These two videos belong here, particularly with the Johnson thing.
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Boris Johnson flip flops his position based on what wins him support.
He is a professional liar.
He doesn’t believe in anything. He just wants the power.
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As much as I hate Johnson I think he’s been pretty reliable on the biking front. I don’t know if he’s a full cycling ally but the language “squeeze more cars and delivery vans on the same roads and hoping for the best is not going to work” is not something I thought I’d ever hear from a Prime Minister yet alone a Conservative.
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He’s not reliable on any front.
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Unfinished London is such a good series. Loving Map Men as well currently.
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Oh yeah, to be clear, fuck Boris Johnson for fucking up pretty much all my life plans, and fucking over entire generations of other people’s lives.
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Just get an ebike
The concept of the big box store can not be separated from the war on cars.
A very large store that is effectively a warehouse by necessity can’t fit inside of a dense residential walkable neighborhood. There are some of these large stores in major cities. NYC has a Home Depot, it had a KMart, Targets are actually opening locations here, etc. But most/all of these are diminished versions of the stores you see in the suburbs.
A big store needs large trucks to come supply it frequently. That means it needs access to large truck-accessible roads. If it only borders small friendly streets, stocking the shelves becomes very difficult, or impossible.
Even though some customers are equipped and capable of hauling large loads with a bicycle, or cargo bike, most are not. Most consumers are going to purchase a lot of things, and a motor vehicle is a near-necessity to get those things home. The NYC Home Depot, for example, offers home delivery service. You checkout normally, but you take nothing with you. Instead, the items are delivered to your door later.
And of course, the very large store needs a very large parking lot. The lot’s existence it makes it easy to drive to the store, but it also makes it more difficult to not drive to the store. Setting the entrance further back from the road, and the store further from the rest of the town means a car is a prerequisite for all customers.
In a society that was not car-dominant these places could not exist to begin with. When they come into existence, they only reinforce car dominance. And in the end, they are a failure anyway for the reasons cited in the Twitter thread and others.
Deeper dive on induced demand.
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A good casualty of the chip shortage.
https://www.autoblog.com/2021/09/02/gm-ford-halting-production-chip-shortage-worsens
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It costs at least 10 million dollars to build a machine that removes from the air the CO2 produced by just 870 cars. Not counting all the other externalities caused by cars, this simple math means we should place a minimum $11,500 flat one-time carbon tax on the purchase of any car.
Another way to say it, we are currently subsidizing the purchase of a car by at least $11,500. Of course people are going to choose car under such a policy.
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Air pollution, sound pollution, or other, living in a place with many cars correlates with dementia.
These machines will never be as effective/ efficient/ scalable, as planting trees and eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
It’s yet another greenwashing project.
Our village is ok but a couple of neighbouring have been devastated by the unpopular HS2 (High Speed 2) works in the UK.
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