Unsafe is safe

When they try it in the UK it'll be trialled in Swindon - always the testbed for barmy ideas - and then we'll see just how unsafe unsafe can be!
listening to the Beatles...the new album would have been pressed in Swindon (Penny Lane) until they closed the factory after less than 10 years as uneconomic...still empty

Get the point and kind of agree with it. The signs springing up on most streets now seem more about keeping sign makers employed. I mean there really is a huge amount of 'street furniture' about and most isn't really needed.

Bring on 'Toutes Directions' I say...

Lots of country roads now have a multitude of highly reflective signs too and they actually work against you by being too distracting and working against your eyes adapting to the dark I find (and half of them almost cause an accident while you're trying to read how many accidents there have been on the road that year).

Like so many things, the message is lost in quantity as opposed to quality. There was an article a while back about some employees in a fork lift zone, who actually do not where Hi Vis vests now, because they stand out more this way from the mutlitude who do...

Havn't the dutch tried this sort of thing with a lot of success. Mixing pedestrians and cars without controls is probably more scary for the cars as yet another old buffer rolls up the bonnet.

Jono

On of the problems in the UK is that the roads are now so congested (thanks Maggie) that the only way of controllong traffic flow is via phased lights. If you left it to the motorist, some lanes simply wouldn't move.

They have done this in the Cowley Road in Oxford. Mixed results depending on who you speak to. Cyclist seem to like it. Bus drivers hate it. I haven't driven down it so can't really comment.

Another related matter, there is a horrendous junction by the railway station at Oxford. This is controlled by multiple sets of lights and traffic backs up in all directions. It has always been believed somewaht cynically that this junction was designed to to hold up the traffic and deter car uers from the City centre.

A few weeks ago at peak time on a Friday, there was a power outage, all the traffic lights went out for a number of hours. Guess what? The traffic flowed freely, the normal taibacks disappeared, drivers were cautious and gave way as appropriate. This was a big enough event to hit the Oxford times. Oxford City Council were of course denying the improvement and implicating an unusually low level of traffic county wide...

quote:

On of the problems in the UK is that the roads are now so congested (thanks Maggie)

Don't blame Maggie. She had a plan to seriously upgrade our road network to cope with demand. Then Norman Lamont pissed the money up the wall on ERM. Ken Clark recently admitted this. The politicians of both sides subsequently used the environment as an excuse for the fact that there was no money. Kyoto came along at just the right time and the cross-party untransport policy was born. This was then exacerbated by the Champagne socialists' desire to get everyone on public transport because they are ideologically at odds with the notion of the masses having access to their own private transport.

The cars are bad therefore we must make life awkward for drivers mentality prevails to this day, although the Conservatives are hopefully waking up to the fact that the electorate is getting a bit pissed of with their freedom of mobility being eroded and/or priced beyond their reach.

If we really care about the environment we tackle congestion through investment. Congestion = CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by cars sitting in queues going nowhere.

I agree that road use is over-regulated but a free-for-all in our town centres to me is dangerously utopian...

Rome wasn't built in a day; Utopia was never built.

Just in: The West coast Main Line is going to run out of capacity in ten years. Passenger numbers are up by 20% this year. If we price people off the roads they'll basically have nowhere else to go. The Socialists' dream of nailing the peasants to the land they inhabit will be thus complete.

OK,so. Surely if the main worry about car pollutants is CO2 emissions, why can't we have a tree tax such that some of every car/petrol/insurance tax contribution directly buys and plants trees. Then we have a big f*ck off number of trees breathing in all the CO2 and which in a million years or so will be reduced to coal/oil so they can fuel future cars and power stations when all the hydrogen fuel cells run out. Easy peasy, don't know why no-one's thought of this already.

The timescale would seem to be the problem.

This government only cares about the environment when there is tax revenue in it. Their policy on mobile phone and Tetra masts is shocking.