On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 01:56:59PM +0000, Pigeon wrote: > Trouble is British cities, at least, seem to be playing catchup with > American ones. Everything is designed on the assumption that everyone > has a car and will use it for everything. New shopping centres are > built outside the town, so it's a long way there and you have to > drive. And the Government is quite happy to subsidise private > transport to the hilt (expenditure on roads >> revenue from road and > fuel tax) but moans like buggery about subsidising public transport. Start talking to your local councils and showing them the biggest American planning failures, like Atlanta, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, New York... It's not like y'all have the space to waste like America does for the most part. > and you haven't got a car, you're buggered. The fact that everybody > hates the place hasn't stopped lots of other towns building > Milton-Keynes-esque urbomas around the outside. Hopefully the Brits stick to thier guns about thier dislike of difficult to navigate cities and you'll see Milton-Keynes and suburban hells dying off before long. > much quicker and much less frustrating to ride a bicycle. The trouble > here is (a) you get wet and So get some rain gear. Umbrellas are an eye-level safety hazard, not rain gear, don't let anybody trick you into thinking otherwise. > (b) most car drivers think that the normal > physical rules about two objects not being able to occupy the same > space at the same time cease to apply when the two objects concerned > are a car and a cyclist. I used to have that problem with Portland cabbies. Then someone chucked a lit roadflare through an open taxi window when one got too close. Cabbies started giving bikes space after that. Might work for you if you can find someone insane enough to go riding around with a lit roadflare... > drive, you have to have a car, even if you can't afford it. People > think it's very strange when I turn up to fix their TV with my tools > strapped to the back of my bike. Here, with me, it's more like, "Dude, you ride a bike all night for work?" "No, my post is watching some doors from behind a desk." I just use it as a traffic avoidance device. > A bicycle is an ideal accompaniment to a train journey as it provides > a great solution to the problem of the station at the other end being > some distance from where you want to be. Yeah. They're adding bike racks to the trains in Portland. I hate the racks, since there isn't ever a seat next to the rack and the handicapped spaces don't go handicapped/elderly -> Bicycle -> Everyone else on order of priority on those trains. That and I don't like lifting my bike to hang from a hook on the ceiling. They really need to bring back the permit system so people too dumb to read a sign telling you where to put your bike are incapable of doing so legally again. (Even worse are people who take strollers onto public transit, despite multiple large, easy to read signs that read "Strollers prohibited, strollers must be folded before boarding." Bus drivers are good about making people do this and it's not really a problem on the busses. The trains, though, almost every day you spot at least one parent stupid enough, that in a perfect world, would not be allowed to procreate, and thier child moved into protective custody. Why anybody thinks taking a stroller with kid in it onto a crowded commuter train instead of making the kid walk or wearing a baby pack is beyond me, when it's to the benefit of everyone involved if they ditch the fscking stroller. These seem to be the same group of idiots that ignore thier screaming child to talk on thier cell phone. Like anybody wants to listen to either during evening rush hour. > The American writer Bill Bryson comments that he cannot understand the > British obsession with cars given that there is not a single aspect of > driving in Britain that has anything pleasurable about it. I must say > I rather agree with him. I do remember it being obscenely difficult to get around there by car and bike. The one thing that *really* messes with me is making a right turn there. Driving like there's a roundabout in the intersection when there isn't seems like a great way to cause head-on collisions on a regular basis... -- .''`. Baloo <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> : :' : proud Debian admin and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system
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