John

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Source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/st0407.pdf

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I am enlightened with your comments, Tayle s, and agree fully. I would only appreciate more the symbols of wealth, such as electricity and central heating if they work when we are in need of them – such as you need electricity when you wake up 4 am to study !

I also agree very much with Chris’s suggestions !!!

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Benjon, the whole of my last post was about the importance of robust statistics. It is getting very difficult to hold a sensible conversation when you spend so much of your time criticising other people’s “lack of knowledge” while failing to show your own.

Of course I understand that greater exposure to danger will theoretically result in more accidents. My question was why you are making such a meal of SUVs with no proper evidence to back your case (the only evidence actually provided by myself, for which you haven’t said thanks), while apparently supporting a Mayor who ignores measures that would demonstrably reduce accidents. This led me to examine his motives, hence the reference to CO2. And it’s clear this is one big political game.

What I find most objectionable is the pleasure which people like Ken Livingstone seem to get from micro-managing our tastes and habits. This car goes free.. that one is £6, this one £8, that one £25… How much for a yellow one these days?

And now we have the prospect of a CO2 charge (is that on top of, or instead of, the congestion charge? – no one seems to know) with a jungle of rules, exemptions, discounts and penalties.

What goes on here? Drivers of bigger vehicles already pay a CO2 charge at the petrol pump. What, in the end, will it achieve? Will the massive upheaval, the running costs, the vehicle databases and the threatened lawsuits from car manufacturers, have been worth it? I very much doubt it.

If the congestion charge is what the tin says, a single flat rate with justifiable exemptions is a perfectly fair method. But of course that would neither create hundreds more pointless jobs nor satisfy Ken’s political ambitions.

As for the proposed 100% exemption for – take a breath – cars that produce less than 120g/km CO2 and meet the Euro 4 standard for air pollution emissions or produce no more than 120g/km of CO2 and appear on the PowerShift register (got that?), what incentive is there left for the introduction of truly non-polluting vehicles like electic cars?

I sometimes wonder if Ken and his ilk will be happy only when they see us driving around in a government approved, Trabant-style “people’s car”.

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So presumably, if SUVs could some how alter their design to be less dangerous your objections to them would simply melt away? Didn’t think so.

Incidentally, why has everyone started calling 4x4s SUVs? Could it be that their detractors are riding on the coat tails of the American anti-4×4 campaigns, who have turned SUV into a dirty acronym?

Perhaps there is something marginally more dangerous about the design of 4x4s, but being hit by a car is not going to be rendered harmless by banning high-fronted cars. As Paul pointed out, there are plenty of other vehicles – buses, trucks, vans, ambulances – that are high-fronted and equally lethal, if not more so. No one is in uproar about them.

Yes, but their size is functional, I hear you cry, whereas people CHOOSE to buy a 4×4. True enough, but the fact that no one NEEDS to drive a 4×4 is surely pointless. I don’t need to do a lot of things, but I find it life-enriching to do so – which is fine as long as those things don’t pose a serious and unacceptable danger to others. Putting spinning blades on the front of my car would be daft, but buying a car that just happens to be bigger than most is not reckless or selfish.

Increasingly, the accusation of selfishness is used as a stick to beat back anyone trying to better themselves. In fact, anyone whose life isn’t one long exercise in self-denial and self-flagellation can expect to feel the wrath of the failed and the resentful.

But never mind my distaste for risk-averse idiots, here’s what Chris Patience, head of technical policy at AA had to say about 4x4s: “There is no shared characteristic of 4x4s that make them any more or less aggressive towards pedestrians compared to a normal car.” Patience even claims that 4x4s might be less harmful to pedestrians when there is a collision. “Typically, pedestrians hit by cars wrap around the front of the car and their head hits the bonnet”, he says, and because 4x4s tend to have more space between the bonnet and the engine beneath it, they create something of a “crumple-zone for the head”.

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Ken Livingstone could be causing injuries and deaths by suppressing findings which could dramatically cut road casualties, Tory MPs are set to tell Parliament.

They say Ken Livingstone is to blame for failing to cut casualties because he has hidden research on the effects of letting motorcycles use bus lanes. A leaked report on a three-year pilot states collisions fell by 42% on routes where motorcycles were allowed to share the lanes.

… Livingstone fears opening more bus lanes to motorcycles will cost him the pro-cycling ‘green vote’ in May’s Mayoral election.

Roger Evans, Chair of the Transport Committee on the London Assembly, said: “I wish I could say this was shocking but sadly this is all too typical of the way the Mayor and his team operate.

“Any evidence that contradicts their pre-determined viewpoint is ignored or distorted. In this case, Transport for London decided that they did not want motorcyclists to use bus lanes so when this report showed that their doing so would reduce accidents, pedestrian casualties and collisions between motorcyclists and cyclists, they buried it and ordered that it be substantially rewritten.”

So here, apparently, we have Ken rubbishing a measure that would eliminate an identifiable and quantifiable number of injuries, at no cost or inconvenience to anyone, for political expediency.

http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/News/newsresults/mcn/2008/February-1-3/11-17/feb1208kenlivingstonecostinglives/?R=EPI-98535

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To criticise cars for the fact they are hard, fast-moving objects that occasionally cause death is disingeneous. You seem to think that their potential for causing injury cancels out all their benefits. If you only consider the cons, then even the most worthwhile enterprises will appear unattractive. Take kissing, for instance. If you only focused on its potential for spreading disease, then it would seem pointless. Eating is the same. If you only considered the choking/poisoning/obesity risks instead of its pleasurable and nutritional qualities, you’d probably starve to death.

Thankfully, most people also consider the benefits when deciding if something is worthwhile. Unless of course, they have had terrible first-hand experience of something, in which case their opinion is likely to be badly biased and, therefore, unreliable. Which is why your comment “Perhaps you could take your supercilious questions to a parent of a child injured by a SUV” is completely disingenuous.

Of course, most sane adults would concede that cars have considerable advantages. Yes, including being able to drive them at speed from time to time. But then you and your like-minded friends know this, which is why the ‘think of the children’ argument is always unfurled at times like these, since they are not legally automonous, and can be used as a stick to beat the people whose lives you disapprove of.

You and I know that cars could be made of marshmallow and creep along at 5 miles-per-hour and you still wouldn’t like them. To you, they are clearly ostentatious symbols of wealth and arrogance, with 4x4s the worst offenders of all. The contemporary belief that they despoil the planet helps justify your feelings, but the contempt would be there with or without it, I suspect.

There seems to be something about bold, unapologetic exhibitions of power or success that riles some people. Perhaps it’s just envy, or maybe they’re like some insecure child that shrivels inside when the big boys enter the room. Either way, it seems churlish for them to demonise the bold and successful. After all, they are the ones responsible for pushing the boundaries, inventing science, medicine, engineering (including your blesses bicycles), economics and space travel. As far as I can tell, all the meek have ever done is sit on the sidelines bitching. Oh yes, and they invented the Health and Safety Executive.

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http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/331/7520/787?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=off-road&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

SUV bonnets are higher than those of cars and this
results in a more severe primary impact on the critical
central body regions of the upper leg and pelvis

Accepted: In theory SUVs may lead to more serious injury in a pedestrian collision. But how big an issue is it in practice, and specifically in London?

I came to this report via the Which? website, which carries a taster… “Off-road cars pose deadly threat” … “All 4x4s should come with a health warning to alert buyers to the deadly threat these cars pose to pedestrians”…”The increased use of the lethal cars …”

This kind of language is absurd. Like so much safety-talk, it’s designed to whip up hysteria and create hate-objects out of normal activity. Lethal cars? Every car is potentially lethal. Getting out of bed can be lethal.

And note what Which? car expert David Evans says in the same article: “The Honda CR-V is proof that even off-roaders can be more pedestrian friendly, with the right design.”

My point is that Ken is not coming clean in his rush to ban, or at least punish, drivers of perfectly legal vehicles. First it was congestion; that has failed. Now it’s CO2 emissions, an argument based on dodgy science from a man who now wants to pepper London with CO2-belching rubbish and biomass incinerators.

The enemy in cities like London is not CO2 but diesel particulates, on which modern 4x4s have no bearing.

It nothing less than class war, and you know it. Having turned 4x4s into objects of hate and derision – playthings of the the better-off – he is now trading on the envy vote. The man is a worm. (No, I don’t drive a 4×4).

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And before I “take my supercilious questions to a parent of a child injured by a SUV (when they would have suffered only a glancing blow if the vehicle involved had been a car - remember that bit?” perhaps you would be kind enough to find me one.

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