It's funny how air quality has improved both visibly and measurably during the UK's lockdown, and yet the proposals for limiting car traffic and encouraging cycling through segregated safer paths within London are always met with howls of derision.
> “It is possible that this was partially due to reduced emissions, but meteorology likely played a much larger role.”
Here in OC over the past couple weeks the haze has returned, while traffic is only slightly up.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/coronavi...
Am I interpreting it wrong?
> In the graphs below, the blue bars show the average level of pollution from late February through to late March, taken from 2015 and 2019. The red bars show the average level of pollution between the same dates this year.
You can easily see that PM2.5 has roughly halved in London.
[1] https://ncas.ac.uk/en/18-news/3057-air-pollution-falling-acr...
You honestly don't understand why?
Lol let me break it down for you, but it isn't "the rich" who need cars to drive to the city center. It's the low/lower middle class workers who can't afford to live in the city center but still need to get to work to pay their modest apartment in the outskirts of the city.
And by the way, those who can afford the luxury of living so close to their job that they can just walk or cycle to work in the city center are not "the poor" either.
Those things called the trains connect only consolidated urban centers where, due to their convenience and higher quality of living driving up demand, the cost of living is considerably higher.
If you cannot afford to live in one of those places, the only options on the table is a) get a car and endure the obstacle course packed with life-degrading inconveniences to actually hold a decent job, or b) waste even more scarce time of your waking life driving to other mass transit services.
So your wage is the same whether you drive to work or drive to a bus or train stop. Great. But public transportation adds easily over 20 minutes each trip to your commute. But that's not a problem, innit? I mean, poor people don't need to spend time with their kids and loved ones. What really matters is if a conceited hipster can ride is bike for 10min eah day to get to work and gloat about how much he is woke and is saving the environment, right? And heavens forbid if that hipster is inconvenienced by having to ride his bicycle on a public road, because that's so unfair to him to the point that it must be a conspiracy by The Man to keep him down.
Putting more cars in increases pollution, and makes it harder to walk and cycle, and reduces the number of people who can safely move around the city.
Ultimately if keep adding cars you end up with a situation where cars are the only viable method of moving around the city, and of all the options available to us it’s objectively the worse.
Boosting walking and cycling in the centre creates extra capacity on public transport, and non-intuitively creates extra space for people driving into the city as locals won’t be occupying space on the roads.
Where I’m living in London household car ownership is about 30%, and the roads already struggle. It’s not like we can build more roads (which would just increase traffic), there’s no physical space to put the damn things in. To top it all off the population is still increasing.
So either we can encourage people to use alternative forms of transport, and we build the infrastructure to support it like bike lanes, or what? We just sit in traffic for the rest of our lives?
What’s you’re solution to a growing population and in a fixed space?
This thread is about London, which has extensive train, bus and underground systems throughout. Driving into London for work is a fool's game.
It also has tiny roads, and almost no parking capacity. Parking capacity is so low that it’s not unusual for people to drive to the outer reaches of the public transport system, park up and then take the tube for another 40mins into the centre.
What sort of data would convince you this statement is true or false? As expected, car ownership rate increases with income [1,2]. But not sure if this is the right thing to look at. The first reference also says that only 50% of the poorest people (income<25K and ~50% of population) own cars even if they have children, but 85%+ of higher incomes own cars, irrespective of whether they have children.
[1] http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...