Town Council traffic topic

Tue 16 Nov 2021, 20:01

Have people ever been to the Netherlands? 

There it is the very general rule that "FIETSERS <excepted>" signs were everywhere on almost every one-way street unless obviously suicidal to be anything but manifestly having to be one-way. 

The "problem" of meeting fiets coming the "wrong way" simply DOES NOT EXIST. When you drive there it's the expected norm. 

Plus I believe Dutch law puts the onus on the MOTOR-VEHICLE driver to explain how they managed to hit a cyclist or pedestrian, not the perverted English law "assumption" that it is the responsibility of the "victim" to explain how they didn't manage to avoid the loaded weapon .. err 2 tonnes of moving moving metal ... wielded by the safely-armoured assailant ^^^^^^^^^ hapless driver assumed innocent until etc. 

This reversal to a much more logical balance of responsibility and the outcome of abrupt alignment of temporal-spatial coordinates has a wondrous effect upon the conduct of those wielding the weapon ^^^^^^ motorised mobile mass of metal. 

If we don't want our near descendants holding off massed m/billions of environmental refugees at gunpoint from the sea walls of our rapidly shrinking-from-above-the-rising-waves of the drowned archipelagos of the remaining hilltops ... Perhaps we should just get used to the idea of cyclists coming the "wrong way" along streets (particularly when the routes are clearly such an obvious short connection between destinations and showing an acute lack of awareness of comparative in/convenience. 

We know that energy consuming machinery is such a major implement of our collective mass species/biocidal efforts that "right" clearly resides on one side. As I said, there, The Law takes sides. And rightly so.

[Someone who speaks Nederlands could remind us of the word on those signs which I have forgotten now, it being many decades since was regularly cycling/entraining all around the Randstadt towns and elsewhere in W Europe when an Environment and Employment/Trade Unions campaigner/lobbyist took me all over, often with my trusty English Touring bike - said looking quite out of place amidst all the laid-back Gazelles along the gracht. And I did quite a bit of vehicle driving, East - before and after The Wall - and West Europe. So saw it from both sides.]