What makes idiots love a car? Anything but the things they say because the completely uninteresting fact is that people like reliable cars, whether they acknowledge it or not.
Please use it to make a huge turd.
This is one of the best pieces of cycling propaganda I have ever seen, I love it. Personal car ownership in central London has become so diabolical even the English are putting down their car keys and picking up a bike. I cycled in London for the first 20 years of my life and watched it become completely dominated by cars. It’s strange to hear them say the words, as if it’s some sort of fever dream. People fundamentally enjoy and benefit from cycling in a way that they never will behind the wheel of a car. Makes me hopeful for the future.
Good to know! They should have been a little more creative and called it something familiar and snappy like Sport Utility Environment or Gas Guzzler.
In my criminal justice system we break the judge and the police’s legs and give them 1k. We keep doing that until they take these crimes seriously. Then we break the legs of the town planners until they build sustainable transport solutions. Imagine how quickly people would learn the benefits. We would be living in paradise in no time.
It’s amazing how lethal cars are and we drive them every day without a care in the world. I never think about the particulate pollution spewing from my brakes or the noxious gases emitted from the exhaust. I don’t consider the pedestrians I will eventually hit if I drive long enough. I never think about anyone dying in my car from heatstroke. I think of my vehicle as the best and only solution to all of my transportation needs because every problem looks like a nail when your only tool is a hammer.
That is at least encouraging news. I was in Oxford recently and there was a lot of cars and very little else. Oxford council wisely decided to drop the ‘15min city’ moniker due to the campaign that was waged against it. Compared to Dutch cities, we remain very much locked in to car culture. They were doing 15min before the concept existed. It’s rare to travel anywhere in Europe and find a more dominant car culture than the UK, more expensive trains or fewer sustainable travel options. Portugal is comparable, Slovakia not great. France, home of the biggest cycle race on earth, is having to do battle with the automotive lobby in Paris. Northern Europeans quietly but resolutely leading the way, as usual.
I’m thinking of the protests in Oxford. Milton Keynes has huge potential as a pedestrian and cyclist friendly city but it has never been fully utilised or inhabited.
Thankfully the pace of climate change has been slow so far because the ability of the English to change is comparable. On the other hand, if the trajectory of the temperature predictions are accurate, we may be in trouble and by we I mean my daughter’s generation. I’m still giving it large it in my SUV, what, what.
Note that the large majority of “lost government receipts”, shown in yellow in the figure below, are due to fuel duty evaporating as drivers shift to electric vehicles. As the OBR notes, the government could choose to recoup these losses via other types of motoring taxes.
I don’t understand how it’s possible to achieve net zero carbon emissions with personal car ownership continuing at the present levels. Cars require a vast amount of energy to produce, before you put anything in the tank or battery. We don’t have viable alternatives to our excellent road network and the English have rejected 15min cities.
Our housing stock is hopelessly inefficient and a huge energy sink. Anyone who frequents municipal waste facilities can get a sense of the vast amounts of waste that we create. While it should be fairly obvious to everyone that avoiding an ecological collapse is ‘cheaper’ (wtf does that even mean?) than blundering into one, it feels fairly inevitable that we will blow past 3C no problem. When people start dying like flies due to floods and famine is around the time we will see any meaningful change.
The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I’m starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?
Much later in my career I came to appreciate the beauty of this system and the link with hexadecimal. I had to debug a network transmitted CRC that was endian flipped and in that process learned that in the Galois Field of two, 1+1=0 which feels delightfully nonsensical to a luddite.
Shuck Chumer
I remember being puzzled by this and many other numbers that kept cropping up. 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 2048… Why do programmers and electronic engineers hate round numbers? The other set of numbers that was mysterious was timber and sheet materials. They cut them to 1220 x 2440mm and thicknesses of 18 and 25mm. Are programmers and the timber merchants part of some diabolical conspiracy?
We should feel compassion towards addicts. Yes, even car addicts.
Em dash will sour your milk and lose you car keys. It will cause your socks to become odd pairs and fart in the lift when your crush alights. Em dash is responsible for the failure of the mars climate orbiter but ran a successful misinformation campaign against SI units.
I would fetch my divorce attorney shovel.
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
Yet another eerie parallel with a certain German political activist from the 1930s.