Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars • Hacker News Board

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#41

Post by mytailorisrich » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:41 AM UTC

orwin wrote: post #30

mytailorisrich wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's very difficult to impossible to widen existing roads. But nothing prevent building wider new roads... which isn't done because priority is actually to save as much money as possible instead of delivering good, future-proof, infrastructure. You can't have fewer roads in a country whose population grows by hundreds of thousands every year...

You can. Paris have less roads (or rather has closed roads to cars) and upped the public transit system frequency in the area despite a small population augmentation. I know one person living in the area, the QOL is now way, way higher.

Comparing a very dense urban area with a whole country is nonsensical, not least because even in your example road access is still needed and still exists.

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#42

Post by gertrunde » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:43 AM UTC

yrro wrote: post #2

Car size should be regulated and a maximum should be enforced. Pavement parking (and other antisocial forms of parking) should also be banned. In the UK, local authorities are in charge of parking enforcement. In Oxford they largely don't bother: I see vehicles parked on yellow lines every day. I can't fathom why, this is an opportunity to raise revenue!

The article does discuss one of the main causes - safety.

If you require various crumple/impact zones for safety reasons, which are usually all about controlling the impact deceleration over a longer period of time, i.e. less g-force on the occupants etc, then the relevant car parts get larger. Doors get thicker, front and back get extended etc.

I suspect it would be quite difficult to walk back those changes, so it may be better to roll with them a little, and dictate better minimum sizes for car parking spaces. (Which might dovetail quite nicely with the increased weight of electric cars - which apparently causes issues with multi-storey parking structures which are designed around lighter cars, and may not be structurally safe if filled to capacity with vehicles 50-100% heavier than expected).

(Not counting the truly ludicrous outliers - like the mentioned EV Hummer and Rolls Royce etc).

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#43

Post by ben_w » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:43 AM UTC

For any problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

On that basis, what would be wrong with the combination of encouraging (electric?) motorbikes while also making changes to road furniture to improve motorbike safety?

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#44

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:44 AM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #23

marcus_holmes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building wider roads in the UK is going to be tricky. A lot of roads have no room to grow without knocking down the houses lining them. Maybe the UK needs less roads?

Of course it's very difficult to impossible to widen existing roads. But nothing prevent building wider new roads... which isn't done because priority is actually to save as much money as possible instead of delivering good, future-proof, infrastructure. You can't have fewer roads in a country whose population grows by hundreds of thousands every year...

Building roads just increases congestion through induced demand.

Population growth means that we need to get more people using active travel (which would also save the NHS a huge amount of money) and have effective public transport. To get more people using active travel, we need some decent cycle/scooter infrastructure, so we should be narrowing roads for the motor traffic. Cycle infrastructure would increase the throughput of the road as cyclists don't usually suffer from congestion.

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#45

Post by RetroTechie » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:45 AM UTC

bowsamic wrote: post #7

Deleted for personal safety reasons.

Humanity is putting too many cars on the road. And average car has too big an environmental footprint. And:

“We don’t need electric windows. In the 1970s, face-level vents were introduced, so the reason for having windows has largely gone away. And why do we need motor-powered seats? Most people don’t move their seat. All these creature comforts that we hardly ever use add weight.”

Go back to essentials, and you can shed a looott of weight (and size, too. Besides cost & environmental footprint).

That's the heart of the problem. The phenomenon described in the article is just one of many symptoms of this. And we (or our governments) are not addressing the root problem as strongly as needed.

Expect things to get worse before they get better.

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#46

Post by eptcyka » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

monooso wrote: post #27

> Car designer Chris Longmore... blames safety legislation for the dramatic increase in size since the 1990s. This doesn't stand up to scrutiny. For example, the 2022 Toyota Aygo X has a 4 star NCAP safety rating (out of a possible 5) [1], and is about the same size as the original 1970s VW Golf [2]. [1] https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/Toyota/Aygo%20X/46259 [2] https://www.automobiledimension.com/model/toyota/ayg…

Cars are crash tested against one-another, not against a benchmark car. This means that the tiny Aygo-X was crash tested with another Aygo-X, not with a Ford "danger" Ranger or a Range Rover or a Juke.

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#47

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

vkoskiv wrote: post #10

AFAIK in many countries there is also the double whammy of heavy electric cars eroding the roadways a lot more, but not paying for the increased maintenance costs with petrol tax.

In the UK, road maintenance is paid for by income tax, though reduced fuel duty will affect public finances. However, fuel duty has been frozen for a number of years, so it doesn't look like the Tories want to stop people sitting in cars.

The road damage from EVs hardly matters compared to HGVs, buses and the biggest vehicles. Road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, so cars aren't responsible for most of it. This can be verified by looking at bus stops and invariably the road surface is damaged by the bus stopping and starting there. A similar effect can be seen at traffic lights.

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#48

Post by austinjp » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

moomin wrote: post #36

yrro wrote: post #2

Car size should be regulated and a maximum should be enforced. Pavement parking (and other antisocial forms of parking) should also be banned. In the UK, local authorities are in charge of parking enforcement. In Oxford they largely don't bother: I see vehicles parked on yellow lines every day. I can't fathom why, this is an opportunity to raise revenue!

Seems a good time to drag up this ad that demonstrated how much space cars take up again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYn8aQIpNH4

Wow, I watched that with the sound off and was surprised it's actually a car manufacturer's ad. What a misfire. In turn, that reminded me of this legendary ad misfire:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strand_(cigarette)#Marketing

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#49

Post by DrScientist » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:49 AM UTC

I think one factor in the gradual increase in car size is the problem of visibility.

A lot of new large cars are not only large ( taller and wider ), but have a tendency to have privacy type glass. This means if you are in a traditionally sized car behind you can't see much of the road ahead.

Driving in a busy city, the lack of visibility of what's happening beyond the car ahead is very disconcerting.

Solution? Get a bigger car yourself, with a higher driving position.

Re: Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars

#50

Post by mihaaly » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 9:51 AM UTC

Britain's road were inadequate for the ammount of cars pushed into it to begin with. A nation that tries to rationalize napkin sized 'gardens' and two level homes as 'proper' on the basis of 'our island has limited space' pours ever increasing ammount of cars into this limited space, into the medieval sized road network and infrastructure and prioritize personal car use almost everywhere (with relatively negligible exception, most are in London) if it was the prairie of the america's, has priority over public transport and to a good degree pedestrians too (traffic lights favour cars), incentivising personal car use where it has admittably no proper environment! Car parks are erected in the very center of the cities attracting cars, cars occupy one lane of the two lanes available in almost every town's main street and all residential streets alowing single car width for two way traffic requiring patiece and courtious driving style not to grind traffic to a halt but more like to crawling speed (driving time in most regions is pathetic) while the few incentive with P+R and partial separation of public transport is mixed together with car lanes bringing it to halt and making inattractive in the times it was supposed to help the most (high traffic periods). High portion of single lane roads, houses built to the very edge of the road, kerbs in rural area roads, stone or bush fences at the vertical of your rear view mirror to protect pastures and meadows and basically any inch of private property from public access roads making it impossible to improve. Cars were poured into this inadequate situation without any considerable effort to develope proper and sustainable alternatives for many many many decades, and into the forseeable future. All aggravetad by the insufficient funds allocated to the maintainance of the roads so the road surfaces are in increasingly terrible state already, half or whole decades passing by until simple road faults fixed.

It is not the SUVs and EVs that caused this problem but decades of ignorance towards building a suitable and proper system that fits the conditions of Britain.