We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Patrick Crozier at Transport Blog links to a piece about the perennial tendency of all concerned to prefer railways to cars, except where their own personal travelling arrangements are concerned. Cars take you where you want to go. Trains can’t take you to almost any of the places you want to go. Work is spread out in the suburbs. Trains can’t be spread out in the suburbs, because they only stop at stations. If you could jump off trains at any point, the way you can jump off the old London double decker buses with the wide-open back doors whenever they slow down, and if trains did slow down quite often, then trains would be much more convenient things. But you can’t do any of that.
So, people actually use cars. But what they vote for and politick for is trains. People don’t like cars, in the sense of liking their combined effect. They prefer the train system to the car system.
Why? Whence the train fascination? Why does even Transport Blog obsess about trains, when trains are such economically stupid things compared to cars?
Part of the answer is surely aesthetic. Trains go in those lovely elegant curves. Trains don’t get stuck in train jams and produce nothing but fumes for twenty minutes. (They do get stuck from time to time. But mostly they don’t get stuck.) Above all, trains don’t need huge, huge train parks to park in. They just carry on trundling around.
Cars, on the other hand, have turned a substantial percentage of the surface of the earth into a place whose only purpose is to be purposeful. The biggest bridges and the most intricate motorway interchanges have genuine beauty and grandeur. But most car infrastructure is every bit as dull and clunky and messy and uninspiring as the word infrastructure itself is.
In particular, car parks are an almost total aesthetic negative, in most people’s eyes. Car parks pave paradise. The more exciting a building is, the greater the price that seems to have to be paid in meaningless tarmac expanse surrounding it. And which is now uglier: a full car park or an empty car park? You tell me.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. → Continue reading: The aesthetics of car parks – let’s have some!
Struggling into the office via the Tube (London’s subway system) this morning, I distinctly thought I heard the following announcement over the public address system. I may have been hallucinating, but I am not sure:
Ladies, gentlemen, buskers and beggars, London Transport regrets to announce that in addition to the Central Line being closed until Hell freezes over while we check to see if the nuts and bolts have been screwed in correctly, the Piccadilly Line has been suspended. So I suggest you suckers get outside and into the fresh air for a bracing walk. Let’s face it, transporting you people is more than our jobs are worth
As I say, I may have been imagining things.
The above is also the title of a piece by Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, about the principle of road pricing in the light of the London scheme (£5 per day) that is just about to come into force. I’m not such how long Eamonn’s piece has been up at the ASI website, but thanks to Alex Singleton for bringing it to my attention.
Like Eamonn Butler, I’m strongly in favour of road pricing, for all the reasons he itemises, and which I have been going on about for many years. But also, like Eamonn, and like Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog, I am uneasy about the effect Ken Livingstone’s London will have on this debate.
Eamonn and Patrick both fear the worst. Says Eamonn:
The London congestion charging scheme is a bad scheme. But if it fails, it will put back the debate on road pricing for another twenty years, until we’re all in an even worse jam.
I’m a pathological optimist, so discount the following if you aren’t, but I suspect that the logic of road pricing is so overwhelming, and the utter absurdity of any other road regime in places like central London – right under the noses of the people who will decide about the overall future of road pricing in Britain – so palpable, that there is nothing that even Ken Livingstone can do to stop this idea. On the contrary, the fact that he is at least attempting it will be what counts and what will get (is getting) the idea out there into the heads of intelligent people everywhere, and if the idea is regarded as not having worked for London, yet, the culprit will be identified as the way Livingstone did it, rather than the idea itself.
So what should have been and should be done about road pricing? → Continue reading: Price Roads! Cut Taxes!
My ego being suitably gratified by the reactions to my earlier post about SUVs, well, I could not resist linking to this nice story, also by Reuters, about the latest incarnation of the mighty Ford Mustang.
It seems that folk who want us Westerners to cut back on oil as a way of squeezing the Middle East are fighting a losing battle at the moment.
Also in a totally gratuitous vein, here is a story with some picks of the latest Aston Martin, as driven by Pierce Brosnan in his, in my view, largely rather silly James Bond movie. But for this petrol-head, the car is pure eye candy. Aston Martin in my view has made some of the most beautiful cars ever. I used to rank the DB5 as the most aesthetically pleasing, but I think the Vanquish is even better.
The sports utility vehicle (SUV) is the bete noire of the anti-globalista class, epitomizing much that they hate about western, and specifically American, culture. They are big, brash, consume a lot of fossil fuels and symbolise an almost Wild West ethos (although in my experience many of them are driven by stockbrokers in deepest west London).
I must say that in my more ideologically manic moments, I fantasize about buying a SUV for no other reason than to cock a snook at the flat-earthers. Check out this interesting story for the enduring appeal of these capitalist behemoths on wheels. Vroom!
Patrick Crozier posted a piece on Transport Blog the other day about something called SkyTran, which I hereby throw to the Samizdata comment pack to see what they make of it. It seems like a wonderful idea.
Said Patrick:
Further to my investigations into alternatives to driving, I stumbled across a site promoting SkyTran. SkyTran will be a 100mph, computer-controlled, magnetically-levitated, almost door-to-door, non-polluting, personal transportation system. It will whisk us to our destinations in futuristic, light-weight pods, eliminate congestion at a stroke, cost next to nothing, turn a profit, allow spectacular views and be built along existing rights of way.
Can it be done? I have no idea. But I so, so hope it can. Imagine, an almost perfect transport system, making trains and cars look like the 19th century technologies that they are and consigning both to the rubbish bin of history.
I love it.
Maybe it was just that other blogs were taking the Christmas holiday off and there was nowhere else to go, but I’ve been struck not just by the quantity but also by the quality of the comments samizdata has been attracting recently. I can’t reasonably expect the number of comments that David Carr got for his piece about communism not collapsing the way it should, but a dozen or more good, informed responses to this proposal, maybe referring to what else has been said about this scheme by critics and commentators in America, is not an unreasonable hope. The more lucid of these comments, if there are any, can then be swung back to Transport Blog, together with a link to the rest if them. So let’s show these trainspotters what we can do, eh? A very cursory google search got me to several more commentaries about SkyTran, but they all seemed to be echoing the original sales pitch. Has anyone been minded to shoot the thing down in flames? → Continue reading: Might it work? – or is it just pie in the SkyTran?
UK Transport is now Transport Blog, and has a burst of short but varied new postings. This is a good name, combining Patrick Crozier‘s all-embracingly global field of vision (although the latest postings are mostly British, with only the occasional Japanese reference) with his general gloom about his ability to dazzle. No “Transports of Delight” nonsense.
Now that Patrick has moved it over to Movable Type, I am nagging him to set me up with automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, to take up some of the slack when he gets too depressed about the state of Britain’s deeply depressing transport infrastructure, for words, as it were. When my campaign has succeeded, this is the kind of stuff I’ll be putting there, although if Perry wants to insert a weekend type picture here, I recommend this as being more his (our) kind of thing.
Being a pedestrian with a heart condition is about to get worse.
This is an absolute classic, picked up and copied in full (I think) by Natalie Solent. Which is a good thing because the link to it supplied by Natalie was also a horse’s arse when I tried it.
The piece in question is both an utterly convincing and an utterly hilarious explanation (based on the size of the standard horse’s arse) of why the standard railway gauge throughout the world is 4ft 8.5 ins, and it has a delightful space age postscript.
Increasing the chances that everyone on earth reads things like this is one of the basic purposes of Samizdata, as far as I’m concerned. Instapundit: do your thing, if you haven’t already. UK Transport (quiet at the moment – I believe Patrick Crozier is moving house) eat your heart out.
Earlier today I did a a piece for UK Transport, in which I had a go at the idea that we live in an overcrowded country. I said the only reason people think it’s overcrowded is because the crowded bits are the bits that most people spend most of their time looking at.
UKT boss Patrick Crozier linked me to another explanation, and maybe a better one, for this daft idea:
We wonder if those who claim the country is being ‘covered in tarmac’ are looking at small scale maps of large areas on which the width of roads is grossly exaggerated to make them obvious. On a 1:10000000 scale wall map of the UK, a motorway may be shown as being 1mm wide. This equates to 1km, when in reality motorways are only about 32m wide – 1/30 of their apparent width on a map. Surely no-one could be so stupid as to believe that thick lines on a small map represent real tarmac on the ground?
Well, no, not when you spell it out like that. But if people have spent their lives looking at the maps and not thinking … And since this overcrowded thing is such an important anti-progress meme, I think this is a very good question. It comes from the Association of British Drivers.
My big brother did a tour of accountancy duty in Hong Kong a few years back. “Overcrowded?” says he to the greenery-sodden English, “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
Patrick Crozier sees that the railways are not immune to the same laws of supply and demand as everyone else
The news that the government is considering removing rail fare controls has, in media parlance “raised fears” of a massive increase in prices.
For once the fear is the right word. Allowing railway companies the freedom to set their own fares does seem scary. The man waiting for the 08:22 has to get to work. For him there is, to all intents and purposes, only one way of getting to work – the train. There is no choice. Buying railway tickets is not like buying bars of chocolate.
So, there must be controls, right? Wrong. Fare controls are amongst the most damaging forms of regulation that governments can impose on a railway. Here, there were very few controls and very few complaints until the 1920s. London and its railways expanded in tandem bringing suburbia to the masses, all at an affordable price. In the 1920s the state imposed controls on freight charges. Railway profits went for a Burton. Then, during the Second World War, the government froze fares while inflation let rip. The railways emerged in a parlous state, in dire need of a major overhaul. During nationalisation fares were constantly being held down while the industry gradually declined. It is significant, that British Rail’s happiest time was during the 1980s when it was allowed to increase fares more or less at will. Incidentally, the chief reason why Japanese trains are so overcrowded is, once again, state-imposed fare control.
But what of the man on the 08:22? What’s going to happen to him when he’s left to the tender mercies of the market? Well, the bad news is that, intitially at least, his fares are going to go up. Quite a lot in fact.
The interesting thing is what happens next. If fares are high and are kept high and passengers see no improvement in service they will start to make different arrangements. Some will move to somehere near a cheaper railway. Others will change jobs to somewhere nearer where they live. Slowly but surely the railway will start to lose revenue.
At this point the market starts to come into its own. Sure, some railways will exhibit a couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude, put up the fares, keep them high and do nothing in return but their profits will decline. But others will take an entirely different approach. They will use the price signal to improve quantity and quality. They will introduce lower fares for those travelling before the peak. They will introduce automatic fare reductions in cases of poor punctuality. They will increase capacity and they will spruce up stations (where they don’t rebuild them). They will do this because higher fares will tell them that there is a market out there waiting to be satisfied and satisfied markets mean nice, fat pay cheques.
When fares are set free the man on the 08:22 will see a step change in the quality of the service. It won’t happen at once (railways are not like that) and it won’t be without pain, but it will happen.
Patrick Crozier says that he’s finding it harder to do UK Transport than when he first started it, because he’s running out of things he’s burning to say. That’s partly why I’ve accepted his invitation to become a regular (although I’ve warned him that it won’t be that regular) contributor to UKT. I don’t think that Patrick will be the only blogmeister who moves towards the Samizdata team-of-writers approach.
I did a piece for UKT last week (complete with a photo I took at Clapham Junction) about the blessing of electric signs which say when trains are coming and where they’re going, and I did another piece last Sunday about the important transport option of just saying no and staying put and not using any transport. Both are unashamedly amateur writings. I have little idea of what government transport policy is this week, not having read any of the relevant pronouncements. I merely travel, sometimes. Go and read these pieces if you want to, but like the second one says, maybe you could rearrange your life a little and not go there.
As a regular commuter in London – I travel from the western end of Central London to the eastern end covering 10 miles each way – I have suffered most evils of modern transportation known to man. This is despite the fact that I ride a motorbike, which should save me from most traffic jams and delays. In fact, I have observed the traffic getting worse over the last two years and even got stuck in ‘motorbike jams’ that occur during major gridlocks. Public transport is horrendous in its own special way, the London Underground (affectionately known as the Tube) is apocalyptically over-crowded (those who travel by it will understand the description – it’s a disaster waiting to happen) and the quaint red buses are pitifully inadequate in capacity and frequency and surprise, surprise, get stuck in the same traffic jams as cars, vans, lorries and trucks. As a biker I especially detest the last three categories.
I have often wondered how much worse the situation needs to get before this major source of frustration of living in London is addressed. Some Libertarian Alliance gurus, namely Brian Micklethwait in his pamphlet on road pricing and Tim Evans in his posting to this blog, think that charging for road use is the way forward, with the market fine-tuning the traffic flows. I can’t wait for their proposals to be taken up and bring the desired results as travelling in London has become unbearable (yesterday, instead of 30 minutes it took me 1.5 hours to get home). 
Therefore, I read with interest an article The war against the car in the last week’s issue of The Economist (alas, subscription needed to view the article) commenting on Ken Livingstone’s, London’s mayor, plan to combat congestion. As of February next year, a ring of 200 cameras linked to computers programmed to recognize licence plates will start scanning 40,000 number plates an hour. The 250,000 motorists who drive into 21 square kilometres (8 square miles) of the city centre between 7am and 6.30pm every day will have to pay £5 a day for the privilege. Those who fail to do so will face an automatic £80 penalty unless they fall into one of the several exempt categories, such as taxi drivers or nurses on duty.
So far, so good. Mr Livingstone seems to be on the ‘free market’ track trying to play the supply and demand game. The article also confirmed my observation that over the past two years, congestion has been getting noticeably worse with average traffic speed dropping from ten miles an hour to nine – slower than at any time since the car took over from the horse and carriage. What really got my attention was that the mayor’s critics say this is not a coincidence. They maintain that Mr Livingstone is deliberately making things worse before his scheme is introduced so that it will appear to work miracles. For example, the combination of new bus lanes, longer red traffic lights and more pedestrian crossings mean more delays for drivers. I can confirm all of these have appeared on my regular routes.
The timing of traffic lights is being subtly changed all over London. A few seconds’ difference can affect traffic for several miles. “Double-cycling” – traffic lights which allow pedestrians twice as much time as cars at busy crossings can have a painful impact – there are places in Central London where forty seconds out of every minute are devoted to pedestrians, leaving twelve seconds for one stream of traffic and eight for another. And of course, road works can always be relied upon to do the trick. You can hear the arteries slamming shut, as drivers’ adrenalin levels rise steadily during London’s rush hours.
The details of how exactly Mr Livingstone can make the London traffic more hellish is important because it is half-way to proving that he is doing so. Yes, the same old story – the mayor is up for re-election in two years’ time and has staked his political future on congestion-charging. Mr Livingstone needs the scheme to be seen to work. Suddenly, his objectives are no longer aligned with mine and those of thousands of frustrated drivers. The saviour turns into the devil, deceiving us in the very act of making the situation ‘better’.
What matters is that those who drive cars in the centre of London during the day are a tiny minority compared with the millions who walk or use public transport – and as any good politician, he can count his votes.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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