You uptick my view of (at least English) Conservatives. Keep it up and you can be promoted to NeoLiberal. :)
Taxing externalities is just Conservative common sense. If you want less of something, tax it. And we do want less congestion, noise, CO2 emissions. particulate emissions and traffic deaths. Pigou taxes QED. Today we have technology that can easily charge vehicles for using roads (in motion or parked) that would vary by time of day, place and proximity to other vehicles and exceeding speed limits. Noise can be controlled by periodic inspection to ensure mufflers are working properly and backed up by enforcement with directional microphone-cameras. [For CO2 emissions we need a taxon net CO2 emissions.] Street design plays a role as well.
That said, I've felt much safer about traffic (except that you guys drive on the wrong side of the street :)) in London than in Washington
This article suffers from a lack of appreciation for the massive, massive benefits of motor vehicles. Without them, urban centers couldn't exist as they do today; not nearly enough supplies (food, in particular) could be delivered to them. To talk of "negative externalities" without making any attempt at comparing them to benefits is to make an incomplete argument.
I've yet to see a rant against motor vehicles that doesn't come from someone who lives in an urban center, which is unrepresentative of a large majority of the use of motor vehicles. This perspective issue explains a large part of the partisan divide on the subject.
of course things like deliveries come via motor vehicles, but most motor journeys in urban areas are not delivering food. that's a pretty small minority and yes, when the supermarket lorry drives down my road, it still does have negative externalities!
Cars are incredibly liberating and transformative but they have huge negative effects in cities. this is something the Victorians understood but which was forgotten.
I refuse to rant, but I live in a former pit village and have to rely on public transport. It takes me over an hour to get to the local hospital on the bus, up hill and down dale as they say, but I take one of those personal reading devices with me; I think they used to be called books.
I support Ed's article 100% (well. 98%, maybe). His target isn't all motor vehicle use but our excessive reliance on private cars. I used to be one such but in the age of Amazon and grocery deliveries (a blessing) I see less and less justification for them.
Most supermarket deliveries tend to occur in the early hours of the morning, long before most people are awake, and play little role in urban congestion.
I live in a pleasant suburban area that has some walkability but is also still car dependent as most people must drive to get to work. Cars do provide great convenience, but they are also expensive, they radically changed the urban landscape, roads are increasingly more congested every year due to population growth and dispersal of employment across the region rather than concentrated in key areas, and a great deal of the high costs of modern life is associated with maintaining the extensive infrastructure for cars - paying for the roads along with the extensive utilities infrastructure for the low density suburban environment. It all comes at a cost!
Who's seen the hilarious Toby Young story describing Oxford's traffic management proposals as 'lockdowns'?
Listened today to a conversation between Richard Hanania and Aaron Siberium on the low credibility of so much conservative discourse. Young - like many conservative provocateurs who are often right about some things, but can't resist being dicks - end up doing nothing to help balance the leftish hegemony.
"the terrifying Aids campaign". The Aids awareness campaign (or at least some of them) ads were directed by Nic Roeg, who also did Performance and Don't Look Now. Amazing to get a director like that to do a public information film.
Really enjoying the substack Ed. In my unloved corner of east London with high levels of deprivation and an ugly, delapidated and neglected social realm car use is maddeningly persistent, often for insanely short journeys. I doubt it's controversial to say there must be a significant correlation between high levels of crime (especially 'low-level' ASB-type offending and behaviour), the failure of the state to enforce the law and regulate behaviour in the public realm and high levels of car use. This is probably an understandable and very rational reaction for self protection (as much psychic, against depressing reality, as for physical protection). But the problem is that becomes a doom loop; the more car use, the more pedestrians are funneled in to inhospitable thin strips of land on the edges of roads, have to take their chances crossing high speed roads and generally feel harried and anxious, thus driving more car use. As useful as they are, I definitely agree cars deform character in subtle and unsubtle ways.
It's quite interesting to watch the Luther Rahman / LTN argument currently playing out in Tower Hamlets which is pretty obviously him just playing up to sectional interests who advance spurious and weak arguments for dismantling more humane spaces (predictably he behaves as if he were a tribune representing his supporters rather than governing in the public interest).
Modern megalopolises aren't possible without cars; they're what enable all the people from the hinterlands to treat the megalopolis as a common destination for commerce, culture, resources, travel hubs, etc., without living in giant residential towers close in to the city center.
"How I wish the 'infernal combustion' engine had never been invented. Or (more difficult still since humanity and engineers in special are both nitwitted and malicious as a rule) that it could have been put to rational uses — if any.”
I think it was Mary Harrington who first predicted that in the future personal car ownership would not be ubiquitous. I think she’s right. I think it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think people are going to be happy about it (despite the improvements to other parts of their life).
And being Britain, we won’t bother funding or building any replacement infrastructure or services ahead of time, to make it easier.
It’s useful for kids. 99% of my urban car journeys are as unpaid taxi service. If I were single I can’t imagine own one unless I was fantastically rich and had a country place. Sadly declining car use among Mary’s ‘precariat’ is also a symptom of just declining quality of life
I couldn’t live without a car. If we still had buses that didn’t cost a fortune, or trams, and built railway lines instead of just making “smart” motorways... Perhaps it would be tolerable.
Horses are better. By products smell better. Horses remember the way home when your drunk. You can have a conversation with someone else riding a horse.
The automotive industry invented a whole new crime, "jaywalking," and lobbied for ordinances against it in order to push the pedestrians off the American street.
feel as if your instinct on most matters is pretty much spot on and balanced, but you are not quite giving both sides of the story here. cities need cars to function, and the best way to get London functional is actually to ban bikes from major roads. the roads can not accommodate both. i work in the city and owing to a disability rely on taxis to get to work, where I earn a very good wage and contribute of course. Yet so many roads are now one way, closed to taxis with so many pathetic restrictions as to make it very tricky to get a taxi most mornings. Take Lime Street, why is this closed to cabs for god sake? Do you expect businessmen in bowler hats to fly into London and take bikes with them to Lloyds of London as they whistle? This is fantasy Ed. Unfortunately London will never be a cyclist city in general, it's just not built that way and the most efficient measure would be to ban cyclists not cars and end the madness of the restrictions.
Amsterdam was very car dominated until the 70s, wasn't always like it is now. People took a conscious decision because they were fed up with the road deaths and the traffic.
There is a place for cars, but because they are incredibly inefficient at high population density, they need to be heavily rationed.
(I don't know what the disability situation is with road pricing in Singapore. I assume there are opt outs or reductions of some sort)
Well at the minute London is passing off motorists, and for very good reasons, without being Amsterdam or even close to it. The city can be one or the other, but have you ever noticed just how small Amsterdam is compared to London ? Small cities are more better suited than larger ones for a start. And London is the global city of Europe. How many global cities are cyclist friendly ? At the moment London is neither one or the other! So either London goes all in on cyclists, requiring a huge amount of reconstruction particularly in the City, or it just admits that this is fantasy and actually goes the other way.
(As an aside, the state doesn’t really produce any great scary adverts anymore, as they did in my childhood, from those short videos showing boys getting electrocuted retrieving their football to the terrifying Aids campaign).
Not quite true. My brother Sean just had his social distancing PIF shown at the BFI alongside classics from the seventies and eighties (Lonely Water 1973 by Jeff Grant, Sea In Their Blood 1983 by Peter Greenaway, After Dark 1979 by Mike Dodds).
Oxford is analogous to London. It has LTNs and long has anti-car local councils at city level and more recently at county level. It has a very pretty city centre which is becoming increasingly difficult to get across. The latest plan is to divide the city into pizza slice zones and charge people who wish to cross from one zone to another. This diverts more traffic on to the already overcrowded ring road. I think it might work if you live in the city but not if you live outside and travel to work or school in the city. Nor does it work for travellers to the regionally important hospital centre which really suffers from the city’s anti car parking policies.
Car-centric policy is also a sub-problem of centralisation and the desire for one size fits all policies. Only 30% of London commuters (as defined by the ONS's Travel to Work Area, which is big, taking in c.9 million commuters) travel to work by car. But this is much lower than any other TTWA in the UK (only Brighton and Edinburgh are also below 50%, and then barely - 47% each). Central government naturally isn't going to annoy the majority of commuters literally everywhere except one city. And local government in the UK, due to our extreme level of financial centralisation, rarely has incentives to make tradeoffs in the benefit of wider economic interests over vociferous locals either (similar story with planning of course). I wonder if the Mayor of London was responsible for decisions on street usage in the summer if he'd have came to the view as the Mayor of Paris?
far more money is spent on public transport in London tbf. if the government introduced road pricing in the north people might reasonably ask where the public transport is. The universe will experience heat death before Leeds gets its tram.
Yes that's of course true, although I'd say the bigger problem is that Leeds can't choose to finance and build its own public transport (possibly with negotiated funding from central government) in the way that many cities in France (and even the US) can, so there isn't going to be a step change in PT provision even where the economics could stand up.
What? Carry groceries home on foot? (In the rain??) Have to live in a apartment tower with limited space, noisy neighbors & limited if any greenery? What if the jobs are in un-walkable spots? No thanks. I’ll take the inconveniences of a car any day over what it would mean to not have one. There isn’t much “community” in large apartment buildings or public parks anyway. Cars are already quieter & smaller than they were 50-60 years ago. Electric cars ware even quieter (which may make them more dangerous)
Maybe the problem is too many people? Or the “corporate life” where we have to commute to a far away job & buy all our groceries in a huge grocery store?
You uptick my view of (at least English) Conservatives. Keep it up and you can be promoted to NeoLiberal. :)
Taxing externalities is just Conservative common sense. If you want less of something, tax it. And we do want less congestion, noise, CO2 emissions. particulate emissions and traffic deaths. Pigou taxes QED. Today we have technology that can easily charge vehicles for using roads (in motion or parked) that would vary by time of day, place and proximity to other vehicles and exceeding speed limits. Noise can be controlled by periodic inspection to ensure mufflers are working properly and backed up by enforcement with directional microphone-cameras. [For CO2 emissions we need a taxon net CO2 emissions.] Street design plays a role as well.
That said, I've felt much safer about traffic (except that you guys drive on the wrong side of the street :)) in London than in Washington
This article suffers from a lack of appreciation for the massive, massive benefits of motor vehicles. Without them, urban centers couldn't exist as they do today; not nearly enough supplies (food, in particular) could be delivered to them. To talk of "negative externalities" without making any attempt at comparing them to benefits is to make an incomplete argument.
I've yet to see a rant against motor vehicles that doesn't come from someone who lives in an urban center, which is unrepresentative of a large majority of the use of motor vehicles. This perspective issue explains a large part of the partisan divide on the subject.
of course things like deliveries come via motor vehicles, but most motor journeys in urban areas are not delivering food. that's a pretty small minority and yes, when the supermarket lorry drives down my road, it still does have negative externalities!
Cars are incredibly liberating and transformative but they have huge negative effects in cities. this is something the Victorians understood but which was forgotten.
I refuse to rant, but I live in a former pit village and have to rely on public transport. It takes me over an hour to get to the local hospital on the bus, up hill and down dale as they say, but I take one of those personal reading devices with me; I think they used to be called books.
I support Ed's article 100% (well. 98%, maybe). His target isn't all motor vehicle use but our excessive reliance on private cars. I used to be one such but in the age of Amazon and grocery deliveries (a blessing) I see less and less justification for them.
Most supermarket deliveries tend to occur in the early hours of the morning, long before most people are awake, and play little role in urban congestion.
I live in a pleasant suburban area that has some walkability but is also still car dependent as most people must drive to get to work. Cars do provide great convenience, but they are also expensive, they radically changed the urban landscape, roads are increasingly more congested every year due to population growth and dispersal of employment across the region rather than concentrated in key areas, and a great deal of the high costs of modern life is associated with maintaining the extensive infrastructure for cars - paying for the roads along with the extensive utilities infrastructure for the low density suburban environment. It all comes at a cost!
Who's seen the hilarious Toby Young story describing Oxford's traffic management proposals as 'lockdowns'?
Listened today to a conversation between Richard Hanania and Aaron Siberium on the low credibility of so much conservative discourse. Young - like many conservative provocateurs who are often right about some things, but can't resist being dicks - end up doing nothing to help balance the leftish hegemony.
"the terrifying Aids campaign". The Aids awareness campaign (or at least some of them) ads were directed by Nic Roeg, who also did Performance and Don't Look Now. Amazing to get a director like that to do a public information film.
The Stranger Danger one was particularly terrifying
didn't Jimmy Saville front that one, or was that the books?
Savile
one 'l'
He did- I was thinking of this one :
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-never-go-with-strangers-1971-online
Really enjoying the substack Ed. In my unloved corner of east London with high levels of deprivation and an ugly, delapidated and neglected social realm car use is maddeningly persistent, often for insanely short journeys. I doubt it's controversial to say there must be a significant correlation between high levels of crime (especially 'low-level' ASB-type offending and behaviour), the failure of the state to enforce the law and regulate behaviour in the public realm and high levels of car use. This is probably an understandable and very rational reaction for self protection (as much psychic, against depressing reality, as for physical protection). But the problem is that becomes a doom loop; the more car use, the more pedestrians are funneled in to inhospitable thin strips of land on the edges of roads, have to take their chances crossing high speed roads and generally feel harried and anxious, thus driving more car use. As useful as they are, I definitely agree cars deform character in subtle and unsubtle ways.
It's quite interesting to watch the Luther Rahman / LTN argument currently playing out in Tower Hamlets which is pretty obviously him just playing up to sectional interests who advance spurious and weak arguments for dismantling more humane spaces (predictably he behaves as if he were a tribune representing his supporters rather than governing in the public interest).
Modern megalopolises aren't possible without cars; they're what enable all the people from the hinterlands to treat the megalopolis as a common destination for commerce, culture, resources, travel hubs, etc., without living in giant residential towers close in to the city center.
"How I wish the 'infernal combustion' engine had never been invented. Or (more difficult still since humanity and engineers in special are both nitwitted and malicious as a rule) that it could have been put to rational uses — if any.”
http://discoveringurbanism.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-tolkien-sold-his-car.html
I think it was Mary Harrington who first predicted that in the future personal car ownership would not be ubiquitous. I think she’s right. I think it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think people are going to be happy about it (despite the improvements to other parts of their life).
And being Britain, we won’t bother funding or building any replacement infrastructure or services ahead of time, to make it easier.
It’s useful for kids. 99% of my urban car journeys are as unpaid taxi service. If I were single I can’t imagine own one unless I was fantastically rich and had a country place. Sadly declining car use among Mary’s ‘precariat’ is also a symptom of just declining quality of life
I couldn’t live without a car. If we still had buses that didn’t cost a fortune, or trams, and built railway lines instead of just making “smart” motorways... Perhaps it would be tolerable.
Horses are better. By products smell better. Horses remember the way home when your drunk. You can have a conversation with someone else riding a horse.
There was a big panic about London getting buried in horse manure just before motor cars took over
https://www.uu.nl/en/research/urban-futures-studio/initiatives/mixed-classroom-techniques-of-futuring/mobility-museum-2050/the-great-manure-crisis#:~:text=In%201894%20the%20Times%20predicted,solution%20was%20found%20for%20years.
The automotive industry invented a whole new crime, "jaywalking," and lobbied for ordinances against it in order to push the pedestrians off the American street.
"mini-car-free zones in parts of London’s suburbs"
Zones free of mini-cars, or mini-zones free of cars?
feel as if your instinct on most matters is pretty much spot on and balanced, but you are not quite giving both sides of the story here. cities need cars to function, and the best way to get London functional is actually to ban bikes from major roads. the roads can not accommodate both. i work in the city and owing to a disability rely on taxis to get to work, where I earn a very good wage and contribute of course. Yet so many roads are now one way, closed to taxis with so many pathetic restrictions as to make it very tricky to get a taxi most mornings. Take Lime Street, why is this closed to cabs for god sake? Do you expect businessmen in bowler hats to fly into London and take bikes with them to Lloyds of London as they whistle? This is fantasy Ed. Unfortunately London will never be a cyclist city in general, it's just not built that way and the most efficient measure would be to ban cyclists not cars and end the madness of the restrictions.
it wasn't built to be a drivers city either!
Amsterdam was very car dominated until the 70s, wasn't always like it is now. People took a conscious decision because they were fed up with the road deaths and the traffic.
There is a place for cars, but because they are incredibly inefficient at high population density, they need to be heavily rationed.
(I don't know what the disability situation is with road pricing in Singapore. I assume there are opt outs or reductions of some sort)
Well at the minute London is passing off motorists, and for very good reasons, without being Amsterdam or even close to it. The city can be one or the other, but have you ever noticed just how small Amsterdam is compared to London ? Small cities are more better suited than larger ones for a start. And London is the global city of Europe. How many global cities are cyclist friendly ? At the moment London is neither one or the other! So either London goes all in on cyclists, requiring a huge amount of reconstruction particularly in the City, or it just admits that this is fantasy and actually goes the other way.
(As an aside, the state doesn’t really produce any great scary adverts anymore, as they did in my childhood, from those short videos showing boys getting electrocuted retrieving their football to the terrifying Aids campaign).
Not quite true. My brother Sean just had his social distancing PIF shown at the BFI alongside classics from the seventies and eighties (Lonely Water 1973 by Jeff Grant, Sea In Their Blood 1983 by Peter Greenaway, After Dark 1979 by Mike Dodds).
https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=hauntedgenerations&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=
Sean's film features himself as his character Quentin Smirhes. It is somewhat different to the darker offerings, but in the same spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGkBFhlnDIs&ab_channel=QuentinSmirhes
Chilling 😂
This is brilliant!
Oxford is analogous to London. It has LTNs and long has anti-car local councils at city level and more recently at county level. It has a very pretty city centre which is becoming increasingly difficult to get across. The latest plan is to divide the city into pizza slice zones and charge people who wish to cross from one zone to another. This diverts more traffic on to the already overcrowded ring road. I think it might work if you live in the city but not if you live outside and travel to work or school in the city. Nor does it work for travellers to the regionally important hospital centre which really suffers from the city’s anti car parking policies.
everyone from Oxford says the same.
presumably it also needs some sort of light rail system.
Car-centric policy is also a sub-problem of centralisation and the desire for one size fits all policies. Only 30% of London commuters (as defined by the ONS's Travel to Work Area, which is big, taking in c.9 million commuters) travel to work by car. But this is much lower than any other TTWA in the UK (only Brighton and Edinburgh are also below 50%, and then barely - 47% each). Central government naturally isn't going to annoy the majority of commuters literally everywhere except one city. And local government in the UK, due to our extreme level of financial centralisation, rarely has incentives to make tradeoffs in the benefit of wider economic interests over vociferous locals either (similar story with planning of course). I wonder if the Mayor of London was responsible for decisions on street usage in the summer if he'd have came to the view as the Mayor of Paris?
far more money is spent on public transport in London tbf. if the government introduced road pricing in the north people might reasonably ask where the public transport is. The universe will experience heat death before Leeds gets its tram.
Yes that's of course true, although I'd say the bigger problem is that Leeds can't choose to finance and build its own public transport (possibly with negotiated funding from central government) in the way that many cities in France (and even the US) can, so there isn't going to be a step change in PT provision even where the economics could stand up.
What? Carry groceries home on foot? (In the rain??) Have to live in a apartment tower with limited space, noisy neighbors & limited if any greenery? What if the jobs are in un-walkable spots? No thanks. I’ll take the inconveniences of a car any day over what it would mean to not have one. There isn’t much “community” in large apartment buildings or public parks anyway. Cars are already quieter & smaller than they were 50-60 years ago. Electric cars ware even quieter (which may make them more dangerous)
Maybe the problem is too many people? Or the “corporate life” where we have to commute to a far away job & buy all our groceries in a huge grocery store?