School runs, UK vs US

This is a 2003 photo of a 14 month child about to be towed four miles to kindergarten.

This is Corvallis, Oregon, a small US town where apart from a university there is ~fuck all. As a way of getting the child to school, the roads are quiet enough that it's much less stressful than in Bristol. Herel, you can never be sure someone has seen that trailer before they cut you up at a roundabout. Corvallis? It only has one roundabout and you can avoid it with ease.

You do not need to worry about the safety of your child when getting them to school by bike in a town like this.

Indeed, once they are a teenager you don't need to worry much about them on the back roads, unlike near Bristol, where outside town, "quiet" roads like Beggar's Bush Lane are viewed as opportunities of drivers to sprint. In Oregon, you can send your child ahead and not worry.

In contrast, in Bristol, you do worry about that school run.

You want to be in front of the child, to get the cars to stop at the roundabout. But also at the back, in case the threat comes from that direction. It's worse when they decide to cycle to school on their own, as worry about their journeys. It's a relief when they decide to start walking with their mates instead.

But journey to school and back is the only bit of their day you need to worry about.

In contrast, in the US, you worry about the safety of your child in the school. That town where nothing happened was 50 miles from Springfield, OR, where in 1998 one of the high school shootings now considered "small" took place. And its 110 miles north of Umpqua Community College where in 2015 someone killed ten staff and students.

In those sleepy middle-class US surburbs and towns, you cannot trust your children to be safe, because all it takes is one unstable person and a gun and their school ends up in the list of "US school killings"

Britain: we've had that tragedy in Dunblane: fix: no more handguns. Indeed, we have even allowed automatic rifles until an afternoon in Hungerford, thirty-one years ago.

Yet too many people in the US are unable to accept that such solutions "no guns" work, and all they are left with is trying to escalate it. Would you feel safer at school knowing all the teachers were armed? Not really.

Maybe, just maybe, this time, with the anger and voice of the children themselves, things may change.

#NeverAgain

VW TDi rigging: —but why?

The VW TDi rigging story is pretty serious; it's the third big automotive software disaster —and we haven't even covered disasters #1 and #2 yet.

Which are, for reference:

1. Toyota's dev team being utterly incapable of writing software in accordance with modern software development practices  —with the failing accelerators being only one of the consequences of this. None of those people should ever be allowed to write code for anything more safety critical than a flash-based web advert ever again.
2. Jeep's "Jeep Cherokee online edition", feature, where every model shipped in 2015 had a modem scannable on the network, an 0wnable infotainment console and an engine (on the same single network), whose network stack never once questioned why the mp3 player was sending messages to the transmission to turn itself off. Those engineers shouldn't be allowed to code for anything directly or indirectly attached to the Internet —which, in modern society, means they can't even code a light bulb any more (do watch that entire video for terrifyingly accurate summary of the current infosec world).
3. VW's US TDi models detecting when they are pushed through their emissions control exam and so not being polluting for the hour or so it takes. (this would be good for MoTs actually; it would go down well with our business plan to rent VW wingmirrors for MoT tests)

Now, one of our team members does own an (ageing) VW TDi barge, and while it is frugal —even at 20 mph, we add—, it has some limitations, specifically it is a lot less responsive than the VW Passat 1.8T "wagon" which used live in the double garage up in the Pacific North West. That car had a ski box in the roof, Z-chain snow chains in the back and the ability to make it from that garage over the mountains and into in he car park of the ski resort in 2h30, —all for less than $20 of "gasoline".

Because that is the surprising thing about the US adoption of turbo-diesels: from an EU perspective, the US give away free fuel to their citizens.

Being evidence driven, here is our evidence, a receipt from ten-days into the Bristol-Traffic-strategic-meetup-with-the bay area self-driving-car/police state manufacturers. Driving, for reference a VW Jetta 2.0 16v petrol engine with automatic transmission rented for $250/week.

This is for seven days worth of commuting across mountain view, 30 miles a day,  plus the weekend leisure activities silicon valley is famous for (going to shopping malls and buying new apple hardware in the belief it will make your life more satisfying).

Assuming 150 miles over the weekend plus the commute, 30x7 + 150 = 360 miles.
The receipt is for ~13 US gallons, 27 mpg. In UK Gallons, that's 32.7 mpg. Not bad.

Now look at the total cost, $44.32 —that's £28.63. For 11 UK gallons. Which is £2.65/gallon —or, more tangibly, 58 pence a litre.

58 pence/litre? And people think the fuel economy of that car was so bad that they had to switch to a TDi model with higher economy. That is, they felt "gas" was so expensive that they had to pay a premium for an engine with more cabin noise, bounces up and down more when you are trying to text at traffic lights and whose overtaking ability, once you consider the gear-drop and turbocharger spinup will only take place once you actually hit the accelerate pedal, isn't actually that good. In contrast, a petrol Jetta is, compared to a UK petrol-engined Golf, half the price per mile and equally nimble, albeit somewhat crippled by its saloon-car design preventing it being so good for throwing things in the back or for parking in smaller spaces. You would have to be doing a lot of long-distance driving to actually justify swapping the petrol engine for the diesel turbine.

That's what VW managed to pull off with their software: not the rigging of the emissions —but the convincing of the US customer that they'd actually have a better time in a Turbo Diesel.

Traffic Cameras: they don't shoot black americans

One of the recurrent themes in the UK press, with the Daily Mail-esque "Speed Cameras steal from motorists" story also recurring in the US,

Usually there are people quoted demanding instead real police, in real police cars, catching people "really" breaking traffic laws —by which presumably they mean "people other than themselves"

What doesn't get covered, though is how scary it is to be stopped by the US police compared to those in the UK. In the UK you get pulled over with some opening gambit like "is this your car, sir?", or "how much have you had to drink this evening?".

In contrast, in the US the lights go on so bright, with such a loud siren that you look up from your phone with a jerk, to see the police car filling your mirror and pull over in fright. Only here, the police officer (almost invariably a white man) walks over with their hand near their gun, ask you to wind down the window and then keep your hands visible, all the while standing a bit behind the door so that you are in front of them and its easier for them to shoot you than vice versa.



It is frightening, and you have to be so careful not do to anything not to make them overreact, and reach for the gun. And that's just as a white adult male in a nice car in a nice part of the US.

Now imagine you are an 18 year old black american being stopped at night. You know the police have a track record of shooting black americans even when pulled over for "minor traffic misdemeanours".  This is a country where failing to indicate as you change lanes has a death penalty.

You are going to be scared whenever you get pulled over, if you look at the statistics from places like Ferguson, you will be pulled over a lot more than white americans, and the is a small but tangible risk of you not getting out the stop alive.

In contrast

1. Traffic cameras don't pick on drivers because of their skin colour or age/state of vehicle.
2. Traffic cameras don't shoot black americans. Or any american, to come to it.

While in suburban americans may scream about unjust and unfair traffic cameras, you might find some locals with different opinions. Ask black americans kids whether they'd prefer being stopped by the police with a risk of being shot or having traffic violation fines sent in the post —you may find more support for the cameras. Now ask their parent, those parents who worry about their children going out for drives at night in the US, and they may give a very different answer.

Traffic Cameras: they don't shoot anyone

The cycling police state: first they came for themselves

Cycling is apparently, "the new golf" for the silicon valley people -the cyclists building the new surveillance state.

They can pop out on a weekend and climb the Santa Cruz Mountains

In the distance, the airship hangars of Moffet Field, which we covered earlier.

We pointed out that the NSA could easily run a fibre cable under the cycle path to the Googleplex. We broke that news two weeks before the "legacy" printed press. Nobody can accuse us of being a spoof now.

What do these police-staters talk about? Their plans for watching everybody. But who do they start with? The drivers? The pedestrians? No, they come for themselves, with the Strava application running on their phones, measuring their time up Old La Honda.



With their phones they can measure their speed, compare it with others, and give them their performance on a ride

 
Which is where we have some bad news for this particular tax-dodger. 2400 of 7500 puts them only just inside the top 1/3 of climbers, which isn’t very good, not for someone near the top of ninetree hill. And that heart-rate numbers makes it clear they were suffering all the way up, heart rate jittering between 170 and 184.Which tells us that they are under fit, getting old and losing peak heart rate, and possibly overfond of consuming beer at those establishments at the top of Ninetree Hill, such as the Hillgrove.

No, this person wasn’t up to having business deal conversations with anyone else, not in aerobic deficit for half an hour. If cycling is the new golf, this person isn’t a good golfer.

Which is information that Strava now knows. In fact, it will know

• who they ride with.
• what their fitness levels are.
• whether they are Soft Southern Jessies who don’t cycle in the rain.
• what their commuting schedule and route is
• what their leisure hours are
• what health issues they may have

This is valuable information -and yet they are giving it away for graphs of how fit they think they are.

For everyone worried about the cyclists building a surveillance state, know this: they will practise on themselves first until they have it right

The cyclists are building a surveillance state: a real one

We have just discovered Richard Wellings, a comedian who pretends to be part of a think tank, IEA.

This is funny: he's running a spoof think tank, a bit like The Thick of It without the swearing. More like the coalition side of the series, where they all go on some off-site meeting and compete on daftest ideas: "lets bill poor people for having spare rooms!", or "let's make it legal to run over pensioners", going round this in circles until someone says something like "let's stop building a nuclear submarine fleet for ICBM delivery as the cold war ended in 1989" and then there's one of those silences round the table as the person who said it looks slighly embarrassed and someone else has to step in .

Anyway, This Richard -is he a new Ali G? The Borat of Politics? - is trying to pretend that there is a mass lobby of cyclists secretly trying to build a mass surveillance state?

Look at this tweet:

Massive increase in surveillance and regulation advocated by cycling lobby: http://richardwellings.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/more-regulation-more-surveillance-and-more-enforcement-the-policies-cycling-groups-plan-to-impose-on-other-road-users

See? Imagining the cycling campaigners, who can't even stop their councils painting over bike lanes, building a police state? Clearly a spoof.

Because if he wasn't a spoof character, if he really wanted to show where the cyclists were building mass surveillance infrastructure, he'd look away from London and over to Silicon Valley, to Mountain view -a city that goes so far as to say "bicycle friendly" by the side of its wide and unblocked cycle lanes




Looking on the Stevens Creek cycle path, we can a small child pedalling on their own, helmetless.



That's bad enough, but it's not what we are talking about -we are looking at the buildings either side of it.

What is that set of buildings on the right?

It's The Googleplex, the mountain view site that hosts the core engineering teams.

What does the Googleplex offer its staff to get around? Hoverboards? Autonomous Cars? No: bicycles. Shared bicycles. Sharing capital items is clearly communism, sharing bicycles is an attempt to destroy society.



Now look in the other direction, to the eastern edge of mountain view. Strange looking buildings going off into the distance.



This is Moffett Field -a military, government science and private airfield, hosting, amongst other things

1. NASA Ames research center: the buildings to the right are wind tunnels for testing rockets, be they designed to go into orbit or merely fly over the north pole to deliver their uranium payloads.
2. The 7th Psychological Operations Group: a psychological warfare unit from the Vietnam War era to keep the country compliant.
3. Larry and Sergey's Google jets: accessible via the bike path or a 20 minute drive.
4. Until recently, the Sunnyvale Blue Cube, believed to be downlink and processing point for all the US government spy satellites.
5. The California National Guard keep trucks and fly planes & helicopters in and out
6. Until the mid 1990s: Orion planes used to hunt for nuclear submarines in the Pacific

This is the Military Industrial Complex viewed from a single path. One side: the engineers building the systems to store all our personal emails. The other: the NSA, the US army, NASA and its various "secret" space shuttle projects, plus psychological warfare groups.

A short distance away from each other: close enough that you could hook up direct fibre optical links from the NSA buildings to Google -the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted access to the emails.

And what is not so much dividing the area as uniting it, as joining the two together?

That's right: a bike path.

These are the cyclists building a mass surveillance state, and your spoof think-of-it think-tank minion is claiming that its the UK cycling campaigns, well, you're clearly out of your technical depth.

Come up with some that is vaguely realistic and so can entertain us, like, say, having Badgers move the Goalposts or something

At the junction of Google and Ampitheater

Over in Waltham Forest, Freewheeler has been expressing some concerns about google.

We too have issues, which, during the teams visit to our strategic partners in California, also cause us to question our long term relationship with them.

Ampitheater Parkway. Like the Bristol M32 Parkway except less congested, and there's a bike lane in the hard shoulder for pickups to sideswipe. All is well.

Ahead, the centre of Google-land, with a little "google maps" pin to show you where the Google maps team is based. All is well.

But what's this we see from our SUV?

That's right: it's a Google employee, on a Google staff bicycle, cycling between offices, while holding a phone.

This is Google, not just encouraging their employees to ride bicycles, but to check their email as they do it. And they aren't even wearing a helmet!

It is unacceptable, and concerns us deeply. Is Google really on our side. We know Microsoft are, because they gave the internet the Comic Sans font, the official font of the Association of British Drivers, Drivers Protest and the like. But Google? By encouraging such reckless behaviour by their staffers, we now have doubts.

Threat #2, integration between the university and the town

Stanford University is on one side of El Camino Real, the town Palo Alto on the other. There is a road over El Camino, providing a safe way to walk or cycle over. But does it make people using such substandard transport options welcome?

Thankfully no.

There's an under-illuminated path for cyclists and pedestrians to share, creating fantastic conflict. If the US had the Daily Mail, this would be the kind of place they'd be using in their complaints.

Ignoring the four lanes of road alongside it.

This is wonderfully reminiscent of the Evening Post underpass, which exists to remind people cycling and walking into the city that they are not welcome. It's like being home again.

Are bicycles a threat to the US lifestyle

Recent studies say that Stanford University is the most bicycle friendly university in the US. We popped over to see if this was a serious risk to the US lifestyle, and hence the economic wellbeing of the entire US.

First, the bad news: there are adverts praising carpooling (organised car ride sharing), trains and cycling, with some happy people on the posters.

The good news: large 4x4s and SUVs block the posters from the gaze of other motorists.

Nothing to worry about at this, the junction of Stanford University (on the right) and El Camino Real, "the royal road"

The Flintstone House

There are some pretty weird buildings in St Werburgh's, but none of them have a decent view of a freeway, the way The Flintstone house does in California

This is why the house has an entry on wikipedia, but the odd houses in St Werburgh's don't: nobody sees them.

Away doing important things

In case people are wondering why the posting rate of this site has dropped, it is that team is off over easter doing Important Things with Important People. Just to make it clear, those readers who walk or cycle around Bristol or other cities: you are not important.

In our trip to the US, we have been with really important people, in a country where pedestrians know there place

Like here, where the crossing lights on the four lane road are taped over to stop people getting the mistaken idea that it is safe to cross. We look forward to this idea being adopted in the UK.

In the meantime, we shall have some photos covering how we, the important people, are important. We shall also consider whether cycling is becoming as much a threat in the US as the press makes out.

Well, there goes Chrysler

I owned a Dodge minivan for a year. That was in the US, at a time when fuel was $1.60/U.S. Gallon, about 30p/Litre, so with a vehicle that did 27 mpg long-haul, was much cheaper than running a small car was or is in the UK.

It was convenient for those long journeys. Automatic 4 speed engine, cruise control, oodles of luggage room in the vast back. And in a country with big drive-in/reverse-out parking bays everywhere, the fact there was no rear window visibility was fairly unimportant.

However, I don't miss it, and I am not surprised by Chrysler's departure.

• It was a barge, refused to corner, and had a stopping distance measured in kilometres. Why? Too much metal.
• It was mindnumbingly cheesy inside. Want pockets in the door to keep things? That would be in the premium model. For something so big, it was very inefficient in its space usage. Compare with EU vehicles like the Renault Megane, that has pockets in its pockets.
• Depreciated really badly over that year. Even though it was cheap to buy second hand, it was hard to sell later on, which made the cost of ownership pretty harsh.
  

One of the weird things about it was that one of its "features" was, apparently, the ability to detect you'd been driving for 10 minutes with the indicator on, and apparently the car would beep loudly to tell you this. This says a lot about their target market: people who drive round with the indicator on.

Even in the US, this vehicle sucked. Which is why Chrysler have filed for Chapter 11 Bankrupcy today. Their target market abandoned the minivan the myth of the SUV, the belief that you were safer in a prone-to-flipping 4x4 truck-like monster, and then, come the 2007-2008 oil and financial problems, stopped buying cars altogether. Oops.

Some people think this site is anti-car, and that we don't like car drivers. That's up to the individual contributors,. When I see someone driving a Dodge/Chrysler minivan round Bristol, I don't just think "oh look, these people are bravely trying to fit a vehicle designed for US suburbs around a city and streets that is way out of its design specification." No, I feel sorry for them. Because they have to drive round in a Dodge Caravan.

[Photo: Hell's Canyon, between Oregon and Idaho]

Redrum. Redrum. Redrum.

There are big problems in the US regarding short-term funding of General Motors and Chrysler, and, to a lesser extent, Ford. Having seen the size of the cheque the governments have written to keep the financial system alive, the CEOs each flew down from Detroit to Washington D.C on their own personal jets, then demanded $25 Billion to keep themselves alive for a year, where they believed all their problems would be solved. Hmm.

This is a photo of a place made famous by a Stanley Kubrick-directed Stephen King film: the Shining. The one where the caretaker is persuaded by the ghosts of the hotel that all is problems will be solved if he cuts his family into little bits and then kills himself, because, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Although the interior is completely different. and there is no room 237 to stay in, its a lovely place to visit; a fantastic climb with a great view of Oregon's Mout Hood behind the building, Mount Hood Lodge. Here though, are how most of the visitors have got there: in cars.

The closest three cars are VW Jettas of different eras: golfs with their luggage removed. Nimble and comfortable. Everything else in the parking lot looks like US product or Japanese toys made to compete: SUVs, Minivans and Pickups. All of which operate on a simple assumption: fuel costs $1.60 a gallon or less. The big three manufacturers had a business model selling overweight truck-based designs with an overweight, under-technological V6 or V8 engine to pull it around, the engine, automatic gearbox and all-wheel transmission adding to the weight and inefficient engine, resulting in SUVs and pickups where doing 20mpg is considered economical; 12-14 MPG bad. The white SUV poking out, a GM Chevy Suburban, probably did 12mpg.

This is the root problem. Fuel inefficiencies and the cost of use. The car manufacturers may blame the credit crunch for killing financed sales (including leasing), but what caused the credit crunch? The collapse of the sub-prime market. And what triggered that? the end of the US boom. And what caused that? Some people (like The Oil Drum) argue that the cost of fuel and hence the cost of driving round the US triggered it. A system that worked at $1.50/gallon struggled at $3/gallon and collapsed at $4/Gallon

Imagine, then if the US had, instead of embracing fuel-inefficient SUVs, had embraced smaller EU-style cars. Cars and "wagons" where a 2.0L engine would be considered big, have a turbocharger on it to make it fun, and deliver a mileage of 35-40 mpg (US gallons here; 4 Litres/gallon). The burn rate of the fleet would be half what it is, so even if the cost of fuel was still above $4/Gallon, it would be affordable. And if the petrol demand of the US fleet was half of what it would be, well, cost of fuel would have been lower even before the recession kicked in. We'd still be vulnerable to the incompetent risk management of the banks, obviously, but maybe things would have been better.

Anyway, it's moot. The US embraced 10-14 mpg toys as what real men drove, and we are all stuffed now. Regardless of whether they get their money or not, the CEOs will be running round the factories like Jack Nicholson with his blood-coated knife, desperately trying to do what it takes to stay in the game. Everything except give up their planes, and the SUVs, of course.

From IMDb:
Delbert Grady: [referring to Jack murdering his wife and son] Mr. Torrance, I see you can hardly have taken care of the business we discussed.
Jack Torrance: No need to rub it in, Mr. Grady.

Cycling rule enforcement in NY

As part of the coverage of cycling-city-ideas-from-abroad, here's footage of the New York Police enforcing traffic laws, which apparently includes a requirement to have a bell. Clearly lacking a bell is a punishable offence.

Bristol cyclists do not yet receive such treatment, which must upset some of the people who write letters to the Evening Post on a regular basis. Incidentally, this shows the merits of wearing a helmet. (Source: Gothamist. Very divided comments).
Updated: the New York Times has more detail. Apparently the cyclist was arrested for his part in the incident -for "attempted assault, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest".