Owen Massey McKnight ([info]addedentry) wrote,
@ 2003-10-15 22:45:00
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I wondered, lonely in a crowd...
Roads in Britain may be congested, but widening motorways and building new trunk roads simply generates more traffic, perpetuating congestion.

Public transport in Britain may be overcrowded, but increasing capacity simply generates more demand, perpetuating overcrowding.

What am I missing?

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[info]dakegra
2003-10-15 03:01 pm UTC (link)
a government with half a braincell?

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[info]addedentry
2003-10-16 02:38 am UTC (link)
You see, I suspect that congestion is a symptom of popularity, so the only cure is structural change to reduce that popularity - i.e. stalling the economy. I don't see any government adopting that as policy, brain cell or no brain cell.

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[info]dakegra
2003-10-16 02:42 am UTC (link)
Hmm. I admit that my answer was somewhat flippant...

It seems we need to either:
a. make public transport so good/cheap/reliable that people actually use it, and/or
b. make using cars prohibitively expensive so people are forced to use public transport

I'm kind of screwed as I need to drop my little boy off at nursery by 8am each day. If I got the bus up to nursery, I then have to catch another bus into Leeds, which wouldn't get me to work on time. Or I get Eddie to nursery early, pay even more than the exorbitant fees, in order that I can catch the bus.

Or drive. Hmm.

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[info]addedentry
2003-10-16 04:09 am UTC (link)
Both a. and b. make public transport still more overcrowded. You can't win.

Unless you teach Eddie to drive.

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[info]dakegra
2003-10-16 04:13 am UTC (link)
or, as [info]sloopjonb suggests, persuade my employer to let me work from home...

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[info]gnimmel
2003-10-15 03:29 pm UTC (link)
People are more likely to stay at home and not use transport at all if it's unpleasant to do so?
Alternatively: increasing capacity on only one of roads or public transport makes journeying on the increased-capacity service temporarily more pleasant, causing people to switch over to it (therefore the solution is supposedly to increase capacity on both, but that's never a solution a government department is going to come up with willingly).

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Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
[info]sloopjonb
2003-10-16 01:00 am UTC (link)
One approach that doesn't seem to have been tried is reducing the amount of journeys made (by any mode). Staggering work times would help (but that would mean planning and co-ordination, which is Socialism, and so not allowed). More radically, how about abolishing the office? I could work from home very easily, but it would cost my employers for phone diversions, etc.; perhaps money poured down the bottomless pit that is our not-a-transport-policy might be diverted to encouraging more homework.

One really radical move that would have enormous benefits in several spheres would be to oblige parents to send their children to the nearest school (unless they wanted to pay for it, and subject to religion etc.), but that really would be socialism.

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Re: Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
[info]addedentry
2003-10-16 02:45 am UTC (link)
Correct answer! I discover that I posted on this topic a year and a day ago citing a flyer which reads 'Nothing we can do with mass transit can match the effect of lessening the need for people to travel'.

The Select Committee report is interesting, and brief, reading - it points out the cost to employers of staff who are tired and demoralized from their journey to work. There need not be a top-down solution: I wonder how great the loss of productivity has to be before employers start encouraging serious flexitime.

Personally, I'd love to work from home, but my employers might object to my taking two dozen rare books with me...

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Re: Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
[info]sloopjonb
2003-10-16 04:00 am UTC (link)
I'm not sure the argumentum ad 'tired and demoralised' is gonna work ... I can hear employers saying 'Yeah, sure they're tired and demoralised; we treat them like shit and pay them f*ck all ... your point is?'

I suspect the real objection to homeworking is the lack of supervision; employers have a not entirely unfounded suspicion that if not watched like hawks their staff will skive all the time (instead of only 90% of the time like we, oops, sorry, I mean they, do now). Of course this begs the question as to why the staff skive, and the phrase 'treat them like shit and pay them f*ck all' returns like a works canteen beefburger.

The trouble with reforming society is that you have to reform society first before you can do it.

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What am I missing?
[info]thegreenman
2003-10-16 05:29 am UTC (link)
the road lobby

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[info]addedentry
2003-10-16 07:33 am UTC (link)
No, unless the entire road lobby gets on my train.

I'm trying to resolve the contradiction between 'increasing use of public transport' and 'reducing overcrowding'.

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What am I missing?
[info]qatsi
2003-10-16 10:35 am UTC (link)
A teleporter. Though, presumably, there would have to be an Ether Traffic Control Service, presumably implemented decades late and over budget by EDS or similar, and you wouldn't want to be at the mercy of that.

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[info]ewx
2003-10-16 11:43 am UTC (link)

There must come a point where adding capacity doesn't produce a comparable increase in demand and thus congestion. If everyone is already driving their cars around all day every day they can hardly drive even more than that. (Given a non-growing population, which isn't too rash an assumption for most developed countries.)

I don't see any reason to assume that those points are the same for different modes of transport, say in terms of the capital required to reach them from where we are now and the cost of staying there the long term. Which way around they are is another question though.

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