The 2012 RDRF Wooden Spoon Award for bad writing about safety on the road had, as you might expect, a pretty stiff amount of competition. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: December 2012
“The True Costs of Automobility: External Costs of Cars”
First, the good news: another academic study using conventional cost-benefit analysis finds that motorists in the 27 EU countries have a net economic cost to society, with the UK second only to Germany in costs. Take a look at the nice short summary in the Guardian. It’s good to counteract what the Guardian correctly calls “The perennial complaint from drivers that they are excessively taxed”, not least the prejudice that cyclists are cheating by “not paying a tax”. The figure given for these external costs – £48 billion per annum, some £10 billion more than the total of motoring taxation revenue – looks pretty damning. However, it can be argued that the costs of motoring to society are considerably greater than those in the picture painted in the study, and that the report is inadequately critical of the status quo.
Let’s look at the report in a bit more detail. Continue reading
Welcome to the refurbished site
As regulars will have noted, this site has changed appearance: in fact it has had a major overhaul and will now be less prone to being hacked into. We are working out how to change what goes on the site: so far we have not had Comments, but this may change. Continue reading