John Humphrys...who's a silly boy, then?
Discussion
This from the Transport 2000 website, quoting John Humphrys......
Time to sink the BBC and put its presenters out to grass, methinks....
Any motorists reading the next sentence may want to dismember me. Motoring in this country must become more expensive.
Outrageous, some might say. The British motorist is already clobbered at every turn. It costs more to drive in this country than anywhere else in Europe and costs are rising all the time. Motorists pay far more than their fare share of taxes and end up subsidising the exchequer as it is. Stuff and nonsense. Let’s try a few facts instead.
Britain is not the most expensive country in Europe. Have people forgotten how much they had to fork out in tolls the last time they drove on a French or Italian motorway? We come about half way down the league table.
Nor are our costs rising all the time. It is cheaper to drive in Britain now than it has ever been. Over the next few years it will become much cheaper still as cars become more efficient. In ten years from now it will cost 20 per cent less to run a car than it does today.
Yes, we hand a great dollop of duty to the Treasury every time we fill our tank, but we would have to fork out more still if we were to meet the true costs of motoring. Building and repairing roads is only a small part of it. Cars are bad for our health and bad for the environment.
The bill for treating all those people with diseases caused by the filth that comes from our tailpipes is £11 billion. Then there are the 320,000 people who are injured in crashes. And how do you put a price on death? In 2000 there were 3,409 road deaths. A child under the age of 14 is more likely to be killed in a car crash than in any other way.
I could go on, but what’s the point? We love our cars and a boring lecture from me about the consequences of global warming and congested city centres and all the rest of it is not going to make a blind bit of difference. It’s the freedom our cars give us, isn’t it?
We talk about that freedom as though we were Toad of Toad Hall parping his way around the leafy, empty lanes of England. As Toad might say: “Pah!”
Freedom to get out of our noisy cities on a bank holiday weekend and drive to the quiet beauty of the Lake District? Fine, except that it means sitting on the M6 in a 50-mile tailback. When we get there, frazzled and fed up and dreading the journey back again, we meet the other million motorists who had exactly the same idea. So much for peace and quiet.
'We talk about freedom as though we were Toad of Toad Hall, parping his way around the leafy, empty lanes of England.'
Freedom to live in the country and drive to our city offices in the morning? Fine again, except that you have to leave so early and get back so late to beat the traffic jams that you’d be better living in town with a window box.
Freedom to drive our kids to work in the morning? Great, if you want them to get fat and lazy and asthmatic from all those fumes from a million mums idling their engines outside the school gates.
Freedom to drive around our cities? In London’s rush hour you don’t move at all for 28 per cent of the time. And rush hour lasts almost all day.
This is all madness and it has to stop. And, for one reason or another, it will stop. Either we pay or we queue. There really is no choice.
Space on our roads is like any other commodity. If there is too much demand and too little supply it must be managed. Stalin dealt with the problem of shortages in the Soviet Union by allowing the queues to form. It was rationing by queuing. We have been doing much the same in this country with the roads. We need a more sophisticated mechanism and road pricing provides it.
Of course there will be problems. Rich people can absorb the charges. Poor people, especially those who live in rural areas, cannot. And nor can they rely on public transport because it’s mostly lousy. But if the rich pay enough they will be effectively subsidising improved public transport.
We have to decide what sort of country we want to live in over the years to come. Do we really want an American lifestyle where the car rules and no-one ever walks or cycles? Already we make 85 per cent of all our journeys by car. Or do we want something more civilised?
John Humphrys has enjoyed a wide and distinguished career as a journalist. He has been a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme since 1987 and fronts BBC1’s On the Record. He has also presented the Nine O’clock News and Panorama.
Time to sink the BBC and put its presenters out to grass, methinks....
Any motorists reading the next sentence may want to dismember me. Motoring in this country must become more expensive.
Outrageous, some might say. The British motorist is already clobbered at every turn. It costs more to drive in this country than anywhere else in Europe and costs are rising all the time. Motorists pay far more than their fare share of taxes and end up subsidising the exchequer as it is. Stuff and nonsense. Let’s try a few facts instead.
Britain is not the most expensive country in Europe. Have people forgotten how much they had to fork out in tolls the last time they drove on a French or Italian motorway? We come about half way down the league table.
Nor are our costs rising all the time. It is cheaper to drive in Britain now than it has ever been. Over the next few years it will become much cheaper still as cars become more efficient. In ten years from now it will cost 20 per cent less to run a car than it does today.
Yes, we hand a great dollop of duty to the Treasury every time we fill our tank, but we would have to fork out more still if we were to meet the true costs of motoring. Building and repairing roads is only a small part of it. Cars are bad for our health and bad for the environment.
The bill for treating all those people with diseases caused by the filth that comes from our tailpipes is £11 billion. Then there are the 320,000 people who are injured in crashes. And how do you put a price on death? In 2000 there were 3,409 road deaths. A child under the age of 14 is more likely to be killed in a car crash than in any other way.
I could go on, but what’s the point? We love our cars and a boring lecture from me about the consequences of global warming and congested city centres and all the rest of it is not going to make a blind bit of difference. It’s the freedom our cars give us, isn’t it?
We talk about that freedom as though we were Toad of Toad Hall parping his way around the leafy, empty lanes of England. As Toad might say: “Pah!”
Freedom to get out of our noisy cities on a bank holiday weekend and drive to the quiet beauty of the Lake District? Fine, except that it means sitting on the M6 in a 50-mile tailback. When we get there, frazzled and fed up and dreading the journey back again, we meet the other million motorists who had exactly the same idea. So much for peace and quiet.
'We talk about freedom as though we were Toad of Toad Hall, parping his way around the leafy, empty lanes of England.'
Freedom to live in the country and drive to our city offices in the morning? Fine again, except that you have to leave so early and get back so late to beat the traffic jams that you’d be better living in town with a window box.
Freedom to drive our kids to work in the morning? Great, if you want them to get fat and lazy and asthmatic from all those fumes from a million mums idling their engines outside the school gates.
Freedom to drive around our cities? In London’s rush hour you don’t move at all for 28 per cent of the time. And rush hour lasts almost all day.
This is all madness and it has to stop. And, for one reason or another, it will stop. Either we pay or we queue. There really is no choice.
Space on our roads is like any other commodity. If there is too much demand and too little supply it must be managed. Stalin dealt with the problem of shortages in the Soviet Union by allowing the queues to form. It was rationing by queuing. We have been doing much the same in this country with the roads. We need a more sophisticated mechanism and road pricing provides it.
Of course there will be problems. Rich people can absorb the charges. Poor people, especially those who live in rural areas, cannot. And nor can they rely on public transport because it’s mostly lousy. But if the rich pay enough they will be effectively subsidising improved public transport.
We have to decide what sort of country we want to live in over the years to come. Do we really want an American lifestyle where the car rules and no-one ever walks or cycles? Already we make 85 per cent of all our journeys by car. Or do we want something more civilised?
John Humphrys has enjoyed a wide and distinguished career as a journalist. He has been a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme since 1987 and fronts BBC1’s On the Record. He has also presented the Nine O’clock News and Panorama.
Then give us a cheap, reliable and efficient public transport system, rather than the crummy unreliable expensive one.
Four times in the last year I have waited for a bus to take me into town (Nottingham) from a suburb 3 miles from the city and it hasn't turned up! A disaster when I've needed to catch a connecting service elsewhere! I'd say it's one of the better bus services in the country as well!
Transport 2000 want to try to make getting from A to B as unpleasant and as crappy as the shoddy services of the bus companies that represent! After all they are only really interested in keeping the shareholders happy!
Four times in the last year I have waited for a bus to take me into town (Nottingham) from a suburb 3 miles from the city and it hasn't turned up! A disaster when I've needed to catch a connecting service elsewhere! I'd say it's one of the better bus services in the country as well!
Transport 2000 want to try to make getting from A to B as unpleasant and as crappy as the shoddy services of the bus companies that represent! After all they are only really interested in keeping the shareholders happy!
Rambling load of old tosh really. Doesn't actually build up a logical argument. I'd be interested to see a justification of the claim that car pollution costs the NHS 11 billion a year. I wonder if that is a modern car, or cumulative damage from lead petrol and cars that are no longer on the road? Also, so what if the most likely cause of a child is a traffic accident? That doesn't make cars super dangerous. It is just a reflection of the fact that children are very unlikely to die at all.
I have always thought John Humphries was a patronising little git. I now know he is. If we really want to clean up the atmosphere then we need rid of diesel trains and buses. If we want to reduce deaths then getting rid of the speed humps and the death/theft cameras is the way to go. If we want to de stress everyone then rmoving traffic lights and freeing up the roads is the way to go. If we want to improve general health then sacking 95% of the desk jockey civil service and offering them jobs on the road gang would get them fit and healthy in weeks. Why do we have to compare ourselves with Europe with respect ot road use? We are after all an oil producing nation so why not compare ourselves with America or the Arab states. Then we are not half way down the cost league we are right at the top and so far off the scale as to be out of sight.
The man is a moron.
The man is a moron.
He had pretty much the same rant a few years ago -
www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?f=10&h=0&t=6135
nubbin's response is a cracker.
www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?f=10&h=0&t=6135
nubbin's response is a cracker.
ATG said:
I'd be interested to see a justification of the claim that car pollution costs the NHS 11 billion a year. I wonder if that is a modern car, or cumulative damage from lead petrol and cars that are no longer on the road?
I agree - modern catalyst cars are very clean. There are very few cars from '92 or before still on the roads with 'Thatcher Legacy' non-catalyst engines.
For the younger viewers among us, PM Thatcher was insistent on pushing the 'Lean Burn' engine through and resisted the catalyst - probably slowed it down about ten years. Although 'lean burn' is more efficient and reduces most toxic gases it wasn't even close to a catalyst engine for those, and burning lean creates masses of toxic NOx pollution.
I wonder how many lung cancer cases were caused by that policy?
Globulators said:
I'd be interested to see a justification of the claim that car pollution costs the NHS 11 billion a year. I wonder if that is a modern car, or cumulative damage from lead petrol and cars that are no longer on the road?
I agree - modern catalyst cars are very clean. There are very few cars from '92 or before still on the roads with 'Thatcher Legacy' non-catalyst engines.
For the younger viewers among us, PM Thatcher was insistent on pushing the 'Lean Burn' engine through and resisted the catalyst - probably slowed it down about ten years. Although 'lean burn' is more efficient and reduces most toxic gases it wasn't even close to a catalyst engine for those, and burning lean creates masses of toxic NOx pollution.
I wonder how many lung cancer cases were caused by that policy?
Without the car and the massive income it generates for the country, I doubt we would afford the NHS!
Globulators said:
I wonder how many lung cancer cases were caused by that policy?
Very few compared to those caused by the emmisions from giant diesels.
Bearing in mind that the catalyst does not work for the majority of emmisions anyway because it has to warm up and most journies are not long enough. Lean burn was the better way to go and would not have created CO2 but would have created less CO. Probably one of the few things Thatcher did right, IMO. No doubt Marquis Rex will be able to give us the definative answer.
I think all it really caused was regular non lean-burn engines (the majority) to be made without catalysts.
You might be right about the CO but I can always smell the unburnt aromatic hydrocarbons if I follow any pre L reg car, knowing what they can do it's never a pleasant experience...
You might be right about the CO but I can always smell the unburnt aromatic hydrocarbons if I follow any pre L reg car, knowing what they can do it's never a pleasant experience...
It all reminds me of an article Andrew Marr put together in a running series called 'how to read a newspaper'. There was a bit in it about opinion columns, what they say and what they mean. An opinion column is written from a position of pseudo-authority and the writers will try every trick in the book to maintain the facade of righteousness. Something along the lines of:
Every time a question, rhetorical or otherwise, appears in the text, they are about to give you their idea as a conclusive answer. When faced with this, just look at the question then answer it with a 'yes' or 'no'. If the ensuing answer can't be boiled down completely to 'yes' or 'no', then it's not a comprehensive argument.
When statistics are mentioned, find the source. If you can't, they've been made up, as revealing the source would lend massive authority to your piece. In order to be conclusively authoritative, the statistics must be laid out graphically in full, showing cohesive evidence in a large volume. If it isn't chances are they've been tweaked and they don't tell the whole story, so when Humphrys says 'costs the NHS £11billion a year', and there isn't any kind of cost breakdown from the NHS themselves, it can't be trusted at all.
When sources are quoted, only trust evidence of a direct interview. If it gives a name and a title, it's probably concrete. If it only gives the name, it's second-hand and may have been edited. If it only gives a title, the journalist has asked a mate to comment. If it just says 'NHS sources', the journalist has made the quote up to bolster the argument when research yielded no actual evidence.
On the basis of these three alone most left-wing lentilist hand-wringers and right-wing xenophobic doom-mongers in our papers could be ripped to shreds in seconds.
Every time a question, rhetorical or otherwise, appears in the text, they are about to give you their idea as a conclusive answer. When faced with this, just look at the question then answer it with a 'yes' or 'no'. If the ensuing answer can't be boiled down completely to 'yes' or 'no', then it's not a comprehensive argument.
When statistics are mentioned, find the source. If you can't, they've been made up, as revealing the source would lend massive authority to your piece. In order to be conclusively authoritative, the statistics must be laid out graphically in full, showing cohesive evidence in a large volume. If it isn't chances are they've been tweaked and they don't tell the whole story, so when Humphrys says 'costs the NHS £11billion a year', and there isn't any kind of cost breakdown from the NHS themselves, it can't be trusted at all.
When sources are quoted, only trust evidence of a direct interview. If it gives a name and a title, it's probably concrete. If it only gives the name, it's second-hand and may have been edited. If it only gives a title, the journalist has asked a mate to comment. If it just says 'NHS sources', the journalist has made the quote up to bolster the argument when research yielded no actual evidence.
On the basis of these three alone most left-wing lentilist hand-wringers and right-wing xenophobic doom-mongers in our papers could be ripped to shreds in seconds.
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