The Dutch are stopping accidents with this one weird trick

If you're a car driver, situational awareness shouldn't end when you turn off the ignition key. Between 2011 and 2015, carelessly-opened car doors killed eight people and reportedly injured 3,108, according to UK government figures. Fortunately, you can be part of the solution, if you just do this:

...[Cycling UK is] urging ministers to have the "Dutch reach" taught in driving tests. This manoeuvre involves the driver or passenger on the right-hand side of the car opening the door with the left hand - forcing them to turn and see if anyone's approaching.

It's a mandatory part of Dutch driving tests. 

It's simple, it works, and I can't imagine why anyone would object to making this tiny modification to their car door-opening behaviour.

Of course, there's bound to be some aggrieved motorist out there who'll go off on some mad rant about how he's* used his other hand all his life without dooring a cyclist, how it's always cyclists who are a menace to all law-abiding road users and how we wouldn't need this latest example of health and safety gone mad if all other road users except him weren't idiots.

It shouldn't need pointing out that this sort of whingeing is nonsense, but it probably does. Part of the problem is the tribal "us and them" mentality which unites some motorists in their hatred of cyclists (and vice versa). The thing is, you can always find individual examples of somebody else on the road behaving badly, including cyclists - the recent case of the wanton and furious cycle killer, Charlie Alliston, comes to mind.

The Alliston case, in turn, generated this headline in Cycling Weekly - "The media coverage of the Charlie Alliston case should be disturbing for cyclists everywhere", as if criticism of one person's selfish irresponsibility needs to be toned down, lest it reflect badly on the rest of the cycling tribe.

The thing is, like a lot of people, I'm sometimes a pedestrian, sometimes a motorist, sometimes a cyclist, sometimes a public transport user. I am large, I contain multitudes. None of these identities is a problem if I behave with care and consideration. Any of them might be if I don't.

The differences between the various forms of transport shouldn't be tribal. The only distinction which matters is an ascending hierarchy of responsibility, related to how much damage your chosen form of transport could do. An individual cyclist might be as careless as an individual motorist, but it seems beyond obvious to me that the motorist's carelessness is a bigger problem, because you can do more damage with a motor vehicle - there's a reason why there have been several terrorists attacks involving motor vehicles being deliberately driven into crowds, but none involving disaffected misfits deliberately trying to create mass carnage with a push bike.




*It might be a she, but I'll bet folding money that it will be a he.

Are we nearly there yet?

Back in 2010, I spotted a hybrid human/electric-powered vehicle called the "Twike" in the wild and was intrigued enough to look up the specs. I concluded that it wasn't a practical or economic proposition for budget motorists like me and suggested that it made more sense for cash-squeezed road-users to use an actual bike for local journeys and a fuel-efficient car/public transport for journeys that were longer, or involved moving family, friends, or useful amounts of stuff around.

I had an irritated response from a Twike enthusiast, who said:

Once you study the impact of what the true cost of oil is, you quickly realize that NOT driving electric is simply unaffordable and unsustainable...

 I have commuted to work and all about town in Chamapaign-Urbana for the past 3 years in a 11-year-old Twike Active. I rarely take dead-dino conveyance, whether public or private... going to the hardware store, picking up groceries, picking up the kiddos...

I once heard a quote that summarizes fuel cell cars quite nicely: "Fuel cell cars were the car of the future 20 years ago, they're the car of the future today, and they'll be the car of the future tomorrow"

IF fuel cells do arrive, and WHEN new and better battery technology arrives, it will be a fairly easy retrofit for a well-designed 11-year-old Twike to upgrade, as it's just a different form of storing electricity!

There is no reason to wait once you know the true costs.

Unfortunately there is a reason to wait, namely that the true, global costs to planet, fuel stocks and society aren't necessarily related to the individual costs borne by the cash-strapped people/families trying to haul themselves + stuff around on a tight budget. It's these sort of privatised costs that drive a lot of us to some combination of bangernomics, bike and buses, not brainwashing by the petrocracy, or some self-destructive compulsion to keep on breathing in great bracing lungfuls of particulates.

2014 update; the car in front isn't a Twike; in fact I've not spotted a second example of the species since my first encounter in 2010.

That's not to say that electric transport isn't gradually getting there. I'm not seeing any Twikes, but I am seeing Milton Keynes' new electric buses on the roads, local electric car charging points (first introduced in 2011, with more to come, although still nowhere near enough to support a noticeable proportion of 'leccy vehicles for conurbation that's home to most of the quarter of a million people in the Milton Keynes unitary authority) and the pre-publicity for a trial of driverless electric pods for (slowly) shuttling people around the city centre, scheduled for the near future (I know, by the way, that Milton Keyenes still isn't a city to the pedants who point out that only the Queen can officially make it so - and she hasn't - but I don't need to wait for some archaic feudal convention to tell me what I can already see; that the place is a city by any reasonable definition of the term).

And, according to former petrolhead Robert Llewellyn, who keeps an eye on electrical vehicle developments, the batteries are the key and they're getting better all the time:

Batteries are getting smaller, lighter, more energy dense, longer lasting and above all, cheaper.

These increases are constant and low level at present. Battery energy density is, according to companies like Panasonic, Samsung and Tesla increasing by roughly 8% a year. No great shakes but in the 5 years I’ve been keeping an eye on this sector, energy density has increased by roughly 40%.

But if they still cost a fortune, so what?

Well, they are also getting cheaper, the cost per kWh of storage a few years ago was around $500 per kWh. It’s now around $400.

So engineers might get us there on the storage front - if their corporate bosses don't sabotage their good work by creating a problem that has nothing to do with the practical constraints of physics, chemistry and engineering, namely, the human-imposed cost of rents extracted via Digital Rights Management.

I'm sure there has to be a better way (for the many end users, rather than the few DRM owners). For example, in theory, you could get over the battery charging time/cost issue by treating electric car batteries in the same way that we now treat camping gas canisters. In this scenario, rather than tethering the car to a charging station for a tediously long period of time, your future motorist gets a low charge warning, pulls into the nearest battery station and has the depleted battery taken out from its quick-change slot and replaced with a fully-charged one from the stack of batteries the station keeps on its charging racks. The motorist gets debited for the price of the leccy + something towards infrastructure/costs/profit and drives off into the pollution-free sunset.

I can see plenty of objections to this scenario - for a start, batteries aren't fungible, like gas, so this would depend on manufacturers agreeing to standardise to a few battery designs, to make battery stations usable for all motorists who pull up (good luck with getting, say, Renault, on board with that). Also, do you give people some credit for changing batteries with some charge left (as opposed to giving them a perverse incentive to obstruct the highway because they want to squeeze every last electron out of their old battery before pulling over and having it replaced, then accidentally run out of juice a few klicks short of the nearest battery station) and what about scammers and blaggers finding ways to nick batteries and sell them on, rather than just having them on hire to exchange for a charged unit when they need to "fill up"?  More seriously, in the longer term, having one, standardised, interchangeable design would tend to slow, or even halt progress towards, and uptake of, the subsequent improvements in energy storage technology, in much the same way that the widespread adoption and dominance of the QWERTY keyboard standard strangled more efficient alternatives at birth.

The battery stations aren't a serious suggestion, but I just mention the idea to point out that there are more ways of killing a cat than hanging it, to use a charming old expression of my dad's.*

Fuel cells, running on fungible hydrogen might be another alternative but, on this one, Twike guy might be right, at least according to Robert Llewellyn, who echoes his scepticism:

Since 1972 when I first heard the term hydrogen is the future I have been waiting. I'm not even mentioning things like infrastructure, the various methods of producing hydrogen, the energy costs associated with splitting water etc etc.

According to  Llewellyn, the great thing about better batteries is that they're not just for cars, but might form part of distributed power networks, like the ones I heard Jeremy Rifkin talking about in a radio talk show plug for The Zero Marginal Cost Society:

However when I talk about batteries I’m not even thinking about them in relation to cars, I’m thinking about our houses, about the grid, about cities, dammit, I’m thinking of the whole country.

The effect that millions of widely distributed batteries would have on the way we generate and distribute power is immense.

Imagine a 100 kWh battery pack built into your house, you have solar panels on the roof which trickle charge them day after day.

Before I explain the difference this could make, let’s look at the cost. Your battery pack is made from ‘depleted’ car batteries and the cost is a great deal lower than buying new ones. It’s not impossible to imagine something the size of a small fridge that could store 100 kWh with no maintenance and 10-15 years of trouble free use.

Talking of decentralised power networks, it would be ironic, but not entirely irrational if progress was driven by that most centralised and statist of institutions, the military. Fewer strategically important power stations to defend, and greater resilience for every remotely defence-related asset - it wouldn't be the first time the military have been distributed network pioneers.

With the prospects for solar generation getting dramatically better, some version of a world with (realtively) cheap, efficient batteries eventually becoming ubiquitous in buildings and electric vehicles is sounding more plausible.

We're not there yet, but we're getting nearer. I still don't think we'll get all the way there in a Twike, though.


*No animals were harmed in the making of my childhood.

Car hat man

It's freezing outside. So cold that I've driven the car half a mile down the road before I've realised that I'm still wearing a hat. In a car. This is not acceptable.

As any fule kno, only two types of male wear hats in cars:

1. Doddery little old men (usually with sticking out ears), who drive slowly and erratically. Hat of choice - the flat cap.
2. Spotty boy racers, who drive fast and erratically. Hat of choice - the baseball cap. The baseball cap effect is scalable, with levels of uncontrolled speed and spasmodic manoeuvring increasing in a predictable way as the in-car baseball cap count increases (immediate evasive action is recommended if the number of baseball caps in one vehicle is equal to, or greater than, four)

My hat comes off and I wait for the car heater to kick in. Hats in cars. There's no excuse.

Take it to the bridge

Today, Newport Pagnell has been celebrating the 200th anniversary of Tickford Bridge, the last iron bridge in Britain to still carry main road traffic. Excited townsfolk duly assembeld to watch a parade of vehicles from sedan chairs and horse drawn coaches to double decker buses and minis trundle over the bridge. And, as we were in Newport Pagnell, the obligatory Aston Martins joined in:

Then off to the Rose and Crown to tuck into that traditional Newport Pagnell delicacy, Mars bar and vodka cheesecake:

Heston Blumenthal, eat your heart out...

Like a big robot fascist

This morning, I heard a couple of Radio 2 DJs discussing whether the latest episode of "Top Gear" was The Best. Episode. Ever. Whatever that might mean. Of course, "The Daily Mash" is several orders of magnitude more awesome than any eposode of "Top Gear" could ever aspire to be:

GOVERNMENT plans to scrap speed cameras were last night welcomed by middle-aged men who believe themselves to be excellent drivers...

The move has also been hailed as a rare victory for common sense, in a country where anti-establishment voices like Clarkson's are often restricted to prime-time television, national newspaper columns and six-figure book deals.

Top sarcasm!

Gayest. Car. Ever.

Ford Mustang convertible. On a beach. With beach volleyball courts nearby so you can preen for your boyfriend in action shots.

Who am I to argue? To my knowledge, Jeremy Clarkson is the only other commentator with sufficient interest in the sexual orientation of cars to have expressed an opinion on the matter:

Media watchdog Ofcom ... decided that Jeremy Clarkson probably was being a little bit homophobic after a flood of complaints came from viewers outraged that he said of the Daihatsu Copen "A bit gay, yes, very ginger beer,” on a Top Gear episode. However, not all the complaints to Ofcom were about Jeremy Clarkson's gay jibe – around 20% of complaints pointed out that the sight of a lanky lighthouse-dwelling Genesis fan who went to the same public school as an Archbishop of Canterbury standing around in a pair of awful jeans and inexplicably deciding to talk in cockney rhyming slang is something that should never be seen on British television again.

The image of Clarkson and the future Archbishop of Canterbury, after lights out in the dorm, gossiping about the latest wheels they'd checked out on their gaydar, is way too entertaining to be dismissed lightly.

Car crash on a plate

The Ford Pinto, manufactured from 1970 to 1980, became notorious, and gained a place in legal history, in the case of Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.

The court case followed a road accident in which one Lilly Grey was killed and a teenager, Richard Grimshaw, was badly burned. An incriminating memo indicated that Ford were aware of a dangerous design fault which made the Pinto's fuel tank vulnerable to damage following a rear end collision, but failed to correct it, calculating that the necessary modifications would cost the company more than simply paying compensation for any deaths and injuries resulting from the fault:

Through the results of the crash tests Ford knew that the Pinto's fuel tank and rear structure would expose consumers to serious injury or death in a 20 to 30 mile per hour collision. There was evidence that Ford could have corrected the hazardous design defects at minimal cost but decided to defer correction of the shortcomings by engaging in a cost-benefit analysis balancing human lives and limbs against corporate profits. Ford's institutional mentality was shown to be one of callous indifference to public safety. There was substantial evidence that Ford's conduct constituted ‘conscious disregard' of the probability of injury to members of the consuming public.
(119 Cal. App. 3d at 813)

Eventually, in addition to compensatory damages of $2.5 million, the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District awarded punitive damages of $3.5 million against Ford.

By now you must all be asking yourselves the obvious question - where you can get a dishwasher safe melamine plate, commemorating Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co, picturing the crumpled wreck of a Ford Pinto? Just imagine what a wonderful wall hanging or dinnertime conversation starter it would make! The answer, my friends is here!

Yours for only $20.00!

Warning: plate may explode in microwave ovens.

Pure evil at 200mph

I never really thought that tobacco companies and advertising agencies were run by decent, public-spirited people. But this is so underhand that it almost qualifies as "evil genius".

Respect to Blazecock Pileon at MetaFilter for the heads up.

How are the mighty fallen

Yesterday, it was announced that GM's last-ditch effort to sell its Hummer brand to a Chinese company had fallen through. The once mighty king of the gorilla-sized-car market—28,000 of them sold in 2007, versus just 9,000 in 2009—could not fetch even a paltry $150 million. Having failed to find a buyer, GM is now moving ahead with plans to liquidate the brand entirely.

Christopher Bateman writes in his Vanity Fair obituary for the "slow, unwieldy behemoth".

In his Bark Bark Woof Woof blog, Mustang Bobby's farewell to the Hummer is more succinct, laconic and straight to the point; "That's okay, guys; there's always Viagra".

Well done, that man.

I'm guessing that a Hummer plus Viagra would look something like this:


Mmm, classy....

Photo courtesy of avlxyz on Flickr

Jeremy Clarkson and the rabbi

I don’t like being bossed about. It annoys me. I don’t mind reasonable requests at all. This is a not-very-subtle distinction that people occasionally fail to get. Let me illustrate.

A few days ago I was listening to a radio interview, following this incident:

A US Airways flight was diverted to Philadelphia after a young Jewish man's prayer items triggered a bomb scare, Philadelphia police said.
The incident arose when the man used a phylactery, a small black box Orthodox Jews strap to their head as part of their prayer rituals, police said.

As reported by the BBC. The interviewer was asking a Scottish rabbi to tell the listeners about phylacteries (or tefillin, as they’re known in Hebrew); what they are, how they are used, their religious significance, etc. The rabbi was an informative and charming interviewee, who answered the questions, clearly, directly and simply. He didn’t do that hysterical this-is-an-outrageous-assault-on-the-freeedom-of-religious-expression thing, so beloved of militant God-botherers.

On the contrary, he thought that the sight of people strapping black boxes to themselves must seem weird to an outsider who didn’t know what was going on. He quite understood how it might reasonably cause people on a plane to get jumpy, given all the high-profile terror alerts that have been happening recently. He suggested that believers wishing to use phylacteries should use a little discretion and common sense – say informing the cabin attendants beforehand if they planned to strap black boxes to themselves on an airliner, just to avoid any misunderstanding.
I don’t share his religious beliefs, but I found his lucid, reasonable, friendly manner a refreshing change from the egotistical, blustering rudeness of so many people who I hear shouting their opinions when I turn on the TV or radio.

There was, though, one moment in the interview when I winced. The interviewer wanted to know the thinking behind putting scrolls with sacred texts inside the phylacteries. The rabbi replied that there was no thinking – it was a commandment. And that appeal to authority rather than reason sums up succinctly why I don’t subscribe to a set of religious beliefs or to any authoritarian creed.

I spend very little time listening to the thoughts of Jeremy Clarkson, who is, I think, wrong about most things I’ve ever heard him ranting on about and who is almost up there with Simon Cowell, Gordon Ramsay and Alan Sugar as one of the nation’s foremost providers of egotistical, blustering rudeness.

Clarkson has a bee in his bonnet about speed cameras. He seems to be the poster boy for that tedious army of frustrated, impotent, pompous, Pringle-sweater-wearing, Daily-Mail-reading middle-aged middle-managers who seemingly have nothing better to do with their lives than sit around the nineteenth hole with their cronies, G and T in hand, boring each other senseless with an endless whiny tirade about how speed cameras are a disgraceful infringement of their inalienable right to drive their stupid automotive substitutes for a flagging manhood with their pathetic vanity licence plates as fast as they bloody well like, because they know how to drive, unlike all those other tossers on the road, because having speed cameras is exactly like living in a police state, and how it’s got nothing to do with road safety, because it’s just another stealth tax, because blah, blah, blah, sodding blah…

Let’s just say I don’t exactly relish hearing JC and the Sunshine Band sounding their funky horns on this one.

Only an idiot would think of speed cameras as a stealth tax. They raise revenue, sure, but how many other taxes can you successfully avoid by simply following a simple instruction on a large, clearly visible sign in front of your nose? Like, durr!?

Then there’s the “bad drivers cause accidents, not speed” argument. An exasperated Jeremy Clarkson-style ‘for heaven’s sake’ has to be the only response to that feeble argument – excuse me for a moment, as I theatrically roll my eyes heavenwards. Mmm, that ceiling needs painting some time. Now where was I? Oh yes, bad drivers. For insurance purposes, most accidents are somebody’s “fault”. In reality, it’s generally more complicated than that. Driver error can be a factor, as can road conditions, speed, traffic conditions, errors on the part of more than one driver involved, mechanical failure. But saying that most accidents are “caused” by the binary alternatives of either bad driving or speed, with the proximate cause ruling out all other contributory factors, is just silly.

Some drivers, fast or slow, just drive badly. How you control this is mostly out with the speed camera debate – maybe the driving test should be tougher, perhaps the restrictions on drivers with probationary licences should be more severe, perhaps any number of things. But if you feel that most of the other drivers using the road are idiots, surely it makes sense to control the speed at which those idiots are travelling, by the threat of penalties if they drive too fast? After all, if these bad or inexperienced drivers are dangerous at 30 mph, they’re not going to get any safer if their local speed camera is binned and they decide they can push the pedal to the metal without fear of retribution.

Speed limits and cameras aren’t a panacea for preventing accidents, but elementary physics tells us that speed and inertia govern stopping times and mean that road users have less time to react to emergencies the faster they are travelling. Maybe the speed limits on some individual roads are a bit slower than they need to be, compared with others but, overall, the idea of controlling speed to reduce the frequency and severity of accidents seems perfectly sound and reasonable to me and I’m not troubled by the paranoid fantasy that a sign telling me that I should stick to a safe speed, plus a camera to enforce it, represents the oppressive power of freedom-hating safety Nazis. No, I just think they’re helping to keep my kid safe from being killed by some irresponsible twat who thinks that speed limits are for other people.

Speed limits come into the category of instructions that I’d regard as reasonable requests, as opposed to bossy commands and, as such I don’t have a problem with them.

To be fair, I do have to put in one good word for Jeremy Clarkson. He may be obnoxious and I may disagree with almost everything he says, but at least there is some thinking behind his opinions, something I can engage with and argue about. Arguments over whether or not speed cameras are a good idea belong in the realm where logic and facts, rather than authority and dogma matter. To give the Devil his due, I don’t think Clarkson’s opinions came straight out of a book that states “thou shalt not have speed cameras.”

I don’t believe it’s right to willingly do anything just because it’s a commandment. Thinking it through for yourself and listening to informed advice with a critical ear are the only ways to decide what you believe and what you should do. But don’t take my word for it. You’ve all got to work itself for yourselves. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do.

Night of the Hunter

Last night I mentioned, among some of the other cars he owned, dad's old Hillman Hunter. I don't speak Finnish, so I have no idea why these guys are, at least according to the caption on YouTube, singing about a Hillman Hunter. How refreshingly bizarre. Here's another tuneful tribute to the Hunter, this time in Persian (a licence-built version the Hunter, called the Peykan was manufactured in Iran until 2005).

And here's the Earl's Court Motor Show, 1966, featuring, among other exciting models, "the complete family car" - yes, the Hunter again.

Allegro, adagio

Whilst I was ranting on about this and that, I see that the Austin Allegro's been voted Britain's worst ever car in some on-line poll. I've not driven enough cars to have a strong opinion on the matter, but I do remember that my dad had an Allegro at one point in the '70's. A blue estate it was, with nasty plastic seats which stuck to your legs despite the little indentations presumably designed to stop that happening. It may well have been Britain's worst ever motor - I don't know, I never drove it. I think it may have been the last car he ever drove - I have a feeling he had it up to '79, when he died. If so, it was a bit of a low note to go out on.

At least he was driving British built, made and designed cars to the last, though - before the "all aggro" he drove a Mini, a Hillman Minx and Hunter, and probably something else made in Britain in the years which are beyond my recall. It's a lost world - the roads full of cars made in this country, my dad in his tweed sports jacket, pipe clamped between his jaws (who smokes a pipe these days?), me in shorts and a little green jumper with reindeer on it, the twenty first century seemingly a million years in the future.

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again

Sentimental nonsense, I know - a lot of the days weren't that happy and we didn't always get on. Yet I miss those times, and him, still,

.