Lost - Eight lumps of tarmac!

Mon 29 Jan 2007, 13:11

Hmmm, yes Richard, that IS interesting and disturbing research. BUT what is even more disturbing is a subtext or secondary "discourse" that is actually more important than the substantive or main "discourse" of the research (but yes, I am thinking about it).

That is: how the consciousness of road use/users "here" is subordinated GIVEN THE PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BRITISH societal system and psychology concerning the "rights of the motorist" to the motor car and its ramifications permeating into all levels of our society and psyche.

The safety diminishing effect raised in the report easily arises from this - plus it raise a real and worrisome "immediate now" and "how things might be different later" conundrum. Something has to give and change.

Tho' the problem will self correct itself within a generation or so, as the personal oil driven motor car will soon be a thing of the past as the global economy shipwrecks upon peak oil within the next decade or two, and with the collapse of the fantasy fairy tale financially based "economy" most people take for granted in Britain, there won't be the basis for anything else, so forget those wonder dreams of affording lekky runabouts and PV recharging and think more in terms of what happened to the Argentinian middle class. Overall: Remember, we inherit the world from our children! But in the meantime, the psychoticism continues and worsens (probably due to the awareness of this impending doom and the denial that goes with it).

Charlbury is in prime leisure cycling territory, and in terms of distance, both Chippy, Woodstock and Witney are within easy range on a daily commute for people well into middle age free of health or injury problems. Why, as a lad I regularly used to go even further afield in hill country on primitive single speed machines for work or for activities like swimming or cinema or whatever, and quite a few "old boys and girls" in the horticultural, fishing and building trades regularly did 5-8 mile daily commutes on prewar sit up and beg machines - and I'm talking about people nearing retirement age in the late 60s/early 70s when I first came here to a rural Sussex village from Canada. In fact, I used to go nearly twice those distances on a daily commute through London in the early 80s (including some stiff hills). Nowadays one has lightweight electric heated gloves and socks running off rechargeable D cells and wonderful waterproofs, wish we'd had those then. My old donkey jacket wasn't quite the same thing as I'd be in that all day long as a young worker outdoors, after a long wet ride in the morning!

But nowadays I am seriously intimidated by the speed of the traffic compared to road conduct and manners and awareness when I last did any significant amount of rural leisure cycling in the 80s - there is both a lot more traffic, going a lot lot faster and cutting corners and clipping hedges a lot lot more than then, and my memories havn't been clouded by rosy images of a distant past, these changes are quite real and have been enough to make me seriously avoid getting my old recumbent bikes out and cycling. I thought I'd enjoy my cycling again out of the City of Oxford but, in effect, I and many other cyclists have been "driven off the road" by the bad driving and bad minds of the average motorist drunk on their "right to roam" over anyone else.

So rather than take the research at first hand and its "surface" value, perhaps we should run it through the "British exceptionalism" filter in context of comparison to other (much more successful and civilised European) social models with regards to our whole attitude to motor vehicle domination of our entire lifestyles, and its reflections in our built environmental forms, and the often shocking crudity (indeed, psychotically insane in the light of any rational system of arranging socio-economic life!!) of thought and value processes we see exposed so often.

For prime example, on this very website whenever ANYTHING - or so it seems - is raised that might hinder or besmirch or constrain in any imaginable and modest way the Great God of the Motor Vehicle and its Totemic Value as Symbol of Our Personal Liberty, Rights, Freedom and Pursuit of Happiness (did I miss any capital letters there?). Or whatever deep emotional structures are being satisfied, triggered, met by, neurotransmitters released or whatever. Sure enough, someone is just gonna pop up with the usual trivial point about cyclists going down one way streets (and of course in other countries cyclists are USUALLY allowed down one way streets to aid their movement, but here ... oh no. Heap big black magic one way street counterflows...).

The original work I was citing from the 80s on lights-on driving was when I was on Planning Committees and had to read all of this stuff (London strategy level in national and international contexts) was within the context of Scandinavian, Dutch and German research.

Clearly the entire mental outlook is different, as well as the legal basis of cause and fault assumption, and this is reflected in the built environment in both its detail and its overall approach. So to a Dutchie it probably won't even have occurred to them that something might diminish drivers observational priming to be aware of cyclists or other non motorised road users, and also the problem wouldn't arise anyway due to the physical infrastructure.

So, once again: British exceptionalism. And people, trust me in this - British isn't always the best. In fact we increasingly resemble some patchily developed industrialising ex third world country, a bizarre melange of the technologically advanced and socially and infrastructurally dysfunctional, a curates egg, good in parts and rotten in others.

I was one of the few voices warning of this drift being inevitable part of the Thatcher/Reagan economic "reforms" when it became obvious what direction those were going to take in ca 77/78 ... prescient, eh? Monetarism and deregulation of currency exchange coupled with container shipping cost crashes didn't have to mean globalism took the form it did as an alternative to the failing capitalist model of Keynsianism - there were other capitalist routes that could have been taken. OK, so I was about the only person who "called" globalism in those days on the British "left" too, i.e. microprocessor computers were't primarily robot labour replacing devices to deal with domestic labour value issues "here" but COMMUNICATIONS devices enabling real time just in time manufacture with fine grained control at all levels "there" in cheap labour locations and container ships being the warehouses of the world. Everyone on the "left" political and labour movement and academics thought me mad saying this. Which illustrated how little grasp most British social theorists have of technological determinism in enabling possibilities and implications. But thats another debate - but one with fascinating consequences for Charlbury's future. "We" could be in an interesing physical location here if "we" were to assess it properly and aim towards self sustenance within a local economy and escape from the fantasies that most people consider "economic reality" in their lives.