“He’s going to school”: Impatient van driver honks and swears at cyclist and his son on a School Street closed off to motor vehicles

brooksby wrote:

It's interesting how often the response from the company is, "Oh, but they were an outside contractor, not one of our proper employees, we've already got rid of them , and we're definitely not using them again..."

Just outsource the responsibility

Hirsute wrote:

The few responses I read show a number of drivers should not be on the road and we need mandatory theory test every few years.

We need police forces and the courts to step up and remove the worst drivers from the road. Once drivers realise that intimidating others on the road will lead to them getting banned, then they'll behave. It's also got the benefit of reducing pollution for the majority of drivers that are considerate.

We need police forces and the courts to step up and remove the worst drivers from the road. Once drivers realise that intimidating others on the road will lead to them getting banned, then they'll behave

We may need them, but there's no sign we're going to get them. It's going the other way in my view- the police (well, Lancashire anyway) is spending a lot of time fighting for the right to refuse to tell you what they did, which was probably either nothing or the joke advice letter. If you are KSI'd you're not going to be in any position to fight your corner, and the police will immediately roll out the standard 'our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family', while they and the courts settle on either nothing at all or some trivial, even suspended, penalty. We really are up against it with increasingly malevolent drivers and unsympathetic, uninterested police

wtjs wrote:

We may need them, but there's no sign we're going to get them.

Especially since the tories have now declared themselves to be party of the drivers.

I've asked my local Tory MP if Gear Change is still party policy. He's yet to reply. I suspect it's rather awkward for them.

Mine has been busy writing op-eds for the local paper and letters to the police about speeding cyclists & escooters upsetting him whilst he ate some tapas https://www.ipswichstar.co.uk/news/23804294.tom-hunt-wants-crackdown-wat...

But then I'm still waiting for a reply to the letter I sent him after he campaigned successfully to have a load of segregated cycle lane bollards removed because he didn't like them.

So I don't rate my chances of getting a response to gear change questions.

Serious question. We're the plans outlined in Gear Change part of their manifesto? If it was, I'd love to point that out to my local MP.

The manifesto only outlined a £350 million cycling infrastructure fund, it was covid lockdown that led to gear change.

IanMK wrote:

I've asked my local Tory MP if Gear Change is still party policy. He's yet to reply. I suspect it's rather awkward for them.

I keep asking my local MP, Mark Harper, Transport Minister, questions, mostly about transport, but answer comes there none.

I posted on a local neighbourhood site about his lack of response, and I am  very far from being alone.

That's an interesting.

My MP Mr Anderson is a Tory Deputy Chairman.

Hmmm.

eburtthebike wrote:

Especially since the tories have now declared themselves to be party of the drivers.

Must be all the U-turns.

However, the car manufacturers aren't happy at all about Meat Tax Sunak:

Alok Sharma wrote:

It takes a very special combination of incompetence and cynicism to manage to unite the car industry and the Greens against you, and Rishi Sunak has demonstrated that.

We need our Politicians to be the partties , councils and govts for ALL people who driver all forms of transport.
We have poor drivers in all forms of transport and if we all started to think and treat each other in the manner we would like to be treated ourselves.
All this would be reduced and on parents being late for school driving badly andbits not just male van drivers, Ive had plenty of irate drivers of both sexes in cars running late. Set your alarm clock 15 minutes earlier i was widowed early in life and i did it works.

Exhorting humans to be "better" without any external changes to drive that is the domain of religions. And after 30 millenia or so (or maybe a lot more?) I'm a little unclear how well that's going.

Agree - in that currently we see "how can we help people drive safely" vs. "... and does that keep other road users tolerably safe? If not how do we remove them?" What we should ask is "how can we facilitate safe, convenient and efficient travel (by all suitable means)?"

Disagree in that we actually do need a different detailed approach for different modes. And we've already maxed out convenience* and done a great deal for safety for drivers (and regulated buses). Cyclists and pedestrians - not so much.

Cyclists and pedestrians are statistically a low threat to ALL other road users, drivers not so much.

* It doesn't feel like it but this is because of all those other drivers. Make something attractive and soon it will be oversubscribed, despite any moral exhortations.

chrisonatrike wrote:

Exhorting humans to be "better" without any external changes to drive that is the domain of religions. And after 30 millenia or so (or maybe a lot more?) I'm a little unclear how well that's going.  (snip)  Make something attractive and soon it will be oversubscribed, despite any moral exhortations.

Here you hit a nub, a plexus, a major factor lacing up the whole sociological issue of human technological trashing of everything around us. We are arrogant, hubristic and untrustworthy as a consequence of a fundamental apsect of our human nature.

This nature is a shapeshifter, though, often hiding its fundamentals under cover of civilising structures that come and go over the centuries. Sadly, for every civilising mechanism or institution, the reaction of the dark and savage undertows in our fundamental nature generates a counter. We yo-yo, both individually and as a society, between the constructive and the destructive.

Civilising structures do include metaphysical constraints such as religious reins-of-restraint and other constructive ideological proposals about good & bad attitudes & behaviours. But they immediately generate their antithesis. The same ocurs in the physical world. For every power sharing & restraining parliament with a rule of law, there's a plutocracy or dictatorship waiting in the wings with some dictats for its turn on the stage of history.

Currently we seem to be heading for the latter; and one of the worserer kinds. There will no rule of law other than the law that says everything is allowed as long as its in support of the ruling clique or mad leader, especially if unfettered persecution of opposition to that clique or leader can be made a popular pastime.

These days, we also have access to hugely powerful technologies that amplify everything about both aspects of our human nature. But the great technological helpmeets are easily overwhelmed by the enormous doom-laden techmonsters. Sometimes, as with the car, they are the same tech.

*********

So, the gharks & hoos lurking under the thin skin of many once civil humans are bursting out and running amok. Crimes of every type are rife and becoming unpunished norms - not-crimes except in the naming schema of a near-dead former culture and associated  near-defunct society.

Some choose to be criminal when seduced by a powerful technology such as a car, a gun, an economic bludgeon or a vast megaphone for spewing the hate that creates pariahs and scapegoats to serve as punishment-fodder for everyone's Mr Hyde. Cyclists make very easy-to-spot-and-punish pariahs ...... . From the perspective of Thatcher-Thing Car-Owning "Democrats" they are, " .... not one of us".

Well we're "the third chimpanzee" which means that there are two other models!  So it could be like the gangs of young thugs up to ultraviolence and a bit of the old in-out if they can get it (chimps) OR the "solving social strife through sharing and sex" of the bonobos.

I think humans aren't especially red-in-false-nail-and-denture by nature.  Although our small-group societies do often tend to feature quite startling rates of sexual misdoings and indeed violent death*.  I'd say a lot of why humans have succeeded is because we're not just the mimic ape but the cooperative chimpanzee.  We clearly have in-built tendencies to go with the flow, to fit in with the group.

... and of course that is very suitable for any of us who maybe are a bit more focussed on themselves!

Lots of global bad stuff just comes because we've done so well we've far exceeded our previous Malthusian population limits.  And increased our resource use.  First we learned to eat the mammoths, then we ate the sabre-toothed tigers before they ate us, then we learned to eat the grass directly ourselves and most recently we've (temporarily...) got the better of the viruses and bacteria.

Perhaps if the cars and the smog we've created was killing vastly more of us and destroying our crops we'd not be in danger of running out of road soon (after all most species don't hang around for long, a few millions of years...).  However...

* There's some debate on exactly how much and why especially as it's normally we "advanced" types doing the looking in a world where it's difficult to be isolated from "civilisation".  IIRC archaeology does also suggest it was a bit more wild when we lived in smaller groups.

Far too many drivers pass their test, and think that's it; completed! And never bother to take extra learning or read The Highway Code ever again.