On Mon, 23 Jun 2014 13:45:30 +0100, JNugent
wrote:

On 23/06/2014 07:58, Judith wrote:

Bret Cahill wrote:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...rpocalyse.html

London's Dirty Secret: Pollution Worse Than Beijing's
London has a dirty secret.
Levels of the harmful air pollutant nitrogen dioxide at a city-center monitoring station are the highest in Europe. Concentrations are greater even than in Beijing, where expatriates have dubbed the city's smog the "airpocalypse."
It's the law of unintended consequences at work. European Union efforts to fight climate change favored diesel fuel over gasoline because it emits less carbon dioxide, or CO2. However, diesel's contaminants have swamped benefits from measures that include a toll drivers pay to enter central London, a thriving bike-hire program and growing public-transport network.

Time to face reality: London was designed for bicycles, not motor vehicles.

Oh really - when do you think that London was actually "designed for bicycles"?

(I am not disputing that it was not designed for motor vehicles: but I think
you will find it was designed for neither)

This old "not designed for motor vehicles" chestnut fails to take
account of something significant.

Go to Pompeii, look at the streets, and you are seeing design which
lasted from the Roman Empire to the almost-present day: the thoroughfare
lined with (as it happens, terraced) buildings, equipped with a footway
at either side and a carriageway in the middle, all paved.

As the centuries wore on, design standards improved and thoroughfares
and their carriageways became wider, mainly to cater for the heavier
horse-drawn traffic needed in larger settlements. Bicycles were never
calculated to "fit" that design and didn't need to be.

But motor vehicles *were* designed to fit into the urban landscape - and
better at it than horse-drawn traffic.

Their overall payload dimensions were based on horse-drawn vehicles,
whether of people, goods, or both. And since London - like other modern
cities - was increasingly designed for equine power, motor vehicles,
usually of roughly a traditional capacity, but much more compact because
of the removed need for draught animals, they were even more suited to
motor traffic than they had been to animal power.

So, when riding a bike, we should all haul a 5'6" wide trailer, and
motor vehicle drivers and cyclists will all get along fine.

Or, you are talking nonsense....

I'd be happy to wager £50 on the latter being closer to the truth.

So... cities were not designed for bicycles. That never happened and
only someone quite unhinged could try to claim it.

OTOH, cities were designed for vehicles of the size of the motor car or
(usually) bigger.