Petrol Gate

Tom_77 wrote:

Quote:

As a cyclist, this doesn’t seem like much of an attitude or behaviour changer.  It does reveal to a wider audience a bit about the weird attachment some people have to their cars; how desperation, violence and abuse lurk just below the surface.

My local Facebook and Nextdoor has been full of anxious people apparently unable to get to work or take their kids to school without a car.

I'm not sure if the current fuel supply issues will cause anyone to rethink how utterly dependent they are on a car. I think it would take a prolonged crisis to do that, and this one is likely to be quite short.

Remember

"Electric cars are neccesary to save us from global warming"

car drivers - "the infrastructure does not support charging up electric cars"

Infrastructure does not seem to support filling up ICE cars

Car drivers - "fix this now, I must use fossil fuels to get to work."

Am I missing somethng?

Tom_77 wrote:

My local Facebook and Nextdoor has been full of anxious people apparently unable to get to work or take their kids to school without a car.

For some it will be difficult or impossible but for many it will be merely an inconvenience.

Lots of kids get driven to school when they could walk or cycle, I've seen the parents who live 5-10 minutes walk away still use the car. My two rode to 3 miles to secondary school virtually every day. Daughter now rides 5 miles+ to college, proud of her independence.

Far too many people have assumed that they can live wherever they like and it's fine to commute a distance to work, up to 50 miles each way. I had to do this briefly many years ago after I had to move house but it wore me out and I grew to resent it. It was a huge relief when I found a job 5 miles away, though the pay was much less, just above minimum wage. The tedium of the stop-start crawl through town prompted me to use my old MTB, a switch that changed my life for the better.

Lots of people could make similar choices if they wanted to. Far from the car bringing freedom, in some ways it's a huge millstone.

Simon E wrote:

Lots of people could make similar choices if they wanted to. Far from the car bringing freedom, in some ways it's a huge millstone.

Hear hear - admittedly we were already enthusiastic cyclists, but since getting rid of the car almost exactly a year ago Mrs H and I are fitter, richer and happier with life in general. We've hired a van precisely once, to move some very heavy bookshelves, other than that we haven't found a single logistical problem that can't be overcome with a combination of bikes and public transport. Admittedly we are blessed with being able-bodied and living in a very well-connected part of London. To me giving up the car has been a bit like Allen Carr's giving up smoking strategy: the key is to realise you're not actually giving anything up, you're simply doing away with a needless dependency you've convinced yourself you have to have.

I got rid of my car in 2016 due to the MOT repairs would be 4x the cost of the car if I sold it. It was the first time since 92 I didn't own a motorised vehicle but as I barely used it at the time, it didn't justify me owning one when I used public transport for work, my wife could walk from work and I had access to my brothers or fathers vehicle when needed. 

I then started back into cycling in 2017 so even less reason. I did inherit my fathers low mileage 2003 Van MPV when he died and use it infrequently and will keep it until it fails its MOT. It is used so infrequently that if petrol does go off, I haven't noticed it affect the engine. For example I think I have filled up only once, maybe twice at most this year, and three times since Covid started. 

I quite agree; far too many people want their cake, and eat it. So the cushy job in the town/city, the nice house in a rural/semi rural area, then send their kids to the best school. And all need travelling by motor vehicle. It has to end......but won't.

The reliance on the car is a damining indictment of modern life.

Velophaart_95 wrote:

I quite agree; far too many people want their cake, and eat it. So the cushy job in the town/city, the nice house in a rural/semi rural area, then send their kids to the best school. And all need travelling by motor vehicle. It has to end......but won't.

The reliance on the car is a damining indictment of modern life.

One aspect of the long work commute is that people inevitably feel emotionally distanced from where they work, so they don't care about the dirt and pollution in the city (that's work - it's horrible) and only care about their home in the countryside. There's also the windscreen effect - drivers are literally insulated from the places that they drive through which leads them to not being interested in them other than a place they try to drive through as quickly as possible. This also manifests as NIMBY - they don't want to see their idyll being changed to help wider society. If we want to get a stronger sense of community, then we need to reduce the distances that people travel to get to work.

kil0ran wrote:

...feudal anarchy...

Surely that's oxymoronic?

Well not necessarily, if you look at The Anarchy in England and Normandy 1135-1153 it was still a highly feudal society with the barons holding sway but a complete breakdown of law and order outside their strongholds. 

Maybe, but I'm not sure you can call that 'feudal anarchy' - it's more some feudal areas and some areas of anarchy. Otherwise, you have to, for instance, say that Afghanistan before the US pull-out had a system of 'liberal totalitarianism', which doesn't seem to make much sense.

I remember reading a novel a few years ago, Last Light, IIRC. A secretive cabal organises a selection of "accidental " disasters to make the price of oil go up. The main character, a specialist in logistics, is brought in after things start spiralling out of control, and informs them that there is no way of fixing it, that everything is so "just in time" that they've successfully killed our "Western" civilisation. Quite a depressing read, IIRC.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

humankind's greatest invention

Not the printing press, or music, or vaccines and cures for numerous diseases, or electric light or computing, but something that kills over a million people globally every year, seriously injures fifty million and sends countless more to an early grave with pollution related diseases...what a depressing worldview.

Incidentally, if you'd care to research some history you'd find that the bicycle has done far more for female liberation than the automobile ever has. As the suffragist and anti-slaver Susan B.Anthony said in 1896, ""Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel."

Nigel Garrage wrote:

And you can quote one person in history (who I've never heard of, at a time when women couldn't even vote) all you like

Well allow me, or rather Wikipedia, to enlighten you; Susan B.Anthony was the primary cause of women in America getting the vote:

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and convicted in a widely publicized trial. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Introduced by Sen. Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA), it later became known colloquially as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was eventually ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Well I was taking a slight liberty with my wording, but to be clear the internal combustion engine (so broader than automobiles) is the absolute pinnacle of human achievement. And you can quote one person in history (who I've never heard of, at a time when women couldn't even vote) all you like, but the facts are clear: without cars, women's lib would be decades behind where it is today and society as a whole would be far less safe. We are so fortunate to live at this time in history, standing on the shoulders of the men and women to whom we owe so much, but people's self-entitlement blinds them to the fact.

Funny, no mention of cars or the internal combustion engine here https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/multimedia/2019/3/photo-innov...

Or here https://www.bustle.com/p/badass-inventions-that-changed-the-world-for-wo...

Or here https://davidson.weizmann.ac.il/en/online/sciencepanorama/inventions-hel...

And? It's not a list of the top five inventions in the history of the world, as surely you are capable of reading, it's a list of "Innovations that have advanced women's rights." In that context, the acceptance of women's rights to wear trousers rather than being expected to wear skirts all the time has made a very significant difference to women's lives, as the relevant section explains. Bicycling, incidentally, was one of the primary drivers of making it acceptable for women to wear trousers.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Victorian women did wear trousers though. It's a completely fake story. And not only is it a completely fake story, it couldn't possibly be classed as either an "invention" or "innovation" in any case if women simply wore the same attire as men.

Forgive me, but I think I'm going to take the "United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women" as a more authoritative source than you.

It wasn't my central point.  It was the relevant UN organisation's point.  But I guess you've had enough of experts.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Victorian women did wear trousers though. It's a completely fake story. And not only is it a completely fake story, it couldn't possibly be classed as either an "invention" or "innovation" in any case if women simply wore the same attire as men.

Of course a few working women did, for example a famous group of women who worked in the mines in Wigan. However, it was socially taboo certainly for anyone from the middle or upper classes and for most of the working classes as well. Search any collection of photographs of the Victorian era and you'll find virtually every woman in a dress or skirt.

An innovation can be the introduction of something that already exists into a new environment. If somebody entered Paris Roubaix on a mountain bike that would be innovative, even though the mountain bike itself would not be an innovation.

You only say 'cos you've absolutely no idea quite how liberating trousers for women are.

Rendel Harris wrote:

Nigel Garrage wrote:

humankind's greatest invention

Not the printing press, or music, or vaccines and cures for numerous diseases, or electric light or computing, but something that kills over a million people globally every year, seriously injures fifty million and sends countless more to an early grave with pollution related diseases...what a depressing worldview.

Incidentally, if you'd care to research some history you'd find that the bicycle has done far more for female liberation than the automobile ever has. As the suffragist and anti-slaver Susan B.Anthony said in 1896, ""Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel."

 

I love the idea of music being humankind's greatest invention – it's certainly one our greatest achievements – but I think it actually pre-dates humanity. 

Well, shall we say the discovery of music then (or we can say the invention of musical instruments or counterpoint if you like)? In a sense you could say everything we invent predates us, e.g., the invention of a nuclear fusion reactor won't be us inventing nuclear fusion but us finding a way of replicating something that already exists in nature.

But you can remove it from the list if you like, it would still leave many other inventions that are significantly greater and more important to humanity than the motor car.

No way I'd remove it from the list! As I said, it's one of our greatest achievements (or activities or whatever way you want to describe it). One of a dozen or so that are more important than the motor car. 

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Finally a note on petrol - note the churlish "remain" nonsense, but where are the panic-stricken selfish areas? Oh surprise! London. The Brexit heartlands have kept calm and carried on, and look forward to decent wages for hauliers instead of a reliance on low-income immigration. Will there be gaps in the meantime? Yes, but frankly we don't care!

Which county voted most in favour of Brexit? Lincolnshire. From The Lincolnite news website:

Large queues have been reported at filling stations across Lincolnshire on Thursday as people try to get petrol or diesel for their car, with some being accused of panic buying.

The HGV driver shortage has prompted many to ‘panic buy’ and stock up on fuel. 

ASDA and Sainsbury’s petrol forecourts in Grantham both had big congestion as people were waiting to fill up on Thursday afternoon, as well as multiple sites in Lincoln, too.

and:

Fuel stations in Lincoln, Grantham and across the county are experiencing gridlock queues, prompting Lincolnshire Police to appeal to motorists to stop panic buying, as there is no fuel shortage overall — though some local garages are experiencing low supplies.

“If you impede emergency services and cause unnecessary delays, you are putting lives at risk,” was the message from Lincolnshire Police.

Keeping calm and carrying on, eh?

.... and Remain voting Scotland is just fine for petrol and diesel.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Finally a note on petrol - note the churlish "remain" nonsense, but where are the panic-stricken selfish areas? Oh surprise! London. The Brexit heartlands have kept calm and carried on, and look forward to decent wages for hauliers instead of a reliance on low-income immigration. Will there be gaps in the meantime? Yes, but frankly we don't care!

Funny that. I live in Hull which voted heavily for Brexit and there has been little sign of keeping calm and carrying on where petrol was concerned over the last week. And the city is literally small enough to walk across the entire city centre in less than 15 minutes. 

And what I am finding most infuriating about the "Brexit" thing at the moment is the basic lack of any acknowledgement that it has caused or exacerbated any of the issues currently affecting people.

We voted to change the way we do a whole load of important things at national level, which is inevitably going to cause issues of one sort or another regardless of any long term benefits. And yet Brexit supporting politicians seem incapable (or unwilling) to acknowledge those issues, even though it is perfectly valid to acknowledge that problems are caused/exacerbated by exiting the EU and still believe that it was the right thing to do. 

It is almost as if they are convinced that Brexit supporters in the country will only remain [sic] so as long as they are convinced that there are NO downsides or shortterm issues at all. 

I disagree, it is the prevelance of large, fast moving motor vehicles on our streets which prevents women, children and many men from utilising the bicycle as the roads are considered too dangerous.

Prior to the car, the bicycle bestowed all those benefits or mobility and autonomy on women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycling_and_feminism

If the motor vehicle were invented today it would like not be permitted.

Pros

Convenience (sometimes)

Cons

Congestion

Pollution

road accidents

poor health of drivers

wycombewheeler wrote:

I disagree, it is the prevelance of large, fast moving motor vehicles on our streets which prevents women, children and many men from utilising the bicycle as the roads are considered too dangerous.

I was thinking about that yesterday. I had a spell where I couldn't cycle for a year and it took another 3 months or so before I could cycle to work.

Getting back on the main roads was an uncomfortable experience and an eye opener to anyone cycling for the first time. I ended up getting a mirror for a bit until my confidence levels returned to what they were.

Generally agree.  Lots of studies report that this is the most frequent opinion - given by people who don't cycle - as to what's putting them off. Like everything "it's a little bit more complicated than that" of course. I don't think cycling is something most people currently consider much as a regular mode of transport.  Even if cycling was regularly on people's mental "list of options", where driving is as easy as cycling then people drive if they have a car. I'd say about everywhere in the UK it is easier to drive. Once in the car people tend to keep using it for additional journeys.  I think that's the real lesson of "they built it and they didn't come" e.g. Milton Keynes.

We have to be careful about people's reports of their reasons also - that can be very dependent on framing of the question, whether they actually have much experience of the topic they're being asked about etc. People are also resistant to change and wary of the unknown.