Roads in part of Bristol city centre are closing in the city’s first car-free Sunday.
Baldwin Street, King Street and Corn Street will be shut to traffic in Mayor George Ferguson’s Make Sunday Special initiative.
While probably not as bad as Brighton, Bristol has long been the home to whacky greeny thinking. St Paul’s, Montpelier and Stokes Croft being particularly bad. The more crummy the area, the more likely there will be crusty’s afoot and the more likely the green religion is in full flow. The city council has been dominated by lefties for decades, so the idea of a car-free Sunday by an anti-car mayor is just the icing on the cake of a steadily encroaching anti-motorist agenda that has been developing for twenty years or so.
A range of performers, including circus acts and community choirs, will take to the streets in the area surrounding St Nicholas Market.
Oh, good grief! I’ll be keeping well away from the city centre on Sundays I think. That way I’ll be making my Sundays special.
The scheme was originally due to run weekly, but will run once a month due to operating costs of £195,000 for all five days.
And who picks up the tab for this absurd political extravaganza? Oh, yeah, the poor sodding council tax payers.
Yes, because nobody actually needs to use the roads to go to work on Sundays, do they?
Indeed.
Those Torycutz must be really biting then.
Not even so much as a nibble, it would seem.
“Mayor George Ferguson’s Make Sunday Special”
He has achieved that – ‘special’, as in ‘education’ and ‘needs’.
“a steadily encroaching anti-motorist agenda”
Sorry, but I have to disagree. I cannot think of another group of people who break laws so regularly and are treated so leniently.
If you make enough laws, sooner or later, everyone becomes a criminal. That is what has happened with motoring, unfortunately. Many of the laws are unnecessary and contemptible. Eventually, people treat them with contempt.
And they are still treated with an amazing amount of leniency which makes your comment that there is a steadily encroaching anti-motorist agenda wrong. If it were true, motorists would not be treated with such kid gloves as they are.
I’m not arguing for the car-free day by the way, I get fed up with roads being closed for carnivals, processions, street parties etc. I just don’t agree with the sentiment that motorists are hard done by and are being more and more persecuted. If anything, it’s the opposite and they are allowed to get away with more and more.
Even if it was true that motoring offences are treated more leniently than comparable non motoring offences – and they are not – you cannot ignore the plethora of speed restrictions, which are frequently inappropriate for the prevailing conditions, ever increasing attempts to slow or stop traffic using one-way systems, speed humps,unnecessary traffic lights or downright dangerous narrowing of junctions and traffic calming or the vindictive taxation of motor vehicles in an attempt to socially engineer us out of our cars. And that doesn’t even begin to touch the matter of local councils attempting to restrict parking in city centres nor their proposals at one point to tax employers who provide parking spaces. To suggest that we are being treated with kid gloves is to ignore reality. The left have been waging a war on the motorist for decades – and they are winning.
None of this is about road safety, because if it was, they would remove the lot and install shared space in urban areas and let us drive at an appropriate speed outside of them – and they would not be nannying us with laws insisting that we wear seat belts or helmets on motorcycles. We are adults and capable of managing our own risks and should be free to do so without risking our driving licences.
I’m not arguing about the plethora of laws, I’m arguing that your statement, “a steadily encroaching anti-motorist agenda”, is incorrect. There is not and never has been an anti-motorist agenda, nor is there a “war on the motorist”.
If these statements were even remotely true, motorists would not be allowed to break the laws in the way that they do. Just ask yourself, not whether a speed limit is justified, but how many times you have broken one compared to the times you have been penalised for doing so.
Try asking yourself the same question when it comes to parking. I’m not saying that all parking restrictions are necessary, I’m saying that most of the time you can break the parking laws and receive no penalty.
How about insurance? How many people get away with no insurance? What penalty do they get if caught? Does it match up to how much they’ve saved by not getting it in the first place.
How many people get a fine for using their mobile while driving? How many use their mobile while driving?
Yes. There are a whole heap of laws that the motorist could be caught by, but on the whole, they can get away with breaking most of them and not getting fined/punished.
Nor is my argument about road safety. That is a totally different argument (I’m in agreement with you on seatbelts and helmets). My argument is quite simply that, despite all these laws, taking into account any new laws that any government has brought in, they are not enforced and any new laws just mean that motorists are getting away with even more as each and every new law is brought in.
In this sentence, you make my point. The plethora of laws are evidence of an anti-motoring agenda.
The reason people get away with breaching laws is due to a lack of ability to police – as you mention. That is not evidence that they are being treated leniently. You can lose your licence for relatively minor offences using the totting up system and if you get caught driving without insurance the penalty is hardly trivial – in my case even the minimum fixed penalty notice would be more than my annual premium. The full penalty of £5,000 + 6 penalty points on my licence or disqualification is hardly “lenient”.
The things I mentioned are clear evidence of an anti-motoring agenda. The lack of effective policing is not evidence of there not being one. Simply that the powers that be cannot enforce those laws – which means that in many cases, there is an argument for repeal.
My original statement was factually correct. That some of these laws are unenforceable does not undermine it. The word you should be using here is not leniency, but incompetence as only the incompetent pass laws they cannot effectively enforce.
No, your original statement was not factually correct. There are a plethora of laws that have been introduced that have absolutely nothing to do with motoring. Indeed, the majority of laws that have been introduced have nothing to do with motoring. That is just a symptom of the current type of interventionist government that we have. It is not evidence of an anti-motorist campaign, if it were the majority of laws would be about motoring.
A large part of the lack of policing these motoring laws is that the people who are supposed to police them, the police, have no interest in doing so. They will only pursue motoring offences when they are pushed to do so. Motorists are allowed, by the police, to get away with the majority of offences. That is leniency.
Okay, my last word on this because this one is straying way off the original topic. My statement was accurate and I gave you a number of examples that evidenced it – including, but not confined to – the plethora of laws.
In the seventies and eighties, motoring and motorcycling was more pleasant than it is now, despite having better vehicles today. Since then,we have seen road planners deliberately restricting vehicular movement with speed humps, dangerous traffic calming, stupid traffic light systems on roundabouts, deliberate road narrowing at junctions and restrictions in city centre parking. Roads that were once national speed limit are now littered with unnecessary speed restrictions, despite the erstwhile limit being perfectly safe.
The reason the police cannot prosecute the plethora of offences is because they simply do not have the manpower, not because they are lenient. Traffic cops are a rare breed these days. Frankly, I would be happy to see more of them and fewer cameras.
You are conflating lenience with not getting caught. Leniency occurs after capture and prosecution – if it happens at all. I could get away with murder and not get caught. It does not follow that murderers are being treated leniently, merely that I managed to get away with it.
if you want to argue leniency, you are going to have to draw a comparison between the penalties for motoring offences with the penalties for non-motoring offences and make a case that one is less harsh than the other. Not getting caught is not the same thing as leniency and never will be.