"Disgraceful stupid little cupboards": CyclingMikey left with "utter disgust" for UK trains' dreaded upright bike storage; Tour de France Femmes gets underway; Remco's victory tour (+ a golden S-Works Tarmac SL8) + more on the live blog

Lots of people do things that endanger people every day. If they didn't, life would be rather difficult, and the benefits are therefore generally considered to outweigh the risks. Likewise, the benefits are generally considered to outweigh the costs.

What if the benefits are mostly felt by one group of people and the costs mostly by another set though?

Or if we all pay ("road tax", pollution, noise pollution, crashes into people and buildings, vast areas of public space covered in tarmac and given over to a particular activity, effects of government sucking to dodgy regimes to keep the resources coming...) ... but some benefit much more than others (those in the road and motor industries, politicians kept sweet by same ...)?

There will always be winners and losers, but I suppose you might hope that in a functioning democracy people with a functioning rule of law people will be treated more or less fairly and that no one will be expected to bear an unacceptable burden.

If you spend too much time worrying that someone else might be getting too big a share of some cake or other I don't think you're going to have a very happy life.

john_smith wrote:

There will always be winners and losers, but I suppose you might hope that in a functioning democracy people with a functioning rule of law people will be treated more or less fairly and that no one will be expected to bear an unacceptable burden.

But it's who are the winners and losers - that's rather important, no?  And does the system work by creating a larger proportion of losers, and how bad is it for them?

Our current system may not be very good at dealing with our longer-term "problems of success".  In effect - to avoid those in power losing it, are we all being encouraged to warm ourselves by burning our boats?

As for "fair" - that would be a maximal hope!

john_smith wrote:

If you spend too much time worrying that someone else might be getting too big a share of some cake or other I don't think you're going to have a very happy life.

I completely agree.  That is my philosophy - but we are humans in a world full of humans, not buddhas.  Preaching self-restraint while a few are running off with all the cake may be ... tricky.  To leave the metaphor - depends how much you want to pay in tax, reduction in health etc. all to be excluded from the roads by others.

Or, tragedy of the commons - the benefits outweigh the costs at any point for any individual, but when everybody does it, most of you end up worse off than if no-one had.

Over many years of reading these reports, the impression I now have is that: Generally, a significant proportion of society regards road cycling as a risky activity, therefore, we have to share some culpability for what happens for choosing to undertake this activity.  I have read reports in the past, where the driver's culpability has been reduced, because the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, or wearing hiviz, and therefore, shared responsibility for their death.

A few decades ago, I read a report of a court (coroner?) case, where the cyclist was killed in a "dooring" collision.  The cyclist was a well known club cyclist in SE London.  Either the Judge (or coroner) concluded that the cyclist was riding a "racing cycle", therefore, he must have been riding too fast, so the driver was exonerated.

Over the thirty or so years sice reading this, I still keep on reading this SH*T, the latest being the fatal collision in Hampshire recently.

Stephankernow wrote:

Try putting a Pashley type bike in one it's mission impossible. These racks are a disgrace, Tbey don't want bikes on trains

Presumably any bike with full mudguards wouldn't fit either, unless you wanted to crush the mudguards?

I don't have any confidence in machine vision traffic control. As you illustrate, some drivers already don't pay attention, and on the other hand, if the ability for computers to accurately classify cyclists as such was good enough, autonomous vehicles wouldn't be as awful as they currently are

brooksby wrote:

Annoyingly, the article doesn't say what those ethnic criteria are, that a hobbyist group like fox hunters can claim them.

Law Society website:

Quote:

Ethnicity is broader than race and has usually been used to refer to long shared cultural experiences, religious practices, traditions, ancestry, language, dialect or national origins (for example, African-Caribbean, Indian, Irish).

So this would appear to be a claim about traditions and shared cultural experiences. Seems like a bit of a stretch, although I'm not a lawyer (lefty or otherwise).

Interesting indeed.

Chambers says "ethnic" can mean "relating to or having a common race or cultural tradition", and Webster says "of or relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background". So if you can argue that you share a common cultural tradition, origin or background with some other person, you can arguably claim the two of you constitute or belong to an ethnic minority.

Agree it's a pity the article doesn't say what the criteria in question were though.

Generations of inbreeding amongst the gentry and aristocracy have left the toffs genetically different to qualify themselves as a distinct ethnic group

ROOTminus1 wrote:

Generations of inbreeding amongst the gentry and aristocracy have left the toffs genetically different to qualify themselves as a distinct ethnic group

Quite like middle-class metropolitans who live in say some London boroughs?

Stephankernow wrote:

ROOTminus1 wrote:

Generations of inbreeding amongst the gentry and aristocracy have left the toffs genetically different to qualify themselves as a distinct ethnic group

Quite like middle-class metropolitans who live in say some London boroughs?

Do the "chattering classes" make a point of it though?  Is Facebook the new Debretts?

This is the podcast mentioned. I've read the (auto-generated) transcript, I'm still not entirely clear. It talks about hunting being a protected belief (which would seem to have very little to do with ethnicity), and as it happens there are 5 tests for that (Grainger Criteria):

• The belief must be genuinely held
• The belief must not simply be an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available
• The belief must concern a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour
• The belief must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance
• The belief must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not be incompatible with human dignity and not be in conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

I doubt being pro-hunting satisfies all those criteria, although there is a court ruling that being anti-hunting can be a protected belief, in that case "The claimant here went to some lengths to attempt to live by his belief in the sanctity of all life".

Of course they've not done any pest control (very inefficiently) for a couple of decades as it's been illegal...

Nah - that wasn't designed - it was someone's fever dream.

If I could, I'd have given that multiple 'likes'. All the more reason to yet again sing the praises of Merseyrail from Chester to Southport. Absolutely excellent, and saves the death-cycling through Liverpool for little more than you'd have to pay to just get across the Mersey.

Judged purely in terms of a design meeting its goal, someone at Hitachi should win an award for this masterpiece of maliciously complying with a statutory requirement. As a human being, for their contribution to making the world worse for other human beings, they should be ostracized.

Cobblers. Hitachi don't specify the interior of their trains. The customer does.  In the case of the UK it's the DfT. 
 

Train OpCo's don't get a choice, except between available/planned rolling stock.