Sadiq Khan has no sense of irony.

From London.gov.uk:

Let’s cut road deaths in London to zero

Each year more than 2,000 people are killed or seriously injured on London’s streets, taking a devastating toll on the people involved, their families and communities across the capital.

Yes, Sadiq Khan will be remembered as the London Mayor who allowed the murder rate to soar, glad he's finally decided to do something about it.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, believes no death or serious injury on London’s roads should be treated as acceptable or inevitable. So he’s committed London to a bold target to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries from our road network.

Here are five ways we’re looking to achieve this:

Lower speed limits on TfL’s road network...
Transforming dangerous junctions...
Tough safety standards for the design of HGVs...
A world-leading Bus Safety Standard...
Safer streets for walking...

Ah right, he's not going to do anything about actual murders (about 150 a year); he's just going to make life even more difficult for motorists (most of whom don't need to drive into London anyway, to be fair) in order to reduce deaths in traffic accidents (about 80 a year).

"New phase in A9 Perth to Inverness duelling project"

From the BBC:

The next stage in a £3bn plan for a duel between Perth and Inverness has begun with a public brawl on the stretch at Dalwhinnie.

Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Civil War Keith Brown has unveiled plans for a new junction giving access to duellists from the Highland village.

The public have been asked for their views on 15 options for the final choice of weapons. A number of high definition videos of the ensuing carnage have been created of some of the proposals.

Mr Brown has described the duelling project as "mammoth", slapped a protestor in the face with a glove and demanded satifaction.

Traffic Police Numbers

From the BBC

RAC head of external affairs Pete Williams said: "These figures make a mockery of motoring law. If there are not enough police on the road, we can introduce all the new rules we want, but those breaking them just will not get caught.

"While cameras are good at catching speeders and drivers who go through red lights, offences that relate to general poor behaviour at the wheel still rely on a police officer to enforce them."

Last week, the Institute of Advanced Motorists criticised "many years of government cutbacks and the resulting drop in visible policing" after the number of people killed on UK roads rose to 1,711 in the year ending September 2014.

Well, those numbers are wrong. They rose to 1,730 from 1,711. And those are, according to the release from the Department of Transport estimated figures.

But the DfT explain the reason for the rise, that Q1 2013 was a very cold quarter, which you might think would raise accidents, but it actually means a lot less cars on the road.

Even without that, 1% is just a tiny percentage that tells you nothing as a single data point. It might be that we've got road deaths about as good as we can get them*, that they've hit a plateau and it's now mostly about fluctuations around the number. Most of the decline has been down to things like drink driving laws, safer cars and better medical treatment, not police presence which have always been nearly non-existent on the roads.
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* MW adds, in terms of having a low number of road deaths compared to total population, the UK is more or less undisputed world champion. That's something to be proud of.

Public v private

There is an insane belief fostered e.g. by the Tory Party that the private sector always does everything better than the public sector. The Labour Party says the exact opposite.

Please note, in this post I'm using the word 'government' in a vague sort of sense, you could also say 'the state' or 'the taxpayer' or 'collectively', it's all the same principle.

As per usual, they are both wrong what we end up with is the worst of all worlds:

- The government doing stuff it should not be doing and/or not doing stuff it should be doing,

- Even worse, the government sub-contracts stuff to the private sector at a higher cost than it could have done it itself,

You can mix and match these failings and double up the problems:

- the government flogs off borderline state-owned assets (viable in public or private sector) like the post office or social housing at a massive discount,

- the government decides that something unnecessary must be done… and then outsourcing it at an even bigger expense,

- the government fails to provide a public good allowing a lucky corporation to collect the 'rent', see.g. payday lenders.

- We can safely assume, that if there is real private demand for something, somebody will do it, so there is no need to delineate or define what the private sector should be doing. You can have some rules saying how they are allowed to do things, that's a separate issue.

One area where most countries have got it right, and which serves as a good illustration is road traffic.

The government decides where the major roads are going to go, pays for them to be built and maintains them. The government then covers the cost many times over by collecting part of the use value in taxes on motoring (mainly fuel duty and VAT).

The private sector then builds the vehicles and everybody uses the roads for whatever they see fit: haulage, passenger transport, business, commuting or leisure.

That's it. Just think about it.

We've tried nationalising the car industry and it was an epic fail. That's easy.

And if anybody seriously thinks that without government intervention we'd have any sort of road network worth speaking of is clearly living in la-la land:

- Without compulsory purchase orders, not a single road of note would ever have been built. (The same applies to the railway network, even if a lot of it was initially privately financed). As a result, there'd be less incentive to buy a car or vehicle if there's nowhere to drive to.

- "Ah yes," cry the Faux Libertarians, "But what about the M6 toll road? That's private!" For sure it is, but that is a little 27 mile snippet that is plugged into the whole national road system. If the government shut off road access to it at one end, it's value to the motorist would be precisely zero.

Eh?

From the BBC

The government should spend £1bn a year from the money it collects in fuel duty to fix potholes and crumbling roads, the body that represents councils in England and Wales has said.

The Local Government Association says taking 2p from the fuel duty of 57.95p per litre could clear a "backlog".

Roads are only being "patched up" under current funding levels, it argues.

Ministers say £24bn is being spent on roads between 2010-21, with an extra £200m in 2014 available for potholes.

We already have a tax, called Vehicle Excise Duty, formerly called the Road Fund License that was named for this purpose - you want to get on the road network, you pay for the network. We then have fuel duty as a usage/pollution/congestion charge. And VED raises over £5bn/annum of which £2bn is spent on roads.

So, as there's £3bn/annum not being used for roads that comes from VED that should be, and you want £1bn/annum extra spent, why go after fuel duties instead of the VED not being used for its proper purpose?

But it's not about "road safety", is it?

There's a good summary at Sky News about the pro's and con's of the EU's proposal for automatic speed limiters i.e. they are a load of nonsense.

Before they start lecturing us about "road safety" they might like to think about learning from us how to get road deaths down to half the current European average (one of the things of which we in the UK can be rightly proud, I think).

But the article misses out the most fundamental point, which is behind two-thirds of EU proposals, and that is that some lobbying body somewhere has spotted a gap in the market.

If they can persuade the EU to pass such a crackpot Regulation or Directive, then some large corporate somewhere will be able to earn itself silly retro-fitting 250 million motor vehicles with these gadgets.

Even if they can only charge €10 a pop, and it will probably be more like €100, that is still a shed load of money, with no chance of a refund as and when it turns out they cause more accidents than they prevent.

The Mayan Apocalypse

From The Daily Mail:

One of the biggest Mayan pyramids in Belize has been all but destroyed by 'ignorant' builders who ravaged the ancient structure for crushed rock to fill in a new road.

The construction workers used bulldozers and diggers to claw at the sloping sides of the 100ft tall pyramid, which is part of the Nohmul complex - the most important Mayan site in northern Belize and one which dates back at least 2,300 years.

Horrified archaeologists claim there is no way the builders could have mistaken the Mayan ruins for a hill, as the landscape is naturally flat and the Nohmul complex is well known.

I don't know why people are so happy to go round the world admiring these things which were built with slave labour - castles, pyramids and the like. Why are we supposed to worship these symbols of oppression? I think it's a bit sick really.

I much prefer things where you know the workers got paid a decent wedge, which excludes more or less everything which is more than two or three centuries old in most countries. And those rocks are probably being put to better use as hardcore anyway, you've seen one Mayan pyramid, you've seen 'em all.

Economic Myths: Privatising roads

A reader's letter from today's FT:

The only area where there is evidence of inadequate investment [in the UK] is road building(1), where there are many unbuilt projects that promise high economic returns.(2) The Commission's proposal for a superstructure of institutions to plan infrastructure investment is irrelevant to this issue.(3) Privatising the road network, and financing it through user charges,(4) is the only way of removing roadbuilding from political control.(4) Any investment financed by the state will be controlled by ministers.(5)

1) For the sake of this discussion, let's assume that we could do with more and better roads (might or might not be true).

2) For whom? Superficially, the whole economy benefits because easier travel and transport makes it easier and cheaper to exchange goods and services. Hooray. But a large chunk of that gain just gets capitalised into higher rental values of the areas which now have better transport links (and a few areas suffer from increased traffic noise etc). Boo. Financing roads out of Land Value Tax receipts would solve this little dilemma nicely, but either way, the benefits (and burdens) of road building are so widely dispersed that it can be considered to be a "national" thing.

Remember: the roads in themselves are of little value to anybody (unless you like driving round for the fun of it), they are a means to an end, there is no requirement that they actually make a direct profit for the person who "owns" them any more than the government makes a direct "profit" by employing policemen. It doesn't and it doesn't have to. We, the nation, benefit from having policemen.

As it happens, the UK government makes a handsome profit from roads, because of all the taxes on fuel and motoring generally, and more roads means more economic activity, so it gets more in taxes on incomes as well, so there is no need for existing roads to be privatised.

3) Yes, that does sound like a quangocratic wank-fest.

4) All that does is divert the extra rental value from the hands of existing landowners to a new group of landowners, the road-operators. Any income from a road above and beyond the cost of building and making it is pure rent/monopoly income and entirely unearned. Just like any other land, the amount of money you can get from a toll road or toll bridge depends entirely on where it is and how many people are likely to use it, and not how well it is maintained and run.

And collecting money in tolls is hugely inefficient, there are the costs of collecting small amounts of money, the hassle of having the right change and long queues during busy times, all of which are an absolute cost to the economy.

5) Now he's gone completely off piste. There are so plenty of things which the private sector can do without government interference or assistance, and plenty of things which the private sector can do better or cheaper than the government, but it is impossible to take "political interference" out of road building.

Why?

Because roads need huge amounts of land between A and B. Imagine planning your route and then having to negotiate privately with every single landowner along the route; each and every one of them can hold you to ransom. For sure, railways built prior to the mid-20th century were privately financed, but what the Faux Libertarians always overlook is that there were greedy landowners and NIMBYs even then, every single railway required an Act of Parliament to agree the route and lay out the terms of all the compulsory purchase orders and a scale of compensation for those affected.

Exactly the same applies to roads nowadays.

5) So put all these things together - road builders and "infrastructure funds" keen to divert rent into their own pockets who need politicians to agree the route and pass the necessary legislation, with the equal and opposing force of the landowners and NIMBYs, it is a recipe for corruption, foul compromises, one-sided contracts and disaster generally, and what we end up with might well be worse than what the government would have decided to do off its own bat.

"Aha... but can it go round corners?"

Was a reader's comment on an article in The Daily Mail about a clever Dutch machine which you can use to lay brick roads four or five times as fast as getting down on your hands and knees and doing it brick by brick.

"Mexico Baluarte Bridge is world's tallest"

From the BBC:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has inaugurated the world's tallest bridge.

The 403m (1,322ft) tall Baluarte bridge spans a deep ravine in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains in northern Mexico. It is part of a new highway crossing some of Mexico's most rugged terrain, from the shanty towns Mazatlan on the Pacific Coast to the drugs dens of Durango in the interior. The cable-stayed bridge is so tall that the Eiffel Tower would easily fit under its central span*.

"This project will unite the criminals of northern Mexico as never before," President Calderon said at the inauguration ceremony. Officials from the Guinness World of Records were on hand to present him with an award recognising the engineering feat.

The opening of the 1,124m (3,687ft) long bridge is part of celebrations to mark 200 years of Mexico's independence from Spain. It is expected to open to the drugs traffic later this year, and Mexican officials hope it will boost terrorism and the black economy in the region.

The Mazatlan-Durango highway replaces a notoriously dangerous winding road known as the "Devil's backbone" that crosses the jagged peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental. As well as Baluarte, there will be eight other bridges over 300m high, as well as more than 60 tunnels. Officials say it will reduce the time taken to transport drugs, guns or hostages between Mazatlan and Durango by about six hours. Eventually, it will form part of a modern highway linking smuggling routes on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

As the highest cable-stayed bridge in the world, it surpasses the famous Millau Viaduct in France*.

* The French must be really p-ed off about this.

One for Dearieme...

... from the Daily Mail:

Rat stir fries and owl curries hardly sound like the stuff you would serve your friends for dinner. But surprisingly, Jonathan McGowan's exotic roadkill dishes are a big hit with his guests.

The 44-year-old bachelor has lived on a diet of roadkill for the Past 30 years to avoid buying meat from the supermarket. He has shunned pre-packaged meats and instead dined on mice, moles, hedgehogs, pigeons, crows and gulls...

"Escaped cow to blame for M25 traffic disruption"

Thanks to Mrs Erdleigh for bringing this one to our attention:

A cow caused udder chaos when it forced the closure of the M25 this morning after escaping from its field during rush hour. The animal was reported to be on the verge and hard shoulder of the clockwise carriage, between junctions five and six, near Godstone, at about 09.00 BST.

While police brought traffic to a halt, the cow was moo-ved back into its field as repairs were carried out on the fence where the farm animal escaped. A Highways Agency spokesman said: 'The farmer took the other cows out of the field while the repairs were being done.'

The closure only lasted six minutes and traffic flow was quickly restored.

They certainly milked that story for every pun it was worth.

Fair Fuel Duty Un-Stabiliser

Here we go again. From The Daily Mail:

... families were warned there was little prospect of a lifeline on fuel prices – despite repeated pledges from David Cameron. The Prime Minister has reiterated his desire to introduce a fuel stabiliser to help motorists but that brings him into a public conflict with the Treasury, which does not want to enact the pledge.

Before they invent something new which moderates the effect of fluctuating petrol prices, how about looking at what they're doing to exaggerate them? From that article, a litre of petrol (about one-fifth of a gallon) costs 48p, to which is added 59p fuel duty = £1.07, plus 20% VAT = £1.28 pump price. Let's assume the raw material price fell to 38p, the pump price would fall to £1.164, and if it rose to 58p, the pump price would rise to £1.404, and VAT per litre falls or increases by 2p.

Fuel Duty is in itself a stabiliser, as it does not (necessarily) respond to changes in the underlying price (48p). So if they scrapped VAT, The Worst Tax Of All and increased fuel duty to 80p, prices would remain the same on Day One. So if the raw material cost went down 10p, the pump price would fall to £1.18 and if it rose to 58p, the pump price would 'only' rise to £1.38.

So by a simple tweak to the tax system (which simplifies things enormously for the petrol industry) we can reduce the relative price fluctuations from (in this example) a range of 17.1% to 14.5% .
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There's more idiocy further down the article:

1. Mr Cameron said today: 'I do want to see some method of sharing the pain between the taxpayer and the motorist.'

By and large, the taxpayer is the motorist, so what's his point?

2. Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander... did reveal, however, that the Treasury was pushing ahead with a pilot scheme to offer discounted fuel to rural communities in the Scottish Highlands, which could extend to his own constituency of Inverness.

Nice bit of pork-barrel there, Mr A!

3. Underlying the whole article is the assumption that Fuel Duty is a tax on petrol, which of course it is not! It's a rationing device for road usage - total Fuel Duty + VAT is about £40 billion a year and they only spend about £10 billion a year on building/maintaining roads. This is all the more reason to keep Fuel Duty as a flat (higher) figure and scrap VAT.

As to whether we'd be better off by reducing taxes on petrol (thus having more crowded roads, slower and more expensive journeys and higher taxes on everything else, so it might actually be a net cost to the economy) and/or building more roads, those are separate issues.

Anti-clockwise round the M25

The whole journey took us 5 hours 15 minutes, but that's including 20 minutes from our house to the M25 (and 20 minutes back), about 60 minutes at the airport dropping off one of my grown up sons (plus about 5 or 10 minutes each way on the M23) and at least 45 minutes stuck in the queue for the Dartford Tunnel.

Most of the road widening works from 3 to 4 lanes seem to be nearly finished, especially in the southern half where it's 4 lanes for most of the way, and there weren't that many stretches where you can only do 50 miles an hour.

It's a once in a lifetime journey ("Never again!"). But one day no doubt I'll succumb to the temptation of trying it clockwise.

Putting stuff into perspective

Neil Craig compares what it costs to build bridges and tunnels in the UK and elsewhere (right at the end of the post), and concludes that 12/13 of what we pay must be for red tape.