Roads Minister interview

[Vorpal]

The problem with HS2 is there are no new stations being built and so as you say its all about shaving minutes off a long distant journey which,frankly is why I find it a white elephant.
I agree the west coast line over burdened but will HS2 aleviate that problem,no one official has mentioned that it will,only that HS2cut journey times

I suspect part of the reason is that if you make it about capacity more than speed, then it would increase the pressure to add a few more curves to stick more closely to the Great Central corridor into London and the M40/Chiltern Line/M42 corridors to/past Birmingham instead of cutting new corridors into London and between Coventry and Warwick.

a few wanted the Chiltern upgraded but believe the costs of that and esp at Marylebone were expensive and you would probably need to double capacity all down the line in areas far more beautiful than proposed HS2. In other countries we would never get this debate and Nimbyism and just build it, BTW there will be a cycle corridor alongside it so hope that would be good ?

There's a thread just for HS2

[ANTONISH]

a few wanted the Chiltern upgraded but believe the costs of that and esp at Marylebone were expensive and you would probably need to double capacity all down the line in areas far more beautiful than proposed HS2. In other countries we would never get this debate and Nimbyism and just build it, BTW there will be a cycle corridor alongside it so hope that would be good ?

[/quote]
I bet it will be a very narrow corridor

[Wanlock Dod]

Some of the views in this piece in Singletrack seem disturbingly plausible

[ANTONISH]

Some of the views in this piece in Singletrack seem disturbingly plausible

Disturbing, yet horribly plausible.

[pga]

We could be radical and pay people NOT to have a car. This would be easy to operate as car ownership is easy to access. At the same time why pay e bike subsidies? We should a fighting obesity not assisting it.

Of course, as usual, government financial inducements would go the better off in the community.

[mjr]

At the same time why pay e bike subsidies? We should a fighting obesity not assisting it.

Because legal e-bikes are only fairly low-power pedal-assist (compared to the US spec e-motorbikes) and hopefully there will be some sort of checking that they're legal, so users are still getting some exercise (possibly quite a lot if they don't pace their battery use, exceed their range and end up pedalling a fairly heavy bike the last bit, but at least they should be warmed up). Plus they're often a stepping stone to unassisted cycling or a way for people to keep riding despite illness - I've seen some of both in our local relaxed rides group). In all, they seem like a way to fight obesity rather than assist it, but I've not checked the research.

Even if they're not, it seems better to subsidise putting dozens of e-bikes on the road instead of an e-car or even an unsubsidised ICE car. E-bikes pollute less, improving other people's health, and clutter our towns up less.

[Wanlock Dod]

This seems to be rather a concerning development given some of the implications raised by Singletrack. It would seem that there is a good chance that the car has some kind of autonomous collision avoidance system.

[Stevek76]

Hmm. We'll have to see what the investigation shows but I've thought before that Tesla's marketing of its 'autopilot' is completely irresponsible and verging on corporate manslaughter. They might mention the need to keep hands on the wheel as a throwaway but the way they marketed it through the press would have left at least some of their fans thinking it was genuinely autonomous rather than no more advanced than the collision avoidance and motorway lane keeping systems that BMW etc have.

As it is if rather see a limit on driving assistance functions. Fully autonomous is fine, collision avoidance etc is also fine. Stuff that lets you take your hands off the wheel some of the time even if it tells you not to just seems to be asking for trouble.

[thirdcrank]

My understanding is that at present, in the UK at least, the driver has to have overall control and ultimately has responsibility for driving the car.

There are, however, already all sorts of features which can be used by the driver to get the car to do some of the work. The providers of this technology have been careful in their use of language because these features are generally referred to as "driver assist" and so avoiding any suggestion of replacing the driver. (I was a bit surprised to see the use of the expression "Autopilot Hardware 1 with Convenience Features.") I don't know if this is because they don't want to frighten off drivers who like to think they do it all themselves, or whether they don't want to give drivers an excuse when something goes wrong. I've just bought a fairly basic Skoda Fabia which has "Front assist" technology as standard which apparently applies the brakes if it detects that a shunt is imminent. The handbook makes it abundantly clear that it's the driver's responsibility to avoid crashing.

My own fear is that much more of this will become standard and will facilitate the inevitable change to driverless, or at least "less driver" vehicles. Now, it will eventually be possible to program this stuff to make a crash almost impossible, but if there are human controlled vehicles and more especially humans (ie pedestrians) to contend with that will be a lot harder and there's a strong probability that some humans would use it to their own advantage: eg if you know a car is programmed to avoid collisions, you can step out in front of it without fear of being run over.

I fancy we are going to see a lot more moves to get pedestrians and cyclists out of the way of autonomous vehicles. I don't think driverless and driver-controlled vehicles would mix well either.

[Pete Owens]

My own fear is that much more of this will become standard and will facilitate the inevitable change to driverless, or at least "less driver" vehicles. Now, it will eventually be possible to program this stuff to make a crash almost impossible, but if there are human controlled vehicles and more especially humans (ie pedestrians) to contend with that will be a lot harder and there's a strong probability that some humans would use it to their own advantage: eg if you know a car is programmed to avoid collisions, you can step out in front of it without fear of being run over.

I cannot understand your use of the word "fear" in this context - I would choose the word "hope".

A world where pedestrians can cross the road with out fear of being run over sounds wonderful to me.

[thirdcrank]

... I cannot understand your use of the word "fear" in this context - I would choose the word "hope".

A world where pedestrians can cross the road with out fear of being run over sounds wonderful to me.

The point I'm trying to make is that we are at the jockeying-for-position stage with driverless vehicles and while total - or at least near-total - collision prevention will be possible, it won't be commercially attractive. eg We had a thread a while ago where one of the interest groups was lobbying - perhaps in the US(?) - for these vehicles to be allowed to keep up with the actual traffic speed, rather than comply with limits. Certainly no suggestion that the vehicles should be programmed to drive according to the conditions. Something I see regularly is drivers - often the drivers of commercial vehicles, but not only them - pulling out into the traffic when they think that the driver with priority will be able to avoid a crash. If they knew that the approaching vehicle would automatically stop, there might be a lot more of that type of driving in the prolonged transition stage where there was a mix of vehicle types..

Like it or not, I fancy that the future holds more pedestrian railings and more farcilities for cyclists to get them "out of the road." It would remove a lot of what is dressed up as unpredictability. I could imagine, for example, sophisticated dashcams being fitted to driverless vehicles to record what happened when a crash occurred. The insurance lobby seems to be fretting about the apportionment of responsibility, and they are unlikely to volunteer to accept more liability.

It's the trade-off between safety and speed of movement. The financial clout is on the side of the manufacturing lobby. Unfortunately.

[Vorpal]

Like it or not, I fancy that the future holds more pedestrian railings and more farcilities for cyclists to get them "out of the road." It would remove a lot of what is dressed up as unpredictability. I could imagine, for example, sophisticated dashcams being fitted to driverless vehicles to record what happened when a crash occurred. The insurance lobby seems to be fretting about the apportionment of responsibility, and they are unlikely to volunteer to accept more liability.

It's the trade-off between safety and speed of movement. The financial clout is on the side of the manufacturing lobby. Unfortunately.

That's not true everywhere, though. I can't imagine the corporate lobby winning the day in countries that already have some form of presumed liability, and give priority to pedestrians and cyclists on urban roads.
The Netherlands, Denmark, and other countries will see pedestrian priority as a win, and are likely instead to ban motor vehicles in places where conflict becomes problematic or expensive. They already do so in many residential areas.

[thirdcrank]

I'd be the last to suggest that everywhere will be the same and in any case, prediction is for fools and charlatans, but I'm fairly confident that I'm on the right lines. I'll plum for big trucks first, probably on night time journeys between hubs, which don't involve much use of non-motorway roads. I could imagine (human) drivers being collected for the last bit of the journey in much the same way that large vessels have pilots in ports.

The thing is, this technology is much further advanced than many appreciate, partly because it's dressed up as "driver assist" as I posted on another thread. There must surely come a point where that becomes "driver replace." There's an element of the "safe speed" argument here ie it's sometimes argued that the only safe speed for traffic is stationary. Now, if everything is driverless, traffic control is only an extension of what's attempted now with some urban traffic control traffic light systems: a computer calculates in real time the optimum sequences to maximise traffic flow. The greater the predictability, the easier that is. Pedestrians and cyclists count as unpredictable here.

It's a matter of degree. At the moment, pedestrians are largely banned from motorways. It would be a twisted mind that said that children playing chicken running across motorways deserved to be run over, but the possibility of their being able to run across motorways with impunity and get their fun from the subsequent chaos might not be so well-received. I'm suggesting that the same line of thinking, which has also applied to railways since victorian times will be extended to more of the road network.

I could also imagine that driverless buses are not far off. We've already had bits and pieces of projects around here with "guided" bus lanes, where the steering of the bus is not under the control of the driver. I think it's naïve to belive that all these farcilities which take riders behind bus stops are for the convenience of cyclists: I'm pretty sure it's to get them out of the bus lane, and ultimately for reasons like this.

As for changes in our legal system, one of the biggest reasons put forward for Brexit was to stop all the foreign interference in our justice system so I'd not bank on any of these pedestrian-friendly concepts catching on any time soon.

[Vorpal]

I'm hoping that the UK can learn from other countries.

[thirdcrank]

I'm hoping that the UK can learn from other countries.

The signs are not good, particularly with regard to learning from Europe.