Transport For London , December 2021, Section 114 "Bankruptcy" - Service Cuts?

[Bittern]

1 hour ago, stewartingram said:

As for schools, the kids always used to go to a local school - they had to, no choice. Nowadays parents choose the school (assuming there are vacancies). Why do they choose one further away?

in theory, local authorities, and thus their LEAs, are required to provide their statutory essential services uniformly across their service area. In practice that's never been enforced when it comes to schools, and there's no similar principle for GM schools or for Academies or all the other  assorted arrangements. Since you generally can't get your kids into a good school by coaching them through the 11+ anymore, you have to do it by either buying your way to winning the postcode lottery, or paying school fees, or by finding a good school somewhere nearby and travelling further.

 

There's also more flavours of religious school nowadays, plus schools with whatever educational philosophy or area of focus, and that means more reason to pick and choose.

[Nearholmer]

Personally, I do expect family-size EVs to be a significant part of transport outside of city centres in the future, although I’m not convinced that the “personally owned/leased car” model will survive in suburban areas. For one thing, the capital cost of EVs cuts against it, and for another the amount of space cars take up is significant. I would expect to see a growing “shared use” system, especially once autonomy allows the vehicle to go from job-to-job, or find somewhere to have a charge-up, on its own. It won’t be universal, and brands will emerge offering different qualities of service, but I honestly think it will grow.

 

But, something we haven’t talked about, and which tips heavily in favour of bikes and public transport, is the £ cost of energy.

 

Energy cost has traditionally not been a huge proportion of transport cost to the user, taxes raised via energy sales are in some cases, of course, but not the energy itself.

 

If/when energy comes to be priced much higher than it is now, people will really think twice about using transport that has a high energy consumption per person.kilometre, which even the best cars do in comparison with the best buses, while bikes have effectively nil marginal energy cost for short trips - it’s only when you get past about 30km on a bike that you start needing a second breakfast!

[lmsforever]

People are moving further into the countryside these areas frequently have no public transport if it does exist it will only be on market day and a saturday .hence the growth of Chelsea tractors .School transport will be there for most schools but they are no use to adults so they will have to use thier own transport. In one area of the southwest a large bus company withdrew its services overnight and the councils had to try and find alternative bus companies .These were found but many services did not return to the general disgust of users ,this is a typical senario all over the country and now its coming to London what ever has happenned to a once admired service.

[C126]

17 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

People are moving further into the countryside these areas frequently have no public transport if it does exist it will only be on market day and a saturday .hence the growth of Chelsea tractors .School transport will be there for most schools but they are no use to adults so they will have to use thier own transport. In one area of the southwest a large bus company withdrew its services overnight and the councils had to try and find alternative bus companies .These were found but many services did not return to the general disgust of users ,this is a typical senario all over the country and now its coming to London what ever has happenned to a once admired service.

 

Please forgive me if I have misunderstood you, but I think this illustrates the points (if I understand correctly) made by some previous posters - (1) It does not have to be like this, because (2) If people change their mind-set, they could vote for a decent public transport network and wish to pay for it.  I am old enough to remember Southdown's rather good rural 'bus service, which was destroyed by the Tory Government's 1985 Transport Act.  Alternatives are available.  There are economic systems (and transport policies) possible other than 'market forces'.

[phil-b259]

1 hour ago, adb968008 said:

 

 

My point was your belief all cars should be banned, which I think is medieval..as there are far too many with valid justifications that do need them, starting with Taxis, and hundreds of other use cases… you cant put manure back in the horse..the car exists, you cannot uninvent it, just replace it..the replacement is electric, not shank’s pony and his mate penny farthing.

 

 

 

I was perhaps guilty of fighting fire with fire so to speak - but the overall premises still stands, namely the road network has a finite capacity for motor vehicles and unless you want to start concreting over yet more of the countryside or undertake extensive demolition in urban areas then some form of rationing is required in places of high demand (i.e. London).

 

How that rationing takes place (and the compensatory measure required) is a complex one - and even within a single city there will be multiple different strategies that need to be employed reflecting the degree to which modal shift can be achieved in each location.

 

In central London, with its extensive PT network, the only sustainable way of addressing a lack of road space is adopting the strategy that transport by private car should very much be a matter of the driver (and or passenger) being unable to use PT. In the outer boroughs where journeys are more diverse and less dominated by what might be termed traditional commuting patterns than travel to central London use of the private car may well be an appropriate response (though that still doesn't help if road capacity is woefully inadequate to deal with the numbers - even if you did get rid of cycling facilities).

 

The Covid Pandemic has obviously thrown a massive spanner in the works of course, disrupting revenue to the likes of TfL (and thus shows up the foolishness of UK Governments in making such an essential service to society reliant on farebox revenue compared to capital cities overseas) as well as shaking up travel patterns. With the Omicron variant of Covid now doing the rounds its going to take even longer to establish the 'new norm' - and thus bring certainty to transport matters, be it financial revenue / spend or demand / usage.

 

In short there are no easy answers that can keep everyone happy (as is predictable when rationing has to be enacted), its frequently a case of choosing the least worst option that can be afforded- the latter being an important point because sitting back proposing grand schemes when there is no funding to implement then helps nobody. Cycle facilities are, generally speaking a quick and low cost thing to implement and as such may be a better bet in places than 'fiddling while Rome burns' (i.e. doing nothing)

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by phil-b259

[adb968008]

15 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

 

 

 

In central London, with its extensive PT network, the only sustainable way of addressing a lack of road space is adopting the strategy that transport by private car should very much be a matter of the driver (and or passenger) being unable to use PT. In the outer boroughs where journeys are more diverse and less dominated by what might be termed traditional commuting patterns than travel to central London use of the private car may well be an appropriate response (though that still doesn't help if road capacity is woefully inadequate.

 

Overall agree, but your not taking account of those travelling outer to inner.

Many parts of the suburbs just dont have the connections needed that cars provide.
 

People are lazy, they will always do the easiest, so make it easy… closing a road and expecting someone to be forced onto 2 trains, a bus and a canoe just isn't going to work. Expecting them to spent £50k moving home isn’t either, and if the job pays, they will sit with the inconvenience and just become more annoyed, belching more fumes, inside the car and out.

Edited December 2, 2021 by adb968008

[phil-b259]

1 hour ago, adb968008 said:

 

Food for thought, back in 2001 everyone cycled everywhere in Shanghai and Beijing, today they are all driving. Workers were in fields, today they are in factories. They are much wealthier than today. Others propose we stop driving and goto cycling, so they can carry on. In that case investing in rice paddies as we close our factories may make sense too, as our wealth slips away. We really need to introduce some acceptance & realism, not just idealism & extremism into this situation before we become a Stone age tourist state… personal transport isnt going away, in a world where you need to travel further to earn or spend… the world is moving the same direction.

 

 

Realism is important, but realism includes acceptance of problems, not pretending they don't exist.

 

There is no 'silver bullet' which fixes all the issues of mass motoring! For example EVs are a welcome step in addressing one specific subset of problems (exhaust emissions / air quality) and as such have a part to play, particularly away from large urban areas where PT based options are never going to economic. Working from home on the other hand addresses both emissions / air quality  and a lack of road space - but means less revenue for public transport operators who may be forced to cut back provision thus attracting more road traffic as a consequence.

 

As such a blend of measures with the exact ingredients varying from place to place is likely - some of which can only come about from an ideological change at the heart of Government and may well need to make the cost of motoring rise in certain situations as part of the 'package' of measures used.

[phil-b259]

26 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Overall agree, but your not taking account of those travelling outer to inner.

Many parts of the suburbs just dont have the connections needed that cars provide.
 

People are lazy, they will always do the easiest, so make it easy… closing a road and expecting someone to be forced onto 2 trains, a bus and a canoe just isn't going to work. Expecting them to spent £50k moving home isn’t either, and if the job pays, they will sit with the inconvenience and just become more annoyed, belching more fumes, inside the car and out.

 

Agreed things are not perfect - but there is a need to start somewhere, we cannot sit there and wait until everyone has the ideal PT solution on their doorstep before implementing certain measures in certain places.

 

As regards laziness - you are spot on! 99% of people are out for the easy life (including me) and the motor car is a extremely easy method of transport which takes you from door to do so quite naturally people are going to object to being told they have got to make their life harder.

 

But how about introducing a new train service so it becomes a direct one, a express bus services so journey times will be less, a park & ride solution which means  you can access the right radial rail line for your destination. These are practical examples where you try and meet folk halfway as it were which can be deployed in certain circumstances. Yes there are thousands of other consideration like fares policy, availability of land, infrastructure capacity etc to factor in to the mix but the point is solutions are out there if Governments work hard enough at them.

 

The facts don't lie - mass motoring in a densely populated country like ours is unstainable - and as with many of the ills affecting our planet humans need to learn to be less selfish and metaphorically take one for the team.

 

As to how you do that - I have no idea, but any sane perusal of the impact of current human lifestyles on the planet show its the only way we can hope to have a chance of a decent life in future - unless we have a few wars and kill a huge chunk of the population again.

Edited December 2, 2021 by phil-b259

[KingEdwardII]

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

in 2001 everyone cycled everywhere in Shanghai and Beijing

In China, the transition has not been to everyone driving cars, although there are plenty of those. Another form of transport that has mushroomed are small motor bikes - increasingly electric ones - which pervade many of the cities. The electric ones are pretty lethal for pedestrians, since they are very quiet and often driven by maniacs who weave about between roads and pavements at will. You need four sets of eyes to walk about in Chinese cities.

 

Yours,  Mike.

[adb968008]

44 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Agreed things are not perfect - but there is a need to start somewhere, we cannot sit there and wait until everyone has the ideal PT solution on their doorstep before implementing certain measures in certain places.

 

As regards laziness - you are spot on! 99% of people are out for the easy life (including me) and the motor car is a extremely easy method of transport which takes you from door to do so quite naturally people are going to object to being told they have got to make their life harder.

 

However the facts don't lie - mass motoring in a densely populated country like ours is unstainable - and as with many of the ills affecting our planet humans need to learn to be less selfish and metaphorically take one for the team.

 

As to how you do that - I have no idea, but any sane perusal of the impact of current human lifestyles on the planet show its the only way we can hope to have a chance of a decent life in future

Yes but how is it going to get worse ?

 

Car ownership has already increased, but as the population stagnates and car ownership reaches equilibrium, it wont get worse… you can only drive one car at a time, no matter how many cars you own. The argument is 15 years too late.. it was two Jags Prescott who said that in 2005.

 

Make cars cleaner, maybe more electric smart cars, but the problem of ever increasing car ownership in London seems out of date.

 

The issue is increasing revenue on transport, without detering passengers to other modes of transport…which brings us right back to topic… How do you maintain a service, when your riders have stopped riding it.. answer a lot of subsidy, or a lot of cuts, or both… but if the services arent being used, and people are working from home.. then its not the cars fault either… if you want the revenue you need to need a tapper upper at 6am and turn off the wifi.

 

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by adb968008

[Nearholmer]

The bald truth is that from an environmental  viewpoint, a land-take viewpoint, a noise viewpoint, a dissection of communities viewpoint, and, IMO at least, a quality of life viewpoint, we all zoom about all over the place far too much by all means of mechanised transport, public and private.  And, we schlepp about more goods per capita than we ever did.
 

We in the top 20% of world prosperity had, until Covid, become hyper-mobile over the past 50-60 years, and that has come at immense cost.

 

Its inextricably tangled-up with our economy, and our lifestyle, and it simply isn’t sustainable. we need to re-shape things big-time, in order to, among other things, cease to be hyper-mobile, and in hyper-want/need of goods.

 

Its a huge, mind-bogglingly complicated, serious tangle of issues, but a good place to start might be by ‘re-localising’ as much as possible, and each consuming less ‘stuff’. Even a 5% drop in ‘stuff consumption’, which I’m sure we could manage as a nation, accepting that some people could easily afford to reduce by 25%, while others are “at the bone” already, would be a step in the right direction. But even that concept is nightmarishly challenging, because our entire model is built on “growth”, which is a synonym for “perpetually expanding consumption”, and our entire psyches are caught-up in it.

 

 

 

[Michael Hodgson]

3 hours ago, ikcdab said:

I think this highlights the problem with "green" policies. They have to be paid for and they generally don't make a profit. People support green policies where they make money (eg reducing packaging in supermarkets, or increasing parking charges) but as soon as they cost, they get dropped.

We just need to face the fact that if we want people to use public transport then it needs to be subsidised to make it cheaper and somehow this needs to be paid for.

I believe that Rome introduced a scheme of very cheap (and free for children) public transport to reduce the volume of car commuting in the centre and reduce problems of congestion and pollution.  It has been said that you might as well make it completely free as you'd save the cost of collecting fares etc and although people might just ride around for no good reason when it first comes in, they would soon get sick of that and find something else to do. 

[C126]

May I just add something else to the discussion (and apologies in advance for drifting further off topic) - electric vehicles I believe are rather heavier than internal-combustion, so will damage roads more, requiring more repairs.

 

I also mention again the fact that the energy they consume still will have to be paid for (in every sense of the term); I do not think E.V.s are going to be the 'white knight' motorists think.  Again, it will require a change of personal paradigm to want to catch that train/'bus/ride a bike, etc.

[Nearholmer]

Interesting graph, showing trends in energy consumption for the U.K.

 

Just look at how transport energy consumption rose between 1970 and immediately pre-Covid, and factor into that that technical advances significantly improved energy efficiency in all modes over that time.

 

 

Despite a net rise in population, and vastly improved quality of heating and lighting over the period, domestic consumption hasn’t changed hugely (and could be reduced further by better insulation) ……… transport is the “stand out sin” here.

 

Here’s another one:

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by Nearholmer

[admiles]

3 hours ago, stewartingram said:

I've often wondered why families have 2 cars. The 2nd car (and we aren't talking cheap old bangers here) is very often there just to take the kids to school (see below) and wifey to work (not a profession, perhaps even part-time).

As for schools, the kids always used to go to a local school - they had to, no choice. Nowadays parents choose the school (assuming there are vacancies). Why do they choose one further away?

Now I've done various back-of fag-packet calculations, that show many that I know could give up the 2nd job, which only gives income enough to be paying for the 2nd car and running it. What is the sense there?

 

 

 

We have two cars because without cars we would be stuck at home. No public transport for miles. My "wifey" as you put it is, shock horror, actually a professional and uses her car to get to work (I know, I unchained her from the kitchen sink) and take our child to school.  I even let her do the shopping once in a while.

 

That brings us onto why he gets taken to school by car. Well, it's about 15 miles away and that's a long walk when you're 4 (and a half). He doesn't go to the school that's nearer because its full.  So our "choice" as you put it was rather limited. 

 

On a more general note has it maybe occurred to you that the theoretical "wifey" (copyright stewartingram 2021)  might actually want to get out of the house once in a while and have a job or visit a friendsay,  just to get a bit of mental stimulation? Even if it is something as unprofessional as stacking shelves or being a secretary, etc.

 

Your comments do appear to be straight out of the 1920's....but takes all sorts I guess.

[phil-b259]

34 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

 

Make cars cleaner, maybe more electric smart cars, but the problem of ever increasing car ownership in London seems out of date.

 

 

Generally the problem with cars in London (certainly towards the centre) is not cars owned by Londoners!

 

Studies prove that car ownership within London is the lowest in the country. This trend neatly matches the accessibility to public transport - and as is to be expected those living in the outer suburbs more likely to own a car than those living close to the centre reflecting the less effective reach of PT in being able to cater for journeys - particular orbital ones.

 

This lower than average car ownership is also reflected in electoral behaviour with the majority of Londoners (as a whole) voting for anti-car policy candidates as traffic congestion (even if the emissions issue is solved by EVs) will still impact PT.

 

Of course, as with car ownership itself, the political views of residents of the outer boroughs will be different from those living closer to the centre - and yes, because urban development is denser towards the centre so has more voters living there this has lead to London Mayors (or candidates for the position) adopting an anti-car stance.

 

However London is not an island - huge quantities of private vehicles enter it every day along arteries like the A40, A13, M4, etc. These people live well outside London, most in places where rail would be a viable alternative for some or part of the journey. These extra private cars hugely distort the actual situation and can easily drive an increase in motoring within London even though car ownership remains low.

[phil-b259]

51 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

 

How do you maintain a service, when your riders have stopped riding it.. answer a lot of subsidy, or a lot of cuts, or both… 

 

 

Which is the nub of the issue - but one that strays into politics.

 

Personally I'm of the view that the British pay far too little in tax - if you want good public services, public transport that actively tries to supress private motoring, etc then you need to pay for them! Far too many politicians over the years have pretended you can acquire a Rolls Royce standard of service / luxury for the prince of a Ford KA. Unsurprisingly after neigh on 40 years of this rubbish (and the way human beings are wired up to be inherently selfish*) its become regarded the norm politically speaking and any party which is brave enough propose anything else being punished at the ballot box.

 

 

*(we wouldn't have become the dominant species on the planet if we weren't) 

 

 

 

 

[Pacific231G]

On 30/11/2021 at 14:42, Nearholmer said:

A factor to be borne in mind with all of the free travel concessions, has to be how people will behave if they are taken away:

 

- a prosperous top-slice will continue as before, but pay for travel, or change modes and, in the suburbs, use cars more, or use Uber, or black cabs;

 

- a middling group will travel less, maybe cutting things back to bare necessities like getting to medical appointments;

 

- some will simply stop travelling beyond the range of shanks’s pony.

 

What definitely never happens is that all the free trips convert into paid trips, magically boosting revenue. The net effect in a city is to further impoverish the poor, reduce general trade, a very small increase in revenue, and, it doesn’t save the operator much if anything in cost of operating services (it’s not like rural areas where many bus services are pretty much ‘pensioners and school kids only’, in cities the demographic of users is much wider).

 

Much free travel is off-peak, and has virtually nil marginal cost of provision, not the case so much with morning school trips, but definitely the case for pensioners.

 

Its also worth considering the right symbiosis between public transport provision and the general function of the city, and it’s prosperity. In mega-cities like London, NY, Paris, Berlin etc that relationship is so tight as to be inextricable - public transport made these cities, not the other way round, they can’t function as cities without it. No coincidence that a significant source of non-fare income for TFL is from business rates, and that the business community is always well-represented on the board of TfL. Even if a very few swankers get driven to their offices in limos, everyone else, from the office cleaners to the Kings of Kommerce gets to Canary Wharf, The City, the West End, both Westfield shopping centres etc by public transport.

 

Solving the problem by one means or another is in everyone’s interests, and if between them they don’t get it right they will “kill the goose”.

I can only speak for myself but I have a car and I also have a London Freedom Pass. The net effect of the latter in pre-covid times was that I made far fewer local journeys around London using the former which, as they are normally off-peak means that I'm occupying a seat that would otherwise be empty on the tube or (less often) on the bus instead of adding to London's pollution and traffic snarls. If every public transport journey was going to cost me a fiver or so then the marginal cost of using my car (a pound or two for the same journey) would make that very tempting.

if the Freedom Pass was removed then I'd simply end up making far more journeys by car which would probably cost London far  more. 

If you work in a high rise office block nobody expects you to pay to use the lifts. They are simply an essential service that the building has to have to be viable. You could very easily make the same argument for public transport in large cities.

[Pacific231G]

On 01/12/2021 at 08:33, Nearholmer said:

That’s rather ancient news, and I think it’s only been included as specifics by the Minister to make it sound as if he’s propelling it, when in fact it’s been underway for ages.

 

The Jubilee, Central, Northern, Victoria, and, as they are progressively commissioned the Met and District are under automatic train operation (GAO2) already, and the Picc has always been next on the list. There has never been a plan to go for unattended train operation (GA04), and exactly what tasks exactly the staff member on the train under GAO3 should do, and where they should sit/stand has long been a subject of debate and head-scratching …… if you think about it, having the staff member “mixed in with the passengers” isn’t by any means obviously the best thing to do when it comes to handling perturbations and emergencies anyway.

 

Mike Brown when he was MD, before he was Commissioner IIRC, in c2015, made a promise/forecast to staff and TUs that every driver currently on the staff at the time would have a driving job until they left or retired if they wanted, but anyone taking on a driving job after that had to accept that they might not be in that position. He said that because it matched the profile of the train fleet and signalling/control, i.e. when the next fleet to be renewed (Picc and Bakerloo) was built, it might not have cabs in the conventional sense.

 

The big issue around all this is having access to enough capital to fund the next line upgrade/fleet-renewal, and a sub-issue is nursing the Central Line stock along, because that has proven not to be as physically robust as earlier and later train fleets.

 

If you want to get your head around what this is all really about, this seems to be an excellent summary https://www.londonreconnections.com/2021/the-political-myth-of-the-driverless-tube-train/

 

 

Meanwhile, the Paris Métro has an increasing number of lines- some of them new- with driverless (and completely unstaffed) trains and they're rapidly expanding the network. Perhaps it's all paid for by the profits RATP (the Paris transport authority) makes from running buses for TfL in London but I very much doubt it.

I accept that London and Paris are not exactly comparable. Quite a lot of the London Underground actually carries out a similar job to the RER in the outer suburbs though rather more slowly and the Métro, with far more closely spaced stations close to the surface, does quite a lot of what buses do in London. Nevertheless- driverless and uncrewed trains don't seem to cause too much of a problem and, in Lille, I've experienced completely automatic Métros that because they don't have crews have a very frequent service almost 24/7.   

[adb968008]

1 hour ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Studies prove that car ownership within London is the lowest in the country. This trend neatly matches the accessibility to public transport 

…

However London is not an island - huge quantities of private vehicles enter it every day along arteries like the A40, A13, M4, etc. These people live well outside London, most in places where rail would be a viable alternative for some or part of the journey. These extra private cars hugely distort the actual situation and can easily drive an increase in motoring within London even though car ownership remains low.

But what do you do about the “part” ?

 

They only drive because its easier. Punishing them wont make a difference, because its still easier.

When I lived in Canary Wharf, I never used a car, I just didn't need it. I had 4 buses, DLR, Jubilee line… there was more than 1 form of transport every minute, 24 hour a day service on two bus routes.

 

Now I live outside, I don't have a choice… yes I have 1 bus every 5 minutes, but it doesn't goto the shops, the schools, the train station, the doctors, indeed in 7 years Ive lived here i’ve probably used it a dozen times because it doesn't go where I need. It ends in West Croydon but I can walk for 20 minutes and take a 10 minute train faster… but thats not even useful for my shopping as Croydon is a dump and I try to avoid the place, if I have to I can drive in about 20 mins, and park for less than the train fare, and not be dependant on a flaky service that varies between 30 minutes and 6 hours dependant on the wind. The bus goes that way because thats the way it, the tram, then the trolleybus has always gone that way since Queen Victoria.

 

I drive to the other station, but the local council has put a parking zone there. The aim was to get people walking.  So now all the local shops went out of business as people now drive to a different station, why ? Because the catchment for the station is about 4 miles radius and no one is going to walk it.

This is why communist ideals wont work in a capitalist society… you cannot force people to change, you can only influence it, with better alternatives.

 

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by adb968008

[rodent279]

57 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Which is the nub of the issue - but one that strays into politics.

 

Personally I'm of the view that the British pay far too little in tax - if you want good public services, public transport that actively tries to supress private motoring, etc then you need to pay for them! Far too many politicians over the years have pretended you can acquire a Rolls Royce standard of service / luxury for the prince of a Ford KA. Unsurprisingly after neigh on 40 years of this rubbish (and the way human beings are wired up to be inherently selfish*) its become regarded the norm politically speaking and any party which is brave enough propose anything else being punished at the ballot box.

 

 

*(we wouldn't have become the dominant species on the planet if we weren't) 

 

 

 

 

Add to that the lie that keeps being repeated that the public sector=waste & inefficiency, private sector=lean, efficient.

[Michael Hodgson]

1 hour ago, phil-b259 said:

However London is not an island - huge quantities of private vehicles enter it every day along arteries like the A40, A13, M4, etc. These people live well outside London, most in places where rail would be a viable alternative for some or part of the journey. These extra private cars hugely distort the actual situation and can easily drive an increase in motoring within London even though car ownership remains low.

Many of those living well outside the central area have no economic alternative.  If you need a car to get to the railhead, you have to pay to park it there all day.  You probably live where you do because you can't afford suitable housing close to your office.  Add the cost of a season ticket and the rip-off cost of parking to the cost of owning & running the motor.  Then compare that to the cost of driving all the way to work, especially if you can find somewhere free or at least more affordable to park near the office. And either way, her indoors probably also still needs a motor. 

 

People's behaviour will change if the economics change.  Different taxes, fares, fuel and parking prices, congestion charges are all factors that will influence their choice.  But unless changes are gradual enough to allow people to adjust, governments will have riots on their hands - and they face re-election every 5 years.

[Nearholmer]

21 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

This is why communist ideals wont work in a capitalist society… you cannot force people.

Talking about it in those terms is, if I may be so cheeky, very “yesterday”. Questions of sustainability and quality of life pretty much don’t template onto that axis at all - they’ve arisen since that axis was identified in the C19th.

 

However, one way of squaring it in a consumer-capitalist society is to ensure that all impacts of an enterprise or activity have to be “priced in”, so that the consumer makes their choices based on the whole set of costs, rather than what normally happens, which is that capitalist enterprise externalises as much of the costs that it imposes on a society as it possible can, and can present the consumer with a “cut price” product as a result. I guess the very beginnings of this are in things like legal obligations to treat the environment with a bit of respect, not pollute etc, and “carbon taxes”, but it has a way to go yet.

 

Added to which, the creativity of capitalism throws up products which are themselves enablers of different ways of doing things, on-line meetings burst-forth, and grocery deliveries re-emerged not because of diktat, but because some clever stick found a way to make a profit from them.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

But unless changes are gradual enough to allow people to adjust, governments will have riots on their hands - and they face re-election every 5 years.

Agree.

 

One of the mega-challenges right now though, is that the need to markedly adjust the way society works is ramping-up at a pace faster than our democratic processes can keep pace with. It may even be that people’s perceptions of the need for change are themselves evolving faster than the processes can keep pace with.

[KingEdwardII]

55 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

but because some clever stick found a way to make a profit from them

Don't underestimate the power that this has - many folk like to diss the capitalist (I'd say "free enterprise") approach, but it has brought us an enormous amount of innovation and benefit. 

 

As for so-called "externalities" (what you call "costs imposed on society"), those are very tricky to measure and in many cases will be a matter of argument and debate. They can be used politically as a way of suppressing some types of activity - something to be highly suspicious of. Clearly, in a democratic society it is possible for the government to impose laws to deal with externalities that are seen as unacceptable by the populace, such as pollution by toxic chemicals. This can be a good thing.

 

However, as with the recent debate about water companies releasing raw sewage into rivers during heavy rain events, we all need to be very clear about the implications of "fixing" such problems. It is easy to blame the large companies involved, but in reality the costs would fall on us, the citizens - as would the sheer mess and disruption of ripping up roads and pavements all over the country to provide systems that properly separate rainwater runoff from sewage. It's no good imagining that "someone else" will pay for these things.

 

Yours,  Mike.