[iandusud]

I haven’t been here for ages but felt compeled to flag this. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6293w4rdpro

Here we have yet another piece of gross misinformation from the BBC on cycling. The article correctly points out that the installation of the schemes was paid for by central government and that the council has only paid for maintenance at a cost of £55k per annum. So let’s assume the scheme has been running for a full 4 years (which it probably hasn’t), it has cost the council approx £20k not £4m, which means that the headline has exaggerated the cost to the council by a factor of around 20,000%. These are the sort of misleading and untruthful headlines I expect of the Daily Mail not of the BBC, although I’m not so sure any longer. I have made a complaint but expect the usual fob off.

Topic

[chrisonabike]

Tom_77 wrote:

Tom_77 wrote:

LTNs are expensive because drivers can’t be relied upon to obey the law. If all (or even the vast majority of) drivers obeyed the law, all you would need for an LTN would be a few No Entry / No Motor Vehicle signs.

An excellent point.  Why do we actually need to make formal “LTNs” in the first place?  After all – despite the claims of the tinfoil hat brigade – people walking, in wheelchairs and on bikes should be able to traverse them in any direction they please? (That’s the case in the ones I’ve seen).

Because motor vehicle drivers *.

Why do we need all these measures to police them?

Because motor vehicle drivers.

As soon as we have “general public” times “motor vehicles” we find that many things we build in the public space are in fact “because motor vehicle drivers” (footways with kerbs, most overpasses and subways, most cycle paths, traffic lights, roundabouts ** )

* Well … OK, they had LTNs them for carts in Pompeii (and indeed kerbs)…

** OK, not this one, or this one, or this – but actually they’re silly and are probably the result of designers still having their “car” brains engaged.  There’s this one of course… but it’s just an extremely fancy way of doing a cross-road – which would have worked as well.

[Tom_77]

LTNs are expensive because

LTNs are expensive because drivers can’t be relied upon to obey the law. If all (or even the vast majority of) drivers obeyed the law, all you would need for an LTN would be a few No Entry / No Motor Vehicle signs.

About time blame was correctly apportioned.

[brooksby]

mdavidford wrote:

It also conflates spending on ‘LTNs and quickways cycle routes’ with spending just on LTNs, and fails to mention that £3.8m is a piddling amount in the context of four years worth of budget that runs into £bns.

I was under the impression that its the sort of amount spent on adjusting a single set of traffic lights or reorganising a single road junction…

[brooksby]

Isn’t it – playing devil’s

Isn’t it – playing devil’s advocate here – that they have spent £4m but that central Govt has then given them money so that the cost to the council was just (4 x £55k) £220k?

[mdavidford]

bbc wrote:

bbc wrote:

LTNs were first installed on six roads in east Oxford and Cowley in May 2022

…so three years so far. They’ve just asked for four years worth of spending to make the number look bigger.

[mdavidford]

It also conflates spending on

It also conflates spending on ‘LTNs and quickways cycle routes’ with spending just on LTNs, and fails to mention that £3.8m is a piddling amount in the context of four years worth of budget that runs into £bns.

[Author]

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