Let's not forget - or lose - what's good about Britain

Life in modern Britain is irritating in many ways, often thanks to greed and incompetence. So sometimes it is helpful to be reminded how good we have it compared to many other places. I've just been reading a report on Minivan News, a Maldivian anti-government news site, about Abdulla Mahir. Mahir is a torture victim, now granted asylum in the UK, and was recently arrested in the UK for throwing an egg at the Maldives president who, he alleges, had him tortured.

“The police treated me very nicely. One officer said to me 'I hope things work out in your favour.'”

“Another policeman was laughing throughout the interview,” Mahir added.

“It was 99% different being under British custody compared to being questioned by Maldivian police. The interview technique was different. I was allowed my lawyer to sit with me throughout the interview and the whole thing was tape recorded. At the end, my lawyer was given a copy of the tape recording. Then a doctor and a nurse came to check that [Maldivian President] Gayoom’s bodyguards hadn’t hurt me.”

It is slightly humbling to see someone so astonished by what we would consider the absolute basics of decent treatment. This is all the more reason we Britons have to be so careful about the relationship between us and the state we, in the final analysis, own. We must, more than ever, guard assiduously against sleepwalking into a state of ever-greater control, suspicion and our government assuming we are all potential criminals as their default position, because it would be a damned shame if our society changed such that the above statement lost its power.

Bicycles and trucks

The tireless and all-knowing Dave Holladay asked me to co-sign a letter to today's London Evening Standard on how adding an extra set of little side-mirrors to trucks isn't going magically to stop trucks crushing cyclists with depressing regularity, as some people seem to believe. In my correspondence with Dave, I made a point about trucks which I think is important, and which I'd like to record here:

When I see vans and lorries with their "If you can't see my mirrors, I can't see you" signs, I am powerfully inclined to conclude that this simply isn't good enough: if you can't see me and I am in a perfectly reasonable place, your vehicle isn't suitable to be used in an urban environment. Full stop.

And this is the root of it: lorries and other large trucks are designed primarily for the motorway, and the vision they afford the driver is entirely suitable for this, as on a motorway the edges and immediate rear of one's vehicle are largely irrelevant. Lorries should therefore be seen much more like military tanks: great in the environments for which they are designed, but absolutely not suitable for coming into towns and cities. Economics notwithstanding, the "proper" arrangement should be that lorries report to distribution centres at motorway intersections and unload their goods to smaller vans for urban delivery.

So there you have it. Sorry Messrs Tesco, Spencer and Sainsbury - I know you don't like ideas like this. But you can console yourself with the fact your directors' continued affluence has vastly more influence on government policy than road safety, congestion or pollution ever will. And to head off your inevitable counter-point: yes, I will gleefully pay 3p more for each tin of beans I buy if it makes my roads better.

Obesity - where's the transport link?

Today obesity is again in the news headlines, the second time this week. The UK government is getting in a right old tizzy about the subject, and rightly so: this is an important issue (although the claim that Britons being fat is as important as global warming is, erm, just a tad anglocentric, don't you think, chaps?).

But why on earth, in all that has been said about this subject, is nobody seeing a role for transport in solving this problem? The facts are that (1) our bodies are not intended to be sedentary and (2) most people drive for most journeys. The majority of journeys under 2 miles are carried out by car, expending practically no energy whatsoever. Getting people to walk and cycle these journeys would make a huge blow against obesity, but it is not being mentioned. Shifting short-distance transport to active modes would change so much and do it simply, but instead we'll probably end up with hamburger-taxes or something equally silly. Sigh.

Drowning in spam

This afternoon, in the space of about 2 hours, I received over 1000 spam emails. These were almost all messages that had bounced and 'come back' to me because they pretended to come from my domain. The headers were all something like

To: 405c6081@nntp.cn
From: "lorimer Bunker" [lorimer_Bunker@drianwalker.com]
Subject: snongiad

Cannot deliver this message: recipient doesn't exist

meaning that spammers must have sent out thousands of messages purporting to come from my drianwalker.com domain, each with a made-up email address. I have received 50 more bounced emails in the time it has taken to type this paragraph. Five more came just in the time it took to type that last sentence!

I'm so livid that I'm being abused this way. I'm furious with the spammers, obviously, but I'm also pissed off with Microsoft, whose woefully insecure operating systems have allowed hundreds of thousands of computers to fall under the spammers' control (because this is how spam is sent, you know: the spammers take control of people's PCs and get them to send all the mail). I'm also mad at the imbeciles who (a) bought Windows PCs and (b) allowed them to get infected. It's not rocket science. Buy a unix computer (such as a Mac, or Linux box) or take extreme precautions: there's just no middle ground. If you allow yourself to get infected you're part of the problem. I hope women laugh at your tiny manhoods.

Celebrity politics

One of my colleagues in our School for Management has shown how people are so unengaged with politics that their voting preferences can be massively swayed by a single celebrity endorsement.

If people are (a) so alienated by the political process that (b) they are happy to chose their political leaders on the basis of Gordon Sodding Ramsey's say-so, then I'm sorry but this democracy idea clearly isn't working out. I hereby announce my readiness to serve as a dictator. Frankly you could do a lot worse.

Everybody on the train rejoice! Rejoice, I say! *

Excellent news, rail travellers! Last year First Group made £108,800,000 profit on its rail business.

But given that this news is some of the best to hit our nation since VE Day, why is it that amongst all the undoubted joy I feel for First's directors and shareholders, I still find myself wondering why I spent an hour on Thursday evening standing with dozens of other people in a cramped vestibule on one of their improbably short rush-hour trains.

And although I'm obviously thrilled that last year eleven First directors between them trousered £2,108,000, a little joyless part of me can't help wondering why the vestibule I was squashed into contained a toilet - one of only two for the entire trainful of people - that to my certain knowledge has been out of order for at least 8 weeks. Perhaps - and here I go being old Dr Cynical again - it might be related to the fact First Group's executive directors all got company cars, or car allowances, to the tune of £80,000 on top of their salaries, which possibly does not entirely encourage them to travel on their trains themselves. Am I the only one who thinks it odd that the people who run a public transport business award themselves company cars for their own travel? Why, it's almost as if they are disingenuous hounds for whom the services they expect us to use are not good enough! Thank goodness that's not true.

But never mind all this! My regular suffering, and that of my fellow passengers on the Cardiff-Southampton line, is a tiny price to pay for ensuring First Group's directors got average bonuses of £168,750 each last year, a sum which, at slightly less than 10 times the annual salary of a First Great Western guard, is practically a slap in the face for them given how hard they worked for it. All my doubts about privatized rail without any possibility of competition between operators have been laid firmly to rest. I no longer see any impediments at all to our getting people to abandon their cars in favour of public transport, and am frankly mystified why anybody would still drive anywhere these days given they can make the same journey with far more delay, cost and discomfort whilst supporting magnificent businesses like this one. Where's the chuffing bunting?

* We're clamping down on non-rejoicers on our railways. Failure to rejoice could land you with a £10,000 fine and a criminal record. Don't risk it.

Around the world by bicycle

Many congratulations to my father, who has calculated that he cycled around the world - 40,000 km - in just the past three years. This is a remarkable achievement.

Of course, he's pretty much managed to cycle around the world without leaving Yorkshire, which somehow seems the proper Yorkshire way of doing exploration...

Thought for the day

Removing cyclists from the road to protect them from traffic is like removing patients from hospital to protect them from MRSA.

Who said it? Me, just now in a meeting!

COGS talk

Tonight I'm talking about cycling in Salisbury. Here is a copy of the slides for anyone who attended. (Warning: big file - >13Mb)

In other news, the Beeb obviously got wind of my talking as I was interviewed on BBC Radio Wiltshire and BBC Swindon in rapid succession this morning. It was very interesting: despite their asking more-or-less the same questions I managed to give them both totally different interviews!

BBC Solent

I'm being interviewed on BBC Radio Solent tomorrow morning at around 1015. I'll be talking about how drivers and other road users interact in shared-space environments, i.e., streets where all the signs and markings are removed. Expect nervous excitement amongst the people of Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight all morning.

Targeting bad cycle lanes

The BBC today has a short video report on London's cycle lanes, which focuses on how cyclists often feel at risk when using them. Those of us who work in cycling know that feelings of danger are a huge deterrent to more people cycling. Now, as it happens, we also know that cycling is a lot less dangerous than it looks, and that any danger which does exist is far outweighed by cycling's health benefits: it is always much better for your life expectancy to cycle than not to cycle; but as long as people avoid bicycles because drivers choose to put them at risk, we have a problem that needs to be addressed.

The BBC report, with its London focus, got me thinking about a conversation I had earlier this year with a London-based road planner, whom I will keep anonymous. He explained how, although the various London Councils are all naturally in favour of increasing cycling, they generally try to make this happen through one simple system: lengthening the London Cycle Network, the city's network of cycle lanes and tracks. A longer LCN is the target because the number of kilometres of cycle lane in a city is easily measurable, you see - you can do it with a ruler - whereas aiming to make cycling 'safe', 'fun' or 'useful'... well, such vague hand-waving oogy-boogy concepts seem like voodoo to the leaden souls at the top of local government.

Because 'lengthening the LCN' has become synonymous with 'improving cycling' in the minds of decision-makers, London's road planners are under great pressure to get a cycle lane - any cycle lane - onto every street. It doesn't matter if it is a good cycle lane, or one that flagrantly makes journeys longer and puts people in danger: if the LCN grows, it's a good thing. Exactly the same principle is driving so many other authorities around the country.

Right now I am submitting a funding proposal, with Lazio Regional Authority and other partners around Europe, to the EU. Our aim is to build research on all these other aspects of cycle infrastructure and to ask how can we best assess concepts such as safety, pleasure and usefulness. When we crack this issue, town planning might be able to get away from the cycle-lane-kilometre as the sole measure of success when it comes to catering for cyclists, who do, lest we forget, pay for these roads and 'cycle facilities', more than do motorists.

Finally, here's a short movie I spotted from my old home town of York, showing exactly why this stuff shouldn't be left in the hands of local authorities when their main aim is just to get a cycle lane - any cycle lane - down on the street. The last of the three examples irresistibly suggests the influence of health and safety inspectors - the one group of people who can make the Tomás de Torquemada look free-thinking and undogmatic.

Google adverts for weirdos?

Google's adverts are context-sensitive: they scan the page they are appearing on and advertise things related to that page's content, so that people viewing a website see adverts they are likely to be interested in.

Look at the advert I just spotted on this blog. Apparently Google thinks I attract cat deviants. Feed your passion? With hairballs?