In these sorts of debates one of the most common things you hear is “I have to have a car in order to do x, or y”, and what commonly gets forgotten is that in the days before cars nobody even expected to be able to do x, and y is only necessary because we’ve spent eighty years designing society around the car. People now expect to go for whatever job they want and travel as far as they like to get it, in the past people took it for granted that they’d spend their working life at the business at the end of the street where they live. Employers even used to build villages for their employees, ironically, my father used to commute 5 miles by car to a village that had originally been built by his employer. Undoing decades of history is nigh on impossible though, imagine if we suddenly discovered that cancer and dementia are caused by electricity, how much enthusiasm would there be for closing down all the power stations?
Stevek76 wrote: 23 Oct 2024, 9:54amFacilities disappearing in villages is entirely an outcome of residents of those villages using their increased mobility from increased car access to preferably patronise facilities in larger settlements. Exactly the same grumbles you get about local high streets even in urban areas. People grumble about the state of their local high street but only a minority of those were still actually trying to use, the rest were just driving to the supermarket whilst still grumbling that their local bakery/grocer have closed.
I live in Braintree, a town of 40,000, and yet apart from groceries, I used to do all my shopping either in Chelmsford during my dinner hour, or drive 15 miles to Colchester, because that's where the best choice was. Even after I gave up driving I would still cycle to Chelmsford or Colchester rather than shop here, because choice has been an expectation I took for granted. It’s only fairly recently that I discovered the paradox of choice, and the damage it can do to the individual as well as society as a whole.
The problem with getting people to give up anything is that people feel the pain of a loss more that the pleasure of an equivalent gain. On the one hand, this ‘discovery’ was a sufficient revelation for economists to earn Kahneman a Nobel prize, on the other hand it’s something we all sort of understood intuitively with the phrase “You don’t miss what you’ve never had”. Getting people to voluntarily give up what they’ve got is going to be nigh on impossible. I gave up driving first by force, then voluntarily: I got used to doing without a car because I lost my licence, then decided not to put it back on the road because I realised that I didn’t really need it.
I don’t think people will accept they can manage without a car unless they’re forced to, and that then just raises a whole new can of worms about democracy and how you get people to vote for what they don’t want.
That brings us to another well-worn argument: “We don’t need bigger government curbing our freedom even more”. This usually comes from someone whose freedoms only impose costs on others, whilst the others who bear those costs often have little or no freedom themselves, either through poverty or the burden of the costs others impose.
Carlton green wrote: 24 Oct 2024, 7:30amI don’t believe in dynamic road pricing as such because the rich will do as they choose and commerce will simply push their costs onto their customers. The poor and middle income earners will be disproportionately squeezed. Rationing is complex and open to abuse, but it’s still arguably the fairest way forward. Variable charging structures, for distance and road type might work but (being based on money) it’s still socially unjust.
As I’ve earlier pointed out school runs are a right pain and typically folk who do them are managing logistics. Timed travel seems fine but hours of work - and school too - are often fixed and hence rush hours. There are no easy and good solutions left, but I have suggested many more complex ones that could well work.
On this thread we have talked about externalities. One of the externalities of centralising services (like schools and medical care) is that it forces users to travel further. Rather than seemingly - and sometimes justifiably - blaming individual choices we also need to restructure society.
Whatever the pricing system there needs to be an element of progression such that those who use most pay a higher rate than those who use least, otherwise, without any progression it will be the poor or frugal who have to cut down more than the rich and profligate. School runs are an ideal use for public transport: a lot of customers all at one predictable time. Tax rebates paid to postcodes with no bus service could help alleviate the problem, and give government an incentive to subsidise more buses.
Bmblbzzz wrote: 24 Oct 2024, 9:22am
I doubt you'd find a UK village with so little car movement now, and that's largely a result of individual choices.
The same could be said of any town or city. But is it individual choices? Yes, many individuals have made the choices which, over decades, have created the car-dependent society we now live in. But they've made those choices in the framework of society created by government policies and the decisions of corporations (in this case, not only car manufacturers but also civil engineers, the oil and gas sector, retail, and others). Or to put it another way: the individuals who count are not necessarily the ones in that village, they're the ones in the boardrooms and cabinet meetings.
This is exacerbated all the more by the popular view that it’s not government’s job to govern any more, with successive governments putting all the responsibility on the individual to make the right choices as a means of shifting the blame.
Jdsk wrote: 24 Oct 2024, 10:34am
The IFS estimate of the relative costs of those disbenefits:
Even this is an immensely complicated can of worms, to start with you have to decide which costs get acknowledged as costs, and then there's the problem of quantifying them in terms on money, which is the only metric we have that can provide a common unit for comparing differing concepts against one another. John Adams spends a whole chapter in his book 'Risk' covering the difficulties of monetizing risk, and you get totally different costs depending on whether you use Willingness to Accept (WTA) or Willingness to Pay (WTP) as the starting premise for your calculations, a choice which is fundamentally arbitrary and subjective.
A little old lady has lived all her life in thatched cottage in a meadow by the river, then one day along comes a grey suit who tells her he wants to bulldoze her cottage to build a new supermarket. What's the cost? Does the lady have to pay £50m compensation to go away and build it elsewhere, or does the contractor pay the old lady £500k for the cottage? Is the value of the cottage £500k, or is it priceless, as the lady insists? You can't put infinity in a spreadsheet, so does the lady get a veto?
Two men on a train: one's a chain smoker, the other has chronic lung disease. Does the smoker get his fags out and pay compensation for the loss of clean air, or does the other pay compensation for the loss of smoking pleasure? The answer all depends on whether there's a "No Smoking" sticker on the carriage window or not, an essentially subjective start point that has no monetary value. What if the non smoker can't tolerate smoke at any price? What if he has no money to pay compensation to the smoker?
What is the price of total loss of a habitable planet?