Urban Transport, the future

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mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
tl;dw, but from skipping through, the core idea seems to be that too much of vehicle costs are fixed costs and only 25% is variable costs...

so people feel that there's little penalty for increased use...

so we should get rid of VED and fuel taxes and put it all on GPS-tracked demand-sensitive road pricing, with that money used to build more sustainable transport measures.

Lovely theory but practically flawed. It seems a tough sell already and then the speaker wants to add a load of nanny state measures to the big brother boxes like speed limiters, making it an even tougher sell. Dealing with that huge flaw (or as he puts it "challenge") is left as "next steps".

It's presented as a cycling measure, but it's only related as a car-punishing measure that makes cycling relatively more attractive. It won't actually affect cycling because it stands pretty much no chance of happening that I can see. Giving space at cycling conferences to this sort of fantasy is really unhelpful and helps to undermine credibility of cycling campaigners. It feels like it's a Yes-Men-style spoof to portray a motorists' nightmare and then show it's what cycling advocates want, except there's no big shot of audience reaction on the end with sarcastic captions overlaid.

I feel it would be better to focus on stuff we may be able to achieve to move things forwards, instead of advocacy of near-impossible single massive steps like this automatic tracking and control of all motor vehicles.
 
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