Paris to Let Cyclists Skip Red Lights

A BBC Report appeared on the Europe side of it's website. It's bold headline is "Paris to let cyclists skip red lights", which just seems extraordinary. Hmm.

So who thinks that "Paris to let cyclists skip red lights" is the most important part of this story? Okay, it's bold and brash, but really there's something more important here.

Phrases such as "Paris, blighted by smog this year" actually lead to something different. London, funnily enough, has a worse problem than Paris.

Then things like "Paris is looking to triple the amount of bicycle journeys in the city by 2020 - ensuring people use bikes for 15% of all journeys." might make you think.

What is London doing? Well there's lots of new fancy bike lanes. Well, actually not. There's a few headline projects. There's nothing that'll take the percentage of people using bikes across London (currently around 2-3% as it's not just the central area) to anything like 15%.

So, along with the older news that Paris has put in place temporary bans on half the cars, the news here is that whilst Paris is working hard to enable it's citizens to get rid of the pollution that kills thousands, London is doing pretty much nothing. All because politicians here are scared of taking on the motor lobby.

Thus we die, again I say, in our thousands because people in awe of the motor car have a toddler trantrum when things don't go their way.

Autonomous Cars

Here's some of the detail surrounding the exciting new development of self-driving cars.

Setting the bar that the autonomous car has to acheive needs to be seen in context, and clearly by many of the comments on the article it's not.

Many people seem to think that unless it can perform perfectly it shouldn't be allowed. This leaves us stuck with a less safe system, killing and maiming more.

I like to think that the bar that should be set is that it is just better than us humans, that killed 1700 people on the roads in the past year in the UK alone. At the moment it exceeds that massively!

It runs alongside the constant removal of responsibility we seem to deem acceptable by people driving. Both by insisting that more vulnerable road users should behave in a way that enables people driving to stop paying attention and by the way we constantly mollycoddle people inside cars away from their actions.

It would seem the best thing to do is completely remove responsibility and hand it over to a machine capable of making many more decisions, much quicker and without anger, impatience, or belligerence we experience when behind the wheel.