Green parking levy in Leicester

[ThurmastonFox]

So Soulsby is thinking of charging businesses £500 per parking space, which can be passed on to employees. Thoughts? I’m not sure, Nottingham introduced it to pay for their tram scheme. What about people who drive into to Leicester from the outer towns - Melton for instance- where is the boundary the city centre or further out…

[Bellend Sebastian]

Anything that upsets the regular commenters on the Mercury website to this extent is probably a good thing

[Strokes]

You get the mayor you deserve.

It doesn’t bother me as it won’t affect me but obviously with the poor public transport into Leicester, it doesn’t look a great idea on the surface.

 

Hopefully business will upsticks and move into the county or even better, encourage people to work from home. He will then have to think of more ways to squeeze the tax payer.

[Voll Blau]

Keeping cars out of the city is a good thing, but the investment needs to then go into public transport to counter that. I think people will buy into it if they see a long-term benefit in infrastructure, but the ambition needs to be there from local government to make that happen.

[davieG]

57 minutes ago, Voll Blau said:

Keeping cars out of the city is a good thing, but the investment needs to then go into public transport to counter that. I think people will buy into it if they see a long-term benefit in infrastructure, but the ambition needs to be there from local government to make that happen.

Problem is many people work in situations away from home that no public transport can solve adequately, people will not fancy getting a bus into the City centre from home and then back out again to their work place and then doing the return journeys certainly in foul weather.

[Julian Joachim Jr Shabadoo]

Weird time to introduce it - surely the congestion is much lower these days than it was pre-Covid? WFH is pretty standard for office staff now

[Voll Blau]

13 hours ago, davieG said:

Problem is many people work in situations away from home that no public transport can solve adequately, people will not fancy getting a bus into the City centre from home and then back out again to their work place and then doing the return journeys certainly in foul weather.

That's why I say local government, rather than Soulsby/the city council. Needs some joined-up thinking across Leicestershire. If you make public transport attractive enough (easy, cheap, regular, fast, convenient and comfortable), people will use it.

[yorkie1999]

37 minutes ago, Voll Blau said:

That's why I say local government, rather than Soulsby/the city council. Needs some joined-up thinking across Leicestershire. If you make public transport attractive enough (easy, cheap, regular, fast, convenient and comfortable), people will use it.

Thing is though, all those things need to be in place before you start trying to tax private parking spaces and we all know that will never happen because of the investment required. Eventually busnesses will vacate the city centre and the charity shops will take over.

[Babylon]

1 hour ago, Julian Joachim Jr Shabadoo said:

Weird time to introduce it - surely the congestion is much lower these days than it was pre-Covid? WFH is pretty standard for office staff now

Well having driven into town from Wigston a few times recently mid afternoon, I'd say congestion is worse than it was. Bus lane one side, cyle lane the other side and two lanes jam packed and crawling to their destination from the top of Saffron Lane and into town. 

[Voll Blau]

5 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

Thing is though, all those things need to be in place before you start trying to tax private parking spaces and we all know that will never happen because of the investment required. Eventually busnesses will vacate the city centre and the charity shops will take over.

Yeah, that's the problem isn't it? That's why I'm saying you need to set out a vision now at the same time as doing this. The money has to come from somewhere, but people need to have faith in the idea they'll get a return for it with better services. It's proper chicken and egg stuff and the council(s) need to be a lot bolder in presenting their vision right now.

[yorkie1999]

20 minutes ago, Voll Blau said:

Yeah, that's the problem isn't it? That's why I'm saying you need to set out a vision now at the same time as doing this. The money has to come from somewhere, but people need to have faith in the idea they'll get a return for it with better services. It's proper chicken and egg stuff and the council(s) need to be a lot bolder in presenting their vision right now.

This isn't a new problem though is it. The council have had years and years to come up with a solution for transport in and out of Leicester, how is taxing private busnesses going to solve anything? It's like supermarkets charging 10p for a plastic bag, it doesn't solve anything, there's still the same amount of plastic bags, it just means your shopping is 10p more expensive. All it means is that you've basically offset the cost of replacing a sea turtle that's ended up eating your plastic bag. People will pay the £500, cos it's cheaper than the £50 a week for public parking, and that £500 wont be used to provide an alternative because it costs millions and millions to provide real alternatives.

[Innovindil]

20 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

This isn't a new problem though is it. The council have had years and years to come up with a solution for transport in and out of Leicester, how is taxing private busnesses going to solve anything? It's like supermarkets charging 10p for a plastic bag, it doesn't solve anything, there's still the same amount of plastic bags, it just means your shopping is 10p more expensive. All it means is that you've basically offset the cost of replacing a sea turtle that's ended up eating your plastic bag. People will pay the £500, cos it's cheaper than the £50 a week for public parking, and that £500 wont be used to provide an alternative because it costs millions and millions to provide real alternatives.

Eh? Plastic bag usage in this country dropped a shit ton since the charge came in. MANY people simply reuse the bags. 

 

As they say the proof is in the pudding:

 

 

Shoppers’ use of plastic carrier bags in England has continued to fall – by 59% in the last year alone – since the introduction of the 5p charge, according to recent figures.

 

Overall, sales of single-use plastic carrier bags have dropped by more than 95% in England’s main supermarkets since the charge was introduced in October 2015, government data reveals.

 

 

[yorkie1999]

12 minutes ago, Innovindil said:

Eh? Plastic bag usage in this country dropped a shit ton since the charge came in. MANY people simply reuse the bags. 

 

As they say the proof is in the pudding:

 

 

Shoppers’ use of plastic carrier bags in England has continued to fall – by 59% in the last year alone – since the introduction of the 5p charge, according to recent figures.

 

Overall, sales of single-use plastic carrier bags have dropped by more than 95% in England’s main supermarkets since the charge was introduced in October 2015, government data reveals.

 

 

The world uses one trillion per year, what we do in the UK is immaterial.

[Innovindil]

25 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

The world uses one trillion per year, what we do in the UK is immaterial.

Possibly so, but we've got to start somewhere. 

[kenny]

2 hours ago, Babylon said:

Well having driven into town from Wigston a few times recently mid afternoon, I'd say congestion is worse than it was. Bus lane one side, cyle lane the other side and two lanes jam packed and crawling to their destination from the top of Saffron Lane and into town. 

I catch the bus from Blaby when im working in town and the buses are empty. My wife has stuck to driving and its back up to an hour.

 

The issue is clearly that people have not yet returned to public transport use.

 

That and the fact that it isn't very good and is very expensive.

[lcfc278]

45 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

The world uses one trillion per year, what we do in the UK is immaterial.

When it comes down to it, right down to the basics of human behaviour, the vast majority of people will only carry on doing and following what the vast majority do.

 

By doing 'our bit' in the UK, it doesn't take long for other communities, countries etc. to slowly do their bit and then it becomes the minority who don't conform to the changes, putting more and more pressure on them to do so.

 

You can say what we've done in the UK is immaterial compared to the amount used worldwide but it's got to start somewhere. No one would have been interested in buying an electric car 20 yeas or so ago, due to changes in perception of people who are now aware of our impact on the world, the vast majority of all car manufacturers now have invested in the technology with a view to making combustion engines obsolete in the next decade or so.

[Free Falling Foxes]

3 hours ago, Voll Blau said:

That's why I say local government, rather than Soulsby/the city council. Needs some joined-up thinking across Leicestershire. If you make public transport attractive enough (easy, cheap, regular, fast, convenient and comfortable), people will use it.

Difficult to make it fast. Buses need, by definition, to keep stopping to pick up passengers.

 

Genuine story: A bus company once argued that it couldn't keep to its timetables because they needed to keep stopping to pick up passengers.

[kenny]

19 minutes ago, Free Falling Foxes said:

Difficult to make it fast. Buses need, by definition, to keep stopping to pick up passengers.

 

Genuine story: A bus company once argued that it couldn't keep to its timetables because they needed to keep stopping to pick up passengers.

Arriva also blame rush hour traffic as if its different each day.

[leicsmac]

1 hour ago, lcfc278 said:

When it comes down to it, right down to the basics of human behaviour, the vast majority of people will only carry on doing and following what the vast majority do.

 

By doing 'our bit' in the UK, it doesn't take long for other communities, countries etc. to slowly do their bit and then it becomes the minority who don't conform to the changes, putting more and more pressure on them to do so.

 

You can say what we've done in the UK is immaterial compared to the amount used worldwide but it's got to start somewhere. No one would have been interested in buying an electric car 20 yeas or so ago, due to changes in perception of people who are now aware of our impact on the world, the vast majority of all car manufacturers now have invested in the technology with a view to making combustion engines obsolete in the next decade or so.

And to add to this it's pretty much the only option we have to make things better anyway as just letting it happen because others aren't along for the ride yet is, at the end of it all, just a race to see who the last will be to die.

 

I'd rather not be that cynical and nihilistic about humanity.

[davieG]

5 hours ago, Voll Blau said:

That's why I say local government, rather than Soulsby/the city council. Needs some joined-up thinking across Leicestershire. If you make public transport attractive enough (easy, cheap, regular, fast, convenient and comfortable), people will use it.

I don't think local government or any one else can solve the issue of people living and working different sides of the City. Even living/working in adjacent suburbs that are too far to walk will not be solved by public transport it's the layout of the City and the fact that many businesses and of course people now don't reside in the City but in suburban business parks.

[orangecity23]

Here comes a rant, so apologies in advance for the length.

 

This is a bad idea in isolation, but that's not surprising, as no thought goes into the overall design of our transport system, or beyond that our economic system as a whole. This is a token gesture, which will have one of two effects - some poor pleb who works their job every day is going to either end up poorer at the end of the month after shelling out a load of money to pay for the levy, on top of paying for their car, and fuel, and car insurance, and vehicle tax, which they need to pay, so that they can earn the money they need to pay for their every increasing housing costs. Or, alternatively, the worker can give up their car, and instead of driving to work in a short period of time, they can sacrifice a larger chunk of their free time, so they have less of their life to spend with their family, their chidren, or friends, or just doing basic life admin like eating, sleeping, cleaning and keeping on top of all the other tasks and busywork required to exist as an adult. Spend 8-9 hours a day at work, plus an hour in the morning commuting and an hour in the evening commuting? Well now you can double you commute times by using (multiple) buses or by cycling or walking, and have less free time as a result. Great! Why does this levy have the proviso that the employer is allowed to pass the cost on to the employee? That should be banned. If the employer is running a business that forces lots of employees to drive in and park there, then the employer should shell out, as they are the ones profitting from the activities taking place at that location. Employer having to shell out too much money in levys for their worker? Well maybe they have located their business in a sub-optimal location in the first instance.

 

If there are to be changes to transport and how we go about it, then instead of starting from the perceived problem (too much pollution in city -> too many cars in city -> tax the car drivers), then the system should be stripped back to its essential purpose and examined to see if it delivers. What is a transport system for? What does it need to achieve? The only reason it is there is to facilitate our lives. People need to be able to move themselves and goods around, so they can eat food, live somewhere, socialise and earn a living. An optimal system would meet those needs, whilst not destroying the environment in the process.

 

Our cities largely ended up the way the are during the industrial revolution, when factory owners located their business near to rivers or rail hubs, or in locations near to natural resources they needed. They needed a shitload of people to work in them, but they at least had the decency to put the slums their workers lived in right next to their place of work. People worked in the factories, then they went home, and pubs and such opened nearby that allowed people to socialise close by. Of course, working hours were too long, and the housing of questionable quality and size, but at least there was some degree of efficiency. People lived and worked in a relatively contained geographic area, much as they have done for most of human history up to that point.

 

Where do we live and work today? All over the place. Some people will still be in those same Victorian slums, except now the factory is long gone, and you'll be working until you turn 70 to either pay the rent to a buy to let landlord, or pay back 200k to a bank, because the slum now has double glazed windows and a "live laugh love" poster hanging in the kitchen. Other people will be living on the edge of cities, in post war council housing estates, that were built there becaue the city was full, so we'll just lob up some houses round the edge, and people can travel into the centre to work. Hold on though, some of the workplaces have moved, and now they are located around the outer ring road, or near the motorway. No worries, we have a public transport system, they can use that. Does it go to the workplace? Nah, just from the outskirts straight to the middle of town. Where the high street has died out, and the shops are out of town now too, or online. Any chance of changing the bus routes? No. Lets build a park and ride instead. Then people can drive their cars to the edge of town, then get a bus straight to the centre. Where they don't work. Because they work somewhere else around the ringroad. Make the park and ride serve large employers like Hospitals and Universities, or put on sevices that go to major sporting stadiums where tens of thousands of people need to get to the same place at the same time? Nah, **** it, just make sure it goes to the clock tower and packs in at 6pm each day and that'll do. If not enough people use it, we'll just put up the fares and rinse the poor feckers who rely on it a bit harder instead.

 

So we have a problem, housing and businesses are all located in completely sub optimal locations. What is the solution? It's not leaving everything where it already is and closing roads to put up a couple of cycle lanes, or spending millions rotating the entrance to a train station thats located in the wrong part of town, because a load of Victorians built as many railways as possible and then a Whitehall penpusher closed the wrong one in the 1960s.

Housing, retail, schools and services, businesses and socialising spaces all need to be located in the right places so people can live their lives without having to spend so much time and resources moving between them.

 

Well, why not build things in the correct places? Ah, well that fundamentally goes against how we run our economy. The aim of the game is to increase the long term prices of housing and other assets, whilst supressing the wages of workers. To keep the whole thing ticking over, we need to keep achieving economic growth, but there's no intention to do things efficiently or give people better lives. The only thing that really grows is House Prices, when really, they don't actually contribute anything of value to the rest of the economy - expensive land means you don't build a bigger or better factory, or locate buildings that people need in convenient places so society operates more efficiently. Plus we can add globalisation into the mix, whereby due to the fact we've made Western economies "uncompetitive" due to high labour costs (wonder if that's anything to do with running economies where the sole aim is pump up the house prices?), then we can just exploit some different people in poorer countries to make stuff instead, and ship it across the world instead. Then once that country gets too expensive, you just switch to the next one. Japan too expensive following the 80s? Just move it all to China. China too expensive? India then. India getting expensive? Time for Africa, then after that maybe the robots can do all the work, while everyone else starves to death and CEOs wonder why the robots aren't buying any of their products or services.

 

The only real area we seem to have made progress in is by creating the internet, and using it to reduce the need to move around so much as now people have more freedom in terms of being able to communicate or transfer information over large distances without actually having to move at all - and that hasn't come about through a top down intentional design for improving society, it's a happy accident that occurred because the American military spent a shit load of money paying DARPA scientists to make a big computer network in the hope it  would yield better communications to enable more efficient blowing up of other human beings, and CERN scientists later managed to  develop a means of displaying information on said big network while in the course of doing Nuclear research.

 

 

[leicsmac]

8 hours ago, orangecity23 said:

Here comes a rant, so apologies in advance for the length.

 

This is a bad idea in isolation, but that's not surprising, as no thought goes into the overall design of our transport system, or beyond that our economic system as a whole. This is a token gesture, which will have one of two effects - some poor pleb who works their job every day is going to either end up poorer at the end of the month after shelling out a load of money to pay for the levy, on top of paying for their car, and fuel, and car insurance, and vehicle tax, which they need to pay, so that they can earn the money they need to pay for their every increasing housing costs. Or, alternatively, the worker can give up their car, and instead of driving to work in a short period of time, they can sacrifice a larger chunk of their free time, so they have less of their life to spend with their family, their chidren, or friends, or just doing basic life admin like eating, sleeping, cleaning and keeping on top of all the other tasks and busywork required to exist as an adult. Spend 8-9 hours a day at work, plus an hour in the morning commuting and an hour in the evening commuting? Well now you can double you commute times by using (multiple) buses or by cycling or walking, and have less free time as a result. Great! Why does this levy have the proviso that the employer is allowed to pass the cost on to the employee? That should be banned. If the employer is running a business that forces lots of employees to drive in and park there, then the employer should shell out, as they are the ones profitting from the activities taking place at that location. Employer having to shell out too much money in levys for their worker? Well maybe they have located their business in a sub-optimal location in the first instance.

 

If there are to be changes to transport and how we go about it, then instead of starting from the perceived problem (too much pollution in city -> too many cars in city -> tax the car drivers), then the system should be stripped back to its essential purpose and examined to see if it delivers. What is a transport system for? What does it need to achieve? The only reason it is there is to facilitate our lives. People need to be able to move themselves and goods around, so they can eat food, live somewhere, socialise and earn a living. An optimal system would meet those needs, whilst not destroying the environment in the process.

 

Our cities largely ended up the way the are during the industrial revolution, when factory owners located their business near to rivers or rail hubs, or in locations near to natural resources they needed. They needed a shitload of people to work in them, but they at least had the decency to put the slums their workers lived in right next to their place of work. People worked in the factories, then they went home, and pubs and such opened nearby that allowed people to socialise close by. Of course, working hours were too long, and the housing of questionable quality and size, but at least there was some degree of efficiency. People lived and worked in a relatively contained geographic area, much as they have done for most of human history up to that point.

 

Where do we live and work today? All over the place. Some people will still be in those same Victorian slums, except now the factory is long gone, and you'll be working until you turn 70 to either pay the rent to a buy to let landlord, or pay back 200k to a bank, because the slum now has double glazed windows and a "live laugh love" poster hanging in the kitchen. Other people will be living on the edge of cities, in post war council housing estates, that were built there becaue the city was full, so we'll just lob up some houses round the edge, and people can travel into the centre to work. Hold on though, some of the workplaces have moved, and now they are located around the outer ring road, or near the motorway. No worries, we have a public transport system, they can use that. Does it go to the workplace? Nah, just from the outskirts straight to the middle of town. Where the high street has died out, and the shops are out of town now too, or online. Any chance of changing the bus routes? No. Lets build a park and ride instead. Then people can drive their cars to the edge of town, then get a bus straight to the centre. Where they don't work. Because they work somewhere else around the ringroad. Make the park and ride serve large employers like Hospitals and Universities, or put on sevices that go to major sporting stadiums where tens of thousands of people need to get to the same place at the same time? Nah, **** it, just make sure it goes to the clock tower and packs in at 6pm each day and that'll do. If not enough people use it, we'll just put up the fares and rinse the poor feckers who rely on it a bit harder instead.

 

So we have a problem, housing and businesses are all located in completely sub optimal locations. What is the solution? It's not leaving everything where it already is and closing roads to put up a couple of cycle lanes, or spending millions rotating the entrance to a train station thats located in the wrong part of town, because a load of Victorians built as many railways as possible and then a Whitehall penpusher closed the wrong one in the 1960s.

Housing, retail, schools and services, businesses and socialising spaces all need to be located in the right places so people can live their lives without having to spend so much time and resources moving between them.

 

Well, why not build things in the correct places? Ah, well that fundamentally goes against how we run our economy. The aim of the game is to increase the long term prices of housing and other assets, whilst supressing the wages of workers. To keep the whole thing ticking over, we need to keep achieving economic growth, but there's no intention to do things efficiently or give people better lives. The only thing that really grows is House Prices, when really, they don't actually contribute anything of value to the rest of the economy - expensive land means you don't build a bigger or better factory, or locate buildings that people need in convenient places so society operates more efficiently. Plus we can add globalisation into the mix, whereby due to the fact we've made Western economies "uncompetitive" due to high labour costs (wonder if that's anything to do with running economies where the sole aim is pump up the house prices?), then we can just exploit some different people in poorer countries to make stuff instead, and ship it across the world instead. Then once that country gets too expensive, you just switch to the next one. Japan too expensive following the 80s? Just move it all to China. China too expensive? India then. India getting expensive? Time for Africa, then after that maybe the robots can do all the work, while everyone else starves to death and CEOs wonder why the robots aren't buying any of their products or services.

 

The only real area we seem to have made progress in is by creating the internet, and using it to reduce the need to move around so much as now people have more freedom in terms of being able to communicate or transfer information over large distances without actually having to move at all - and that hasn't come about through a top down intentional design for improving society, it's a happy accident that occurred because the American military spent a shit load of money paying DARPA scientists to make a big computer network in the hope it  would yield better communications to enable more efficient blowing up of other human beings, and CERN scientists later managed to  develop a means of displaying information on said big network while in the course of doing Nuclear research.

 

 

I think this is a fair accoutrement rather than a rant tbh, well stated.

 

I'll add that automation of a lot of tasks should and hopefully will be the future. How that will change the economic and social outlook for the world is anyone's guess, but R Buckminster Fuller said it best: "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

 

Automation has the potential to prove him right,

[orangecity23]

15 hours ago, leicsmac said:

I think this is a fair accoutrement rather than a rant tbh, well stated.

 

I'll add that automation of a lot of tasks should and hopefully will be the future. How that will change the economic and social outlook for the world is anyone's guess, but R Buckminster Fuller said it best: "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

 

Automation has the potential to prove him right,

I'd agree with that. Automation coming hand in hand with things such as Universal Basic Income could be a gamechanger. We will have to be careful about what happens during the transition though - if the profits from Automation end up with multi-national giant companies with a penchant for avoiding taxes globally, then countries may struggle to implement the necessary changes in the short term. It will be difficult for the ideas to break through the orthodox thinking though, everything over the last 30 years or so has been geared towards focussing on making people do more work rather than less, hence the increasing state pension age, certain Goverment MPs and captains of commerce whining about "needing people back in the office" because they hate the idea of people working from home where they can't be pointlessly micro managed all the time, or perhaps the idea that companies might get rid of the very expensively rented city centre office buildings that their landlord pals leach their living off of. That Fuller quote is bang on.

 

[Paninistickers]

On 07/07/2021 at 19:34, orangecity23 said:

Here comes a rant, so apologies in advance for the length.

 

This is a bad idea in isolation, but that's not surprising, as no thought goes into the overall design of our transport system, or beyond that our economic system as a whole. This is a token gesture, which will have one of two effects - some poor pleb who works their job every day is going to either end up poorer at the end of the month after shelling out a load of money to pay for the levy, on top of paying for their car, and fuel, and car insurance, and vehicle tax, which they need to pay, so that they can earn the money they need to pay for their every increasing housing costs. Or, alternatively, the worker can give up their car, and instead of driving to work in a short period of time, they can sacrifice a larger chunk of their free time, so they have less of their life to spend with their family, their chidren, or friends, or just doing basic life admin like eating, sleeping, cleaning and keeping on top of all the other tasks and busywork required to exist as an adult. Spend 8-9 hours a day at work, plus an hour in the morning commuting and an hour in the evening commuting? Well now you can double you commute times by using (multiple) buses or by cycling or walking, and have less free time as a result. Great! Why does this levy have the proviso that the employer is allowed to pass the cost on to the employee? That should be banned. If the employer is running a business that forces lots of employees to drive in and park there, then the employer should shell out, as they are the ones profitting from the activities taking place at that location. Employer having to shell out too much money in levys for their worker? Well maybe they have located their business in a sub-optimal location in the first instance.

 

If there are to be changes to transport and how we go about it, then instead of starting from the perceived problem (too much pollution in city -> too many cars in city -> tax the car drivers), then the system should be stripped back to its essential purpose and examined to see if it delivers. What is a transport system for? What does it need to achieve? The only reason it is there is to facilitate our lives. People need to be able to move themselves and goods around, so they can eat food, live somewhere, socialise and earn a living. An optimal system would meet those needs, whilst not destroying the environment in the process.

 

Our cities largely ended up the way the are during the industrial revolution, when factory owners located their business near to rivers or rail hubs, or in locations near to natural resources they needed. They needed a shitload of people to work in them, but they at least had the decency to put the slums their workers lived in right next to their place of work. People worked in the factories, then they went home, and pubs and such opened nearby that allowed people to socialise close by. Of course, working hours were too long, and the housing of questionable quality and size, but at least there was some degree of efficiency. People lived and worked in a relatively contained geographic area, much as they have done for most of human history up to that point.

 

Where do we live and work today? All over the place. Some people will still be in those same Victorian slums, except now the factory is long gone, and you'll be working until you turn 70 to either pay the rent to a buy to let landlord, or pay back 200k to a bank, because the slum now has double glazed windows and a "live laugh love" poster hanging in the kitchen. Other people will be living on the edge of cities, in post war council housing estates, that were built there becaue the city was full, so we'll just lob up some houses round the edge, and people can travel into the centre to work. Hold on though, some of the workplaces have moved, and now they are located around the outer ring road, or near the motorway. No worries, we have a public transport system, they can use that. Does it go to the workplace? Nah, just from the outskirts straight to the middle of town. Where the high street has died out, and the shops are out of town now too, or online. Any chance of changing the bus routes? No. Lets build a park and ride instead. Then people can drive their cars to the edge of town, then get a bus straight to the centre. Where they don't work. Because they work somewhere else around the ringroad. Make the park and ride serve large employers like Hospitals and Universities, or put on sevices that go to major sporting stadiums where tens of thousands of people need to get to the same place at the same time? Nah, **** it, just make sure it goes to the clock tower and packs in at 6pm each day and that'll do. If not enough people use it, we'll just put up the fares and rinse the poor feckers who rely on it a bit harder instead.

 

So we have a problem, housing and businesses are all located in completely sub optimal locations. What is the solution? It's not leaving everything where it already is and closing roads to put up a couple of cycle lanes, or spending millions rotating the entrance to a train station thats located in the wrong part of town, because a load of Victorians built as many railways as possible and then a Whitehall penpusher closed the wrong one in the 1960s.

Housing, retail, schools and services, businesses and socialising spaces all need to be located in the right places so people can live their lives without having to spend so much time and resources moving between them.

 

Well, why not build things in the correct places? Ah, well that fundamentally goes against how we run our economy. The aim of the game is to increase the long term prices of housing and other assets, whilst supressing the wages of workers. To keep the whole thing ticking over, we need to keep achieving economic growth, but there's no intention to do things efficiently or give people better lives. The only thing that really grows is House Prices, when really, they don't actually contribute anything of value to the rest of the economy - expensive land means you don't build a bigger or better factory, or locate buildings that people need in convenient places so society operates more efficiently. Plus we can add globalisation into the mix, whereby due to the fact we've made Western economies "uncompetitive" due to high labour costs (wonder if that's anything to do with running economies where the sole aim is pump up the house prices?), then we can just exploit some different people in poorer countries to make stuff instead, and ship it across the world instead. Then once that country gets too expensive, you just switch to the next one. Japan too expensive following the 80s? Just move it all to China. China too expensive? India then. India getting expensive? Time for Africa, then after that maybe the robots can do all the work, while everyone else starves to death and CEOs wonder why the robots aren't buying any of their products or services.

 

The only real area we seem to have made progress in is by creating the internet, and using it to reduce the need to move around so much as now people have more freedom in terms of being able to communicate or transfer information over large distances without actually having to move at all - and that hasn't come about through a top down intentional design for improving society, it's a happy accident that occurred because the American military spent a shit load of money paying DARPA scientists to make a big computer network in the hope it  would yield better communications to enable more efficient blowing up of other human beings, and CERN scientists later managed to  develop a means of displaying information on said big network while in the course of doing Nuclear research.

 

 

Thanks. Really interesting read. 

 

As a quick add on, public transport for London is designed not to suck everybody inwards to.piccadilly circus, but tontake people living in Wembley to shop in Stratford. Brixton residents to work in Hammersmith ....and so on. 

 

If we had a state run, subsidised bus system for Leicester with an integrated underground style.map and oyster style pricing, people could.skip across.from.general hospital to Beaumont leys to fosse Park....even running buses along dedicated lanes, like a tram - but not as expensive nor inflexible. 

[orangecity23]

1 hour ago, Paninistickers said:

Thanks. Really interesting read. 

 

As a quick add on, public transport for London is designed not to suck everybody inwards to.piccadilly circus, but tontake people living in Wembley to shop in Stratford. Brixton residents to work in Hammersmith ....and so on. 

 

If we had a state run, subsidised bus system for Leicester with an integrated underground style.map and oyster style pricing, people could.skip across.from.general hospital to Beaumont leys to fosse Park....even running buses along dedicated lanes, like a tram - but not as expensive nor inflexible. 

The tube definitely works well, every time I've been in London it's pretty trivial to move around fairly large areas quite easily and painlessly, and there are so many points where the lines intersect, so switching between lines is quite easily done without too much wasted travel in a pointless direction. The single point nodes of all the transport in Leicester going straight to the centre is one of my biggest gripes with the buses. Almost everywhere I would like to travel is at least 2 bus rides away, and most of the time you'll be going into the centre and back out again. I onlly go to the city centre for the occassional bit of shopping once in a bue moon. On the other hand, going to the train station, visiting my parents, visiting friends who live in Oadby, going to the King Power - these are things I do much more frequently than going to the city centre, and all take 2 or more buses. Quite often its easier to walk a long distance than use the bus, its way cheaper and often barely any longer time wise, which goes to show just how inefficient the bus routes are if they can't even outspeed a pedestrian over the course of the a journey.

 

I'd love to see what could be done by completely redesigning the bus routes - having routes that circle the city, more west to east routes or North to South, or perhaps having more routes made up of shorter journeys. Would be really interesting if it would be possible to combine that with data on where the largest centres of employment and residentitial density are over the greater city area. Instead, Soulsby is going to build us another Park and Ride in Beaumont Leys. If anyone in Beaumont Leys wanted to get a bus into the city centre, they'd just catch a 54 - so what's the point of the park and ride? Unless he's planning on building a shit load of houses further out in the countryside, the housing density actually gets fairly sparse beyond that, so unless Anstey is going to be quadrupled or soemthing like that, I don't see who exactly is going to be driving their cars to the park and ride?

Edited 8 July 2021 by orangecity23