Sir Freddie Laker, the man who took on the nationalised airlines in the 1970s with his cheap "Skytrain" airline, only to go bust, has died at the age of 83, according to this report. Laker was, despite the failure of his venture, a hugely influential figure in the airline industry by daring to suggest that flight need not be the preserve of the wealthy. He laid down the model to be copied by the likes of Southwest, Easyjet and Ryanair. His tough business battle with BA also inspired Sir Richard Branson to have a crack at the privatised national carrier's transatlantic business.

The economics of airlines has fascinated me, not least because as a business it has attracted some of the largest egos and some of the few remaining examples of buccaneering entrepreneur. Perhaps that is why we like them or even if we don't, find them fascinating. They stand out from the grey suits. None more so than Sir Freddie.

On the subject of cheap airlines and their globalising impact, here is an excellent piece from a year ago by Matt Welch in Reason magazine.

I have been in the habit of buying zone 1 (i.e. very central London) tube (i.e. London Underground railway) tickets, in clutches of ten, for a reduced price, compared to what such tickets would cost if you bought them one at a time. I tried again, a few days ago, but it seems that as of January 1st 2006, the only way to get cheaper tube travel is to buy an Oyster Card. Oh no, please no, I said, you'll make me fill in a ludicrously complicated form. No, they said, just buy an Oyster Card. What just buy it? No name, no address, no grandmother's maiden name. Yes, just buy it, and put some money on it. Okay then.

A day or two ago, I was out and about, and had forgotten how much money I had left on my Oyster Card, and saw a machine which looked as if it might tell me, if I put my Oyster Card on the sign, like the one you use when you are passing through a ticket barrier. It duly told me how much cash I had left, and it also gave me the option of learning about my 'card usage'. I pressed that. And this is what I got (click to get it bigger):

The message is loud and clear. We know where you have been, and when, and we want you to know it. Because, combine all that with surveillance camera info, and they can tell at once who you are.

The times we now live in.

How long before not wanting to buy an Oyster Card is itself regarded as cause for suspicion?

Well, Christmas is nearly upon us. I am shortly off to demonstrate my serious limitations as a singer down my local church. (I write this from Suffolk in eastern England at my folks' farm. The weather has been sunny although snow is promised later in the week). One of the things that I certainly valued this morning was my ability to get out of central London by car. People reliant on public transport have been reminded, alas, that public sector trade unions are among the most cussed groups of people around. The London Underground system is threatened with a strike on New Year's Eve, which would seriously mess up many people's celebration plans. And as this story suggests, it may even tempt some people to use their cars, even if they are over the alcohol limit.

Anyway, enough of such glum thoughts. May I wish my fellow contributors and Samizdata readers a very happy Christmas and prosperous 2006.

All hail the Bugatti Veyron, the world's most expensive car that you can drive on a road, as opposed to a circuit. From nothing to 250mph in less than a minute. The audio system alone costs $30,000. Have you got $350,000 to spare? Then go for it. That will cover the deposit if you want to place an order.

And all hail to Jeremy Clarkson for featuring this mighty vehicle on Top Gear. It is this evening's repeat, of the show first shown on December 11th, which I am now listening to.

Clarkson also wrote in the Times - on November 27th, but I doubt (see below) if any faster car has appeared since then – about the Bugatti Veyron, and the struggle to make it go as fast as it does:

Somehow they had to find an extra 30kph, and there was no point in looking to the engine for answers because each extra 1kph increase in speed requires an extra 8bhp from the power plant. An extra 30kph then would need an extra 240bhp. That was not possible.

The extra speed had to come from changing small things on the body. They started by fitting smaller door mirrors, which upped the top speed a bit but at too high a price. It turned out that the bigger ones had been keeping the nose of the car on the ground. Without them the stability was gone.

In other words, the door mirrors were generating downforce. That gives you an idea of how much of a bastard the air can be at this speed.

Volkswagen, the parent company, decided to make this Bugatti wonder car as a mere "engineering exercise", and they are apparently taking an enormous loss on each one that they sell. Clarkson reckons this is a car Concorde, and that what with "everyone twittering on about global warming", they might never again make another such.

Having, almost three months ago now, tracked down the latest Rolls Royce, this is my current must-photo car.

When the answer is bloody obvious, that is when!

There is a public investigation by the US Congress underway into a string of disappearances aboard cruise ships.

So let me get his straight, a cruise liner, which is in effect a floating pub in which people regularly drink to excess, has people disappear from it and that is... mysterious?

How about this: they unwisely drink too much, they fall overboard when no one is looking and as a consequence they drown.

And it takes a Congressional investigation to solve that 'mystery'?

This Chinese banning of electric bicycles is placed firmly in the stupidity column at Beyond Brilliance Beyond Stupidity. Bicycles good, cars bad.

It is hard to disagree with BBBS when they oppose this particular piece of partiality towards cars and against bikes. My only uncertainty concerns the fact that someone has to decide about how roads are administered, and there just might be good reasons for this, besides trying to hurry along the making of a big home market for cars in China, and clearing the proles off the roads, to speed things up for fat cat limos.

That hesitation aside, this certainly looks like a classic case of a law to stop the potential future from competing with the established present. Cars are already big business. Electricity for transport has a long way to go, but will surely go that long way, if allowed to. Batteries, to name just one crucial aspect of electric transport technology, seem to be progressing well, judging by how much better digital camera batteries have got lately. So is China wise to be deliberately trying to rebuild old Detroit?

The libertarian line on all this, which of course is the one I prefer, is that road owners should price the use of roads, and then the market would decide whether electric bikes are a reasonable proposition or too much of a bother to other road users, such as cars. Something tells me that this solution will not be unleashed in China any time soon, although that something may be misinformed.

Whatever you make of this story, it is an interesting angle on China now. My personal policy towards China is (a) trade with it by buying cheap stuff, and (b) learn about it, good and bad, and (c) blog about it, ditto. And one interesting thing I learned from reading this story is that in China they apparently have something called the China Bicycle Association. Concerning this ban on electric bikes, the China Bicycle Association is "enraged". Good to hear that associations in China are allowed to be enraged. I could not find any China Bicycle Association website though.

As I predicted a few weeks ago, SUV-phobes need not get into a hissy fit. The market is changing people's driving habits:

Toyota Motor Corp. has seen a rise in demand for hybrid vehicles in the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as consumers seek more mileage out of $3-gallon gasoline, a top official said on Thursday.

"At the end of last month, we had a 20-hour supply of the Prius (hybrid sedan)," Jim Press, head of Toyota's U.S. operations, said at the Reuters Autos Summit, held in Detroit. "We no longer count in days."

Price increases change human behaviour. Who would have thought it?

Uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan, fresh back from his holidays, rages against Americans who drive big SUVs on the grounds that by doing so, they help swell the coffers of terror sponsoring states in the Middle East. Patriotic Americans, says the ahem, British Mr Sullivan, should drive smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. He does not like the habit of "soccer moms" driving their kids around in such vast vehicles, full of clobber he thinks is a waste of space and money.

Well Andrew, maybe. I would have thought that with the price of crude oil hitting the region of around $66 per barrel, that even the dimmest motorist is going to see the impact on a bank statement eventually and wonder about trading in the Hummer for something a tad smaller. I know it is crazy ideological talk but people do actually take account of prices.

If oil prices stay on their current trajectory, it won't need a scold like Sullivan to remind Americans, or indeed anyone else, to adjust their consumption. All it takes is the operation of prices. Some Scottish geezer called Adam Smith once wrote about this about 230 years ago, I think. It is such a shame that even bright folk like Andrew Sullivan take all this time to catch on.

It has not been a good last few days in the airline industry. Today, a passenger jet crashed in Venezuela, killing its entire passenger muster of more than 160 people. A Cypriot airliner crashed in Greece at the weekend, killing its entire passenger list and crew. And a few days previously, an Air France plane had a crash near Toronto, but fortunately all the passengers survived.

There is probably no direct connection to all this but it is a harsh reminder that, even in an age of ever-improving safety standards, air travel carries its hazards (and of course that is even before we get to the terror issue). It is also makes me aware that the skies over southern Britain, for example, are crammed with aircraft and it is still amazing that not more accidents occur than is the case. The volume of aircraft now flying to and from Heathrow's mega-airport is extraordinary and continues to grow. The margins for error when it comes to potential collisions must be razor-thin.

Sometimes talented, sometimes monumentally untalented assailants of one's ears: yes, the phenomenon of the public "busker" seems to be alive and well on the London Underground. A guy at Chancery Lane station this evening was dressed in what must have been a hot and thick red jacket, with a sort of Elvis haircut and was belting out Sinatra hits. (Not bad, actually). The sound of Old Blue Eyes followed me down the Stygian depths of the platform until the racket of the train overwhelmed it. A strange evening. The station was full of police with their yellow jackets on on high alert four Thursdays on from the mass murders of July 7. Cops and Sinatra on a Thursday night. A rum combination.

I am taking the scenic route home at the moment. I know readers will think I am a wimp, but I still cannot quite summon up the courage to go down the Tube again - which is unpleasantly hot in the summer, anway - and have been getting plenty of exercise. My route takes me from Holborn, down Chancery Lane, down to the Embankment and then a long walk up to Parliament on the side of the River, then through Millbank, past the lovely Tate Gallery and then back to my home in Pimlico. (Brian of this parish also lives in the area).

The atmosphere is rather odd. There is the constant racket from helicopters hovering about, over Buckingham Palace much of the time. There are hundreds of police, some armed, outside prominent buildings including Parliament and the big Whitehall offices, of course. There are thousands of tourists, although quite a few appear unwilling to use their cameras for fears of appearing insensitive or possibly even suspicious. A lot of the tourists look even more dazed than is often the case. Most people seem pretty cheerful, though, which is good.

As I walked past Parliament Square opposite the rather scruffy anti-war posters, a young black guy in a posh shirt was shouting out loudly his evangelical Christian message. No offence to Christians but it struck a jarring note. I wish folk like this fellow, no doubt a decent person, could realise that hectoring religion is not quite what London, or anywhere else, needs right now.

A final thought for tonight: I cannot help notice how many stunning women there are walking about the moment. They may not realise it or care less, but in their ravishing way, these suntanned goddesses are sticking one in the eye to the women-hating jihadis.

Hot British crumpet - FUCK YEAH!

I'm watching the BBC Top Gear motoring programme right now and its main presenter, the irrepressible Jeremy Clarkson, is driving a hot-rod Mercedes sports car at high speed along a German autobahn listening to a CD of Margaret Thatcher speeches.

How can you not love this guy?

Still buzzing with pleasure after a terrific day with pals at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday, it struck me as I walked around the ground and past the huge car park as to how fantastic is the level of motoring engineering, aesthetics and of course safety these days. But we are hemmed in as never before by rules and regulations, speed cameras and road humps, the combined effect of which is to make driving in most of Britain a frustrating experience. The joys of flooring the accelerator on the open road, with the roar of wind in the hair, are over.

Such a shame. As my dad said, it is a bit like being surrounded by the world's most beautiful women and then to be told by the State that you are not allowed to ask any of them for a date.

I was going to write a piece with that title (assuming the allusion would spare me from discipline for scattering the star-field with apostrophes) but it seems Richard Tomkins in the FT has done it first, and, almost certainly, better.

However, that's a subscription-required piece, so I will rehash my main thoughts for those who do not subscribe, and do not still have a venial physical paper habit like mine.

I was dumbstruck by the general soft welcome among free-market types for Alastair Darling's hints at individual travel charges by satellite. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but the only word that springs to mind is - "suckers".

Just because a minister says something is "road pricing" does not mean it is a real live example of a market mechanism. In fact, when a minister in the current UK government says something, one would have thought that by now most people would be looking for the misrepresentation. If the minister seems to be saying something, then the truth is likely incompatible with the impression.

The thing is, it is not a price unless you get a choice. Road pricing as conceived by freemarketeers involves someone being willing to pay the cost of more convenient travel, someone else being prepared to provide it, and a bargain between them established when the buyer chooses to use the road.

The price is determined by the market, and the choices available depend on the costs of the providers and the willingness of travellers to pay. There are geographical constraints, and competition with non-transport uses for land, but politics, though it might influence the course of the roads, has no direct effect on the price you choose to pay. The turnpike company does not care who you are, or how far you go, as long as you pay the toll. It is only selling roadspace.

What Mr Darling offers us under the same name is no choice. The state will ration travel. The state will control the charges on the basis of what it thinks is good for you. There is a monopoly provider, the state. Its nominal purpose is to "reduce congestion", that is, stop travel, rather than assist it. And it insists that total surveillance of - and therefore control of - the individual traveller, is necessary to do it, rather than a disinterested payment mechanism.

Still like the idea? Here is another example of how to deal people who want to be where the government thinks they should not be.

The UK government has floated the idea of fitting GPS tracking devices into cars as part of a way to enforce road tolls, with a pilot project starting in a few years' time before going nationwide. One can immediately see how civil libertarians might object to such a setup, given that it could further consolidate the surveillance state.

Even so, the idea of charging for road use has a strong free market pedigree, as the Adam Smith Institute blog makes clear here. Road toll systems operated by private firms need not necessarily involve the centralised data collection systems that our present UK government might favour.

One little detail of the ASI comment made me grin, in that apparently, road tolls in Hong Kong failed in the 1980s to become law because men feared the toll invoices would reveal they had been spending their evenings down the local bordellos. Okaaaay.

From Instapundit, the excellent news that traffic cameras have been voted down in Virginia, New Hampshire, and Indiana.

A number of jurisdictions still have such cameras in place (or at least a place for them has been reserved, legal authority-wise), but fortunately there is a solution.

P J O'Rourke weighs in with a modest proposal on public transit in the Wall Street Journal. A choice tidbit:

The Heritage Foundation says, "There isn't a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides." Heritage cites the Minneapolis "Hiawatha" light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.

That, my friends, is a sound bite that can stop a light rail train (proposal) in its tracks if it gets in front of the voters before the referendum passes. Of course, as we all know, these kinds of facts emerge only after the horses have left the barn, so to speak, because of the bare-faced lying that always accompanies the run-up to large public works projects.

A song called London Underground is currently being spread all around the Westminster political elite by e-mail. The song represents public sector workers not as altruistic heroes, but as "wankers" and "lazy".

The London Evening Standard says:

London Underground was penned by Adam Kay, 24, a junior doctor at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and Suman Biswas, 26, an anaesthetist....

"Having lived in London all my 24 years you get used to the Tube service," said Mr Kay.

"Once in a while you are three hours late after what should have been a 20-minute journey. It has struck a chord with people. They also like the swear words, they seem to get people going." Mr Kay is receiving around 1,000 emails a day from people asking for copies of the record.

You can download it here.

Walking past a newsstand near my office yesterday, I saw the banner headline "Tube Bosses Buy Parts on eBay". The accompanying story told us, in faintly mocking tones, how engineers working on the London Underground system have resorted to using the online auction firm because the parts they need are so old that they cannot get the pieces they need from regular stock.

Now it may at first appear a terrible thing that our metro systems are so old that the folk running them have to resort to an online auction set up by those vulgar American geeks from their Silicon Valley offices to get the stuff they need. But (drums roll!) I have a certain admiration for the Tube staff who had the entrepreneurial savvy to make use of the amazingly successful eBay platform. If the power of the internet can make my journey to work a bit smoother, I ain't complaining.

It makes me wonder how many other major businesses are resorting to services like eBay to solve their inventory supply needs. I think it is still not yet possible for an airline to buy jet engines that way, though you never know. Is capitalism great or what?

Do you remember all of those science fiction movies where air taxis would soar across the skyline taking paying customers from highrise to highrise? Neither do I but air cars were included in the visions of the future that the twentieth century popularised. That future is now creeping up on us.

A firm in the United Kingdom called Avcen has developed a short take off and landing prototype called the Jetpod.

Mike Dacre, Avcen's Managing Director, says "We are expecting a great deal of interest from around the world in this unique form of localised air transportation."

The Jetpod T-100 air taxi and the P-100 personal transpeeder can operate quietly in tiny city-centre landing sites that will be one tenth of the length normally required, thereby opening up cities to true pay-on-demand, free-roaming air taxis.

This is preferable to the train or tube and could prove the disruptive technology that ends New York's taxi licence cartel.

Yesterday, while out and about in London town, I espied this vehicle.

Does this Samizdatista perhaps visit London more often than he tells us, on business he has omitted to mention?

Well, probably not. This is probably just another fan of this.

The present UK government, like many socialist-leaning administrations, does not like cars. Besides complaints - sometimes justified - about pollution and congestion, a lot of the hatred of the car contains a puritan impulse (sometimes this is also seen among a certain tweedy sort of conservative). Congestion charges, petrol taxes, speed cameras, road bumps... you name it, owning a car will soon be on a par with smoking, eating red meat, or confessing to enjoying recreational sex.

Well, I have bad news for the puritans. I spent last Saturday in total petrol-head heaven - the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed in west Sussex, and the event was a total sellout. I saw the Lotus of the late Ayrton Senna driven immaculately on a wet track at 150 mph and hear the unbelievably high noise that a F1 car makes. Vintage Maseratis, Ferraris, Lotuses and BRMs vied with Le Mans endurance cars such as the Ford GT40 or the Gulf Porsche (of the kind that Steve McQueen drove in the movie, Le Mans). Magic. There is an almost sensual pleasure involved in the sight, shape, noise, and yes, the smell, of a very fast car.

The crowds were large although not so big as to impede my enjoyment. From what I could see, Britons remain firmly in love with cars, including very fast and noisy ones. I would not presume to check the political/cultural views of the crowds, but I would guess the bias would be towards liberal (small l), fairly pro-enterprise, pro-fun, and not very keen on environmentalism and high taxes. If I were Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, then the Goodwood Festival of Speed clientele would be the sort of folk I would have in mind as a target constituency. I would call it the 'Jeremy Clarkson Voter Segment'.

The Goodwood event also reminded me of something else, which is the high number of South Africans, Finns and Scots who have excelled as drivers over the years. I wonder why that is?

When I was in my native Australia a couple of months back, I was pleased to discover that it is at last possible to fly around the country on Australia's airlines for something like the at times very low cost of flying around Europe. Traditionally, domestic air tickets in Australia have been mind blowingly expensive due to truly astonishingly stupid over-regulation of the industry. (Just as an example, for several decades only two airlines were licensed to fly domestically in Australia, one state owned and one privately owned. These two airlines were required to charge identical fares, operate identical aircraft, offer an identical number of seats on each route, honour each other's tickets, and operate to identical timetables. This meant that if one airline wanted to fly an 9am flight to Sydney, the other airline had to agree to do so before it would be permitted). Getting rid of this asonishingly stupid over-regulation has been a slow and painful 20 year experience. Thankfully, though, it is largely gone. Although there is still far too little competition, the competition is now clearly on its way.

In any event, I was explaining this to Brian Micklethwait last month over a cup of tea, and he suggested I should write it up. I started doing so for this blog, but the story was sufficiently long and esoteric that by the time I had finished I discovered that I had written 6000 words, and it was a little too long and esoteric. Therefore, I have posted it to Transport Blog, where it probably more belongs.

And if you have ever wondered how Australia got from being the richest country in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century to being substantially behind the pack (although still a rich country) in 1980, and how it has managed to catch up substantially again since then, the answer is quite a lot of this sort of regulation and protectionism, followed by a substantial (and it times quite hesitant) about turn in the early 1980s, and this story captures most of the key details.

I refuse to pay more than about £100 to sit in a tube for several hours, no matter how far it travels or how interesting the place at the far end, and even if they let me sit by the window and look at the clouds and, with extreme luck, at the beginning and the end of the journey, some actual views of earth. So until now, and given that no one else has thought it worth paying for me to visit, I have resigned myself to never actually seeing the (now sadly truncated) towers of Manhattan and the depths of the Grand Canyon (to name the two American things I most want to see before I die), plus whatever else American has to offer, such as those peculiar shaped small mountains in the desert wherever those things are, nice people, Carnegie Hall, an NFL football game, etc. But now, via the invaluable Transport Blog "In Brief" section (April 28th), I have come across this:

Transatlantic flights for as little as £60 could soon be available under a deal being forged between a German airport and US carriers.

The managing director of Cologne-Bonn airport, Michael Garvens, says he has been negotiating for several weeks to establish the service, which would take low-cost travel into a new realm.

Under the proposals, carriers such as Hapag-Lloyd Express and Germanwings would fly passengers from Cologne-Bonn to New York, Chicago and other destinations in America and Canada for as little as £60 per stretch. The deal would require passengers to pay for refreshments and to book online.

"We are currently holding concrete discussions with American carriers," said an airport spokesman. The airport said its goal was to combine the strengths of budget airlines.

Concrete discussions, no less. (Interesting that "concrete" in this connection means a discussion that is actually going somewhere. Often "concrete", applied to conversations, means the opposite of that.)

Two possibilities suggest themselves. Either Cologne-Bonn to America will shortly be followed by (e.g.) Stansted to America, or Stansted to Cologne-Bonn by Ryanair or scumbagair or reallyeasyjet or gojet or whatever can be stuck on the front of the journey, and I could be in the USA for something around or not far above my £100 limit.

The world is getting smaller.

So, now, who will pay my American hotel bill and cab fares, or put me in their spare room and feed me for a fortnight, having collected me from the airport? Some pocket money would be nice. A few speaking engagements (but not too many), some TV and radio appearances in which I can air my opinions to the American masses and become an instant celebrity, maybe some girl friends for the duration (see the Kris Marshall scenes in Love Actually for details), …

Who will start the bidding? America is the land of opportunity, right? So America: prove it. Show me some opportunities. (And please: no "we will pay this much for you to stay at home" nonsense. Well, actually, yes, that might be good too.)

I've just been relaxing in front of the telly watching a show called Fifth Gear, on Channel 5. This show was preceded by another automobile-based show about "Building the Ultimate …" in this case, building the ultimate racing car. (Although, luckily for me, given my actual tastes, I switched back to BBC4 TV in time to witness this amazing boy doing his thing.)

Trouble is, what with speed cameras and satellite snooping systems and politicians who just plane hate cars, except for themselves to be driven about in, there are fewer and fewer places where you can drive these monsters in the manner intended by nature.

So, Fifth Gear went looking for the answer, and they came up with Race Resort Ascari. (Either that or they were told about the answer, and they stitched the question onto the front.) The Race Resort Ascari website is long on atmospheric photography and on self-importantly waffly abstractions ("The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express" – Sir Francis Bacon) and short, as befits the website for a super-luxury product, on trivia like what it is and what it costs to buy it, so I will have to describe this place myself, based on what Fifth Gear showed. Basically what Race Resort Ascari means is that now, you can not only own an ultimate racing car; you can actually drive one at its ultimate speed, around a privately owned race track. You can now go on holiday and drive your car at two hundred miles per hour, just like in the car advers on the telly. And if that palls, you can have a go with one of the other cars they have there permanently. A grand prix car? No problem. A finely tuned rally car? Step inside and foot down.

Financially, obviously, this is one of those "if you have to ask you can not afford it" deals. (I think I heard the figure of £100,000 mentioned.) Personally I would never spend my money this way no matter how much I had. But even so, I salute the principle.

The next step is for someone to build a money-no-object private road which does not just go around in a circuit in the one little lump of land, but on which you can actually go from somewhere to somewhere else, and the further apart these somewheres are the better.

At two hundred miles an hour. In your car. Yours not mine, for once again, I would not be queueing up for this service any more than I now want to spend any time at Race Resort Ascari. Nevertheless, that I would love to see. That I would love to share a planet with.

Every single incident and accident on the UK rail network in recent years has prompted a torrent of bug-eyed wailing about the 'disastrous effects of privatisation' and the iniqiuties of those 'greedy' shareholders who insist on putting their squalid demands for profit ahead of safety concerns.

The answer (say the established media, the transport unions, the sundry activists, lawyers, Uncle Tom Cobley and all) is to take the network back into public control. Only when the 'distorting' private profit-motive has been eliminated, they say, will it be safe to travel by rail.

As safe as this?

Up to 3,000 people have been killed or injured in a huge explosion after two fuel trains collided in North Korea, reports say.

The blast happened at Ryongchon station, 50km north of Pyongyang, South Korea's YTN television said.

Nationalisation kills! Privatisation now! Put profits before people!

Let's take some time off away from the gloomy issues of the day to drool over the latest creation of the Ferrari empire. This car looks fantastic.

A four-door car that does 200mph. This model looks particularly good in silver, as is the case with a lot of famous Ferraris. Is capitalism wonderful or what?

What does this sound like to you?

[From UK Times]

DOZENS of speed cameras are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points.

The devices are to be placed where police can no longer justify having a speed camera because there is no recent history of crashes.

Police hope that the speed indicator devices (SIDs) will defuse some of the anger generated by the huge increase in camera fines. Last year an estimated two million drivers caught on camera were fined £60 and given three penalty points.

The new devices use radar to detect the speed of an oncoming vehicle, and flash it up on a screen. If the driver is within the limit, the screen changes to a smiling face.

At just 1mph over the limit, the face will frown.

Because it sounds to me like the Home Office are starting to back down.

At this rate it will take about another year for the 'frowny faces' to be replaced by an All-Weather Traffic Co-Ordination Officer whose job it will be to stand on the verge of a dual carriageway and shout "fascist, fascist" as the cars whizz by.

Paul Smith is a man with a profound interest in driving and road safety. As a driver myself I, too, have a vested interest in these matters. Whenever I depart from point A I much prefer it to be overwhelmingly probable that I will reach point B with all my favourite limbs and organs in situ and functioning as nature intended.

The British government and its various agencies claim that they share this interest as well. Moreover, they assure us that the solution to the problem lies with forcing everyone to drive more slowly and punish those drivers who fail to comply. Hence the virus-like proliferation of the 'GATSO' or 'Speed Camera' which (just by complete coincidence I am sure) has also raised tens of millions of pounds for the public coffers from already over-taxed motorists who infringe blanket and arbitrary speed limits.

In response to the wave of discontent this has caused, the government, the police and the various lobbyists that support them, have doggedly stood their ground and explained that, yes, it is all very regrettable but the point of the GATSO's is most assuredly not to raise revenue (no, perish the thought!) but merely to save lives. In other words, they are relying on the canard that freedom must be sacrificed in order to achieve safety.

Well, they are wrong and Paul Smith has made it his business to prove, publicly and beyond argument, that they are wrong. His website, Safe Speed, cuts a swathe through the cant and the piety:

We have never seen any credible figures that put road accidents caused by exceeding a speed limit at even 5% of road accidents. We object to speed cameras mainly because they fail to address the causes of at least 95% of road accidents. The Government claims of 1/3rd of accidents being caused by excessive speed are no more than lies according to the Government's own figures.

I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

Mr Smith has amassed a treasure trove of documentary, audio and video evidence that entirely discredits the myth that Tax Speed Cameras are anything whatsoever to do with either road safety or saving lives. In fact, so confident is Mr Smith in his own research that he throws down this gauntlet:

So here's the challenge. We promise to publish here (in this box, on the first page of the web site) web links to any serious credible research that implies a strong link between excessive speeds and accidents on UK roads.

So if you are one of those people who thinks that the GATSO is a life-saver, you know exactly what to do.

In the meantime, more power to Paul Smith and his campaign for common sense and reason. When we eventually win this battle, the victory will be due in no small part to the dedication and integrity of people like him.

Cross-posted on White Rose.

The reasoning is clear and simple: if you drive a car, you must have too much money for your own good. It is time that HMG relieved you of some of this burden:

Motorists convicted of speeding may have to pay compensation for victims, the government has proposed.
The plan, published on Monday, is one of several changes to the funding of victim support services.

Motorists given a prison term or suspended sentence would pay £30 to a Home Office fund providing victim and witness compensation and support.

Those fined for speeding or driving without insurance would face a levy of £5 or £10...

He said a victims fund would put more money into services such as practical support, information to victims of rape and sexual offences, road traffic accident victims and those who have been bereaved as a result of crime.

So, if you get caught speeding, you get punished for sexual offences and murders.

Not that the absurdity will matter in practice. I predict that not a single real victim of any real crime will ever see a single penny of that money ever.

This morning I was watching the news about the US requiring UK passport holders to either provide biometric information on it or stand in queues and pay money for visa for any visit to the US. Bugger. And I was looking forward to travelling to the US more regularly in the future. It did strike me as a move out of the blue and rather harsh in the light of both the Anglo-American relationship and the global trade and tourism links between the US and the UK. But, I thought, the terrorism meme has won the day and the US is going to 'protect' itself back to the Middle Ages.

However, as the day progressed I have learnt that the situation may not be as bad the media represent. Apparently, the news reports that talk about passengers having to have biometric passports containing fingerprint details as well as digital photographs are, quite simply incorrect. It is true that discussion has been taking place between the USA and all of the 27 countries on the visa waiver programme regarding mandating this information on the machine readable passports currently being issued and it may be that some countries will have to comply. However, at present, no such stipulation has been enforced and it is felt "unlikely" that such measures will be forced upon the UK.

For the time being nothing has changed. The position remains as originally stated by the US - all travellers from the UK had to be in possession of machine readable passports by 1st October 2003 or would require a visa. The deadline was subsequently seen as unachievable and it was extended until 26th October 2004. Advice given to corporations by their agents acting as liason to the US Embassy and the Foreign Office remains that UK travellers will have to be in possession of a machine readable passport by the 26th October in order to gain entry into the USA under the visa waiver scheme. (A machine readable passport is one with the electronic strip on the back and containing a digital photograph of the holder).

I am still confused. Despite my reservations about the BBC and other major media I find it hard to believe that they would report such a huge factual error about this matter and got 'biometric' confused with 'machine readable'. I am quite anxious to know the truth not only for the impact such measures would have on my personal travel arrangements but also their implications for introduction of biometrics into documents in the UK in general. Daniel Johnson points out in the Telegraph today:

British passports are not, of course, biometric; nor, for that matter, are American ones. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the Government will be speeding up their introduction - as a form of ID card - before you can say "David Blunkett".

The Telegraph also has doomsday reports about his issue. Can anyone tell us what's really going on?

It's useless new law time again in the UK.

From today it will be an offence to drive a vehicle on a public road while using a mobile telephone (or 'cellphone' for our North American readers).

A complete waste of time. Which is not to say that driving a vehicle while using a mobile telephone certainly can be dangerous, so is driving a car while unwrapping a sandwich, tying shoelaces, fiddling with the buttons on the radio or playing the accordion. Whatever the object of distraction, the point is that the motorist is driving without due care and attention and since that is already an offence, surely no elaboration is required.

If the police are unable or unwilling to prosecute motorists for extant offences then what on earth is the point of merely enacting more?

Really this all smacks of the the short-term 'something-must-be-done' mentality and the impulse which requires the demonisation of objects rather than the uses to which those objects are put.

The UK media are blitzing the issue as a part of which I have been drafted in as libertarian voice-du-jour. I have not long returned from the BBC studios in Central London where I got my oar in on the Jeremy Vine show and, this evening, I will adding my piece to a similar debate on Classic Gold radio.

For anyone interested enough to listen in or phone-in, the show will be streamed live on-line at just after 8.00pm UK time.

Inspired by the posting below about soundbites, Patrick Crozier has lashed up a list of attempted transport policy soundbites. Not all of them have quite the zip and zing that you are looking for in a soundbite. For example, I don't see this catching on:

Transport is not an unalloyed good.

"Unalloyed"?

Or this:

The chaos on Britain's railways is to a large extent the fault of the EU.

"To a large extent"? That sounds like John Major as enacted by a TV puppet.

But, as I said in a comment there, never mind. As soundbites they are mostly unfinished, but they're a definite start. Others can maybe get polishing.

And, as I have also already commented at Transport Blog, before realising that the thought might also be worth airing here, one of Patrick's suggestions may actually be ready to spread around. Here it is:

Safety is dangerous.

This little phrase may have been arrived at many times before (comments about that are of course very welcome), but I've not heard this exact combination of words before. I think it might be a winner.

First, it is short. Three familiar, easy-to-remember, easy-to-say words. Very important.

Second, it asserts an important truth, which is that an overzealous pursuit of safety, by (for instance) shutting down a pretty safe transport system in a vain and very expensive attempt to make it ever more safe can actually cost lives. The costs incurred (but hidden because spread around) can make everyone's lives a tiny bit more unsafe, and the alternative transport they use in the meantime might be a lot less safe. Shutting down railway systems after crashes, or grounding huge airplane fleets ditto, can kill, on the roads. And of course "safety is dangerous" has numerous applications besides and beyond transport.

But third, just as important, "safety is dangerous" has just the right degree of counter-intuitive outrageousness, such as will arouse interest and stir up debate. Because this soundbite is, literally speaking, untrue, it could cause opponents of the truth it flags up to get drawn into a stupid argument about its truth, and its unfairness. "It's not true!" "Ah but you're missing the point, what it says is true." Etc. etc., blah blah. The sense of outraged logic of the victims of the soundbite could be all part of the fun, and will cause TV interlocutors to keep on throwing this soundbite in their faces, simply because they hate it so. Like all good soundbites, it could supply a cushion for the lazy TV compere to fall back on.

Well, maybe. Most attempted soundbites are like newborn fish, doomed to die immediately. But maybe this one will prove to be a fish with legs, if you'll pardon the expression.

It could be that "safety is dangerous" needs more work done on it. Maybe it should read: "Safety is unsafe." Or maybe the even shorter: "Safety isn't." Personally I think that "Safety isn't" is too brutal towards the banal truth that safety, properly understood, is indeed safety. Also, the claim is too absolute. It isn't being claimed that "safety" is always unsafe. Just sometimes. You might have to change "safety is unsafe" to "safety can be unsafe" and then the word count starts to rise. ("Safety is to a definite extent unsafe.") "Safety is dangerous" is the best, I reckon.

Low cost airline RyanAir is a subject that gets mixed feelings from this blog's different contributors. Their latest problem is an EU ruling that affects their French and Belgian operations from the British Isles because the preferential rates offered to RyanAir amount to a state subsidy (funny how state subsidies to farmers do not seem to get the same response, eh?) because the airports in question are all state owned:

The airport is owned by the Walloon regional government, which approved grants worth an estimated £5 million a year to subsidise landing and handling charges and marketing costs. Ryanair pays a landing fee 85 per cent lower than the list price. However, since the airline's arrival, the annual passenger "throughput" at Charleroi has risen eight-fold to nearly two million, sharply boosting the local economy.

[...]

Managers say they would adopt the same approach for other publicly-owned airports. Negotiations are already under way with a dozen private alternatives. Some European countries, such as Italy, Germany and Sweden, have a significant number of non-state airports, but not France.

The solution is screamingly obvious. Privatise all the frigging airports in Belgium and France and the problem goes away! Duh.

One of the pleasures of British television as the nights get longer and darker is watching the gloriously laddish and unPC gentlemen on the BBC2 show TopGear, fronted by irrepressible Jeremy Clarkson, a sort of British version of P.J. O'Rourke. I am not quite sure how the great man continues to work in the Guardianista-infested corridors of power at the BBC, but maybe the bosses there feel they need at least someone like him to 'appease Middle England' or whatever.

Sunday night's show had a number of good features, not least the bit when Jeremy and his two co-presenters drove a variety of BMW sports cars, very, very fast around the country lanes of the Isle of Man. Apart from some built-up areas, there are absolutely no speed limits on the island. Yep, not one.

At one point, one of the younger presenters - sorry, I forget his name - said this place was the motoring version of Fantasy Island. And Clarkson waxed lyrical about how the place was a 'nanny-state free zone'.

Yes, I know it is just about cars. But somehow, I find it mighty encouraging that these sentiments get aired on prime-time British telly.

We rag on the BBC a lot in these parts, and rightly. Well, TopGear is a veritable oasis of petrol-head good sense. Clarkson for Prime Minister!

Tedd McHenry writes in with some creative musing on an idea that would allow even the most extreme privacy fetishist to harness a splendid cost minimizing technology whilst keeping the user shielded from intrusive data mining. With apologies to John Donne for the editor imposed title.

This idea was inspired by Highway 407 in Toronto, Canada, which is a toll highway. I do not know if it is privately managed, but it could be. I am very interested in both toll roads and private roads, which have been discussed before on samizdata.net. Highway 407 solves the toll-collection problem with two technologies. When a car enters and leaves highway 407 its licence plate is photographed, and that information is used to bill the owner for the distance traveled on the highway. Regular users can get a subscription wherein they mount a transponder on their car, which makes billing easier (and gives them a discount). Both of these technologies make toll roads much more viable by making toll collection cheaper and easier. But they both entail a very serious compromise of privacy, in that someone collects information on where and when your car travels.

The solution that occurred to me was to have, for lack of a better name, a privacy agent through which a car owner could subscribe to the highway. The transponder would be registered to the agent, and the agent would collect from the car owner. There would be no way for the bill to be tied to any actual person or vehicle.

Then it occurred to me that this system could be generalized for any service. You could interact with governments and markets through your privacy agent, much as subscribers to anonymizer.com interact with the web. Privacy agents could provide credit and debit card services allowing you to buy any product or service anonymously. Where a service requires identification (name, social insurance number, etc.) you would simply provide your privacy agent account number (and a PIN, to prevent fraud). Your public identity would be somewhat like a corporation, but with a reversal: whereas a corporation limits the liability of its owner but must publicly declare who he is, this body would not limit the liability of its owner but would also not publicly declare who he is.

There must be some holes in this plan, other than the obvious difficulty of selling it to politicians, but I am not coming up with them on my own. Any thoughts?

Tedd McHenry, Surrey, BC, Canada

I can not tell whether this is real or a joke. It could very easily be both of course.

Fuss has recently been made about an amphibious sports car, which seems genuine enough, if rather extravagant. But this, linked to by BoingBoing, is an amphibious bus, and is strictly for the luxury end of the bus market:

John and Julie Giljam, a married couple from South Carolina, created a first-class motor coach that doubles as a yacht.

The Terra Wind is an amphibious 42 ½ foot motor home. The RV can cruise down the highway at 80 mph, and when it hits water it becomes a yacht … with just a few maneuvers.

What it looks like when in water is a drowning bus caught in a flood. I seriously wonder how seaworthy it is. So how well is it doing?

The Giljams said there has been a lot of interest in the amphibious motor home. They plan to show it off at boat shows, RV shows and yacht shows.

Oh dear. "A lot of interest." They "plan" to show it off at shows. This is salespeak for no one wants to buy the bloody thing.

If that is so I am not surprised. As I understand it, boats are heavy, because they have to be strong enough to keep water out, and because the water can support them even though they are very heavy. They just have to be able to slide along in it. Vehicles are not so heavy, because they have to be dragged about on roads by an engine, with no water to prop them up as they go. Vehicles have to be self-supporting. A floating sports car is just about plausible. A floating bus? Forget it. The physics is, I feel, similar to the physics that says you can have insects the size of insects, but you can't have them the size of elephants, like in very bad Michael Caine movies.

But what if I'm wrong? The great thing about capitalism is that barking bonkers people like the Giljams are allowed to have a go at things like this, and can try to prove that they aren't so barking bonkers after all. Maybe my physics is all up the spout. Maybe they are using some new space age material for the bottom of the bus which combines being strong with being very light. Maybe … who knows? Maybe people will love the idea of travelling in it so much that they will queue up like mad things for the tickets, no matter how expensive they are.

Not long ago I was reading about the people who built the first steam engines, and that gave me a lively sense of how possible impossible gadgets can sometimes prove themselves to be.

I wish the Giljams luck.

And by the way, I've just noticed that this is the four thousandth Samizdata entry. How about that!

It seems self-indulgent to regale readers of this blog with a personal gripe, but indulge me a moment. Like all too many Londoners, I usually have to take our Tube (subway) system to work. It is unpleasant. It is irregular. It is often extremely noisy and the air pollution is bad. In the summer months, it is incredibly hot (we Brits cannot figure out airconditioning without bleating about how vastly expensive it is). And it seems a cult of incompetence has gripped the organisation that runs it, like ivy creeping around the trunk of a tree.

This morning, on the Victoria line, all trains north and south were halted "owing to a signal failure in the Kings Cross area." At least that is what I thought the announcer mumbled into the microphone, though the voice was so hushed and marked by embarrassed pauses that he or she could have been announcing something entirely different, such as last night's football scores.

We gung-ho capitalists may hope that an injection of raw, competitive private enterprise will blast all this complacency and mule-headed uselessness away. Maybe. But sometimes I wonder whether if the country that built the first great railway network 150 or more years ago is capable of every again running big engineering projects with a modicum of talent.

Right, I'll cheer up now.

Just a reminder to anyone planning to tour Britain, this bank holiday weekend, by rail. Well, the bad news is, you can't. The good news is that the cricket's on.

That useless subsidy-addicted creature of government, Network Rail, has decided to shut down large parts of the rail network in order to create road chaos, sorry, in order to carry out essential engineering work. For instance, if you're a small bear from Peru, with a fondness for marmalade, hoping to stowaway on a Great Western locomotive from Bristol to London, this weekend, don't do it. Otherwise a whole series of books about you in the future will have to be named 'The Adventures of Reading Bear'. Paddington station is closed.

If you're old enough and stupid enough to remember voting for Mr Tony Blair, in 1997, on the back of the glittering promise that he would sort out Britain's transport system, you'll by now have realised that we only get what we wish for. For he's well and truly sorted it, by turning it into a snake-pit! Why doesn't the fool just hand it over to the Transport Blog, who'll make a much better fist of it?

I myself shall be attempting to navigate a path, to Victoria, to take a train to Worthing to visit my mother-in-law (Reginald Perrin fans, please note, I am not making this up.) Let's hope it's not as warm and humid down in the Tube, this afternoon, as it was this morning on the Bakerloo line, where I literally thought I was going to liquefy. Yes, literally become a puddle of once human flesh.

I shall be imbibing a ridiculously over-sized bucket of iced gin and slim-line tonic, the moment I descend the steps at Worthing station, if I should get there before midnight. My advice to everyone else who can, is stay at home.

For those poor blighters, like me, having to travel: Good luck, everyone!

Blogging is unpredictable. It began as innocent posting by me about the Segway, which is a sort of mobile Zimmer frame, on Transport Blog.

Then Patrick Crozier, presiding boss of Transport Blog, made this rather more profound comment.

I have no idea whether the Segway is a good idea or not. But it strikes me as one in a long list of good ideas eg. bikes, roller skates, the C5, which might have been the answer to all sorts of our problems had it only been possible to give them the right sort of road space.

Take roller skates. Small, fast, relatively easy to learn. They should be fantastic. Lots of people should be using them. Why aren't they? Because if you skate on the pavement you are constantly bumping into people and if you skate on the road you get run over (if not arrested).

But what if you had dedicated roller skate lanes or even dedicated roller skate highways? Different story – perhaps.

Incidentally, this is one of the most compelling reasons (I think) to want a free market in transport – because if entrepreneurs could do their own thing we might actually find out what forms of transport were actually (given all the factors) the best. We certainly aren't going to find out so long as the state runs the show.

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

David Sucher of City Comforts Blog, copying and pasting all of Patrick's comment onto his blog, responded thus:

1. Why not look at the way things are as the result indeed of a free-market of choices but in a vast time frame and not bound by the use of coin? There's an expression "people get the kind of government they ask for." I believe it. Think of it as people, individuals, corporations, etc making choices over the span of several centuries or even longer. In the USA, at least, state creation/control/limitation of the transport system has emerged out of the desires of the populace. (Perhaps that is difficult for either the extremists – I don't mean the people at Transport Blog, of course – of left and right to accept, finding as they do on every hand a conspiracy to enslave the people.)

2. Crozier raises a valid question about the state monopoly over road space. This monopoly is an outgrowth of eminent domain.

And the reason we have (and forgive me for repeating myself yet again) eminent domain (compulsory purchase) is because earlier generations, going back hundreds of years, found it impossible to create transport networks without such a mechanism. Our tradition of eminent domain goes back to an era when The King's Highway was to be taken literally. (Though I am an anti-monarchy – not that what the British do is any of my direct business – I can also readily concede the evolutionary necessity for kingship and pay it its historical due.) You cannot create a network which crosses the properties of thousands (or at least hundreds) without compulsory purchase; and you cannot leave compulsory purchase in the hands of a private party as that leads to the very abuses which so concern libertarians. So we have a double bind: the bargaining problem, the "hold-out" problem makes it structurally impossible to create a network without eminent domain and yet to delegate eminent domain to private parties is even more horrendous than leaving it with government. I think that any discussions of the government as monopoly over road space must start with those assumptions.

***

Perhaps I demonstrate my lack of imagination but I cannot visualize a scenario in which our routes and corridors are transferred to private parties. Does that mean that we might lose efficiency compared to how a private party might manage the space? Perhaps in theory yes a private party could build/manage a street grid (and in Seattle, btw, that consists of roughly 50% of the land area of the city) better than the government does. But that's in theory.

I just can't see how it would either evolve or be managed. Indeed, that does mean that lots of good ideas – more dedicated bike paths – will be ignored by conventional majoritarian thinking. But the transaction costs of the market itself require that government (or something similar) step in to create common, network systems because The market is incapable of doing it itself.

Or else it would have already done so.

And now a very few brief comments from me, because what I really want is for the Samizdata libertarian commenters gang to lay into this guy, politely of course, as politely as he lays into us.

First, I've long ago lost count of the number of times when an arguer against the free market confuses his own inability to imagine a market-based solution to some entrepreneurial problem or other with the permanent inability of any entrepreneur, in any market, anywhere, ever to come up with such answers. Sucher at least has the grace to use the phrase "Perhaps I demonstrate my lack of imagination …" in using this line of attack. Usually this argument is not so politely put, but the impolite version is no different in substance to Sucher's version.

Second, doesn't Sucher's argument boil down to saying that might is right? "People get the kind of government they ask for." David Sucher says he believes this. Does he really believe it? I was going to put: Only in America. But the truth is more like: Not even in America. The fact that something hasn't yet happened maybe opens up the possibility that it is impossible, but it doesn't prove it.

We now live in the Age of Democracy, as surely as people in earlier times lived in the Age of Kings, and earlier than that in the Age of Caesars. And democratic assemblies and electorates all of them seize control of "infrastructure", and by the ubiquity of their thieving they suggest that such theft is necessary, and impossible not to have. And their apologists certainly say so, endlessly. (They say similar things about education and healthcare.) I daresay in earlier times people felt much the same about military conscription, capital punishment, interrogating prisoners with torture, and the upper classes raping the women of the lower classes with impunity, all of which are things which still happen a lot but which are not any longer considered inevitable or necessary if civilisation is to keep advancing.

But we shouldn't be diverted from the outrageousness of the claim that, in general, governmentally speaking, people get what they ask for to divert us from the particular debate about whether linear and connected infrastructure of all kinds can or cannot be supplied in a purely free market.

Suppose a democratic assembly existed which had been persuaded that, although it could steal all the infrastructure it wanted to, it nevertheless ought not to. And suppose it further defcided that nothing infrastructural could be done without the consent (purchased freely) of all the property owners in the path of such plans. How would matters then develop? Would the assembly really be obliged to intervene, in order for us to have any running water at all, or any roads or footpaths? Would the concept of "right of way" lead necessarily and inexorably to the democratic equivalent of the King's Highway, which the King (democracy, with taxation money) would then be obliged to look after, because if he didn't no one would.

These are important questions, which I usually approach here at Samizdata from the other end. In my wonders of capitalism posts I often end by asking (by way of explaining what the post is really about) something like: Wouldn't it be great if the stuff now engulfed by the public sector could be as good as [insert capitalist wonder of choice]? What if roads were constructed as carefully and as artfully as the vehicles that now travel on them? What if one could choose one's water supply as happily and in the light of as many choices as one now chooses wine or fizzy drink of the sort that comes to us in supermarket bottles? What if improving the road system could be as relatively painless as the switch from LPs to CDs, or from VHS to DVD?

It would be a great shame for civilisation to miss out on such wonders merely because the people who believed them desirable accepted by default the argument that they are impossible, rather than because they really are impossible.

Kevin Connors talks about a certain British civil servant with a licence to kill, er, drive

Bond purists know that there are only two 'proper' cars for 007 to drive, an Aston or a Bentley. But for many years, while the British auto industry decayed, neither Aston or Bentley produced anything James would be caught dead in (book readers might recall Gardner gave him a Mulsanne Turbo in 1984). But over the last decade, the British Car business has been undergoing a renaissance, riding a wave of American and German capital and technology. The fruits of this are really starting to come now. Two years ago, Aston Martin (now owned by Ford) introduced their beautiful V12 Vanquish, seen in last year's Die Another Day. But still, relative to the breathtaking Ferrari 575M Maranello, it's only real competition, most automotive commentators declared it an also-ran. (While the comparison is far closer than that of the classic DB5, introduced in Goldfinger, and the 1964 Ferrari 500 Superfast, to say nothing of the incomparable 250GTO. Even the Lamborghini 350GT and Maserati 3500 GT, would likely have cleaned the DB5's clock.)

Now, all that is behind us. After many teases, Bentley Motor Cars, (now owned by Volkswagen) is finally releasing their latest masterpiece, the Bentley Continental GT:

It has no competition.

This 4 passenger, 5000lb, W-12, AWD monster does 0-60 in 4.7 seconds, the same as a Porsche Carrera. It tops out at 198 mph, faster than all but a handful of 2 seat super-exotics. All this while coddling the passengers in the lap of luxury.

With plenty of room for Q to hide toys, this is a car Commander Bond would love. Of course, the next car 007 actually drives will be determined by the real world consideration of how much the manufacturers are willing to pony up in product placement money. And, although the producers know the fans want to see Bond in a British car (and not a plastic toy Lotus, even if it does go underwater), If Toyota forked over enough, James might be driving the new Supra.

BUT WAIT!
There's a new player on the scene

I didn't consider this at first, because of the leading name on the moniker. However, on further consideration, there's likely more actual British engineering and manufacturing content in this than the Bentley. Ladies and gentleman, coming in about six months, I give you the revolutionary Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren:



As opposed to the Bentley's porcine two and a half ton mass, carbon composite construction helps keep the SLR to a svelte one and three-quarters. This, along with slightly greater horsepower (580, not 605 as stated on spec. sheet), shave a full second off the Bentley's 0-60 time. Top speed is 211 mph. A handful of currently available automobiles are in the performance league with the SLR: the Lamborghini Murcielago (also VW, btw), the Pagani Zonda C12-S 7.2, the Ferrari Enzo, and the Saleen S7. But all these are, to one degree or another, racing cars for the street. The SLR promises to be the first super-exotic that's also a viable daily driver.

Of course, the SLR costs (before Q-izing) two or three times the price of the Bentley. But, to Her Majesty's Government, it's just chump change seeing as they have all those taxpayers to call on.

Our Revered Leader Perry de Havilland has been telling us in conversation that our postings here are better than they were in the early days of this blog. I'm sure I hope so, and I believe that something similar may also apply to David Farrer over at Freedom and Whisky.

His latest posting is a particularly choice item, based on an equally choice story in the Sunday Herald, about a potential collision between ramblers in Scotland and trains in Scotland, caused by an actual collision between "Right to Roam" legislation and the decision to bring charges of Corporate Manslaughter against six of Britain's railway ex-bosses for an earlier prang.

The railway infrastructure has been taken out of the hands of shareholders and into the safekeeping of selfless (sic) public servants. Surely this kind of mix-up shouldn't occur. Don't tell me that there's something wrong with socialism! In the meantime the local council is forcing open the gates over the tracks and Network Rail is locking them up again.

The folk at Network Rail are - wisely - looking out for number one:

“If people are serious about crossing live railways, the safest way is by underpass or bridge and somebody has to fund that – and it’s not going to be the railway because it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility must either rest with councils or central government.”

Dave Fordwych, the Sunday Herald man, thinks both policies are foolishness, but David has the answer to the problem:

I think that a solution may be found if the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, has a quiet word with the Secretary of State for Scotland who is, er, Alistair Darling.

And I thought that Rod Liddle, in his recent Spectator piece about the Kelly Affair had been joking about …

… the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland.

David adds a personal recollection to the effect that Darling seems inclined already towards talking to himself.

Funnily enough, the only time I have ever seen Mr Darling, my own MP, was on an aeroplane flying from London to Edinburgh and, yes, he was talking to himself.

"Joined up government" is what David calls his posting. You can't get much more joined up than this. But, it doesn't seem to be working very well.

Nothing surprises me about this shower of idiots, collectively known as the UK government, but sometimes their crass shamelessness still manages to astonish me. After six years of adding nothing to the UK road network, other than the insane pink Kremlin lane, from the first class lounge at Heathrow, to the drawing room of 10 Downing St, comes a U-turn of almost epic proportion.

In 1997 they won the election, under a pledge (remember those?) to impose a road building moratorium, in order to bring those of a green persuasion into an anti-Tory rainbow coalition. In 1998, they told us building more roads to ease the road congestion, on the M25, was "not an option", and in 2000, they held fast to the anti-roads position that "simply building more and more roads is not the answer." So what do they do, in 2003? Yep. You guessed it. They are going to build more and more roads, in a huge new road building programme, mainly concentrating on widening the M25, and the southern stretches of the M1. Incredible.

Does the word hypocrisy never spring from these people's lips? Do the lies, which tumble so effortlessly from their spin-doctors' word-processors, never keep them up at night? Do they actually manage to catch themselves, in the mirror, each morning, and think to themselves, what a good-looking and upstanding politician you are? Or do they shuffle out of the door, ashamed, and afraid? Sorry, I was forgetting these people are socialists. All the New Labour lies will be worth it, one day, for the greater good. Some time real soon now, apparently.

But, linking to Mr Carr's story, from earlier, do I detect a tang of bare panic?

After stealing £40 billion pounds, annually, from the motorist, and then pouring it into the black hole of the railways, which get worse by the day, I think they might have realised the game is up. This may be their last throw of a taxpayer subsidy, from a pot which is rapidly dwindling. They can not admit to themselves that socialism does not work, of course, propped up as it is on a crispy bed of lies, so they have done the next best thing. They have simply blanked out, from their minds, the last six years of their failed policies.

No doubt they will call this new roads programme a 'Fresh Start', or a 'New Beginning', or some other such Stephen-Byers-style nonsense. But what they will not admit is that they have dropped the ball, big style, and made a complete hash of their fabled 10-year plan — even Uncle Joe had the sense to only impose 5-year plans!

I do not claim an authoritative knowledge on transport issues, and you may want to go here to find such a thing, but from where I am sitting, it looks to me like a severe case of headless chicken street, down there in Whitehall. They are on the ropes, and the poor loves just don't know what to do about it.

And with the Tories rising in the polls, remarkably even ahead of St. Tony's party, the New Leftist panic is in. So let's steal some of the Tories' policies; let's abandon our own 'principles' of car-bashing, and let's try to buy back some of those hateful south-eastern votes we've lost. They will not bring in any of Tory Tim Collins' more sensible road privatisation plans, or private road toll schemes, or cut the outrageous levels of fuel duty, but they will try to keep Mr Commuter, of Epping Forest, happy, with an extra 'free' lane, on the M25.

I must say, as somebody who had to commute from Oxfordshire to Surrey, every day, for six months, I would welcome a new lane, but I have got news for you, Mr Blair. Six years of nothing, and then a big splurge to try to buy back my favour, ain't going to work. You are like the girlfriend who chucked me out, who then asked me back when she could not get her grasping hands on anybody else. You had your chance. But you blew it. Big time. Thank you, Tony, and goodbye!

And now, to paraphrase Mr Carr, as we watch the tigers in valley, a green-striped tiger joins the BBC-striped tiger, to attack the red-striped tiger. Let's just sit back, and enjoy the view!

The usual practice here is to denounce France, and certainly (with only occasional and admirable exceptions) the French, as one of God's more incomprehensible derelictions of His creative duty. But this device, the Trottoir Roulant Rapide – which means "fast rolling pavement", is, I think, impressive.

Science fiction buffs have long been able to read about such gadgets. At Heathrow, as in many other places I'm sure, there's a slow rolling pavement, which makes your journey a bit less wearisome from the tube station to one of the terminals. And I seem to recall something similar connecting a couple of bits of the London Underground somewhere in the City, although I could be imaging that. But this TRR is an altogether more serious creation, because it is fast. It is rapide.

"People have to learn how to use it and that takes time," the trottoir's inventor, Anselme Cote, told BBC News Online.

He added that escalators had presented travellers with a similar challenge when they were first introduced.

People stepping directly on to the TRR would be sure to lose their balance, so they first have to be accelerated - and then decelerated again at the other end.

"The problem lies in the transitions; one has to glide from one phase to the next; we ask people not to move, but they are not used to it," says Mr Cote.

"One must keep one's feet flat between the two phases, but people walk. There's a technique to it. But people get used to it very quickly."

Fair enough.

Some regular users say it is a great timesaver, but that they would not dare use it with a rolling suitcase or a pushchair.

People who use walking sticks are also advised to steer clear.

What, no equal access for the handicapped? Apparently not.

It seems to me that "invent" is hardly the right word for what Mr Cote did here - we've all long known that such things could exist. It's just that until now they haven't, so to get the thing installed and working is still a major achievement. And it is no mere inventor's indulgence.

"The real problem nowadays is how to move crowds; they can travel fast over long distances with the TGV (high-speed train) or airplanes, but not over short distances (under 1km)," he says.

You can travel from Le Mans to Paris in 50 mins, he points out, but crossing Montparnasse Station may take you 20 minutes.

This explains the enormous international interest the TRR has aroused.

Experts from all over the world have gone to Paris to see the magic trottoir in action.

The price for moving short distances can often reflect these difficulties. In the age of cheap air tickets, it is now a common experience to find oneself spending as much to get to and from an airport as one spends on the plane ride itself. I'm not saying that there should be one of these things connecting London SW1 to Stansted. And in general, London is pretty full up and might not be able to accommodate anything new along these lines. TRRs have to be straight, it seems, and presumably they don't work so well in the open air. But for airports, spectator sports facilities and the like, surely the TRR, and its various spin-off and copies, has a big future.

Now I know that this has probably been done with public money and all that, so maybe I ought not to be, but nevertheless … I'm impressed.

I also like that word "trottoir", even if all it means is "pavement". It is suggestive, I think you will agree, of horses, although they'd better keep horses well away from this trottoir. And perhaps I should also add that my heading could be wrong. It could be a "nouvelle" kind of trottoir. Linguistically speaking, as I'm sure you all know, the French bring sex into everything.

The EU will shortly announce its plans to more strictly regulate the Budget Airline industry. After decades of nationalised "flag carriers", which in Europe priced out ordinary consumers from regular air travel, world-wide Thatcherite reforms of this important transportation industry drove prices down, and greatly increased the numbers of destinations and budget price options; this brought a stagnant European industry more into line with a vibrant US.

But those heady days seem numbered under the forthcoming EU regulations. These, of course, will be written by many in a corrupt organisation regularly claiming 1st class weekend airfare expenses, from Brussels to home, without the need to produce either receipts, or even without the need to take the flight.

Instead of the consumer placing their custom where they will, with different competitors, and companies building up individual loyalty and trust in their brands, the EU has decided, in its wisdom, to crack down its regulatory whip.

For those passengers bumped off over-booked flights, compensation levels will be doubled; some claims for compensation may even be several times the original low-budget fare. The new measures will also introduce enforced compensation for delays, whether the fault of the airline or not; indeed the industry claims 75% per cent of delays are caused by the failures of the various European air traffic control systems.

Many of the companies involved, such as Ryan Air and Easyjet, have complained bitterly about this planned interference in their market. They argue that if travellers want both low fares and compensation, they should protect themselves through the purchase their own travel insurance. But it seems the EU will have its way.

Once again consumers are to be treated as mindless cattle, with an inability to make their own travel choices, change their purchasing decisions, or risk the uncertainties that low-fare travel inevitably brings with it. What's really sad, is that many consumers in this dirigiste continent will agree with the plan; what many of these supporters won't realise however, until it's too late, is that they will also pay for it.

It seems certain that fares will rise sharply, to cover the airline insurance necessary to fulfil compensation claims, and the courts will be swamped with form-waving compensation-culture vultures trying to bleed the industry dry. Marginal destinations, such as the many which have recently sprung up in France and Spain, servicing holiday-home Britons, may also be dropped altogether, as their slim potential profits will fail to cover the possible compensation costs or necessary insurance.

So, thanks Big Brother EU. Where would we be without you?

It is about time that some mainstream voices were prepared to challenge the absurd and iniquitous eco-fascist-inspired war against the motorist and, much to my surprise, that voice is emanating from the Conservative Party:

The Tories promised yesterday to raise the motorway speed limit from 70 to 80mph as part of a "fair deal for drivers".

Tim Collins, the shadow transport secretary, said this was part of a set of reforms to be unveiled later this month.

They will include the removal of the bus and taxi lane on the M4 between Heathrow and London and speed cameras that trap motorists "unfairly".

Unnecessary road humps and road tolls will be abolished. Some speed limits, through villages, for example, may be tightened.

Its a funny old world when the Conservatives are starting to make anti-establishment noises but that is what they are doing. I suppose it is symptomatic of having spent so long in the political wilderness that even they realise there is nothing to be lost by saying boo to a goose.

It is still a long way from the kind of radicalism that we need and it is not enough to cause me to review my poor opinion of them as an institution but I am prepared to give them credit where a little bit of credit is due.

Last week, Connex became the first private rail operator to be stripped of its franchise after being accused of financial mismanagement and poor service. The company, which carries 300,000 commuters a day, has become a byword for crowded, dirty and late-running trains.

What caught my eye was the fact that Connex is a French-owned company and the main reason for its demise is its contant pleas for funds. Connex has lost its franchise mainly because of its financial management. The SRA (Strategic Rail Authority) decided the extra £200 million of public subsidy demanded by the company would not be wisely spent (after it has already spent £58 million of public money received last December).

In the last couple of weeks we have had some interesting exchanges among commenters attacking and defending France. The trains were held as an example of French superiority in matters of public policy and generally as the evidence of higher civilisation in France. Ross Clark points out in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph:

If there is one good thing to come out of Connex's humiliation, it will be that it should stop British railway passengers whining: "Why can't we run our trains like the French do?" Connex, of course, is a French company, which brought with it to Britain experience of running commuter services in Paris.

The superiority of French trains is hugely overstated. TGV trains may be rapid and relatively inexpensive to use, but that is an inter-city service with few stops and it operates thanks only to state subsidies which would make a British taxpayer squeal. Most other French trains run on slack and infrequent timetables which ensure punctuality but at the cost of providing little amenity for the passenger. On holiday in Brittany two years ago I took my family on a 15-mile train ride from Paimpol to Guincamp. The journey took well over half an hour, excluding the 10 minutes that it took to buy a ticket. It cost £17 for two adults and two children; and there were only three trains a day.

The problem with travelling by train in London and the South-East is the millions of passengers being transported over an increasingly large urban area. The rail network is far from efficient but comparing it to the French equivalent is misleading at best. I am sure the guys from the Transport blog could supply all the relevant comparative statistics but even without them one can see that conveying commuters in London is, at least when it comes to size, a slightly different proposition to doing that in Paris, Rome or other European capitals.

One of the more feeble but less important things about the euro is the actual design of the banknotes. It was decided early on that the notes would show pictures of bridges, supposedly to symbolise "the close cooperation between Europe and the rest of the world". However, due to the fact that there were not going to be enough notes to show a picture of a bridge from each Euro-zone country, the notes were instead designed with pictures of bridges that don't actually exist, but which resemble (in terms of style) bridges that do exist somewhere in Europe. (To my eye, a remarkably large number of them resemble real bridges that are actually in France, but that might be just me). So, rather than drawing attention to the great cultural treasures that do in fact exist in the euro-zone, European money instead gives us a sort of homogenised blandless.

(Euro coins have one common side and one side that the country that would issues the particular coin into circulation can do what it likes with. Just as with the state quarters in the US, which the states got to design, the quality of the designs is variable).

In any event, it was nice to see on the front page of this morning's Times (which Samizdata does not link to) that the people who design British coins do not go for such blandness. From 2004 to 2007 Britain (assuming it does not join the euro) is going to release a series of four new pound coins showing great British bridges.

Of course, issues of everyone getting their turn come into this, too. As England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all use the same coins, one of the four coins has to feature a bridge from each of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom. (Curiously, the situation with the pound is the precise reverse of that with the euro. All of the UK uses the same coins, but England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have different banknotes).

This is where we get to the interesting part, which is the choice of bridges on the coins. Choosing for Scotland and Wales was undoubtedly very easy. Benjamin Baker's Forth Bridge and Thomas Telford's Menai Strait Bridge are so famous that it can't have taken more than a moment to choose them. As for Northern Ireland, we have the rather more obscure Egyptian Arch from the Belfast-Dublin railway. Sadly, there are no really famous bridges in Northern Ireland, so we have to make do with what we have. I would rather a more famous bridge from somewhere else in the UK on the coin, but I guess Northern Ireland has to get a coin.

As for England, we have the very new Gateshead Millennium Bridge. This choice doesn't impress me greatly, as I think the new bridge is more a piece of urban decoration than a piece of important infrastructure. (It illustrates that with modern super-strong materials, engineers and architects designing urban footbridges suddenly have immense freedom to be playful with the design of such bridges, as almost anything they can imagine has suddenly become technically possible and affordable. This is an interesting story, I am all for urban decoration, and I think the bridge is a very good example, but am not sure that this bridge is the right choice for a series of coins that celebrates great bridge building.

So what would my choice for the "England" bridge be?

Well, the two most famous bridges in England (besides the unspeakably ugly Tower Bridge in London) are Abraham Darby's Ironbridge in Shropshire and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. The Ironbridge is beautiful, and was utterly revolutionary when built. This would be my choice. The Clifton Suspension bridge is a great bridge built by Britain's greatest engineer, but is very similar to the Menai Strait Bridge, and the Menai Strait Bridge was built first.

However, if you were to choose the Ironbridge as the fourth bridge, then you have chosen four bridges built between 1779 (The Ironbridge) and 1890 (The Forth Bridge). This isn't that surprising, as this is the era during which British engineers led the world. However, I am guessing the coin designers decided they wanted something more contemporary for the fourth bridge. In the 20th century, bridge design came to be more and more dominated by the Americans, but British engineers still did some impressive things. As I see it, there were three major movements in the design of long bridges. One of these developments was the steel arch bridge. One of the most important examples of this type was designed by British engineers, but unfortunately it is in Australia. There are one or two examples of this type of bridge in the UK - most notably the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, but there are much greater examples in Sydney and New York, so this has to be ruled out.

Bypassing the second for a moment, the third major movement in 20th century bridges was made possible in the 1980s by the same invention of new super-strong materials that gave the designers of pedestrian bridges their new freedom to exercise their every whim. This same materials revolution led to the cable stayed bridge becoming the most economical type to build for spans of up to about 1000 metres. Sadly, though, there are no particularly good examples of the type in the UK. The longest is the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford, and the circumstances of the location prevented this from being an especially pretty bridge. In any event, the bridge was not particularly long or innovative by international standards. (There is a stunning example of this kind of bridge across the mouth of the Seine in France, however. If real bridges were being used for euro notes, I would definitely nominate this one. In fact they have put an imaginary bridge that looks quite like it on the 500 euro note).

So what have we left? Well, the second and most important 20th century movement for long bridges was the long span suspension bridge. The first two of these to be built were in the United States: the George Washington Bridge in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. However, there are three major bridges of this kind in the United Kingdom. The Forth Road Bridge is in Scotland, right next to the more famous rail bridge, so it doesn't qualify for the English coin. (Also, it wasn't a particularly innovative bridge, for reasons I will get to in a moment). The Humber bridge in East Yorkshire had until very recently the longest span of any bridge in the world (the record is now held by the Akashi-Kaikyo bridge near Kobe in Japan), and is a good piece of engineering, but not an especially exciting one. In any event, the amount of public money wasted on this fairly pointless bridge was so great that the Treasury is unlikely to want to constantly reminded of it.

The third long span suspension bridge in the UK is the First Severn Bridge, near Bristol. This bridge has a story.

In the early 20th century, suspension bridges got longer and longer, and their decks got thinner and thinner. This all went well until 1940, when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State shook itself to pieces. It was then realised that the aerodynamics and resonance properties of bridge decks were not as well understood as engineers had thought. For a while, this problem was solved by attaching a thick metal truss to the bridge deck to make it rigid. However, this was expensive in engineering terms and looked ugly. (The Forth Road Bridge has such a truss, which is why I described it the way I did earlier).

Eventually, though, engineers did figure out the aerodynamic and resonance properties of Bridge design, and the Severn Bridge was the first long bridge built with a thin deck after the problems were properly understood. It is for this reason a significant bridge, as well as being a particularly beautiful bridge, especially at twilight, In my opinion it is the best bridge built in Britain in the 20th century. If not allowed the Ironbridge, this would be my nominee for the bridge to put on the "English" coin.

Except the Severn Bridge probably doesn't qualify to appear on any of the four coins. The Severn Estuary marks the boundary between England and Wales, and while one end of the bridge is in England, the other is not. Personally I would still put it on the English coin, and insist that it had been chosen to emphasise "the close cooperation between England and the rest of the United Kingdon". But the bureacracy probably couldn't cope with this.

Despite all this commentary, I do like the design of the new coins, and very much look forward to actually seeing them in circulation. This is one more (relatively unimportant) reason to vote against the euro.

I was just watching a report on early morning TV which was in itself a rather mundane piece about how the authorities in Britain are clamping (immobilising) cars which are stopped on the road and found to have unpaid vehicle tax. Yeah yeah, whatever.

But then came a remark which astonished me...

"Unpaid annual Vehicle Excise Duty costs the British economy millions of pounds per year"

Now without getting into the rights and wrongs of vehicle ownership taxes (as opposed to road use taxes), the implication is clear: money not paid to the state for the privilege of owning your own several property does not create wealth... only when that money is safely in the hands of the state does the British economy benefit. Note, the words use are not "costs the British state millions..." but rather "costs the British economy millions..."

And with that tax money taken out of private hands, the state creates a net gain in wealth how exactly? Hiring more wealth destroying bureaucrats? And of course that money you selfish tax dodgers have not paid to the state is going to be flushed down the toilet rather than being used for some alternative economic activity, right? Likewise immobilising people's transport because they have not paid an annual ownership tax, and thereby preventing those people making deliveries or getting to work, that does not British economy a penny, right?

Arrogance and ignorance in equal measure. The state is not your friend.

In London just now there is a big push on to make the place more pedestrian friendly, and less car-dominated. The Congestion Charge is part of this trend. So are the three new footbridges across the Thames, in the form of the Millenium Bridge between the City and Tate Modern, and the two new footbridges they've put on either side of the old Hungerford (railway) Bridge to replace the one old puddle-ridden sewer of a footbridge that used to be there.

As a confirmed pedestrian, I consider all these changes to be big steps in the right direction, especially the Congestion Charge. The long term threat is that London may one day stop being a living city, and become a tourist city, like Paris. Paris is pretty. Of course it is. But the trouble with Paris is that increasingly, that's all that it is.

In London, for the time being, tourism is no threat. London is far too big, busy and ugly for that. Tourism is the seasoning of this great city, not its basic nourishment. And one of the more entertaining sights to be seen in London in recent years has been the tourist related one of seeing one of these things trundling about, these being DUKWs.

DUKWs, or "Ducks" as they have always, inevitably, been called, were originally used for amphibious landings during World War II, and although I've never witnessed them actually making the transition, the London ducks are amphibious here too, being both buses and boats at different stages of their travels about London.

While putting this together, I found myself wondering, not for the first time in my life: why DUKW? Well, according to this:

D = First year of production code "D" is for 1942
U = Body style "U" utility truck (amphibious)
K = Front wheel drive. GMC still uses that on trucks today (K5 Chevy Blazer)
W = Two rear driving wheels (tandem axle)

So now you know.

I also learned on my google-travels that London is not the only city where DUKWs are still making themselves useful, and keeping people employed driving them and looking after them. They are to be found all over the place, it seems.

The Royal Mail is to sell off the Post Office Underground Railway, better known as Mail Rail. For the uninitiated, this is basically the Crossrail project (the East-West rail link across London that is as eagerly anticipated by commuters as it is delayed by politicians and dreaded by taxpayers). The only differences: it exists in reality, not just as a gleam in John Prescott's eye, and it only carries sacks of mail. Millions of them per day. Like Crossrail, however, it is too expensive - the Post Office says it is simply not economic to run any more.

The Times [to which Samizdata does not link], asks in today's Leader for ideas on what use may be put to such a railway, bearing in mind it is only tall enough to carry passengers if they lie down like guests in a Japanese capsule hotel. Surely the collective ingenuity of Samizdata can come up with some good ideas?

Here's two to start the ball rolling:

• Cross-London packet sevice. Surely it could continue in its present role if anyone - private individual, corporation, courier or freight company - could use it. Modern barcode technology could make it easy to identify the right packet to serve up at the receiving station. Mail Rail is infrastructure; if the Post Office opened their pipes to competing "content", like telcos and ISPs do, then perhaps the infrastructure would be viable, and even extended?
• The real Crossrail. Wouldn't it be cheaper to widen a tunnel that already exists than to build a new one? Everyone knows that Crossrail is desperately needed if London is not to sieze up - and risk losing companies migrating elsewhere to restore the balance. Everyone also knows that the £4bn estimate is likely to be spent several times over before the system goes into service - these projects always overrun. Isn't this a good opportunity to cut costs?

The usual prize (kudos, not cash) for the most innovative suggestion.

Last Sunday I did a posting about the new Rolls-Royce Phantom, and now that comments there have had as much say as they're going to, I'd like to add just one more. I appealed in my posting for eyewitness accounts of new Roller, but commenters were only able to speculate about the new car's appearance and about the impression it makes on people nearby from various photo-links we had found, until this arrived, from Joseph Beckner of Atlanta, Georgia:

I saw the new Rolls-Royce Phantom at the Amelia Island Councours D'Elegance in Florida in March.

Impressions:

1) It is an IMPOSING automobile. It has a massive quality to it that transcends any other car in recent memory. The grill is indeed huge and, in my mind, overbearing. it comes up to my chest and is very wide. The car is very long and wide, and seems to have been carved from a block of granite. It simply dwarfs anything on the road. The first descriptive thought that came to me was "it's a locomotive".

2) There is nothing stately about the car. It has what I can only describe as a "Panzer" feel to it. You'll never mistake it for any other car in your rearview mirror. And I guarantee you'll move over.

3) The auto oozes quality in every detail. The paint is flawless, the interior fit and finish is beyond fault, and the materials are first rate. That said, it isn't a "warm" car. Unlike the Rolls of yore, it feels cold and unforgiving. Rather than "This is your reward, sir, for a life well-lived", it seems to say "See, I have more cubic money than you. Out of the way, swine!".

4) The wheels are enormous, and according to reports, the biggest tires on any passenger car. They are 31" in diameter, and while they visually tend to make the car appear smaller in pictures, in the flesh that trick doesn't work. With its giant grill, high beltline, and small glass-to-body ratio, it just overwhelms the viewer.

5) The coach doors in the rear ('suicide doors' to Americans), are a nice touch. Well integrated in the design. Whether they actually work in real life remains to be seen.

6) Everything about the car suggests that it is what the Germans believe the British think of as a "Rolls-Royce". It's almost cartoonish. It's an idea that's been filtered through BMW's preconceived notions of the British. "You know, Hans, with their overinflated sense of "Empire" and such, the British really think they still rule the world. This is the car that reflects that attitude."

One of the other commenters, blogger Charles Hueter linked to and quoted from this story, which happens to include at its top left corner, this photograph, which I think best illustrates Beckner's reaction to this remarkable, but it would also seem, decidedly offputting vehicle.

Early last month I did a piece over at Transport Blog about the new Rolls Royce. This car, the "Phantom", is interesting for several reasons.

First, it costs a lot, around £250,000. That's a lot more than a Rolls Royce has ever cost before. Who will buy such a thing?

Second, will the fact that Rolls Royce is now German-owned affect sales in the USA? I don't know, but maybe commenters from the USA can enlighten us. Presumably the German connection will ensure that the car has fewer bits falling off it than is the case with cars made by large but still British-owned car makers. But do Americans perceive the Rolls Royce now to be a German car? Or do they still view it as British, with Germans merely helping out with the running of what remains a Great British Institution? If Americans do think it's now German, will that matter?

Third, it may work terribly well, but is the Phantom a nice enough design to be worth all that money? I have yet to see one of these beasts myself. When I did my Transport Blog piece, I was merely noting the new Roller's existence, a transport event in itself. Since then, I have heard Jeremy Clarkson's somewhat critical views about what the Phantom looks like, and what driving about in one might say about you, and I suspect Clarkson is right. What he said was that the thing is just not beautiful enough. In fact, he said, it's rather ugly. If you drive about in one, you'll come across as, not to put too fine a point on it, a bastard. I don't recall Clarkson's exact words, but that is the gist that I recall.

When it comes to car aesthetics, photographs are notoriously not sufficient to answer such worries.

Some photos make the Phantom look rather small, but this could just be because the wheels are so very big. And if the Rolls is actually very big, then it could turn out to be the front that will upset me. If you follow the Rolls Royce link above, and scroll down the one of a certain Tony Gott introducing the car, you'll see what bothers me most about this car, which is the latest version of the radiator grill. What used to look stately and classical now looks like it may be aggressive and overbearing. Rollers used to mean noblesse oblige. Well, they did until the sixties, when pop stars and drug dealers started buying them. This latest one looks more like the kind of Germanic noblesse that doesn't give a scheisse. On the other hand this may all be effect of the photograph exaggerating the size of the radiator, and actually the Phantom is very nice.

I've been walking about in London now for two months since this beast was launched and have yet to spot one. Could it be that it isn't selling very well, and that others have similar reservations to mine?

Has anyone else laid eyes on it? If so, what did you think of it?

Patrick of Transport Blog links to this story, drawn to his attention by this promising rival/collaborator to/with Transport Blog.

So that, when trawling through the Samizdata archives in 2085 you may learn what this story was about, it is an advert by a car making enterprise called "General Motors" featuring a bus with "CREEPS AND WEIRDOS" on its sign machine instead of saying its destination. (I know what you're thinking: what's a "bus"?)

"Truth in advertising" says Patrick. Indeed. This advert says something extremely true and important about public transport, which is that not all of the public are very nice or companionable people. So obviously the advert can't be allowed and General Motors have been made to withdrawn it. But it looks like the blogosphere will immortalise and universalise the message. Congratulations GM. I shouldn't be at all surprised if they provoked the row deliberately, in order to help them make their point wihtout having to go on paying for it to be said. And in Canada! The horror.

GM is famous in public-transportophile circles for having bribed and corrupted buses and trams into perdition in the USA and replaced them all with the hated (by everyone except the non-creep non-weirdo public) motor car. The more I study this argument, the more I think that GM is the messenger being blamed for the message, the message being that most Americans prefer cars to buses and trams and for good reasons. Whereas buses and trams are quite good for getting new American places to live and work in started, they are not very good for serving all the people who subsequently go to live in these new American places, because American places are, generally speaking, big dispersed smudges rather than arranged in neat bus and tram friendly lines.

And the rest of the world is now following America into this argument. The only "public" transport issue of import now is not how to replace cars, but how to make the car system far, far better, which can't happen while the infrastructure remains in "public" hands, which can't be changed until the public sector is bullied into introducing road pricing, because that way there'll be an income stream to privatise.

One of the many benefits of the new London road pricing scheme – crude and intrusive though it undoubtedly is – is that London buses now go a bit less slowly.

I hate blogging sometimes. You start out doing something short and frivolous and fun, and you end up with something long and profound and wearisome. It's a bit like life, isn't it?

Patrick Crozier at Transport Blog links to a piece about the perennial tendency of all concerned to prefer railways to cars, except where their own personal travelling arrangements are concerned. Cars take you where you want to go. Trains can't take you to almost any of the places you want to go. Work is spread out in the suburbs. Trains can't be spread out in the suburbs, because they only stop at stations. If you could jump off trains at any point, the way you can jump off the old London double decker buses with the wide-open back doors whenever they slow down, and if trains did slow down quite often, then trains would be much more convenient things. But you can't do any of that.

So, people actually use cars. But what they vote for and politick for is trains. People don't like cars, in the sense of liking their combined effect. They prefer the train system to the car system.

Why? Whence the train fascination? Why does even Transport Blog obsess about trains, when trains are such economically stupid things compared to cars?

Part of the answer is surely aesthetic. Trains go in those lovely elegant curves. Trains don't get stuck in train jams and produce nothing but fumes for twenty minutes. (They do get stuck from time to time. But mostly they don't get stuck.) Above all, trains don't need huge, huge train parks to park in. They just carry on trundling around.

Cars, on the other hand, have turned a substantial percentage of the surface of the earth into a place whose only purpose is to be purposeful. The biggest bridges and the most intricate motorway interchanges have genuine beauty and grandeur. But most car infrastructure is every bit as dull and clunky and messy and uninspiring as the word infrastructure itself is.

In particular, car parks are an almost total aesthetic negative, in most people's eyes. Car parks pave paradise. The more exciting a building is, the greater the price that seems to have to be paid in meaningless tarmac expanse surrounding it. And which is now uglier: a full car park or an empty car park? You tell me.

But it doesn't have to be like this.

Car parks aren't just ugly; they are aesthetic no-go areas. By this I mean that mostly they are not just ugly, but are places where no attempt is now made to make them look beautiful. It is simply accepted in our culture that whereas it makes sense to try to make an office block or a sports stadium or a appartment building look cool and dandy and the sort of thing that people would want to take photos of, car parks are just incurably awful places, and we just have to put up with them and make them as un-huge as we can.

Well, correction. Trees are often planted in among car parks. But to believe that only trees can beautify a car park is, in a way, to accept the very point I am saying should be challenged. Do we really have to accept that the only way to make tarmac surfaces look good is to punch little holes in it and allow weedy, smoke encrusted and apologetic little plants to peep through (and then shed leaves everywhere)? Cannot a car park, by virtue of its own carparkness, be as beautiful in its own right as a tree?

Car parks could look great, surely.

Anyway, what I would like to see is a serious attempt by architects and designers to make car parks into things of beauty, and a quite deliberate acceptance of the fact, which it surely is, that doing this would amost certainly mean spending extra money.

But so what? There is no law that says that a car park should not be so amazing that people would actually visit it, and pay extra to park in it and to photograph their car in it, and buy picture postcards of it seen from the air the way they do of the Sydney Opera House or St Paul's Cathedral. In the hands of a great designer, could not a car park be paradise?

For people who are supposed to 'worship the motorcar', we sure are crap at building car cathedrals.

Two general suggestions. One: as per Sydney Opera House, think curves. Avoid rectangles. This actually makes driving sense. The sharp right angle turn saves space, of course it does. But it is not fun to drive in sharp turns. Curves make driving sense. And of course curves give you all kinds of chances to make places that look great.

Two: spend money to get away from total flatness. At present, aesthetics tends to forbid turning hills into car parks, because hills are too beautiful thus to ruin, even if a car park carved into a hillside might be a lot nicer. So build slopes and hills and intersecting ramps. Advantage: tourists can take good three-d photos without having to hire helicopters or climb towers. Eventually, places with frankly rather drab looking lumps of earth (hills) would be asking successful car park designers to turn their boring earthly protuberances into groovy car parks.

Discuss.

Questions. First, of course: am I, approximately speaking, on to something? Two: are there already examples in the world of car parks built in the manner I suggest, with the kind of aesthetic and financial exuberance I would like to see? Surely yes. Three: are there any rejected or fantasy car park designs along the lines I suggest? Surely yes again. Pictures and links to pictures appreciated.

Struggling into the office via the Tube (London's subway system) this morning, I distinctly thought I heard the following announcement over the public address system. I may have been hallucinating, but I am not sure:

Ladies, gentlemen, buskers and beggars, London Transport regrets to announce that in addition to the Central Line being closed until Hell freezes over while we check to see if the nuts and bolts have been screwed in correctly, the Piccadilly Line has been suspended. So I suggest you suckers get outside and into the fresh air for a bracing walk. Let's face it, transporting you people is more than our jobs are worth

As I say, I may have been imagining things.

The above is also the title of a piece by Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, about the principle of road pricing in the light of the London scheme (£5 per day) that is just about to come into force. I'm not such how long Eamonn's piece has been up at the ASI website, but thanks to Alex Singleton for bringing it to my attention.

Like Eamonn Butler, I'm strongly in favour of road pricing, for all the reasons he itemises, and which I have been going on about for many years. But also, like Eamonn, and like Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog, I am uneasy about the effect Ken Livingstone's London will have on this debate.

Eamonn and Patrick both fear the worst. Says Eamonn:

The London congestion charging scheme is a bad scheme. But if it fails, it will put back the debate on road pricing for another twenty years, until we're all in an even worse jam.

I'm a pathological optimist, so discount the following if you aren't, but I suspect that the logic of road pricing is so overwhelming, and the utter absurdity of any other road regime in places like central London – right under the noses of the people who will decide about the overall future of road pricing in Britain – so palpable, that there is nothing that even Ken Livingstone can do to stop this idea. On the contrary, the fact that he is at least attempting it will be what counts and what will get (is getting) the idea out there into the heads of intelligent people everywhere, and if the idea is regarded as not having worked for London, yet, the culprit will be identified as the way Livingstone did it, rather than the idea itself.

So what should have been and should be done about road pricing?

The obvious place to start is the busiest motorways, because they're busy, and because by their nature, motorways only have a very few entry points.

The simple principle to apply is: No payment, no passage. Clearly there would be a demand for payment systems that didn't interrupt one's journey, in the form of a kind of giant credit card attached to one's car, or something similar. Once everyone had got used to it, the same gadgetry could then be applied to much more complex situations, like central London.

To invent an untried system from scratch for central London, which is what Livingstone has done, is asking for trouble. His scheme involves photographing every car that crosses the line, and then sending out bills, based on knowing who the owner of the car is from the number plate. Trouble is already guaranteed, in the form of all the Nigerians in our midst (from Nigeria itself and of the home grown variety) who are applying their minds to this arrangement. Having bogus German number plates ought not to make any difference to a decent road pricing system, yet suddenly London seems to have many more German diplomats than formerly.

I live just inside the western boundary of the London payment area. Big Cs have been appearing on all kinds of roads near me, and for a while I just thought that C stood for me being Confused. I still don't know how it will all work, but will surely have stories to tell about it all, if not here then on Patrick's Transport Blog, for which I also write occasionally.

As for the Cut Taxes! part of my title, and of Eamonn Butler's, I think that's trickier than Eamonn makes it sound. There are two ways to do road pricing. You can do it a bit at a time, which makes sense but which makes car use tax reduction decisions hard to make sense of, because you can't reduce these taxes only very locally. Or: you can make a gigantic switch from free-at-the-point-of-use roads to priced roads, throughout the entire country, which would at least make tax reductions work okay and with reasonable justice, but which would be insane on just about all other counts.

That's to assume, of course, that the politicians can be trusted to cut car use taxes in the first place, having introduced road pricing, which of course they can't.

But even there, I am an optimist, in the sense that if all that road pricing means is a sharp increase in the price of motoring in certain places and along certain roads and nothing much else (the probable story), I think that would still be an improvement. Even that would be better than gridlock.

My ego being suitably gratified by the reactions to my earlier post about SUVs, well, I could not resist linking to this nice story, also by Reuters, about the latest incarnation of the mighty Ford Mustang.

It seems that folk who want us Westerners to cut back on oil as a way of squeezing the Middle East are fighting a losing battle at the moment.

Also in a totally gratuitous vein, here is a story with some picks of the latest Aston Martin, as driven by Pierce Brosnan in his, in my view, largely rather silly James Bond movie. But for this petrol-head, the car is pure eye candy. Aston Martin in my view has made some of the most beautiful cars ever. I used to rank the DB5 as the most aesthetically pleasing, but I think the Vanquish is even better.

The sports utility vehicle (SUV) is the bete noire of the anti-globalista class, epitomizing much that they hate about western, and specifically American, culture. They are big, brash, consume a lot of fossil fuels and symbolise an almost Wild West ethos (although in my experience many of them are driven by stockbrokers in deepest west London).

I must say that in my more ideologically manic moments, I fantasize about buying a SUV for no other reason than to cock a snook at the flat-earthers. Check out this interesting story for the enduring appeal of these capitalist behemoths on wheels. Vroom!

Patrick Crozier posted a piece on Transport Blog the other day about something called SkyTran, which I hereby throw to the Samizdata comment pack to see what they make of it. It seems like a wonderful idea.

Said Patrick:

Further to my investigations into alternatives to driving, I stumbled across a site promoting SkyTran. SkyTran will be a 100mph, computer-controlled, magnetically-levitated, almost door-to-door, non-polluting, personal transportation system. It will whisk us to our destinations in futuristic, light-weight pods, eliminate congestion at a stroke, cost next to nothing, turn a profit, allow spectacular views and be built along existing rights of way.

Can it be done? I have no idea. But I so, so hope it can. Imagine, an almost perfect transport system, making trains and cars look like the 19th century technologies that they are and consigning both to the rubbish bin of history.

I love it.

Maybe it was just that other blogs were taking the Christmas holiday off and there was nowhere else to go, but I've been struck not just by the quantity but also by the quality of the comments samizdata has been attracting recently. I can't reasonably expect the number of comments that David Carr got for his piece about communism not collapsing the way it should, but a dozen or more good, informed responses to this proposal, maybe referring to what else has been said about this scheme by critics and commentators in America, is not an unreasonable hope. The more lucid of these comments, if there are any, can then be swung back to Transport Blog, together with a link to the rest if them. So let's show these trainspotters what we can do, eh? A very cursory google search got me to several more commentaries about SkyTran, but they all seemed to be echoing the original sales pitch. Has anyone been minded to shoot the thing down in flames?

I'm not sure I quite love SkyTran. There's something uniquely satisfying about choosing and owning your own vehicle, which SkyTran doesn't seem ever to allow. Nevertheless for commuting SkyTran looks most enticing, if it can be made to work.

SkyTran is basically a scheme I myself have gone a good way towards inventing – in a science fiction kind of way – as a result of my decades-long enthusiasm for the idea of road pricing. Road pricing, once it is installed (and I do believe that it will be with us in a big way any decade now), will reward the road operator who manages to fit as many vehicles as he can onto his road, and this he might eventually do by taking control of the vehicles himself. The trouble with both trains and road vehicles now is that the gaps between them are too big. Computerised control of the vehicles by the system itself might make much denser track and road usage possible. Essentially, what you need are traffic jams which move along as convoys, all vehicles starting and stopping at the same time, yet the individual vessels being separable and recombinable into different convoys, by destination. Need I add that you also need the faultless driving - second by second, day after day, year after year - that a humans can't manage but which a computer might?

But we're decades away even from a fully rational pricing system for roads, and who knows when computerised vehicle guidance will come on the roads, if ever? This might be a much quicker fix, at any rate for urban transport.

My principle technical confusion about SkyTran is: does the system involve "points"? (As in railway-type points. Funny, I never realised until now what an odd word that is to describe what it describes.) It seems as if it must, in order (a) to allow the SkyTran pods to go from any destination to any other destination, and (b) to enable the pods to detatch themselves from the main line and to insert themselves into the stopping system, like so many London taxis in a cab rank.

Such road pricing as does happen in the near future will definitely help, because it will concentrate minds wonderfully on dreaming up and arguing about possible alternatives. Alternatives like SkyTran.

UK Transport is now Transport Blog, and has a burst of short but varied new postings. This is a good name, combining Patrick Crozier's all-embracingly global field of vision (although the latest postings are mostly British, with only the occasional Japanese reference) with his general gloom about his ability to dazzle. No "Transports of Delight" nonsense.

Now that Patrick has moved it over to Movable Type, I am nagging him to set me up with automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, to take up some of the slack when he gets too depressed about the state of Britain's deeply depressing transport infrastructure, for words, as it were. When my campaign has succeeded, this is the kind of stuff I'll be putting there, although if Perry wants to insert a weekend type picture here, I recommend this as being more his (our) kind of thing.

Being a pedestrian with a heart condition is about to get worse.

This is an absolute classic, picked up and copied in full (I think) by Natalie Solent. Which is a good thing because the link to it supplied by Natalie was also a horse's arse when I tried it.

The piece in question is both an utterly convincing and an utterly hilarious explanation (based on the size of the standard horse's arse) of why the standard railway gauge throughout the world is 4ft 8.5 ins, and it has a delightful space age postscript.

Increasing the chances that everyone on earth reads things like this is one of the basic purposes of Samizdata, as far as I'm concerned. Instapundit: do your thing, if you haven't already. UK Transport (quiet at the moment – I believe Patrick Crozier is moving house) eat your heart out.

Earlier today I did a a piece for UK Transport, in which I had a go at the idea that we live in an overcrowded country. I said the only reason people think it's overcrowded is because the crowded bits are the bits that most people spend most of their time looking at.

UKT boss Patrick Crozier linked me to another explanation, and maybe a better one, for this daft idea:

We wonder if those who claim the country is being 'covered in tarmac' are looking at small scale maps of large areas on which the width of roads is grossly exaggerated to make them obvious. On a 1:10000000 scale wall map of the UK, a motorway may be shown as being 1mm wide. This equates to 1km, when in reality motorways are only about 32m wide - 1/30 of their apparent width on a map. Surely no-one could be so stupid as to believe that thick lines on a small map represent real tarmac on the ground?

Well, no, not when you spell it out like that. But if people have spent their lives looking at the maps and not thinking … And since this overcrowded thing is such an important anti-progress meme, I think this is a very good question. It comes from the Association of British Drivers.

My big brother did a tour of accountancy duty in Hong Kong a few years back. "Overcrowded?" says he to the greenery-sodden English, "You don't know the meaning of the word."

Patrick Crozier sees that the railways are not immune to the same laws of supply and demand as everyone else

The news that the government is considering removing rail fare controls has, in media parlance "raised fears" of a massive increase in prices.

For once the fear is the right word. Allowing railway companies the freedom to set their own fares does seem scary. The man waiting for the 08:22 has to get to work. For him there is, to all intents and purposes, only one way of getting to work - the train. There is no choice. Buying railway tickets is not like buying bars of chocolate.

So, there must be controls, right? Wrong. Fare controls are amongst the most damaging forms of regulation that governments can impose on a railway. Here, there were very few controls and very few complaints until the 1920s. London and its railways expanded in tandem bringing suburbia to the masses, all at an affordable price. In the 1920s the state imposed controls on freight charges. Railway profits went for a Burton. Then, during the Second World War, the government froze fares while inflation let rip. The railways emerged in a parlous state, in dire need of a major overhaul. During nationalisation fares were constantly being held down while the industry gradually declined. It is significant, that British Rail's happiest time was during the 1980s when it was allowed to increase fares more or less at will. Incidentally, the chief reason why Japanese trains are so overcrowded is, once again, state-imposed fare control.

But what of the man on the 08:22? What's going to happen to him when he's left to the tender mercies of the market? Well, the bad news is that, intitially at least, his fares are going to go up. Quite a lot in fact.

The interesting thing is what happens next. If fares are high and are kept high and passengers see no improvement in service they will start to make different arrangements. Some will move to somehere near a cheaper railway. Others will change jobs to somewhere nearer where they live. Slowly but surely the railway will start to lose revenue.

At this point the market starts to come into its own. Sure, some railways will exhibit a couldn't-give-a-toss attitude, put up the fares, keep them high and do nothing in return but their profits will decline. But others will take an entirely different approach. They will use the price signal to improve quantity and quality. They will introduce lower fares for those travelling before the peak. They will introduce automatic fare reductions in cases of poor punctuality. They will increase capacity and they will spruce up stations (where they don't rebuild them). They will do this because higher fares will tell them that there is a market out there waiting to be satisfied and satisfied markets mean nice, fat pay cheques.

When fares are set free the man on the 08:22 will see a step change in the quality of the service. It won't happen at once (railways are not like that) and it won't be without pain, but it will happen.

Patrick Crozier says that he's finding it harder to do UK Transport than when he first started it, because he's running out of things he's burning to say. That's partly why I've accepted his invitation to become a regular (although I've warned him that it won't be that regular) contributor to UKT. I don't think that Patrick will be the only blogmeister who moves towards the Samizdata team-of-writers approach.

I did a piece for UKT last week (complete with a photo I took at Clapham Junction) about the blessing of electric signs which say when trains are coming and where they're going, and I did another piece last Sunday about the important transport option of just saying no and staying put and not using any transport. Both are unashamedly amateur writings. I have little idea of what government transport policy is this week, not having read any of the relevant pronouncements. I merely travel, sometimes. Go and read these pieces if you want to, but like the second one says, maybe you could rearrange your life a little and not go there.

As a regular commuter in London - I travel from the western end of Central London to the eastern end covering 10 miles each way - I have suffered most evils of modern transportation known to man. This is despite the fact that I ride a motorbike, which should save me from most traffic jams and delays. In fact, I have observed the traffic getting worse over the last two years and even got stuck in 'motorbike jams' that occur during major gridlocks. Public transport is horrendous in its own special way, the London Underground (affectionately known as the Tube) is apocalyptically over-crowded (those who travel by it will understand the description - it's a disaster waiting to happen) and the quaint red buses are pitifully inadequate in capacity and frequency and surprise, surprise, get stuck in the same traffic jams as cars, vans, lorries and trucks. As a biker I especially detest the last three categories.

I have often wondered how much worse the situation needs to get before this major source of frustration of living in London is addressed. Some Libertarian Alliance gurus, namely Brian Micklethwait in his pamphlet on road pricing and Tim Evans in his posting to this blog, think that charging for road use is the way forward, with the market fine-tuning the traffic flows. I can't wait for their proposals to be taken up and bring the desired results as travelling in London has become unbearable (yesterday, instead of 30 minutes it took me 1.5 hours to get home).

Therefore, I read with interest an article The war against the car in the last week's issue of The Economist (alas, subscription needed to view the article) commenting on Ken Livingstone's, London's mayor, plan to combat congestion. As of February next year, a ring of 200 cameras linked to computers programmed to recognize licence plates will start scanning 40,000 number plates an hour. The 250,000 motorists who drive into 21 square kilometres (8 square miles) of the city centre between 7am and 6.30pm every day will have to pay £5 a day for the privilege. Those who fail to do so will face an automatic £80 penalty unless they fall into one of the several exempt categories, such as taxi drivers or nurses on duty.

So far, so good. Mr Livingstone seems to be on the 'free market' track trying to play the supply and demand game. The article also confirmed my observation that over the past two years, congestion has been getting noticeably worse with average traffic speed dropping from ten miles an hour to nine - slower than at any time since the car took over from the horse and carriage. What really got my attention was that the mayor's critics say this is not a coincidence. They maintain that Mr Livingstone is deliberately making things worse before his scheme is introduced so that it will appear to work miracles. For example, the combination of new bus lanes, longer red traffic lights and more pedestrian crossings mean more delays for drivers. I can confirm all of these have appeared on my regular routes.

The timing of traffic lights is being subtly changed all over London. A few seconds' difference can affect traffic for several miles. "Double-cycling" - traffic lights which allow pedestrians twice as much time as cars at busy crossings can have a painful impact - there are places in Central London where forty seconds out of every minute are devoted to pedestrians, leaving twelve seconds for one stream of traffic and eight for another. And of course, road works can always be relied upon to do the trick. You can hear the arteries slamming shut, as drivers' adrenalin levels rise steadily during London's rush hours.

The details of how exactly Mr Livingstone can make the London traffic more hellish is important because it is half-way to proving that he is doing so. Yes, the same old story - the mayor is up for re-election in two years' time and has staked his political future on congestion-charging. Mr Livingstone needs the scheme to be seen to work. Suddenly, his objectives are no longer aligned with mine and those of thousands of frustrated drivers. The saviour turns into the devil, deceiving us in the very act of making the situation 'better'.

What matters is that those who drive cars in the centre of London during the day are a tiny minority compared with the millions who walk or use public transport - and as any good politician, he can count his votes.

Paul Marks takes a radical view of Britain's transport system

No one has yet explained to me why the railways could not have been sold as a single unit.

If it had been more efficient to brake up British Rail into regional companies then the new owners would have done just that. Just as if it had been more efficient for the rail to be owned by one company, and have the trains run by other companies this is what would have evolved via the choices of people buying and selling shares ("market forces" are, of course, simply the choices of people engaged in trading). There was certainly no need for the government to engage in complicated schemes - just sell the thing and stand back.

People often talk for the need for subsidies for the railways to compete with the roads (and, to a lesser extent, the airlines) - but whilst I am pleased to accept the fact that the railways and roads do compete for custom (which rather undermines the idea that the railways must be compulsorily broken up to ensure "competition") I think the whole idea that the railways must fall apart without subsidies is false.

Firstly the roads should not be provided "free" (i.e. free at the point of use) by the state. The problem is not that the government builds motorways late - the problem is that it builds them at all. If people want motorways let them build them and charge people to use them (such things as "road tax" should, of course, be abolished). If people really want to build free motorways let them do so - but I doubt charitable people will put up enough money for this idea.

As for the railways - subsidies should be abolished, but so should regulations. The railways have been attacked by regulations as far back as the 19th century (there were such things as profit controls even then), but in 1906 the government basically declared war on the private railways. Putting trade unions above the law of contract (i.e. outside civil interaction) hit British industry badly - but the railways companies were a specific target of the 1906 Act (the Act was, after all, a direct reaction to the "Taff Vale Judgement" in which the courts declared that a railways company had the right to sue a trade union for organised contract breaking). The "Liberal" government of the day also launched a tidal wave of regulations at the railway companies in the period 1906 to 1914. And then (during the First World War) the railways were taken over by the government, maintenance neglected and the system undermined. We should be very wary of making claims such as the idea that the British railway system was the best in the world in 1919 - such claims are not only rather easy for statists to refute, but (more importantly) undermine the libertarian case that regulations and state control have undermined the railways.

Why the history lesson? Simple - after the returning of the railways to a sort of private ownership history repeated itself. First history repeated itself as farce - in that the government of Mr Major did not intend to harm private railway companies with regulations (but did anyway). And then history repeated itself in a straightforward way with the Labour government's transport boss (Mr Prescott) setting out to undermine the railway companies as much as he could. A policy continued by his supposedly arch "New Labour" successor as transport boss.

Without the regulations the railways might well be able to compete quite well with the roads without any subsidies at all - even if the roads remained free.

And (of course) a railway system without regulations would be a much safer railway system - as it would be clear who was in charge and who was responsible.

Paul Marks

Well, it seems hapless former UK transport minister and all-round-twit Stephen Byers learned the hard way of why the once-magnificent British railway system was to prove his downfall. As they say, it could not have happened to a nicer guy.

Meanwhile, Patrick Crozier, at his excellent UK Transport blog, confesses to being totally surprised at the resignation of Byers. I confess to feeling the same way. But of course I am not kidding myself that anything will change in the quality of our transport network as a result of Byers' departure. The trains will still be late and dirty, the Tube (underground subway) will still be noisy, late and hot; our roads will be jammed, and the cost of motoring will still be extortionate.

Britain is a member of the Group of Seven industrial nations and yet we have an increasingly third world transportation system.

So he's gone. Stephen Byers, formerly Secretary of State for the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions has resigned. And just when I thought he'd never go. You just can't tell.

Now, all the speculation is about who should replace him. Should it be invisible Charles Clarke? Or should it be Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon? Neither is about to set the world alight. Of the two, Hoon, would seem to have the best credentials to step into Byers's shoes: not only can't he manage the news, but I understand he's rapidly buggering up the armed forces.

But I have got a much better and simpler idea. One that will almost certainly solve our transport problems. 

Abolish the Department.

It only goes back to 1919. Before then we had the best railway in the world. We had already built most of the tube. Electric trams, taximeter cabs and motorised buses plied the streets of the capital looking for trade. 

And then Transport got a Ministry and a Minister: Eric Geddes. It got off to a bad start - forcibly re-organising the railways and hamstringing their profits. So started their steady decline. And after the bad start things just got worse. London Transport was nationalised halting development in its tracks. Not satisfied with that they then decided to nationalise the whole railway. The decline just gathered pace. And so on and so forth. 

Luckily the Ministry's incompetence was masked by the growth of road transport. But even there motorways were built too late and in insufficient numbers. 

Almost every move the Department has ever made has made things worse: expanding the railway, then cutting it; expanding the road network then slamming on the brakes. They couldn't get nationalisation right. They couldn't even get privatisation right.

Politicians are not part of the solution: they are part of the problem.

Patrick Crozier

That's it, that's the story. Most libertarians know the arguments for pricing roads sanely instead of insanely. This Sky News report tells us that the RAC (Royal Automobile Club), a big fragment of the British road lobby, now 'gets it' as well. Perhaps some of the people there even realise that road pricing, far from being "anti-car", will in reality usher in a new golden age of the car, and put the present dark age of gridlock behind us.

In his first posting yesterday (Saturday May 4) on UK Transport, Patrick Crozier posts a challenge to libertarians everywhere. Can you build railways without compulsory purchase orders (or what Americans call, I believe, "Eminent Domain" laws)? I'm sure this question has received many answers over the years, but I haven't come across one I liked. I'd like to. Maybe the answer is that railways are inherently anti-libertarian. If so, a pity, I say. Maybe railways can be run by libertarians, once they exist, but not built by them. Ugh!

And a question to Patrick, with whom I discussed the matter by phone the other day. What is it with airport landing "rights", awarded, it would seem, by politicians, to the airlines that are cleverest at lobbying? What's the story there? Surely there should be a market for the right to land (and, presumably, take off). If there was, what would happen? Would prices surge? Would they fluctuate a lot? Is there anywhere which already has such a market?

Patrick Crozier of UK Transport looks at Britain and realises we have seen it all before.

It is an essential service. It has been starved of funds. It is in desparate need of modernisation. Of course, this will require some money but the politicians promise us that after they've got the new technology working everything will be as right as rain. Is this the National Health Service (NHS) we're talking about? No, British Rail in the 1950s. 

The railway was clapped out just like the NHS. It had been the pride of the nation - just like the NHS It had faced years of re-organisation coupled with fare control, followed by Depression, followed by War, followed by nationalisation. In an age of diesel and electricity, British trains were powered by steam and the industry was losing money fast. So, they called for a Modernisation Plan and a stack of cash was produced. And in the late 1950s British Rail spent it - just like the NHS is about to. And, boy, did they spend it. They spent it on diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, steam locomotives (would you believe it), marshalling yards, DMUs, EMUs, electrification projects. They commissioned something like 20 different types of locomotive - some of which actually worked. Some of which are rattling around the network to this very day. 

But by the early 1960s things were looking bleak. British Rail was still shipping cash even though it was supposed to be breaking even. It seems that people had found alternatives to one-size-fits-all railways. They had bought themselves flexible, go-anywhere-anytime cars and lorries and didn't need boring old trains anymore. Cue Doctor Beeching. Cue the closure of half the network.

As with the railways, so (up to a point) with the NHS. They will spend the money. Some of their IT projects will work. There will be some nice new hospitals. And in 5 years' time there will be little else to show for it. 

The big difference is customers. British Rail wanted customers. The NHS doesn't. British Rail didn't get what it wanted and neither will the NHS. British Rail lost out because there was an alternative. The NHS will lose out because there isn't. The NHS is going to gouge out the private sector for doctors, nurses and beds. In doing so it will force even more people to suffer its tender mercies. And in 5 years' time a new Doctor Beeching will have to sort out the mess.

Patrick Crozier

Dr. Tim Evans welcomes 'Red Ken' to the world of capitalist rationality... sort of

I have long been an advocate of private roads and road pricing. State ownership of public space and its attendant services such as police beat patrols is madness. Indeed, I have long believed that London and all other geographic areas will only get decent integrated roads and transport systems through genuine private ownership and good old free market price signaling.

What I did not expect was that that doyen of the British left and now Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, would be the man to instigate the transition to such an approach. Let me be clear, Livingstone is planning to introduce road pricing into the capital city early next year. However imperfect his plans will be (and my God, they have some glaring holes at present) and however he seeks to dress this move up with all the usual environmental waffle, the long term affect of his policy of “congestion charging” is going to lead to the commodification of public space. By pricing roads, encouraging an income stream down them and therefore deriving revenue, Livingstone will slowly become addicted to the money.

As he becomes addicted and the approach spreads – already Durham, Cheshire, Milton Keynes, Surrey, Warwickshire, Isle of Wight, Cumbria, South Gloucestershire, Leeds, Hampshire, Derby and at least twenty other areas are already talking to the Department of Transport about introducing road pricing – the incentive for a supply side revolution in roads and public space will mount. For as money pours into the coffers and drivers slip into the psychology of becoming consumers of road space, so there will be ever more pressure to find new ways of generating more income and therefore getting the supply side of public space to meet people’s demands: that is - some semblance of a market approach.

It is with this in mind that the utopian ideas so long espoused by the Libertarian Alliance in such glorious pamphlets as:

LA Economic Notes No. 49, Brian Micklethwait, The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use, 1993 *

LA Economic Notes No. 57, Martin Ball, Liberate the Roads! The Benefits that will come from road privatisation, 1994 *

LA Political Notes No. 17, Max More, Private Police and the Free Rider Problem, 1983 *

LA Political Notes No. 40 Chris R. Tame, On the Side of the Angels: A View of Private Policing, 1989 *

LA Political Notes No. 58, Sean Gabb, The Case for Privatising the Police, 1991 *

...will begin to become relevant to everyday experience and discourse. And that in turn could well mean fantastic new private roads and even maintenance work being undertaken with the customer in mind and not the producer interest.

Sure, these new roads might be built underground by private sector companies who put in the latest air purification technology. And yes, the owners of X road might well want to contract with a private security company to breath test one in every 10,000 drivers for excessive alcohol. But hell, that is capitalism. The owners of X road will want to tell customers that this road is the cleanest and safest way to travel.

None of this will happen in the short term. But slowly, step by step, the incentives to engage a market in road provision are mounting. Sod the Queen’s nationalised highway. I want it owned by capitalists. As a driver, I want roads to be appropriately priced and to be served as a customer.

Come to think of it, perhaps that is why those most hard-line privatisers at the Adam Smith Institute had Ken Livingstone visit their offices three times over the last year on the subject of roads?

Come on comrade Ken, scatter those libertarian seeds and take us to the supply side!

Dr. Tim Evans

^*= (links requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar pdf reader) which can be downloaded for free)

UK Transport isn't a blog name to make the heart race, or so Perry and I have been telling Patrick Crozier. Transports of Delight? Freedom Wheels? Libertarian Travelblog? But UK Transport by any other name would smell just as sweet, for just as long as he can keep it going and keep it coming.

For example, among several nice things there was a beautiful little piece there yesterday (Wed April 3) entitled Safety Costs Soar. I know: yawn. But read it. Says Patrick: "There is something of a shifting of the tectonic plates going on in government circles at the moment." Trust me, this is about more than safety. It is but the grain of sand in the molecular depths of which a whole world is revealed.

Taking the tube (London's underground rapid transit system) last night was a nightmare. A delay on one line meant no trains at a rush-hour period for more than 20 minutes. Chaos. Angry crowds. A scene sticks in my mind. A young London Underground staffer, dressed in usual garb of garish blue jacket and hat, was shouting at a vexed young man in a suit, telling him to wait at a certain point. She was using the manner of a particularly authortarian school-marm. Ask yourselves, gentle reader, could such a thing occur in a privately run business, like a food store? I think I know the answer to that one.

London Underground's new slogan?

I have a friend called Don Riley, who originates from New Zealand. He is a property developer. He owns - lucky man - property next to London's new Jubilee Line. The Jubilee Line, as everyone in the Anglosphere surely knows, is the latest addition to the tube, that is to say to the London Underground railway system.

Don is also an International Man of Mystery. He'll tell you all kinds of stories about how he sold computers to the Russians in the seventies, and he still has numerous deeply mysterioso friends from behind the ex-Iron Curtain. He occasionally goes on "birdwatching" expeditions to places like Morocco. So if he isn't a spook of some ex- or pensioned or maybe even current variety, he has a lot of fun pretending to be.

Last year Don wrote a book, about "public" transport and how to finance it without the government crawling all over everything. Book. You remember those? A pile of paper joined together at the side. Paper? Well, it's flat and usually white, about the same size as the average screen but you generally point it upwards rather than sideways, and it's very user friendly but for the time being rather hard to update … oh never mind …

Anyway the point is, unlike the usual drivel perpetrated by businessmen who fancy themselves as political stirrers without troubling to learn the trade, Don's book is actually quite good. I haven't read it properly, despite Don's telephone nagging, but Patrick Crozier over at UK Transport has, and I commend his review to your attention, and the book itself.

Patrick Crozier has given two of my last-Friday-of-the-month talks, which are a regular fixture of the London Libertarian scene: last year about the general background and history of the British railway system and why the privatisation of it went so wrong (subsequently published as Libertarian Alliance Economic Notes No. 91), and, this February, on the political foreground of it – very fraught just now and likely to remain so. During these talks Patrick mentioned that in Japan there exists an interesting exception to the general rule these days that all railways are a mess and getting worse: a superbly efficient, profitable national railway network. Write it up, Patrick, everyone said. Well, now he has, not at huge length but very usefully, over at his recently launched UK Transport blog.

A point Patrick is fond of making about railway systems is that they aren't so much a matter of seizing upon the very latest whizz-bang technology, as of simply using relatively mundane kit and making all of it work properly, all at once, all the time. I got a sharp email ticking-off (which I hope in due course to respond to more directly) from Neel Krishnaswami for being "fuzzily mystical" about "Asian values" in my earlier Japan related posting of March 06 2002. But, might not the Japanese railway system be an example of the Japanese playing from their stereotypical strength - consensual cooperation, and from their equally stereotypical "weakness" - unwillingness to fly off at an anti-consensual innovatory tangent? Patrick's point being that this weakness may also be a strength when it comes to running a good railway.

Patrick Crozier has a good article On Corporate Manslaughter. He notes that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) will be prosecuting Railtrack (the company which 'owns' the actual railroad infrastructure in Britain, recently in effect re-nationalised by the State). Thus one part of the state is trying to make another part of the state pay fines to yet another part of the state.

Patrick makes several excellent points and avoids the usual stale perspectives on these sort of issues.