When Environmentalists Get Control

I had the opportunity to go to London last week on business. An absolutely beautiful country that is firmly in the grasp of the environmentalists. The UK is in a heat wave and last week it was in the mid-70’s and every news broadcast I saw pinned it firmly on climate change. In fact that was about the only thing I heard news-wise the week I was there. I never heard a word about a war that was raging two borders away. In one way or another all the information being put out by the BBC was environmental in one way or another that I heard anyway.

London is a huge city. All of the narrow roads have been narrowed into one way roads due to the addition of bicycle lanes. You cannot widen the roads as they are already almost in the building breezeways. So now they are all one way with a bike lane. In the twisting turning roadways of London it was a thirty minute cab ride to go two blocks over because it is almost all one way…. To further exacerbate a huge traffic problem, the speed limit throughout the city is 20 to 30kph…. Less than twenty miles per hour. The city monitors the speed with radar and cameras on each traffic light. It was an almost two hour trip from my hotel to Heathrow airport…. Oddly, the city subsidizes the gas burning double decker buses primarily for tourists I imagine because the primary means of travel was by train….. All of which is great if you are thirty years old and have good knees.

I have seen the future of environmentalism during my visit and I fear this is exactly the direction we are headed. Short sighted feel good actions that have little if any positive affect but are humanly brutal in their outcome. I would bet you the lawmakers that implemented these actions travel comfortably in their personal vehicles. And I bet they aren’t bicycles either.

 

Let’s get John Kerry’s opinion on this…..

 

Just more real world evidence of the failure of "feel good solutions"....and you are absolutely correct that it has no impact on those who implement these policies as they are above the rest of us.

 

Your premise is just an anecdote run amok. I lived in the UK, mostly in Leeds, for 6 months. EVERY road in the country is tiny. The cars are tiny. The trucks are tiny. And it doesn't matter where you go top to bottom, all the roads are tiny. We drove from Scotland to Wales and everywhere in between. I saw the whole place. In wide open country, the roads are so narrow, you have to pull off the road to let others pass in the opposite direction. This is in contrast to this country. We keep building them wider and wider. The UK is just a country built on narrow roads.

I think maybe you attach your personal biases to situations you can't rationalize any other way. You start with what you believe and then gather evidence to support what you already believe. Confirmation bias isn't unique to you, but you are a part of a political party that practices it often and obliviously apparently. No offense but I see this type of "cause and effect" misfire all too often.

 

Instead of maintaining the high throughput of their main thoroughfares, urban planners often overlook creative opportunities to better manage their traffic, instead sacrificing car lanes in order to fit in bicycle lanes.

One thought I have is that they could try maintaining their most productive auto lanes by diverting bicycles to parallel streets dedicated to that purpose. In so doing, they could manage auto traffic and bicycle traffic more independently, with less conflict between them, and maintain two way traffic on more of their streets as well.

Sounds much simpler than it would be, of course (consider the loss of on-street parking where only bikes would be allowed), but it's a starting point for further development / refinement.

 

When will the Green People awake from their Utopian Dream? The USA is suffering because the Greenies have "shot from the hip" and have not considered the consequences we face today. I say, "Go Nuclear."

 

My art for today . . . Inspired by @JoeNation and his think-alikes.

While shuttin' down our sources
Enviro's are Controllin'

High prices from the bourses
Ignorin' widespread pollin'

Not far off are unseen pains
In spite of insightful derision

Trade poisoned soil for acid rains
Spawned by lack of vision​

The Greenies, they's a smilin'
Not knowin' what they're doin'

The bills, they keep a pilin'
We're in for a Capitol screwin'.
​

.​

​