Drivers and their problems

Indeed.  Several good articles knocking around on this one, Carlton Reid said it best IMO: "where cycling and driving are convenient, Brits drive".  More detail argues that even in Stevenage / Milton Keynes (the most often-cited new towns with cycling provision) things were stacked in favour of the car from the get-go.

In the UK the genie is more than half a century gone from the bottle there is often very substantial resistance to any change.  A lot of people see changes affecting their car travel as an existential threat.  So much so that even making something else available and making driving both more expensive and slightly less convenient won't cause most people to change.

I do believe lot of people can be persuaded to change - and will find that it didn't ruin their life in retrospect, rather the opposite.  That's because it has happened both elsewhere and here.

Yes - if only more people had cars (or there were more roads into town) that would restore their trade, surely? 🤔

Never mind, there are still a few people with cargo bikes about to make up for others who are no longer popping in for an entire pig or a side of beef.

Does make me think of how sometimes the time AND place must be right (minds open, basically):

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/the-demonstration-cycle-ro...

Bay Em Vay not bee em vee

Try for the proper pronunciation of VW while we are at it.

David9694 wrote:

I think we'd all rather live in a world where trams were a thing then not.

Seems a bit wasteful to me. Either install them, or not, but make your mind up.

To save the city we had to destroy it... Shurely we all know the only way to solve Bath's traffic woes is with bigger, electric cars?  Or start removing cycle facilites, pavements and opening up all possible routes to ease the congestion?  Or make the cars self-aware? (That might do it but maybe via them running over all the drivers though).

I don't know whether Edinburgh's initial tram plan was complete utopian fantasy or just wildly optimistic financially.  It was at least trams (plural) rather than the single model railway version we have now.  Equally I don't know whether the outcome would have been brilliant had the council actually taken advice / employed suitable folks to actually manage this.  What I can say is that the Dutch - who know a thing or two - recommend that you avoid mixing cycling and trams and manage interactions carefully.  Edinburgh certainly didn't, with serious injuries and a fatality as the result.

I like public transport and trams can sometimes be a useful part of that, but the claim "avoiding a tram rail is no harder than not cycling into a kerb" is so obviously ludicrous and demonstrably false that I find it difficult to take anything Mr Tram Fantasist says seriously if that's the sort of nonsense he spouts. 

There are things that can be done to mitigate the risks associated with tram tracks for cyclists, but if your starting point is that there is no danger and you ignore the issue, then you are undoubtedly going to encounter problems.

There have been well documented problems in both Edinburgh (http://www.spokes.org.uk/documents/public-transport/tram/) and Sheffield (https://www.cyclesheffield.org.uk/2015/11/08/tram-crash-cyclist-tram-acc...) 

Even odder that speed limiters that are easy to use have been around for 25 years or more and installed as standard on some cars, yet cruise control that allows you to easily exceed the speed limit is a more popular option to fit than the device that allows you to abide by the speed limit - without checking.

I was chatting to someone about this in the week, I recognise that when you change speeds it can be hard. I find it difficult coming off a motorway coming into a residential. But if you drive you know this, so concentrate or use a limiter (bloke I was chatting to used the limiter, I don't)

It's not just judgement, it's how you react to other cars.

My biggest problem a few years ago was the "creeping speed" problem on motorways. You come up behind someone who is going slightly slower, and to pass them you speed up a little, but you want to leave a gap so you keep going for a bit, and you creep up behind someone going a little slower so you speed up a little to pass... etc.

I can remember journeys where I set myself a challenge of driving my regular journey down the M40 at 70, and yet by the end I was hitting 90 - back in my brand new Cavalier 2.0iL days.

The other problem is reacting to other people, so these days I am far more comfortable dropping back if someone accelerates when I overtake -typically they are not racing, they are just incompetent and I know they will slow or sit behind the next vehicle and I can ease round them while they sulk about being trapped as they didn't read the road ahead. Both cruise control and speed limiters, depending on traffic conditions, are useful crutches to speed control.

My car (Hyundai Kona) has a speed limiter and cruise control but the minimum speed that may be set is 20mph - I have no idea why. Also the CC is pretty good at keeping the car at 20 and doesn't let the speed come up when you go downhill for example, but the speed limiter readily allows the speed to come up and will bong at you when more than 2mph over the set speed. The car is electric and is fully capable of slowing itself down. The speed limiter is just crap and I wish it were better.

I had a limiter on a 1999 Mercedes, and that could only use engine braking to hold the speed. On my 2012 they integrated it with the ABS/stability control system and now it will apply brakes to hold the speed. When approaching a speed limit it is easy to gently knock it down in 5s or 1s to hit the new limit bang on the line - which of course pisses off drivers behind who think that you have a few hundred meters of allowance so you shouldn't start braking until some point after the limit sign (but before any obvious speed cameras of course).

Exactly, some cars have much better systems than others. There is no reason why the Kona shouldn't be able to apply engine braking (or whatever the equivalent on an electric vehicle is called, and it really is VERY effective if you fully lift off) but instead I get a stupid fucking bong as though it's up to me to limit the speed when the speed limiter is engaged. I find it so infuriating. I do love how effectively the CC knocks the speed down like you say though.

I trust you were too much of a gentleman to turn that particular image into a comment about lady drivers...

Something like this?

I sort of imagined the Horse drawn carriage was on a tree lined Parisian boulevard given the original caption and wanted to create a juxtaposition which hilights the particular un-necessity of driving large SUVs in urban environments, the special incompetence demonstrated in managing to turn them upside down and their existential threat to cyclists and pedestrians in such an environment.

(Some of those words need to be said in a posh art critic type Brian Sewell voice).

Did someone say Allo, allo?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycqc0L4a2wQ

David9694 wrote:

Or a Jacques Cousteau accent?

Bois de Boulogne was my guess for a location.

Can anyone make out le caption?

Roughly translated it reads "New Paris: Our pretty female coach drivers. Nice to look at but you don't want to get too close." So ironically, given the way it's being used now, it's actually taking the piss (albeit in a sexist manner) out of dangerous drivers who run into cyclists.

Bois de Boulogne a good shout, or possibly Bois de Vincennes.