And knee-jerk culture war nonsense to shore up support and distract from failing to cope with reality.
...is absurd. Supporting a safer cycling environment should not be controversial! Grant Shapps has recently railed against cyclists and suggested ridiculous legislation against it
Nope, not absurd at all. LTNs are a political issue, and it's a mis-characterisation to imply that they're solely a safer cycling scheme. Jeremy Vine has a duty of impartiality which by expressing support for LTNs he's explicitly breached.
Or is riding a bike now a political act? I suppose it's similar to many things that have been weaponised by politics, perhaps they shouldn't be so political, but they increasingly are, more seriously than cycling LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, abortion.... etc
Well the problem with thinking of the issue in that way is it implies LTNs exist in some sort of vacuum where they make cycling safer and that's it; no other effects. And that is not the case. They have various other effects, including increasing congestion on main roads, increasing emissions on main roads, redirecting traffic away from local businesses which are included in the LTN, affecting their revenues, etc. Which is why people disagree with them, not because people want to actively make cycling dangerous
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/98992316-2adf-11ed-a4d5-afa440292fae?shareToken=97049bc5880af025e4d3a4d8ea035b30Pasted from the Sunday Times: "Whatever the outcome of the battle for No 10, the process is a constitutional travesty. The leader of the Conservative Party is entitled to be prime minister because some 32 million voters elected a House of Commons with a majority of Tory MPs at the last general election. But the final choice of our next prime minister is not being made by those MPs. It is being made by some 160,000 party members. This would be fine if we were talking about a local Rotary club. But political parties are not just private associations. They do not belong only to their members. In a parliamentary democracy, they have a vital constitutional role as intermediaries between the public and the state.Traditionally, members contributed support, funding and hard work, but political direction came from the parliamentary party. Conservative leaders were chosen by the party’s MPs until the leadership contest of 2001. The successful candidate that time was Iain Duncan Smith, who was supported by a minority of Tory MPs but nearly two thirds of members. The MPs booted him out two years later in a no-confidence vote. Labour MPs chose their leader until 1981. After some unsatisfactory experiments with an electoral college, Labour handed the choice to party members and supporters in 2015. They chose Jeremy Corbyn, a man with minimal support among Labour MPs, who tried several times without success to get rid of him.Party members are by definition unrepresentative of the people who vote for their party. They are activists who naturally congregate at the edges of the political spectrum. This tendency has been aggravated by tactical entryism. The first-past-the-post system at general elections tends to create a duopoly of the two major parties, which forces the fringes to take over the centre if they want a voice in parliament. Labour has been invaded, since losing power in 2010, by the hard left of Momentum. Conservative constituency associations have been gradually occupied by powerful Europhobic groups whose natural home would have been Ukip or the Brexit Party in a more diverse political system. Conservative Party members are also significantly older and wealthier than the average voter, and heavily concentrated in the southeast. Imbalances like these are a problem for both parties. But they are a bigger problem for the country, because they undermine the way that democratic politics work.A democracy comprises millions of individuals with conflicting opinions and interests, who will never agree on very much. Its first task is to accommodate these differences, so that people can live together in a single political community. Parliamentary parties have a major role here. They are coalitions of opinion, united only by a loose consistency of outlook and the desire to win elections. They operate in a political marketplace. To command a parliamentary majority, they have to appeal to a much broader range of opinion than their own members. Their whole object is to produce a slate of policies which perhaps only a minority would have chosen as its preferred option, but which the broadest possible range of people can live with. This has traditionally made them powerful engines of national compromise.When choosing a new leader, MPs and party members have a very different outlook. MPs are there to represent the interests of their constituents and, in a broader sense, the public interest, whereas party members represent no one but themselves. MPs will look mainly to the impact of their choice on the electorate at large, because that will determine their chances of re-election. They know that this will involve a large measure of ideological compromise. By comparison, party members are rarely interested in ideological compromise and inclined to look no further than their own political positions. They will choose someone who shares their prejudices, and kid themselves that the rest of the electorate will see the light. Leadership contests become an auction in which candidates compete to promise political goodies calculated to appeal to their members but not necessarily to anyone else. Labour Party members and supporters nearly destroyed their party by selecting Corbyn, a man in their own image, as their leader. So far, no UK party leader chosen against the preferences of its MPs has ever gone on to win a general election.This concentration on marginal sectors of the electorate polarises our politics and limits the choices available to voters at general elections. Sooner or later it will destroy the political market on which our democracy depends, and aggravate the dangerous alienation of the public from the whole political process. Arthur Balfour, who was Conservative prime minister from 1902 to 1905, is said to have declared that he would rather take political advice from his valet than from rank and file members of his party. Like many things that are better left unsaid, this has an inner wisdom, as the Conservatives are about to discover."
Quote from: Bradders on September 01, 2022, 06:25:45 pmWell the problem with thinking of the issue in that way is it implies LTNs exist in some sort of vacuum where they make cycling safer and that's it; no other effects. And that is not the case. They have various other effects, including increasing congestion on main roads, increasing emissions on main roads, redirecting traffic away from local businesses which are included in the LTN, affecting their revenues, etc. Which is why people disagree with them, not because people want to actively make cycling dangerousFirstly, LTNs are just for cyclists, they are for everyone not in a car. The anti-LTN lobby have been very good at making it about cyclists, who seem to be one of the bogeymen due jour.Secondly, I would like to see the stats you have used to come to the conclusion that:increasing congestion on main roads, increasing emissions on main roadsredirecting traffic away from local businesses which are included in the LTN, affecting their revenuesTaking the first point, we know that increasing car capacity (extra lanes) increases traffic (induced demand) and there is a fair bit of evidence that well planned LTNs bring a short term increase in traffic on boundary roads but then there is a often "traffic dissipation", leading to a decrease in traffic both in and around the LTNs. Some data to ponder:https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/disappearing_traffic_cairns.pdfhttps://findingspress.org/article/17128-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-car-use-and-active-travel-evidence-from-the-people-and-places-survey-of-outer-london-active-travel-interventions.https://enjoywalthamforest.co.uk/work-in-your-area/walthamstow-village/comparison-of-vehicle-numbers-before-and-after-the-scheme-and-during-the-trial/Regarding the second point, cyclist and pedestrians spend more than motorists. As a topical example, Putney is seeing more traffic due to the closure to cars of Hammersmith bridge. This doesn't seem to have increase spend in any of the businesses there!Reading:https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-cycling-economic-benefits-summary-pack.pdf
Surely everything is a political issue if some bunch of tw*ts chooses to make it such.
Thought this was worth sharing on the Johnson contempt of Parliament 'opinion' published by the government. (thanks to JRS on t'other channel for spotting it)https://davidallengreen.com/2022/09/the-not-at-all-devastating-devastating-johnson-opinion-on-contempt-of-parliament/
today we find out if we are going to get collectively punched or kicked for the next term
