Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads:
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- • Tube Lines connections tabletop dice game – rules (PracticeTheoryPlay)
- • Tube Lines game – printable map (PracticeTheoryPlay)
- • London’s other massive tunnel construction operation (E&T)
- • Her Majesty’s nuclear flying boat (WarIsBoring)
- • The real costs of trains vs planes (DW)
- • Paris keeps its car ban along the Seine (CityLab)
- • Calgary builds pedestrian bridge but rednecks complain (Guardian)
- • Model train endless loop art (ThisIsMarvellous)
- • The scooter is not the enemy (Intelligencer)
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The experience in Calgary where sustained high level opposition to a pedestrian/cycle bridge and cycle network turns into support once it is in operation, is not unique. Trondheim saw a conservative Mayor who introduced congestion charging increase his majority at the next election. London saw a Labour Mayor do the same. Waltham Forest which saw very high levels of opposition to the mini-holland scheme ended up re-electing the councillors responsible with increased majorities once the scheme was implemented. There are more examples available. Surely this tells us that good schemes which aim to reduce traffic levels can well be vote winners, against the prevailing wisdom. Bad schemes, of course, will never win votes.
@ Quinlet – I don’t dispute your factual statement about Waltham Forest councillors being re-elected. As a tiny counterpoint I’ll just say I refused to vote in the last council elections partly because of the negative impact of Mini Holland on my local area as well as the shambles inflicted on the local bus network. That shambles is due to get even worse in the future. Given Labour’s grip on most of Waltham Forest my actions make no difference to their power base.
As far as I am concerned the state of local, London and national politics has caused me to draft a letter to my MP (to be copied to other relevant politicians) setting out my likely refusal to vote whenever the next cycle of local, London and national elections are. I am sure you will consider this short sighted but there is little viable choice for someone with my political preferences. I have been disenfranchised.
It’s unwise to ascribe the re-election of Labour councillors in Waltham Forest to widespread approval of the various mini-Holland schemes. It is more likely to be that floating voters feel disenfranchised and give up voting (as Walthamstow Writer explains) while Labour’s hard-core support is seduced by the sectional political tactics deployed by WFBC.
As this forum is apolitical, I won’t describe these tactics.
Alternatively. Maybe schemes to reduce road traffic and encourage walking and cycling are genuinely a good idea and voters really do like them – and that’s why the councillors got re elected.
As we like data here and voting behaviour is notoriously difficult to analyse, shall we just agree to differ on this point.
@WW: That’s FPP for you…. Whether or not these increased margins were down to voter apathy or whatever else can only be determined by detailed forensics on the numbers. Something one might expect from Diamond Geezer analysing bus stop M!
No matter how you feel about what’s happening, I would recommend you never give up your chance to vote. If necessary just vote for the comedy candidate, it’s about time one of them got elected!
As someone without a British Passport, I only have partial franchise and stand to lose even that token gesture…. You’ll only miss it once its gone…
I think the point about the Waltham Forest councillors being re-elected with increased majorities is one of two alternatives. Either, despite the very noisy opposition, the mini-holland made no significant impact on the vote, with other issues, more important in voters’ minds accounting for the increased majorities. Alternatively, the issue did make a significant impact on the vote but with more people in favour than opposed. One of these two cases (or a mixture of the two) must apply, whether opponents of the scheme, for whom this was a decisive issue, either voted for a different candidate or, as in WWs case, didn’t vote at all.
Incidentally, WW, with no disrespect, I doubt if your MP (of whatever party) can do very much about it if you find there is no candidate who views you can support. The only answer is to find and nominate a candidate who does have such views.
In my experience people vote in local council elections for the following reasons
1. to show displeasure of the national Government
2. level of council tax
3. are the bins emptied on time
And sometimes the bins become the most important issue. Any council that messes up bin collection (no matter the promised improvements) will have the ire of the voters wrecked upon it.
You might get the odd individual voter who is up in arms about a cycle lane but that’s it.
@LBM
Many thanks for the link to ‘The real costs of trains vs planes’. Very interesting and thought provoking !
The DW article misses the point that not everyone is going to and from city centres. I can get to an airport faster than to St Pancras, so even if there were no security checks needed on the Eurostar, flying to Amsterdam is still faster for me (especially when I don’t want to end up in Centraal station).
Surely it applies to the majority of people though, as the city is far more densely populated than the areas around airports?
(And as a good approximation most of things you are likely want to go to are in the city center, too – major museums, restaurants, the most profitable companies, etc.)
In this case, you and the people you know may not be representative.
@ChrisC: The two first issues cited by the chairman of Waltham Forest Conservatives as to why he expected to pick up seats in May were the Low Emissions Zone charge and the Mini-Holland. Bins weren’t mentioned.
Evidently these issues didn’t get the traction amongst voters that he hoped for.
As for apathy, a way to measure that objectively would be whether turnout in Waltham Forest fell in 2018. Unfortunately the local council don’t seem to give turnout percentages for the 2014 elections, and there is the complication that those were on the same day as European elections.
See the London borough council elections of 2006 for an example of where a transport issue undoubtedly influenced the outcome of an election (Labour losing seats in Hillingdon and Ealing due to the West London Tram proposal)
Parking has also been an issue affecting the vote in a number of boroughs (for example, Camden in 2006, when Labour lost control of the council). It’s clear that transport *can* have an impact on votes, just not in Waltham Forest in 2018 – of if it did, it was supporting the sitting council.
What is also interesting from the comments by the leader of the Conservative group on Waltham Forest is that he was clearly adrift of local opinion. This is also common in transport where politicians have repeatedly reacted to strongly stated views without actually understanding if this was a majority view or not.
Potholes often come up in local elections. Normally as something to attack incumbents on.
I was surprised when roads around here were resurfaced en masse last spring without an election as the last few times have coincided with County Council elections.
In LBWF, transport, including “mini-holland” is only one of a number of highly contentious local issues. It is almost impossible to say that any one, single topic is swinging those who bother to vote in any way.
There are also other, irrelevant to this blog, serious issues in dispute.
Enough said?
I find it hard to reconcile the carbon figures in The Real Cost of Trains v Planes.
My daughter is a first officer on Boeing 737s. She loads 2400 kg of fuel for each hour flying (plus reserves, of course) . With 180 pax that is 13kg per person per hour. 13kg of kerosene generates 40kg of CO2. And an hour’s flying covers 750km or so.
Yet Munich-Budapest (572 km) claim 168kg of CO2 per passenger – between four and five times more.
@John Thorn – Even more difficult, I couldn’t find any relation in the article between rail and air load factors. I could well imagine that air trips are full or nearly so; it’s less obvious that rail has such high load factors. Adjustment for such things might well tell a different story to the one in the article. InterCity used to think it was doing well to get to 70% and although Ouigo reports close to 100% loadings, that comes at the cost of a lower than average TGV fares per mile, for example.