Active Travel England - Boardman

[mattheus]

And includes the delightful description of rosy retrospection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

There's a vast amount of it in this forum and the thread on use of English offers some great examples.

Thanks for that - it was quite delightlful. Apart from the use of "oftentimes" what a horrible American term!

[thirdcrank]

It's not a new idea. Memory vague now but this was mooted/threatened / spun before I retired which dates it to the fag end of the Major government. I was personally concerned because I routinely commuted by bike but there was a parking space reserved for me and I didn't want taxing on it.

But all that takes is a requirement that you have to sign up to it. Companies can *offer* free parking places, which are taxed as benefits. They keep track of other benefits, like lunches and cars. They can keep track of parking spaces, too. Either that or charge employees a fee to park.

I was only talking about my concerns at that time, when the parking space came with the post. Those concerns were unfounded. Closer analysis would have revealed that the garage parking was for only cars taken into police possession, but that's not how hierarchies work. Are there data available on eg hospital consultants/senior administrators who eschew a reserved parking spot, preferring to cycle to work?

[ratherbeintobago]

Are there data available on eg hospital consultants/senior administrators who eschew a reserved parking spot, preferring to cycle to work?

As a hospital consultant I can assure you we don’t have reserved parking - just in the main car park with everyone else (and good luck finding a space).

Matt Jackson who is also a consultant and co-wrote that blog I linked to above cycles in every day, and some of my colleagues do so too.

I’m a bit far and a bit lacking in safe routes…

[Cugel]

Yes. And live.

And as is often the case a major threat is Golden Agery.

Golden Agery?

The tendency to see a particular era as better than the present or a possible future. Often the era when the speaker was between 5 and 15 years old, but other Golden Ages are available.

For example Declinism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declinism
suggests ages of 10 to 30.

And includes the delightful description of rosy retrospection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

There's a vast amount of it in this forum and the thread on use of English offers some great examples.

Fortunately it's one of the easiest cognitive biasses to spot and remove and avoid. By checking what's true and what isn't.

Jonathan

Golden Agery has been a mode of thinking and explanation about human cultural, social and political doings for centuries. It has its roots in Platonism and the subsequent Garden-of-Eden memes even now present in a lot of Western thought. But there's a modern Enlightenment counter-thought mode, best identified, named and described by Michael Oakeshott in various essays and the like, handily collected in his volume "Rationalism in Politics".

This Rationalism (note the capital "R") supposes that the past and all its traditions of human understanding, action and the institutions supporting them are vastly inferior - "wrong", in fact - compared to the results of rational humans (of a Liberal outlook, naturally) considering things in modes of immaculate reasoning and logic followed by planned actions to meet well-specified outcomes. This mode of Rationalism has dominated much of Western culture, economics and politics for many decades now, even though in truth it's shot through with dozens of assumptions generated from .... our many old traditions!

The Rationalist mode, though, rejects "mere" traditions as likely to be inherently wrong, not meeting current conditions and born out of various prejudices. The Rationalist will offer instead a wholly new plan, which is expected to consist entirely of formal logic and similar modes of analysis and construction. However ....

Rationalism has two major flaws: it fails to recognise that many of its underlying assumptions are actually "traditional prejudices" intrinsic to a culture, its language and so forth; and it ignores the many unintended consequences of its plans.

Rationalists like to pose as "political scientists" or "social scientists" or one of the other academic disciplines pretending to follow the scientific method. Alas, this is rarely, if ever, the case. The problem is that the equivalent of physical facts in science are hard to identify or define when it comes to human actions. Humans defining themselves, their motives, their behaviours and their psychology find it impossible to do so without incorporating vast rafts of already-extant traditional understandings of those things.

Moreover, the theories of these pseudo sciences are often those old traditional prejudices dressed up in modern-speak. We need to prove that the poor are so intentionally and are thus undeserving, so we "find" descriptions of them and their behaviours/psychologies to suit. Behold our Toryboy or Hatemail "facts". Or, if we belong to a certain kind of Left-like political group, we find different descriptions to generate alternative facts (and "theories") to those of the Tioryboys.

In politics, "true facts" can be hard to come by!

***********
So, when we consider our culture and politics, we'd be foolish to adopt one of the extreme positions of these opposing world views. In fact, there were (and still are) many worthy and effective traditions that we can and do use to good effect. We suffer a loss if we reject them out-of-hand to be replaced by some back-of-an-envelope political policy that some bright spark dreamt up in a bar near Parliament, a policy that pretends it has all the answers and no drawbacks.

Some elements of our past culture do indeed represent "golden" modes, of benefit then and now to most in a particular society. Moreover, any tradition worthy of the name is not a static and always-correct mode of thinking and behaving but rather an evolving and dynamic mode, changing gradually and carefully to meet new conditions.

Of course, many other traditions are nasty and damaging. We should evolve them more vigorously perhaps. But isn't it strange how the nasty traditions survive and prosper, often disguised in a New Model Rationalist suit, whilst the better traditions are destroyed by those same Rationalists intent on pursuing the "logic" of one or another of their mad political ideologies - ideologies born out of one and another of the nastier traditions, from aristocracy to finance capitalism to colonialization et al?

Where are the worst examples of mad ideological Rationalists? You could view them by the ton throughout C20th, in forms such as communism, fascism and other totalitarian modes, all believing they've rationalised the One True Answer. In the C21st you can observe the mad Rationalists of various totalitarian kinds that have taken up various flavours of Neoliberalism as The Answer. China, the USA and Britain are three prime examples, as are most of the members of the EU.

Some examples of the latter are particularly queer. A "Conservative and Unionist Party" that has adopted crazy Rationalism of the very worst back-of-a-fag-packet policy making, inclusive of a wholesale destruction of virtually every British tradition we have other than promoting the financial and power interests of a self-defining aristocracy - a long tradition in class-ridden Britain manifesting in various very nasty forms. There's absolutely nothing conservative or unifying about them other than their desire to preserve themselves as the latest model of a destructive aristocracy.

*****************
In respect of active travel, I recall the first 17 years of my life when public transport was cheap, effective and everywhere; in which cars were not the be-all and end-all of everyone's needs & wants; when a fat lad in a school of 1000 pupils was a less than 1% rarity; when people walked for miles each day and thought nothing of it. Is that Golden Agery or just a regret that neoliberal ideology, accelerated by The Thatcher Thing and her inheritors, has destroyed most of those far less damaging modes of travel?

Cugel

[Jdsk]

So, when we consider our culture and politics, we'd be foolish to adopt one of the extreme positions of these opposing world views.

Or even set them up and discuss them at great length. Because they're straw man stereotypes.

Some things are true and some other things aren't. There are lots of things that we don't know. When we're comparing historical periods, including the current, it's smarter to rely on things that are true.

Jonathan

[Jdsk]

From another thread:

https://www.transportxtra.com/publicati ... rtid=71884

Prescriptions for walking, cycling and wheeling will be offered by GPs in 11 local authority areas in a Government trial. The councils will get a total of £12.7m, which will fund adult cycling training, free bike loans and walking groups.

Is this provided in any other country?

I don't think that the term social prescribing is widely used elsewhere, but the general concept is pretty common.

The Wikipedia article mentions Ireland and the Netherlands:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_prescribing

NB the tiny amount of money for these trials.

Jonathan

[Vorpal]

Part of my earlier point & the points that stated in the other thread I linked is that stuff like cycle training & walking groups isn't enough.

There are a wide variety of reasons that people don't exercise & they all need addressing.

How is someone who is working 2 jobs to make ends meet, supposed to take time for cycle training, even assuming they have or can get a bicycle? Or join a walking group? Especially women, who still carry the burden of childcare & household management, even when they work full time or more hours? what about counselling & coaching to address psychological & motivational aspects? Or a nutritionist to address dietary ones?

Social prescribing is a step in the right direction, but until the NHS take a holistic approach to these things & treat mental health *in a positive way* along with physical health, and many fewer families live with food insecurity, initiatives like this can only make incremental improvements.

[Cugel]

So, when we consider our culture and politics, we'd be foolish to adopt one of the extreme positions of these opposing world views.

Or even set them up and discuss them at great length. Because they're straw man stereotypes.

Some things are true and some other things aren't. There are lots of things that we don't know. When we're comparing historical periods, including the current, it's smarter to rely on things that are true.

Jonathan

Strawmen eh? So you don't recognise the died in the wool traditionalist or the past-rejecting ideologues then? And what's this about "some things are true and other things aren't"? Surely you're not going to defend the notion of absolute truth!? I thought you were of the scientific persuasion. Or are you just a-one o' them Progressives?

I recall the "true history o Britain" that they taught us in schools of the 50s and 60s. It turned out to be far from any variety of truth worthy of the name. Then there's the long history of even scientific "truths" many of which have turned our to be phlogisten-like.

Myself, I like to rely on things that work to their good intents, rather than "things that are true". So much is labelled "true" that .... isnae. Often, it's informative to consider who did the labelling and why.

Cugel

[Cugel]

Part of my earlier point & the points that stated in the other thread I linked is that stuff like cycle training & walking groups isn't enough.

There are a wide variety of reasons that people don't exercise & they all need addressing.

How is someone who is working 2 jobs to make ends meet, supposed to take time for cycle training, even assuming they have or can get a bicycle? Or join a walking group? Especially women, who still carry the burden of childcare & household management, even when they work full time or more hours? what about counselling & coaching to address psychological & motivational aspects? Or a nutritionist to address dietary ones?

Social prescribing is a step in the right direction, but until the NHS take a holistic approach to these things & treat mental health *in a positive way* along with physical health, and many fewer families live with food insecurity, initiatives like this can only make incremental improvements.

Your observations seem "true" to me. Many of our current issues are treated by what we might call Rationalists as a simple and singular phenomenon with a single cause giving the disliked effect. If only it was that simple!

As you intimate, our social. cultural and political conditions are a complex and highly networked whole in need of a great deal of disentanglement, knot-elimination and other actions of complexity at least as great as the complexity of the networked whole. Personally I don't think we stand a chance, as we're now very much a phenomenon of the network ourselves, despite having long ago been it's creator.

We like to think we can "understand" and "control". Alas, we automated all that a couple of centuries ago and now have no real ability to find or grip the levers of control or the user-manual explaining how it all works (or doesn't).

Cugel

[Nearholmer]

One of the “lenses” that I tend to see things through is the history of technology, because I’m very ‘into’ that subject, and it does illuminate the ‘active travel’ discussion to some degree, IMO.

The transport (actually ‘communication’, more than simply ‘transport’) technologies available at any date in history are seriously important shapers (if not exactly determinants) of how society operates, the mental landscape, and the physical fabric of society.

Confining ourselves to the ‘bicycle age’, that began at a period when society was in symbiosis with railways, horses and carts, highly-developed water-borne transport, the postal system, and wired telegraphy. If you look at pre-WW1 society, and it’s entire physical fabric it was very heavily built around those things, and ‘active travel’ was an important component for short trips (long ones too, if you were skint!), and it was enabled by the wider ecology. Society, both urban and rural, worked on the basis of water and rail for travel and goods logistics over distance, and horse-cart, bike, and walking for the last/first few miles.

Zoom forward to now, and we are in symbiosis with a different set of communications technologies, some of which (cars and lorries) have already been around long enough to heavily re-shape the mental and physical landscape, others of which (notably e-communication) are still new enough that the re-shaping they will cause is part-done, with the future equilibrium state anything but clear (will urban high-streets die altogether, or re-emerge as primarily social places, for instance).

My personal feeling is that, given that it is impossible to un-invent things, and practically impossible to ban things that are useful and convenient in many circumstances (I mean cars and lorries), any attempt to increase active travel, and to undo the worst of the collateral damage that some of the technology (cars and lorries again) wreaks, has to be multi-pronged, and is unlikely to deliver widespread transformation super-quickly.

The biggest cities, and large new-build areas are probably the places to go for first, for different reasons. Big cities typically have the density of population and activity to be able to support core public transport routes (bus, tram, metro, heavy rail), and can have the services that people need (shops, medical, schools etc) close enough to homes that they are in active travel distance. Large new-build areas are opportunities to create the ecology of transport/travel, services etc in a way that favours public transport and active travel, by creating “string of beads” developments. I see some good things happening in big cities, if too tentatively for my tastes, but we seem to be missing opportunities big-time when it comes to new developments.

Away from those places, things can be done in established, less densely populated areas, but they are I think more challenging, particularly in terms of public transport, and we probably need to think about such areas differently, focusing on low-impact electric cars (many trips being in hired ones, hopefully autonomous) for many purposes, and creating archipelagos of active travel areas.

One thing which, of itself doesn’t really work is providing a good active travel infrastructure alongside a good in-active (car) travel infrastructure. I live in Milton Keynes and we have just that, a very good shared-use path network (by no means perfect, but way, way better than almost anywhere else in the U.K.), but it is frankly under-utilised, because we also have a first class road network, largely congestion free except for micro-peaks. The whole city is very dispersed, low density, and the natural choice for most trips for most people becomes the car, which is no surprise given that the place was designed before the unintended negative consequences of mass car ownership became apparent.

Where we come a cropper in the U.K. I think is in our reluctance to adopt wide-area planning, centralism effectively. We are very wedded to the idea that things are best left to The Market, that now seems to be our default political stance, and IMO it simply doesn’t work in terms of fostering sustainable, livable arrangements - these things need ‘guiding minds’.

[rjb]

Prescriptions for cycling and walking. What a joke, you can't get to see your doctor these days hence the rush to a&e. And now it's even being proposed that your GP will be able to issue you with energy vouchers to give you a discount on your heating. Our future PM must think this won't cost a penny as the GP bars his door due to the rush.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... 4iVBiB14vK

Scheme due to start a few days before the Fiscal Year. 01/04/2023

[Cugel]

One of the “lenses” that I tend to see things through is the history of technology, because I’m very ‘into’ that subject, and it does illuminate the ‘active travel’ discussion to some degree, IMO.

The transport (actually ‘communication’, more than simply ‘transport’) technologies available at any date in history are seriously important shapers (if not exactly determinants) of how society operates, the mental landscape, and the physical fabric of society.

Confining ourselves to the ‘bicycle age’, that began at a period when society was in symbiosis with railways, horses and carts, highly-developed water-borne transport, the postal system, and wired telegraphy. If you look at pre-WW1 society, and it’s entire physical fabric it was very heavily built around those things, and ‘active travel’ was an important component for short trips (long ones too, if you were skint!), and it was enabled by the wider ecology. Society, both urban and rural, worked on the basis of water and rail for travel and goods logistics over distance, and horse-cart, bike, and walking for the last/first few miles.

Zoom forward to now, and we are in symbiosis with a different set of communications technologies, some of which (cars and lorries) have already been around long enough to heavily re-shape the mental and physical landscape, others of which (notably e-communication) are still new enough that the re-shaping they will cause is part-done, with the future equilibrium state anything but clear (will urban high-streets die altogether, or re-emerge as primarily social places, for instance).

My personal feeling is that, given that it is impossible to un-invent things, and practically impossible to ban things that are useful and convenient in many circumstances (I mean cars and lorries), any attempt to increase active travel, and to undo the worst of the collateral damage that some of the technology (cars and lorries again) wreaks, has to be multi-pronged, and is unlikely to deliver widespread transformation super-quickly.

The biggest cities, and large new-build areas are probably the places to go for first, for different reasons. Big cities typically have the density of population and activity to be able to support core public transport routes (bus, tram, metro, heavy rail), and can have the services that people need (shops, medical, schools etc) close enough to homes that they are in active travel distance. Large new-build areas are opportunities to create the ecology of transport/travel, services etc in a way that favours public transport and active travel, by creating “string of beads” developments. I see some good things happening in big cities, if too tentatively for my tastes, but we seem to be missing opportunities big-time when it comes to new developments.

Away from those places, things can be done in established, less densely populated areas, but they are I think more challenging, particularly in terms of public transport, and we probably need to think about such areas differently, focusing on low-impact electric cars (many trips being in hired ones, hopefully autonomous) for many purposes, and creating archipelagos of active travel areas.

One thing which, of itself doesn’t really work is providing a good active travel infrastructure alongside a good in-active (car) travel infrastructure. I live in Milton Keynes and we have just that, a very good shared-use path network (by no means perfect, but way, way better than almost anywhere else in the U.K.), but it is frankly under-utilised, because we also have a first class road network, largely congestion free except for micro-peaks. The whole city is very dispersed, low density, and the natural choice for most trips for most people becomes the car, which is no surprise given that the place was designed before the unintended negative consequences of mass car ownership became apparent.

Where we come a cropper in the U.K. I think is in our reluctance to adopt wide-area planning, centralism effectively. We are very wedded to the idea that things are best left to The Market, that now seems to be our default political stance, and IMO it simply doesn’t work in terms of fostering sustainable, livable arrangements - these things need ‘guiding minds’.

An illuminating set of observations, those.

The so-called "free market", though is not some sort of natural phenomenon operating in nature. In effect it's a highly planned and detailed centrally instigated and maintained wide-area planning tool. (The global market, in fact). The problem is that it's objectives are not the creation of a sustainable society in which all can benefit but an economy in which only a few - a shrinking few - can benefit. And the benefits are all judged in terms of their cash value or the power they award, nothing else.

The market plan exists in, and is implemented via, the various laws propping up and privileging "the market". A very different set of laws could achieve a very different set of social (and associated cultural) outcomes. But those market laws have achieved a life of their own and filled the whole economic ecology with their plague-of-locusts spawn.

The market plan is no longer in the control of anyone much. Those who benefit greatly from it have no real motive or means to change it, despite having the power to do so (in theory, at least). The rest of us are its subjects. In reality, we're all wedded to a vast and complex status quo in economics that even the most damaging events do little to alter. No political party likely to retain or obtain power is going to change anything significant about the hegemony of "the market". We're more likely to find ourselves in a proto-revolutionary situation when the whole shebang become moribund, as in The Crash between the World Wars.

As you mention, there are many opportunities to improve "active travel" and a whole host of other things. Nobody is doing so to any significant degree. In fact, whole swathes of the population have been well-programmed by "the market" to demand the opposite of any change, even as they drive into the widening bog of modern Britain.

Witness the total inability to do anything about climate change, despite any amount of knowledge and technology that would allow us to do so. Crazy ideologies, from neoliberal free-market claptrap to psychopathic nationalism to religious fundamentalism and various other made-up-stuff modes of "thinking" are preferred. And the vast profit makers are still busy wrecking everything to keep making their vast piles of pointless pelf.

Cugel, once more predicting doom but still riding me bike and trying to buy them batteries.

[axel_knutt]

So, when we consider our culture and politics, we'd be foolish to adopt one of the extreme positions of these opposing world views.

Or even set them up and discuss them at great length. Because they're straw man stereotypes.

Some things are true and some other things aren't. There are lots of things that we don't know. When we're comparing historical periods, including the current, it's smarter to rely on things that are true.

Jonathan

One of the things that's demonstrably true is that wealth has increased immensely, and the Easterlin Effect suggests that this doesn't make people any happier (once a minimum threshold is exceeded).

[Nearholmer]

Nobody is doing so to any significant degree. In fact, whole swathes of the population have been well-programmed by "the market" to demand the opposite of any change, even as they drive into the widening bog of modern Britain.

Entirely agree, but I thought I’d lay-off that sort of talk today, because last time I gave my own bleak and blunt assessment of ‘the state of the nation’ in respect of the challenges facing ‘active travel’, I was accused of being biased and negative.

In the unlikely event that anyone needs help to feel depressed about all this stuff, I would point them towards a very good book by Jonathon Porrit (can’t recall the title, but the cover is green), which I read c1982 (forty years ago, for non-mathematicians), in which he lays out the bones of the sustainability issue, and how planning, transport etc can play into improving our lot, or not. He might actually have made a small contribution to saving resources by not writing or publishing it, because I get the impression that not a single person of power or influence took the slightest bit of notice of the hugely important things he was saying.

[Vorpal]

Where we come a cropper in the U.K. I think is in our reluctance to adopt wide-area planning, centralism effectively. We are very wedded to the idea that things are best left to The Market, that now seems to be our default political stance, and IMO it simply doesn’t work in terms of fostering sustainable, livable arrangements - these things need ‘guiding minds’.

You've made some really good points, but I would like to point out that the current & previous (coalition) governments have *dismantled* the systems that were put in place to ensure that planning and building met the goals of both the local and national frameworks and the Climate Change Act of 2008.

Blair's, and Brown's governments put in place policy frameworks that required increased area-wide planning. Many of the 'Communities & Local Government' publications were targeted at improvements in the holistic approach to planning, and guidance to meet the national frameworks. Planning Policy Statement 25: Development and Flood Risk Practice Guide, published in 2009 and the Manual for Streets, published in 2007 are good examples of this. Not all councils took these initiatives as seriously as they should have, but that could have been resolved with incentives from central government.

The current government and the coalition government have de-centralised and placed the burdens of following this guidance on local authorities, who largely do not have the resources to do it well.

The reluctance is manufactured by our elected representatives.