Chris Till

Tag: Public Transport

  • Labour will be a disaster on the Climate

    Starmer’s right wing so called Labour Party will be an unmitigated disaster for the climate and nature. They are ripping up planning regulations so that their mates in the private sector can build unsuitably large, car dependent, poor quality in many cases, not remotely sustainable, homes that will not address the chronic need for genuinely affordable housing, nor the desperate need for council housing. While at the same time forcing developments through on communities that have voted against them multiple times in recent years. For example the Goring Gap proposed development in Worthing that we thought we’d seen the back of.

    The type of housing we need is mid-rise apartment buildings of tiny home size flats, built on brownfield or derelict sites, in harmony with nature as much as possible; and with sustainability at the heart of every element of the design and build process. And yeah, maybe you can go out into the green belt a little bit when you build in harmony with nature as I say. But that is not what Labour is going for. Quite the opposite.

    Perhaps a bit more wild than this, but you get the idea

    We need developments to be walkable and with great cycle infrastructure. To have minimal car infrastructure. The narrowest roads we can get away with to carry buses, delivery vehicles, emergency services, taxis when necessary, and so on. No private cars. We need to have all the amenities required nearby. This is obviously very possible when you build with this type of consistent medium-ish density. We need to have rail connections within a reasonable distance. Obviously, when you build in this way, it becomes far easier to achieve this. If you build, as Labour plans to, ugly, expensive suburban sprawl; then rail connectivity becomes incredibly difficult to achieve. Especially when they don’t want to spend any money as a government. Maybe they’ll rip up regulations on that too, and get a US firm to come and build us private rail lines with diesel power in the late 2020s.

    This topic is probably the most frustrating of all to communicate in modern Britain. Even more so than the climate crisis itself. Despite what Julia Hartley-Brewer would have you believe, most people get that the climate has warmed and we need to burn less fossil fuels in order to have a future. But when it comes to housing, and building in general, people don’t really put two and two together. I think people have a sense of the population being high. Some are just racist, but not all, and the non-racists have a point. It’s interesting, because the thing we should be worried about is not the thing they’re worried about. They’re talking about public services being stretched, which is really caused by austerity. Some extra immigrants aren’t making a noticeable difference there. The real problem, which they’re not talking about, is in terms of building and general overpopulation causing our already severely nature depleted country to be put under yet more strain, to the point that almost all our wildlife is threatened. We can’t live without wildlife.

    The truth that these people will never bring up, is that we’ve obviously built on all of the suitable sites without major issue. For example, I wrote about before a site in this town where they built a development on an actual swamp. It even includes its own pumping station to make sure it doesn’t flood. If places like that already exist, how many suitable sites do you think are left? That aren’t on a floodplain? That aren’t on a swamp? That aren’t on precious remaining green belt land? This is why we have to build density, and very carefully build on the fringes of the green belt. But making sure to tread as lightly as we possibly can. The opposite of what Labour is going to do. They don’t care at all about our remaining precious wildlife habitats. They want endless growth, and they’ll trample anything they have to in order to see that line on the graph go up. They think that’s the key to getting re-elected in 2029, and it’s all that matters as far as they’re concerned.

  • What I would do tomorrow if I was in charge

    After the last post where I talked about how much it feels like what we’re doing now is leading us straight to extinction; I thought I would indulge myself and come up with a list of things I would do immediately if I was in charge of the country (and assuming every other country was led by someone with exactly the same ideals). In the process show any doubters that I am in fact positive about the future. Just one where we make massive changes; rather than one where we waste precious time tinkering around the edges of our disastrous current system.

    Rather than write a lot about each policy idea, I just want to simply lay out the basics of my plan, and perhaps go into more detail in future. Especially on topics I haven’t previously covered.

    • End capitalism
    • Nationalise all essential industries, and shut down all businesses that don’t bring a clear benefit to society.
    • Bring in a universal income so work is optional and only for the benefit of society as a whole; not for individual gain.
    • Ban all new and begin rapid phaseout of existing fossil fuel infrastructure
    • Implement the MEER Reflection Framework, Marine Cloud Brightening, Ocean Pasture Restoration, and other Geoengineering / solar radiation management techniques.
    • Tax the rich 99% (everyone lives the same way)
    • Ban all unsustainable building materials
    • Ban private cars for everyone except for those who couldn’t live without one today (disabled etc). Begin rapid phaseout of diesel taxis and the small number of private cars that will remain in favour of EVs.
    • End deforestation and give back vast areas of grazing land to nature.
    • Ban all cryptocurrencies, mining, NFTs etc.
    • Ban pesticides
    • Ban meat production
    • Ban all new road, airport, port, and other developments intended to increase trade and GDP.
    • Ban all new single family homes, luxury apartments and mansions, and begin the process of converting existing large homes into many tiny apartments or buildings for other societal purposes.
    • Ban landlords
    • Begin rapid phaseout of fossil fuelled vans, trucks etc. Aim to replace most vans with cargo bikes. Demand for vans and trucks will drop due to massively reduced consumption levels.
    • Ban private jets, super-yachts and all other privately owned luxury transport.
    • Ban second homes
    • Severely restrict flying. Mandate that people may only take one return flight per year, regardless of wealth. Only holidays, visiting family, moving overseas permitted. Business travel by air banned.
    • Mandate that ground transport must be used for all trips where the destination can be reached within about 24-36 hours. Air travel only when absolutely essential.
    • Immediately invest massively in public transport, bicycle parking, and begin the phaseout of diesel buses, coaches, trains.
    • Immediately begin phasing out plastic and mandating the use of reusable containers and schemes to return them to shops for reuse.

    I could probably go on endlessly listing more and more things, but I think this covers a lot of bases. Imagine a real politician coming in day one and doing all of this. It would be incredible compared to everything we’re used to. But we shouldn’t forget that what I’m talking about here isn’t some crazy nonsense. What politicians do right now is pure insanity. What I’m proposing is entirely logical and urgently necessary. The people talking about net zero 2050 are the crazy ones.

  • We don’t drive at 200mph, so why do we need HS2?

    Cool looking trains, but they’d still be cool running at 125mph on current lines

    The reason why Shinkansen trains are accepted in Japan is because they were built at a time when everyone bought into the fast life idea. Practically no one questioned it. The economic benefits, GDP and all of that. Those things that a rapidly increasing contingent of us now know to be unnecessary, and are actually killing us.

    It was at a time when we didn’t have connectivity like we do now. How would you justify high speed rail now when you could take a limited express or a sleeper service and work on the way with wi-fi or 5G? The answer is, you don’t talk about it, or you make up some bullshit about it taking strain off the existing network. Well, I’m no railway engineer, but I imagine that building more standard lines in our current railway system would also do that for an infinitely lower cost. Both environmentally and financially.

    Who says “it would help the economy if I could drive my car to Manchester at 200mph”. Not even Jeremy Clarkson would say something so ridiculous. Well, I don’t think he has anyway. And who would want to take a coach at 200mph? I definitely don’t. There are enough coach crashes around the world as it is, and I can’t imagine it would be a fun ride, if such an insane bus actually existed outside the realm of video games.

    So, we don’t need HS2 because the speed benefit makes no sense if it’s not applied elsewhere (not that it makes much difference to journey times anyway); and because of the connectivity and remote working we now enjoy. But what about the environmental impact? We know that the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, and we also know that the route of HS2 just happens to trample on 32 ancient woodlands directly, and another 29 indirectly. And considering the fragility of these precious ecosystems, it’s unlikely that those 29 will survive at all.

    We can’t lose this. Photo credit: waronwildlife.co.uk

    If HS2 was necessary, which it isn’t; the obvious question would be why didn’t they build alongside existing motorways where there is often a lot of space and certainly great grid connections? Is it because nature is effectively worthless under this economic system and therefore an easy target? Is it because the rich business travellers who would be frequenting this service would like a nicer view out of the windows than a motorway? Is it because our leaders don’t care about nature at all and sadistically would enjoy trampling on it? My guess it’s a bit of all three.

    And then there’s the climate implications of all of this. We know that in order to give ourselves a chance of survival in the face of the climate catastrophe, we have to slash consumption by as much as possible, and we have to live slower and smaller lives. We will travel less, and when we do, we will go slower and on the ground unless absolutely essential (visiting family overseas for example, not for business travel). We’re already seeing a resurgence of sleeper trains across Europe, and we need to see it here too. We do have a couple of services domestically, but we need to see more; and we desperately need sleepers that use the channel tunnel and serve the major European cities.

    But obviously the climate implications of HS2 don’t end there. There is the immense amount of emissions generated during the building of the railway in the first place; but time is also a huge aspect. Because we only have a handful of years at the most to slash our emissions to as close to zero as possible; we can no longer take on decade long mega projects like this (or Hinckley Point C for example). There will be the odd exception, such as a massive upgrade to our existing railway infrastructure that can’t be completed in just a few years. But generally speaking, we have to think as short term as possible. This sounds counterintuitive since we’ve always been taught growing up to think about our long term future. Unless you’re in business in which case short term profit over long term stability has been the name of the game. But as long as the Earth’s climate is in the disastrous state it is, we have to think day by day with a single-minded focus on how to slash our consumption, and therefore our emissions as much as possible. Very little else matters. The byproduct of which will be providing a better, cleaner, fairer world to everyone, and allowing ourselves a chance at a future. In addition, we will be protecting and restoring our natural areas and our precious wildlife. It’s easy to do. It simply requires doing nothing.

    Just like with Covid, we solve the world’s biggest crises by just slowing down and stopping. Lounging around and being lazy can stop runaway climate change? If you’re anything like me, that’ll sound pretty appealing.

  • Bike Parking needs to change fast

    In my last post, I wrote about how comprehensive bicycle infrastructure networks, for the most part, are no longer necessary at this late stage of our climate crisis. But bike parking is a totally different story. We desperately need quality bike parking facilities.

    The Dutch understand this and are investing massively, and have been for years. Which is why a new, state of the art facility that accommodates tens of thousands of bikes is opening seemingly every week. They understand that secure parking is almost (if not equally) important in getting people cycling as providing the safe routes themselves.

    I don’t know if the Dutch are rolling these bike parks out at the immense clip that they are because they know how critically short we are on time to prevent climate tipping points; but they certainly are acting as if they do. As I mentioned previously, almost everything we do now as a world society to tackle the climate crisis has to be possible within a few years. That’s why we should ban cars now instead of copying the bike network of the Dutch. But there is no other option when it comes to parking. You have to design and build these facilities, which takes years of design, planning and construction. At the rate Britain is going, we might have one of these facilities, on the scale of the world’s biggest in Utrecht, open in 2026. And I’m far from convinced that it will actually happen. We have to move fast and put the money into this immediately. If we focus on bike parking as our transport priority, we could potentially have them in every major town and city by 2024 or 2025.

    In order to achieve something like this, you would need to completely flip the transport budget upside down. The government has their £27.5 Billion road building program, but cycling is only getting a less-than-pathetic 1% of that amount. Any government serious about having a future on this planet would immediately swap those around, but of course almost no governments would do that. But let’s just pretend they would and imagine a better world for a minute.

    You might be wondering in this hypothetical scenario what we do between now and 2025 when all of these bike parks are up and running. Do we all just not ride bikes in the meantime through fear of getting our pride and joy stolen? Obviously, we can’t afford to wait, and we need to limit theft as much as possible. The data for June this year showed a 50% spike in theft compared to the same month in 2020, near the end of the first wave of covid. Utility trips (and therefore bikes locked up) dipped by 20% in 2020, and even though it will have picked back up in the second quarter of this year, it wouldn’t have accounted for that huge uptick in thefts. It seems more likely that the demand for bikes and the manufacturing shortage has lead thieves to up their game in terms of organisation and “professionalism”. With highly skilled thieves taking advantage of the lack of secure parking, authorities have to move while we wait for the Utrecht style bike parks to come to fruition.

    Smaller scale secure parking can be introduced quickly in residential and commercial urban streets, for example. And it’s also possible for existing buildings to introduce new or improve existing bike parking facilities for staff or customers. We’ve seen train stations introduce swipe card entry and CCTV to existing bike storage rooms for example. And I think folding bikes are going to play a big role in urban areas. They are always a great idea, and with the lack of secure parking, they’re essential to the growth of cycling in the next several years especially.

    Cargo bikes are going to be increasingly huge in terms of the transport mix as we go forward, and they will also present a security challenge. However, their sheer size and weight will help deter thieves, and the most recent models often come with immobiliser type functions where they won’t roll unless they’ve been unlocked by the owner. I also think commercial cargo bikes won’t be effected due to them being either in constant use, or stored at the business premises. Cargo bikes for individuals and families will be more of a challenge in the short term; but as mentioned above, they are much less appealing to thieves than regular bikes. And let’s not forget, you can (and should) insure them like you would insure a car, except it’s a lot less expensive. Even if the worst was to happen, you could just get another one, and it would still be far cheaper than owning and running a car.

    Bike hoops outside SpashPoint Leisure Centre in Worthing

    But what we really need to get away from is shit bike parking. Don’t get me wrong; bike hoops are clearly the least bad of the options, but they’re not great; especially when they’re uncovered. Front or rear wheel racks are basically useless and they are not designed for all of the different tyre widths you see. No new (or relatively recent) development should have uncovered racks of any sort. SplashPoint Leisure Centre (pictured above) is the most egregious example where I live. They installed quite a few hoops, to their credit. But could you really not afford to at the very least cover them up?

    When I was in Cambridge a couple of years ago, I visited a new station north of the city. It had hundreds of bike loops, and they were covered by a large roof, to at least keep the rain off. At that time, I remember being astounded that they would do anything that cycling friendly at a medium sized train station in the UK. That’s what living in West Sussex does to your expectations. But from now on, I think it is the absolute bare minimum we should expect to see at transport hubs.

    And then there’s the other local destinations. Convenience stores, doctors surgeries, dentists, libraries etc. So many of these places have rusty old bike racks that hold maybe 4 or 5 bikes if you’re lucky, but they also have a car park for 20 or 30 cars. If we somehow did wake up from our climate slumber tomorrow and decide to ban cars, you’d have all sorts of problems with bike parking at these locations, 1 or 2 miles from home.

    We clearly need a two pronged approach to this critical problem. Small, covered, sometimes secure parking in residential areas and local amenities, and massive investment in Utrecht style parking for tens of thousands of bikes in urban centres. We can’t wait any longer for this change. Cycling rates will stay relatively stagnant until something happens to show people that cycling really is respected as a form of transport, like it is elsewhere.

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