MatthewToad43

@PowerCrazy Also, while some local councils are intentionally neoliberal, most are just trying to survive.

Central government does of course force them to take the neoliberal solutions you describe. Because all other options are prohibited, impractical, or cannot be funded, due to the rules set down by central government.

Local government can be corrupt (so can central government), it can be incompetent (ditto).

But the villain here is the tories. It’s always the tories. And while they tend to control rural councils, they don’t control most of the cities.

@PowerCrazy IMHO this is not true.

An individual driver speeding will normally receive a £100 fine and 3 points on their license.

You lose your license after 12 over 3 years. Even if you can avoid the points with a course once, you can’t do that repeatedly.

So the practical effect is that people who get caught are more careful.

Which is a win for everyone.

As far as road design goes, while there are discussions to be had around that, there are good arguments for reducing the speed limit to 20mph. Roads are not designed for that. But we can enforce it anyway, cheaply.

@PowerCrazy Because they have a bunch of things that they’re legally required to do and not enough money to do them all.

Some of them are easier to downgrade, ration, or scrap, than others.

Central funding was largely eliminated, while local government can no longer increase its own taxes beyond a certain threshold (requiring a referendum), thanks to laws passed by central government.

So they have to cut something.

Speed cameras save lives. It’s politically easier to get rid of the speed cameras than to get rid of the roads. Mostly because our cities remain car dependent, and even buses depend on roads. Local government cannot get rid of cars for free; that will take a sustained national effort with considerable funding and political will.

Would you rather they cut the already very limited funding for helping old people who can’t afford their own care needs?

Of course it’s a political decision. But the cuts, the restrictions on raising taxes, and turning speed cameras from something that saves lives, enforces the law, and generates revenue, into a cost, are all carefully calculated to restrict local government’s choices and blame them for the central government’s cuts.

How can you be anti-car and still anti-speed-cameras?

And yes, the rule that the national treasury keeps the fines did not apply to traffic wardens. Central government specifically set out to cripple one of the main tools for reducing road deaths, to make a populist political point.

Though whether they make a profit on traffic wardens is less clear. A fair bit of enforcement is actually by the police, which is of course a different budget.

@PowerCrazy You’re saying we shouldn’t have buses, bicycles and ambulances either?

I believe we can reduce the number of cars by maybe 70 to 80% over the next few decades.

But there’s a lot to do to get to that point. We can’t flip a switch overnight to eliminate *all* cars without dealing with accessibility, housing, prejudice, new rail lines, a whole bunch of problems, some of which will take some time to fix.

On the other hand we *can* make significant progress by investing in public transport, especially buses, combined with some mildly coercive measures such as LTNs, reduced parking, lower speed limits, bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.

@PowerCrazy They are removing them because they *LOSE* money on them.

They are, in the UK at least, not allowed to keep any of the money generated.

But they have to pay for the costs of running them.

And they can’t afford to because their budgets have been cut so far over the last 13 years of tory misrule that in many cases they can no longer provide basic services that they are legally obliged to provide.

Back when they could cover their costs, there were lots of speed cameras. Now there are very few. Because evil politicians, usually tories, have always sacrificed lives for political convenience.

@gabriel @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Some of this results from the practical reality that many of our cities are specifically designed to force people to drive. Unfortunately it will take time to fix that.

However, as I just boosted, there are plenty of people who can’t drive.

@gabriel @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Because somehow drivers have decided that driving is a right in the same sense that freedom of association is a right.

That any restriction on their ability to drive, that any monitoring of their driving in a public place, is somehow against civil liberties.

That the law should be reinterpreted to suit them. That “causing death by dangerous driving” is somehow less serious than manslaughter (aka murder 3).

Freedom to drive has never been a constitutional or human right. Certainly not in my country nor in the USA.

Cars need to be regulated for the same reason that guns need to be regulated.

@gabriel @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 You can’t do statistics on speed cameras if there are almost no speed cameras.

Which is the reality today. Sometimes the police go out with mobile units. But there are very few fixed ones.

@PowerCrazy We need to substantially reduce the number of cars.

Increasing the number of speed cameras, while reducing speed limits, is a step in that direction.

@immibis @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Why not? Elected local governments should be able to fund the maintenance of fixed speed cameras out of the fines received.

They can’t, which means, given enormous cuts in their budget largely the result of central government decisions, they could no longer afford to maintain speed cameras.

As a result, more motorists drive at unsafe speeds, and people die.

More speed cameras is a *GOOD* thing.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with enforcement paying for itself in this case.

@immibis @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 In the UK, local councils pay for fixed speed cameras.

Central government confiscates the fines.

When this was introduced the vast majority of fixed speed cameras disappeared more or less overnight: Councils could not afford to run them without a revenue stream. Their budgets had been cut ~50% by that same government.

The government justifies this by saying “the war on the motorist is over”.

But it’s a funny kind of war. The fatalities are overwhelmingly caused by motorists.

@sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Modern petrol cars contain lots of computers too.

Automatic enforcement, with the right to override it recorded in the black box to be used as evidence in crash cases, is a perfectly reasonable idea. But inevitably there will be bugs, just as there are in self-driving cars (especially the often dangerous “semi-autonomous” vehicles).

However there is a cheaper solution: Fixed, widespread speed cameras. Which right now are effectively banned in the UK, because the treasury confiscates the fines (local government pays the running costs, and therefore can’t afford to run any).

While I understand there are usability issues, and design can help with that, if you’re not able to drive your ton of metal safely and legally you shouldn’t be driving it. If people expected to get caught, they’d drive slower.

The bottom line is speed limits are the law. And lower speed limits reduce the number of serious injuries dramatically and help to push people onto public transport. Although with old cars they increase emissions slightly; with modern hybrids they reduce them.

@mr_washee_washee Delaying the technologies that we know work, continuing to dig up more fossil fuels, and giving it a veneer of credibility by funding more research is a classic delayer tactic. Delay being a stage of denial.

@mr_washee_washee Either way, the technologies already exist and need to be deployed rapidly.

The alternative is burning more fossil fuels.

Which is both more expensive and *vastly* more dangerous. We need rapid progress towards sustainability, because it’s the *total* carbon emitted that matters.

Emissions must peak by 2025 at the latest (in fact they must peak as soon as possible). The UK, for instance, has agreed to reduce its emissions by 68% by 2030 (compared to 1990), a target that it will almost certainly miss according to the last CCC report.

@mr_washee_washee I’ve seen people argue that nuclear actually has the lowest material requirement overall. I’m not entirely convinced by that argument though!

By all means reduce the number of cars, but some of the things we will need to do to achieve that will take significant time - especially fixing housing and building more rail.

However there will still be vehicles, even if they are only buses.

@mr_washee_washee How do you propose to balance the grid without wind?

Solar panels are indeed mostly silicon, but they’re not entirely made of silicon. They also use “minor metals” (indium, gallium etc) in smaller quantities. They certainly use copper, steel and aluminium.

The inverter for a solar panel might contain rare earths. The big ones for long range HVDC interconnectors very likely do.

Whatever we build will involve some amount of mining.

However given the enormous cost of the status quo, renewables are a step forward.

@mr_washee_washee @suodrazah So do wind farms. Are you opposed to them too?

@rm_dash_r_star @notapantsday Unfortunately batteries with nickel are still pretty widely used. However it’s definitely going in the right direction.

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in-batteries

In any case digging up fossil fuels is also pretty dirty, and has been known to pollute indigenous people’s drinking water, steal their land, and on occasion pay for private militias and government troops to put down protests.

Obviously electric buses are preferable to electric cars. Public transport is worth investing in.

Also on batteries, iron-air is promising for grid storage, but not likely to be used for vehicles.

@rm_dash_r_star @notapantsday Is LMFP actually available in quantity? Wikipedia suggests not.

The problem with sodium ion batteries, apart from lower density, is that they have a shorter lifespan. On the upside they’re easier to recycle. IIRC there was some recent research that might fix the lifespan problem.

@flux @QuinceDaPence The other common gotcha with new train lines (e.g. HS2) is:

What if we get a modal shift from internal flights to trains? If air demand is constrained by supply (i.e. landing slots), that means there will be more long-haul flights, and overall emissions increase!

There is some truth in this. But it just means we need to drastically reduce our aviation capacity, and increase prices, at the same time as building more train lines. We could start with a frequent flyer levy.