling.

Likeside, I think there is some merit in his comments around the holier than thou attitude of some cyclists.

There really isn’t. They’re the same people that drive and walk. Such comments are just a tool of social leverage: anyone riding a bike is portrayed as aggressive just the same as anyone crossing a road a century ago was portrayed as stupid; and in both cases everyone else, particularly anyone in a car, is portrayed as the victim of those alleged faults.

There is also the strange fact that building bigger roads makes traffic worse.

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

So if the goal is to sell lots of cars to ‘stimulate the UK economy’ via finance and debt then have at it, but otherwise making roads smaller for cycling infrastructure isn’t harming anything.

Some background reading:

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gvdy5m/a-look-into-canadas-most-controversial-environmental-organization

Note the climate change denial, acknowledged misrepresentation of scientific research, anti-vaxxer support, etc. “A right-wing ideologue who is [also] a brilliant writer.”

The GLA and TfL have realised that London’s existing transport infrastructure network is so finely balanced that the only way to increase capacity without spending serious money on new infrastructure is to promote bicycle use.
this then has other benefits – reduced pollution, increased health, increased footfall in retail, less noise, allowing those existing infrastructure assets to continue in use without significant disruption.
I know quite a lot of people who are surprised that I own a car (and a van) because in London I cycle nearly everywhere otherwise using trains, buses or the tube.
I still drive about 16,000 miles a year – I just don’t do it in London, because TBH you’d have to be an idiot to do it every day.

I think we should move away from labelling people as ‘drivers’ and ‘cyclists’. The government taxes vehicle use as it creates negative externalities, like increased pollution, which no one individual cares about because the contribution from one car is small. Bikes aren’t taxed for the opposite reason, but they use the road network which is designed for vehicles hence the resentment.

if the goal is to sell lots of cars to ‘stimulate the UK economy’ via finance and debt

Why the “if”?

No, he doesn’t have a point.

It is a valid point that restricting the lanes for vehicles whilst not reducing the amount of vehicles on those lanes by the same proportion is of course going to lead to more congestion.

This argument was had with a friend when Cardiff put a bus/taxi/bike lane down one side of Newport Road while we were sat in his car watching the P&R buses go past him stationary. He couldn’t see why buses got priority. Even when I explained to him that the bus has 30+ people on it and takes up the space of 3 cars while the 3 cars around us had a grand total of 5 people in them. If those 5 people had taken the bus then he could have been 3 cars further forward in the queue. He went a bit confused when I said that if we’d been on bikes we would have been sat in the pub with our friends for 20 minutes or so rather than sat in a queue wearing his car out and burning fuel.

Some people just can’t get their heads around using alternatives to cars.

I think it’s going to be decades for cities to sort themselves out. I can see the future being more lightweight small electric transport to be honest. You. Ebikes etc.

The rise of Low Emission Zones should speed things up a bit. We’re getting one in Cardiff at some point and I can’t wait!

but they use the road network which is designed for vehicles the prevailing rhetoric is to obfuscate the nature of taxation and the provenance of the road network as well as to highlight the difference in private costs whilst completely hiding the difference in public costs which in actual fact more than reverses the economic status of the two as private transport modes hence the resentment

FTFY

If every cyclist jumped in cars instead to get from A to B, watch how this Lawrence Solomon theory unravels!

It tends not to be pipes (is the roads) that slow traffic flow but the junction, the source and sinks.

You can have a massive pipe full of water but if there is only a small outlet the flow remains the same as a much smaller pipe. It’s the fact that there is in essence no where to go in city centres and people are moving round each other at junctions that slow things up not the size of the roads between junctions.

So bez, you’re saying everyone is better-off cycling? People are upset cos they did something stupid like buying a car. Good argument. I want the haterz to ride as well though.

So bez, you’re saying everyone is better-off cycling? People are upset cos they did something stupid like buying a car. Good argument. I want the haterz to ride as well though.

And more importantly society is better off when more people cycle.

So bez, you’re saying everyone is better-off cycling? People are upset cos they did something stupid like buying a car. Good argument.

No, that’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is that the reality of how taxes are gathered and spent is wilfully misrepresented, and that people *are* personally better off (by certain but, crucially, palpable measures) in cars, because that’s the economic environment that was consciously constructed many decades ago: see the previous post of “why the if?”

At its most basic is the “road tax” thing: VED revenue matches (explicitly since Osborne’s chancellorship but implicitly prior to that) the cost of the Highways Agency, which covers motorways (on which cycling is prohibited) and the rest of the strategic network (trunk roads on which traffic levels and carriageway design together present so much danger that it amounts to a de facto prohibition of cycling). So no “road tax” is spent on providing anything for cyclists: almost all the roads that carry any cycle traffic are funded by local taxation, which is the same regardless of how many cars or bicycles you have.

Fuel duty revenue is roughly equivalent to the calculated public cost of road traffic collisions. And, other than VAT on cars, that’s your motoring-derived public revenue pretty much spent.

Beyond that you have various other social costs of motoring, such as pollution-related disease, which is significant, none of which are funded by motoring-related money but are instead covered by general taxation.

The world is quiet about this when it comes to walking, of course: when was the last time you saw a newspaper column complaining about the money and space used to construct pavements? (Note that carriageways are rarely converted to footways, and footways and formal crossings exist entirely to serve the function of keeping people subservient to motor traffic.) But when we provide for cycling, the response is highly charged.

We’ve been conditioned to the idea that roads are for motor vehicles (I assume the implied “motor” in your phrasing, since pedal cycles are vehicles) but the point is that this is deliberate conditioning. We come at this with a perspective that was constructed long ago, and right now that perspective is being used to underpin articles like this which collectively pave the way for the second annexation of the road network in preparation for autonomous vehicles.

The arrival of autonomous traffic is inevitable, but we should all at least understand what’s happening and how, because without doing so we are helpless against that arrival coming at a cost as dramatic as the arrival of the private car itself.

right now that perspective is being used to underpin articles like this which collectively pave the way for the second annexation of the road network in preparation for autonomous vehicles.

To build on that, there’s an awful lot of people on forums, Facebook etc saying they can’t wait for autonomous cars on the grounds that a fully autonomous car won’t (OK, shouldn’t…) do punishment passes, dangerous overtakes etc.

Sadly, that’s bollocks since the era of fully autonomous is 20 years off yet and when they do arrive, do you think the car manufacturers are going to be OK with the idea of people jumping off kerbs, taking primary position, riding 2-abreast etc and “forcing” the car to yield? No chance – this is building momentum for the point where they say that roads are for these lovely autonomous cars zipping freely around the place with everyone else (pedestrians, horse riders, mobility scooters, cyclists…) all herded off somewhere else. A dirt path to one side maybe, that seems to be the holy grail to which even a supposed pro-cycling charity (the irony of cycling as a mode of transport being provided for by a charity!) is happy to put their name against and call it a Cycle Route.

IIRC there’s published work by Mercedes that has the autonomous vehicle set up to prioritise the safety of its occupants if faced with something unexpected like a pedal cycle, so I can see the possible worry of their uptake.

OTOH, autonomous vehicles will ease the worst of the effects of motorised transport by taking dickish behaviour and random factors like personal decisions about what speed to travel at out of the equation. motorways where all traffic moved at the same speed would be far better from all points of view for instance (except that of the petrolhead who wants to use it as a playground).

There’s a lot going on here, and while I’ve read Bez’s arguments that we’re in the middle of a setup for the rise of the automated car and can see the logic, I’m not 100% sold. I have noted recent Ministers talking up self-driving cars as a major thing in our economic future though, so I guess that’s more weight added.

Crossing this with the HiVis thing, I can see hivis being used as a point of recognition for the automated driving system (pretty sure Bez suggested this also) but going further – if there is a Government mandated item of outer wear that cyclists must wear on the road and not cover up, betcha it gets a registration mark added across the shoulder blades.

IIRC there’s published work by Mercedes that has the autonomous vehicle set up to prioritise the safety of its occupants if faced with something unexpected like a pedal cycle, so I can see the possible worry of their uptake.

Nah. Badly misquoted/interpreted rubbish by someone who should know better. But knows that website traffic is driven by snappy headlines……

do you think the car manufacturers are going to be OK with the idea of people jumping off kerbs, taking primary position, riding 2-abreast etc and “forcing” the car to yield?

Yes. Why do you think it’s taking so long to develop the technology?
If there were plans from the manufacturers to get the unpredictable users off the road. We’d already have done it. As without them, we could have gone autonomous 5 years ago. (Probably cheaper and quicker to lobby/bribe politicians than to actually do the job properly.)

aP – Member
The GLA and TfL have realised that London’s existing transport infrastructure network is so finely balanced that the only way to increase capacity without spending serious money on new infrastructure is to promote bicycle use.
this then has other benefits – reduced pollution, increased health, increased footfall in retail, less noise, allowing those existing infrastructure assets to continue in use without significant disruption.
I know quite a lot of people who are surprised that I own a car (and a van) because in London I cycle nearly everywhere otherwise using trains, buses or the tube.
I still drive about 16,000 miles a year – I just don’t do it in London, because TBH you’d have to be an idiot to do it every day.

And motorcycles have all the benefits of bicycles, and more, yet we’re mostly ignored when it comes to reducing traffic and congestion.

Bikers use no extra space on the road in solid traffic, don’t need separate cycle lanes or ANY alterations to the road infrastructure, don’t hold up cars trying overtake them, they have lower emissions overall due to never sitting queuing in traffic, reduce overall traffic and emissions (if 10% of cars switched to a motorbike traffic would reduce by a huge amount), and of course there’s the benefit to the biker of getting to work faster, less stressed, and it costs less too.

More motorbikes is the answer, but I don’t see any plans incorporating them any time soon.

Obviously I’m on the road driving around all day. And yes from time to time bicycles do appear to slow “motorized” traffic up a bit. But if all those cyclists ( myself included when not working ) were driving cars, I’m sure overall journey times would increase. In Cardiff anyway cycle infrastructure mostly consists of completely ignored lines painted on the road 🙁

If there were plans from the manufacturers to get the unpredictable users off the road. We’d already have done it.

We largely have, but it happened sufficiently long ago that few people now realise that it did.

First there were pavements to move people out of the way of city traffic, then came designated crossing points to encourage people not to stray from the pavement wherever they chose, jaywalking laws to enforce them not to do so, and light controls for the crossings to make people wait for traffic to flow through junctions and only cross the road when cars were already stopped in order to let other cars flow in different directions.

Near where I work there’s a junction in an uninteresting suburban location with a 30mph limit, where if you want to walk to the opposite side you need to wait for four separate phases of the lights. If you’re in a car you only ever have to wait once, and one of the main reasons that people on bikes choose “get in the way” of people in cars is so that they too only have to wait once: the cyclepath is the footpath, so if you use it you have to not only wait for all the same phases of the lights, watching drivers merrily flowing through on each (there is no point, ever, at which all traffic is halted), but you also have to pick your way through everyone on foot.

Many, of course, would make the use of that cycle path mandatory: the media publish plenty of “letters” and op-eds expressing that sentiment. But in the absence of cycleways or footways which offer at least the efficiency of flow afforded to motorised traffic, that sentiment is nothing more than a desire to sweep people out of the way of cars.

The extent to which foot traffic (and all non-motorised traffic) has been pushed into ghettos is something most of us fail to see, simply because it was arranged like that before we were born, not because it’s somehow an inevitable fact of nature.

motorcycles have all the benefits of bicycles, and more

Not all: pedal cycles don’t cause pollution, don’t consume additional natural resources for fuel, don’t cause noise, aren’t sedentary, carry significantly lower risk of harm in a collision, are cheaper to run, and require even less road space.

Crossing this with the HiVis thing, I can see hivis being used as a point of recognition for the automated driving system (pretty sure Bez suggested this also) …

I literally work in the industry designing these algorithms. This is utter nonsense. It just won’t happen. 100% guarantee it.

I know it’s difficult to understand if you are not in the industry, but a computer can recognise anything a human can. If you can spot a person in an image without the use of some kind of special clothing, so can a computer. (Google Photos already does this). Except the computer is always paying attention and has no blind spots.

That’s not to say these things are going to be perfect straight away, but people won’t need to where any special clothing or carry any kind of transponder or phone or anything.

Some companies are suggesting such a thing, but they probably won’t get anywhere like a lot of those awful kickstarter or Dragons Den ideas.

Forgot to add,

(Probably cheaper and quicker to lobby/bribe politicians than to actually do the job properly.)

This is essentially the point I made in the most recent column: the astute solution to the economic challenge is to reduce or remove the need for a solution to the many engineering challenges.

Getting others to introduce regulation, or to influence the public to support such regulation, is a perfectly rational approach when you’re faced with the prospect of having to build computers that can both sense and protect the unpredictable humans around them whilst also being marketable by way of transporting their customers quickly and predictably. Fundamentally, it’s the latter part of that which is the sales pitch: a car which stops every time someone steps into the road or which decides to kill its occupants when faced with the Trolley Problem is going to sell about as well as a Sinclair C5 with a Ford Pinto petrol tank zip-tied to the back.

If you can arrange things such that other people pay for infrastructure, other people agree that humans shouldn’t wander onto the roadway tracks, and other people pay to police that state of affairs, then that places far fewer demands on your engineering and on the “intelligence” of the computer driving it: just as when humans started driving cars it was easier to push for sidewalks and jaywalking laws than it was to engineer non-harmful cars or to demand that drivers were rigorously trained, retested and sanctioned. Who’d have bought a Model T if it only went at walking pace, was covered in soft cushions, and you had to go through the equivalent of a private pilot’s test to be let loose in one?

Bez to the thread…

Ah never mind.

That’s not to say these things are going to be perfect straight away, but people won’t need to where any special clothing or carry any kind of transponder or phone or anything.

The issue comes, though, when you want the computer to travel at speed. Optical systems fundamentally have the same issues as eyeballs do, and while Lidar doesn’t have the same reliance on an external source of light it still requires reflectivity, which varies by material. So for a given sensor there must be a limit to the distance over which it can detect different materials. If it can detect any material at a distance that comfortably exceeds the stopping distance at the vehicle’s speed then that’s a good start, but is that the case? (This is presumably one area where network communications can help: giving a wider, if less positionally precise, view beyond the Lidar range.)

Would be very happy to be pointed in the direction of more data and information, though.

Too many people fall into the trap of want new technology to be perfect, really it should only need to be better than what we currently have, which are us, and we’re shit.

With regard to the original article, it was clearly written with a very deliberate set of biasses with only one conclusion in mind, but it’s entertaining to see it taken apart regardless.

It popped into my Google News feed as I’m interested in ‘bicycles’ as far as Google are concerned, obviously Google haven’t worked out that I’m pro bike rather than anti. I’d like to see some of the comments above in the comment section on the article. With no refutals this is type of article will reinforce the attitude of many towards people on bikes, and cycling infrastructure.

Oh and ‘flannelwank’ might be my new favourite insult.

In the same way that it’s a valid point and there’s some merit in suggesting that Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Yes that might be an attempt to Godwin the thread, but TBH that’s what discussion of an article like that deserves – it’s nothing but pro-motoring, anti-cyclist flannel.

Not all: pedal cycles don’t cause pollution, don’t consume additional natural resources for fuel, don’t cause noise, aren’t sedentary, carry significantly lower risk of harm in a collision, are cheaper to run, and require even less road space.
[/quote]

You glossed over possibly the biggest one – sedentary. Motorbikes don’t provide huge health benefits to their users – those health benefits alone are one of the biggest population advantages to increasing cycling.

I still stand by my comment on a holier than thou attitude shown by *some* cyclists. You only need to see some of the cyclist videos posted up and discussed to see that. Equally, as discussed here as well even in the same videos, there is an attitude of drivers that see themselves as the priority above all else and see the bike as a thing to be put down forever. Which is another holier than thou attitude as well.

Which comes round to my point , which perhaps I didn’t expand on properly. I think to address the issues in large cities, there needs to be a significant social and cultural change by all parties using the road and transport networks, and that is to move away from thinking that their particular method of transport is singularly the best method that should prevail at the expense of all others.

No matter environmental friendly and less polluting each becomes:
– Bikes, and similar devices of movement are not going to go away completely.
– Cars, and similar devices are not going to go away completely.
– Large transport vehicles are not going to away completely.
– Buses and similar concentrated public transport vehicles are not going to away completely.

So to me, the attitude has to move from trying to eliminate each other to getting them to work together sensibly and socially accepting them in a shared environment.

Cycleways & congestion

This has been mentioned above, but if the cycling community in London had a ‘don’t take the bike day’ twice a year, and drove, or took the underground, the place would grind to a halt.
You could put a sticker on your car or a badge indicating you are a cyclist normally.
The other drivers might actually learn to be thankful that the cyclist makes it possible for the roads to function.
Without them the infrastructure is ****.

if the cycling community in London had a ‘don’t take the bike day’ twice a year

There is no cycling community!!
In the same way that there is no driving community or bussing community. There are a collection of individuals travelling around for any number of different reasons using the best/most appropriate method of transport for them at that moment*

*OK, clearly not quite true given the number of kids driven half a mile to school in the 4×4 but you get what I’m saying.

Call me selfish but frankly I couldn’t care less about anyone else cycling/driving/walking/getting the train. I treat them with respect, I expect to be treated the same way and I don’t wish any harm on them but I don’t really care about them! Nor do I consider myself part of a “community” based solely on my transport method at any given time.

mrlebowski’s link.

/end thread

I did read the article in OP. It was (unsurprisingly) full of the same old anti-cycling shite. He hardly even tried to dress it up.

Ban private car ownership and use in cities, might as well start now as we need to go on.