'Mr Loophole' lawyer is back with another anti-cycling rant; MotoGP pro Aleix Espargaró shares brutal 300km ride on Strava; BTP Cheshire slammed for cycle safety pics; Burst pipe turns cycle lane into 'log flume' + more on the live blog

The thing I hate about this story is its just some third-rate local lifestyle magazine trying to court publicity by airing a controversial commentary.  The problem is that it is confirming in the eyes of the three people that read Cheshire Life or whatever its called that lycra-wearing cyclists are a menace who should be punished.

PRSboy wrote:

Re the Mr Loophole story, I propose that lawyers who get wealthy speeding motorists off offences be clearly marked with hi-viz and a registration number, so that they can be easily identified by families who've lost loved ones through speed-related injuries.

How dare Freeman comment on road safety...

hawkinspeter wrote:

Road safety is NOT a game!

The Tufty Club! Takes me back...

Must ask, in squirrel vs. shark, who prevailed?

Probably depends on whether it's a red or grey squirrel.

Red squirrels are smaller, but more agile so they'd probably just settle for teasing the shark. Grey squirrels have been known to attack and kill sharks, but they don't do it for food, just to have a bit of a laugh.

jollygoodvelo wrote:

I'll happily confess to ordering a huge amount of stuff online, and it does annoy me slightly that all the deliveries come in a massive diesel engined Transit or Sprinter.  Diesel engines are actually really good for some things - long distance constant load like a motorway cruise for example - but there's no good reason that an electric cargo bike or small electric van couldn't be used for the stop start local dropoff run.  The parcel distribution hub is five miles from here, Amazon similar, there's no way they're doing more than 250-300 miles per load of boxes.  Why has no-one invented a standardised slot-in battery pack for vans yet, they could have them charging at the depot while the van is out and turn it around in the time it takes to stack the back with more boxes.

I regularly cycle past my local sorting office on a morning and get overtaken by a stream of delivery vans, all making local stop start deliveries and probably not covering more than 200 miles in a day. There's is no reason on earth why they should be all electric vehicles. The savings in fuel and maintenance cost would huge even if they don't give a toss about the planet!

I think the trick is for the van to b making the larger delivery, not individual parcels, so a distributer delivering a bulk order to a retail outlet is probably best, but our demands for instant next day delivery for everything make this harder.
The worst has got to be individual purchases in seperate Jiffy bags coming from China. I will admit to having made that mistake on Amazon a couple of times

I agree with most of what you say, introducing extra kinds of tax always has costs associated as well, whereas increasing the rate of an existing tax doesn't. The only thing I would disagree with is the "steady increase in fuel Tax", I believe that steady increases has a minimal effect as folk simply accept small increases and get used to them, whereas significant increases make them sit back and think.
They treid to reduce tobacco usage from the 70s onwards this way and it had no effect as folk always found the money, but in the early part of this century they had larger increases along with other social pressures which finally had an effect. We can see the same thing being done in Scotland with minimum alcohol pricing, having little or no effect and it will only have an effect if they doubled the price overnight (please don't do that)

It's not entirely analogous to tobacco though. In that case the consumer only had one choice - pay the tax, or don't buy the product. In this case, they have the option of buying it offline. As the costs of delivery increase, the less tenable it gets for online retailers to sell at the same price as offline, so they'll either start introducing delivery charges anyway, or building it into the price, making offline more competitive.

My question would be, are offline purchases really (from an environmental perspective) more desirable, given that the default choice of transport to those retail sites is very often the car. It may not be ideal to have a delivery van doing a run of 50 or 60 parcel drops when a cargobike could do it, but isn't it still better than 50 or 60 car trips to the retail park?

Yeah, the reason for a steady increase is to give businesses time to adapt and to not overly penalise small businesses that don't have many resources.

At least with businesses, you can hope that they make more rational decisions than smokers or drinkers, and if they don't then there's room for a rival that does adapt to a low-emission future.

EK Spinner wrote:

We can see the same thing being done in Scotland with minimum alcohol pricing, having little or no effect and it will only have an effect if they doubled the price overnight (please don't do that)

I understand where you are coming from, but I wouldn't be too dismissive of Scotland's minimum alcohol pricing.  While hardly the panacea for Scotland's troubles with drink, it would appear to have moved us in a better direction.

https://www.alcohol-focus-scotland.org.uk/media/440012/mup-evaluation-ev...

This. Plus congestion charging / motor traffic free zones.

One problem with just exempting cargobike deliveries is it doesn't make any allowance for encouraging hybrid models - i.e. freighting in bulk to local distribution centres, then using bikes, etc. to do the 'last (ten) mile(s)'.

Generally I'd subscribe to the idea that things should be charged at what they cost, otherwise the market fails to take account of them. Hence water meters, etc. So I'd rather see delivery broken out of the product price and separately charged at what it costs than being rolled up (aka "free").

As to delivery vans, I'm sure they are more efficient than each item being sourced individually from the high street, probably by car.

That's the problem at the moment - pollution isn't charged back to the people/companies making it and so society ends up bearing the hidden costs. I'd also like to see a kind of 'road tax' that is charged relative to the weight of the laden vehicles (or the fourth power of weight which would be more accurate) to offset the cost of repairing roads. That would definitely hit logistics companies hard though, so there's a good chance that everything would get more expensive.

Putting the tax on fuel should automatically favour the more efficient form of transport, whether that be delivery vans or cars etc.

The additional benefit of the tax on fuel vs the tax on deliveries is that the tax on fuel will penalise amount of pollution regardless of the means of getting the product to the consumers home - i.e. it would reward local e-bike deliveries (a lot of local suppliers near me are doing this since the started of Covid), it would give some advantage to a hybrid model using a mix of electric and fuel and would hit hardest "all fuel" models, whether that is driving to the shops or delivering from the shop.

Then, if a van doing 60 drops is more efficient than 60 trips to the shop, that model should win out, if the 60 trips to the shops is more efficient that would win out.  Now this of course doesn't account for the time costs for different means of transport and the cost/ value someone might place on going shop (whether as a chore or a means of entertainment) but then again neither will a flat tax on deliveries.

We've has that exact model in place for the last decade, it's called the "fuel tax escalator".

Unfortunately the Tories have decided not to escalate it once during their reign.

Being in the last mile logistics industry I can see exactly where Boardman is coming from and where the problems will increase going forward. While next day is achievable by van as the number of parcels delivered is still high per vehicle the problem now is that the latest business model is delivery within the hour, where hulking diesel vans are far less efficient than cargo bikes.

However, until the consumer picks up the bill for their profligacy and pays closer to the full cost vans will always be the go to answer. The last mile (more like 5 in reality) is the highest cost in the courier providers chain, so they sub-contract it out, to an army of self employed contractors. Why choose a cargo-bike to service the end delivery at £6k up front when you can lease a Mercedes Sprinter for approx £10/day?

Luckily, a few cargo-bike retailers are now offering lease options for bikes too, so there is an option to choose bike over van, but the industry as a whole is very slow to adopt new ideas. I should know, I've been in it, running bicycle based deliveries for over 20 years now and have seen very little change in that time.

The only way it will change is if the national carriers can see a cost saving, that's all they are bothered about, but even then the purchasing price of cargo-bikes is put onto the sub-contractor. DHL, TNT etc aren't going to invest in the bikes themselves apart from a bit of greenwash PR to make themselves appear to be tackling the problems of pollution that blights our towns and cities.