Is that based on stopping distances?
Yup, time for vehicle to travel its own length, the thinking and stopping distances hence time between vehicles.
There's a local maximum at 20mph for four metre long vehicles.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Infrastructure
"Queensferry Crossing project ‘months behind schedule’ "
(805 posts)-
Posted 6 years ago #
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The bridge(s) will always be congested, even if made into 3 lanes and the old bridge opened as well, as long as demand is not managed.
"Induced demand" says this will happen.
There are 3 ways to manage demand:
1. Rationing system e.g. books of tickets to allow you to cross at a certain time.
2. Queuing. This is what we do at the moment.
3. Pricing system, ideally performance pricing.In a normal capitalist system, demand is regulated by pricing. Like it or not, allowing the market to set prices drives efficiency. If the road is priced correctly for a given time/day/vehicle, it will never become congested and will instead operate at close to it maximum capacity. Public transport will also see the benefits as it will be competing against a correctly priced road system instead of a subsidised one.
Efficiency is achieved because, at peaks, those who can move their journey to a different time or mode will do so. Some will not make the journey at all, e.g. by moving closer to where they work, or by shopping locally, etc.
As an analogy, think about the electricity supply. You could argue that access to an electricity supply is now a fundamental human right in Western nations, more so even than being able to drive to Fife.
Yet imagine if electricity were made free at the point of use, like the roads currently are. Everyone would leave appliances on all day. On average, people would take longer showers, knowing there was no additional cost. There would be no incentive to fit energy efficient appliances. The supply would frequently collapse. Demand would be limited by power-cuts (rationing).
^^^ This is how our road system is (not) working at the moment.
Posted 6 years ago # -
Everyone would leave appliances on all day…people would take longer showers…no additional cost…no incentive to fit energy efficient appliances
I believe this is known as the Jevons Paradox, in which the rate of consumption of a resource actually increases with respect to the efficiency of its production.
Make something efficient and you can use less of a resource, but perversely because it's efficient, people will feel justified in using it more, thereby using more of the resource — and as Jevons learned, people inevitably use even more of the resource, more than wiping out the original efficiency gain.
Posted 6 years ago # -
@nedd1e_h
There are other ways. The state could mandate that no one with an address in Fife take a permanent job in Edinburgh and vice versa. We could match housing to employment and insist on employers going where the spare housing is to cut down on car commuting which most people hate.
I don't think price rationing for common goods will be acceptable until the amount of money people have is generally accepted to be directly proportional to their social utility but we are a long way from that (un?)happy circumstance.
The Dukes of [Redacted] benefit from the income from huge swathes of Scotland, but appear not to own them. Their tax positions are unclear. Perhaps they chipped in for the Third Forth Crossing, perhaps they didn't. In any case they'll laugh as they pay whatever the toll might be. Their positions are extreme, but there are many, many more such anomalies.
Posted 6 years ago # -
Is it me or is the visibility of electricity as a finite cost-controlled resource not as visible as it used to be? When I was small there was lots of washing-machines-on-overnight, immersion heating and suchlike, but that was when meters were huge big mechanical clicking things in cupboards under the stairs, rather than discreet computers remotely read by the same people who discreetly supply flammable gases. Over the same period the number of plug sockets required in an average-sized room has quadrupled.
Posted 6 years ago # -
"
There are other ways. The state could mandate that no one with an address in Fife take a permanent job in Edinburgh and vice versa. We could match housing to employment and insist on employers going where the spare housing is to cut down on car commuting which most people hate.
"
As you know, that's not going to happen with any sort of society/governance likely to be on offer any time soon!
SNP clearly against tolls, there is a certain 'infrastructure fairness' logic.
In many ways the bridge(s) is/(are) irrelevant.
It's the expectation that carborne travel to work is acceptable and to be encouraged/facilitated.
We've had whole threads on living in Fife (and the Lothians) and working in Edinburgh.
Of course if Edinburgh was a country and outside was 'Europe' some attitudes might be different!
It will be interesting to see if bus companies rise to the opportunity of a dedicated PT bridge and increase/improve services (and if CEC improves bus priority).
There is still a need for better train capacity/services.
Of course when I say "need "it could just be a demand that it might not be a good idea to give in to.
Then again, it's only 'fair' to balance the provision for single occupancy cars...
Posted 6 years ago # -
@wingpig: The number of plug sockets may have quadrupled, but has the average power consumption of the devices attached to those plugs (and light fittings!) quartered?
Posted 6 years ago # -
but that was when meters were huge big mechanical clicking things in cupboards
Off peak demand and supply is lessened these days with far fewer people being on white meter electric heating. Though with electric cars that might change again.
The smart meter on our coffee table goes a apoplectic shade of red when the eletric shower is on.
(Not sure why we've got an electric shower and a combi boiler supply water to the bath I'm standing in but thats the design choice I inherted and don't have the time to rectifiy.)
Posted 6 years ago # -
@Steveo:
To be fair you'll be very happy with the ability to still have a shower in the morning when your boiler packs it in, or to wash in the bath if the shower gives up the ghost!
(Speaking from experience...)
Posted 6 years ago # -
So, re the whole Cole-Hamilton media splurge thing.
What a time wasting frothing opportunist this chap is. All over a proverbial storm in a teacup.
All I can say is that the voters of Edinburgh West deserve a better representative than this charlatan.
Posted 6 years ago # -
@IWRATS
The state could mandate that... = socially unacceptable state interference and social engineering.
A private company could charge for... = socially acceptable* interference and social engineering.
*Except UK roads.
Posted 6 years ago # -
"
Continuing rush-hour congestion on the new Queensferry Crossing will subside when the bridge becomes “less of a novelty”, the Infrastructure Secretary has claimed as he rejected calls for the Forth Road Bridge to reopen to traffic.
Keith Brown was forced to defend the £1.3bn project after Liberal Democrat MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton said the old bridge over the forth should be temporarily reopened to cars to ease congestion.
"
Posted 6 years ago # -
lovin the signage for Horse rider and Horse+ cart rider - its like something from the 1800's!
Posted 6 years ago # -
Comment on above link
"
Peter Sargent Boroughmuir High School
Yesterday I expressed a need to offer a temporary solution for the problems at the Queensferry Crossing. I also read the views expressed by others and find it incredible that they have been ignored. Even those expressed by the RAC. I have to say that to ignore the views of everyone is quite remarkable given the "people" events during the week before. Looks like politics getting back to normal again, do not adjust your set but remember the power of your vote in the future. Final point. The road layout is atrocious and the word " slip" road could well be just that when it comes to safety design. Surprised Police Scotland have not intimated as such. Accident waiting to happen.
"
A friend of mine said to me today 'people aren't using the the whole slip road because no-one lets them in'.
Posted 6 years ago # -
<i>The state could mandate that no one with an address in Fife take a permanent job in Edinburgh and vice versa.</i>
The state could do that if (a) it the party in power left that out of their manifesto; (b) did not care about losing its next election; (c) was somewhere like the old USSR where you had to have state permission about where you lived. Both unlikely and undesirable.
And that's what's sad about green politics - to be effective it has to be highly coercive.
Posted 6 years ago # -
"And that's what's sad about green politics - to be effective it has to be highly coercive."
I know what you (probably) mean.
I'm not a GP member, (or any other party), there are a few on here who may wish to argue...
One reality of "green politics" is that, to some extent, it's about ideas - some of which eventually become 'acceptable'.
Of course the GP would like to be elected to get more 'green policies' implemented sooner.
Posted 6 years ago # -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b093t07w#play
Listen to ACH at 1hr 08
Keith Brown responds at 2.36 including him saying how important getting more active travellers over FRB is...
Posted 6 years ago # -
Councillor Scott Arthur gets it:
Posted 6 years ago # -
"
Whilst the delays on the Queensferry Crossing are frustrating, adding capacity substantially beyond that provided by the Forth Road Bridge is not the solution. Doing so simply moves the bottleneck closer to Edinburgh. We’d have longer queues on St Johns Road and Queensferry Road – key arterial routes cutting through Mr Cole-Hamilton’s constituency that are already overloaded and have significant air quality problems.
These problems notwithstanding, experience and the theory of induced demand tells us that simply increasing capacity will generate more traffic, more congestion and more air pollution.
"
Quite!
Posted 6 years ago # -
"And that's what's sad about green politics - to be effective it has to be highly coercive."
It's a rather clumsy comparison to equate green politics to the former USSR and by implication, controls on where people live, centrally planned economy, etc. (Accepting that this notion was suggested by another forum member). In any case not all communist ideas were bad: free state healthcare for example, has proven quite popular in this part of the Western laissez faire capitalist bloc. Public ownership of the railways seems also to be a popular idea.
There's a further assumption implicit in that statement, that the current arrangements or status quo in Scotland are not coercive, and that we are all free to live as we choose. Which is not true either, of course. You can only live wherever you like if you have the resources to allow this: of course not everyone has access to those, therefore there is not as much freedom in this society as we like to imagine. Take the pattern of land ownership as one example, or the necessity for most people to work in order to meet their basic needs for another. These factors alone introduce strong elements of coercion into this Western mixed economy that are rarely seen as such.
To classify green politics as 'highly coercive' is simply a misunderstanding of what 'freedom' means in a capitalist mixed economy. Our current freedoms are largely economic. Certain groups in society exercise their freedoms (driving a car, for example; or owning a large area of land) at the expense of others whose freedom is curtailed as a result, and who are coerced into certain behaviours as a consequence of the freedom of others.
Green politics is largely interested in promoting other freedoms from those chosen by certain business and political interests in this society. I might add that the Green parties in these islands are libertarian on many social issues, much more so than any of the other parties represented in either the Holyrood or Westminster parliaments.
Posted 6 years ago # -
I may not be getting a Christmas card from ACH...
His response to me on FB, which I then took him to task on
"
My stance is compatible with the pollution issue. As a cyclist and representative of an area which hosts two of the most polluted streets in the country, it's important for me to get the FRB open to busses asap. But we can't have another weekend like that. So I'm asking Transport Scotland to hold off on the FRB works until the teething probs with the QC are resolved. I'd even suggest they route busses and taxis over it now to relieve pressure and begin the work in the spring, when QC has had time to bed in."Posted 6 years ago # -
Certain lacks of logics there...
Posted 6 years ago # -
[ignore me]
Posted 6 years ago # -
The state could do that if (a) it the party in power left that out of their manifesto;
Bitterly ironic argument to make on the day the Mother of Parliaments voted to allow ministers of the Crown to make law without its scrutiny or oversight. The correct parallel there isn't with the USSR but with the 1933 Ermächtigungsgesetz.
@Crowriver writes very well above and makes many of the points that I would, but I would add one more in the shape of a question;
Is there a form of market-based society that is capable of making this graph flatten out and turn down?
If there isn't then we'd better return to traditional British values of planning and control. Some people think planning and control of society isn't profoundly British but it is. Slavery was only abolished on the territory of the UK in 1799 and very close control of most people's lives by various methods endured until the fifties. And by 'people' I mean white people in the UK. Let's not forget the British approach to freedom of anything for brown people under their control.
The present free-for-all is a very odd very recent development. Great fun sometimes right enough.
Posted 6 years ago # -
Re ACH's comments: why can't we have another weekend like that?
On the wider issue, as a rail engineer told me a while back (in relation to HS2 rather than bridges but it still applies): we don't have a transport policy in this country; instead we try to use transport to sort out the issues caused by our failed housing policy.
Posted 6 years ago # -
we don't have a transport policy in this country; instead we try to use transport to sort out the issues caused by our failed housing policy
That's it exactly. And housing is a mess because of land ownership law which is a mess because of feudalism.
Posted 6 years ago # -
Is there a form of market-based society that is capable of making this graph flatten out and turn down?
Yes, a market-based system could do that.
Provided: carbon emissions are priced high enough to achieve the desired curve and everyone who emits carbon is charged the market rate.
Obviously this is not a free market, as the atmosphere is not privatised. It would have to be controlled by governments.
Posted 6 years ago # -
We should start a spoof campaign for a fourth Forth Bridge at South Queensferry
Three is not enough to solve the congestion we need four
Fourth the Forth at South Queensferry
Posted 6 years ago # -
Is it me or is the visibility of electricity as a finite cost-controlled resource not as visible as it used to be? When I was small there was lots of washing-machines-on-overnight, immersion heating and suchlike
Part of the peak/off-peak metres / "White Meter heating" logic was to make use of excess overnight capacity from "too cheap to metre" nuclear power. I'm old/young enough to recall the advertising drives for White Meter heating in the late 80s/early 90s, indeed we moved in to a house in 1989 that was like a 1930s-50s timewarp except for the spanking new White Meter heating system that the now deceased old lady who had lived there had been sold. One of the first thing my folks did was have it taken out and replace with a much cheaper to run gas system.
Posted 6 years ago # -
@nedd1e_h: "demand is regulated by pricing"
It's worth bearing in mind that "price" does not necessarily mean monetary cost. In the case of the road network, part of the cost of using a popular but capacity-constrained resource like a bridge is the time lost stuck in traffic.
An 'intelligent consumer' weighs up all the costs of each option against its benefits in order to choose the best one for them. However, that does rely on them having adequate information in the first place (questionable when it comes to road congestion), and not being subject to "drag" which makes switching options difficult or unattractive. (An example of the latter might be the sunk costs in a car making it difficult - though by no means impossible, of course - to justify switching to public transport, or cycling.)
In theory congestion on the roads should encourage people to consider other modes of transport. But there is a lot of drag involved, not all of it completely real eg social status, perceived convenience and comfort benefits.
The only place I know of in the UK where pricing is used (crudely) to try to manage road use is the M6 toll. I've heard anecdotal reports that, ironically, this is often more busy than the old toll-free route. So much for the intelligent consumer...
Posted 6 years ago #
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