Tuesday 29 October 2013

Costs and benefits

Many of the severest acts of government are in the name of public health and safety. This is like the skeleton key, the free pass to spend our money on basically screwing up everyone's lives. The reason we have these atrocities is because people don't understand they are, as if they did once a single road got humps or street lighting was turned off to save money there would be a revolution like they do in France, and if the councils and politicians knew this they wouldn't be voted back if they dared to try it again.

There can never be an excuse to ruin lives today to prevent possible problems tomorrow, especially when they both never existed today or yesterday, or prove such acts prevent them at all. And with road humps we do know exactly what they do. Each costs around £10,000, they cost the council far more per year in compensation for damaged vehicles, and besides the official role of deterring car drivers (yes, Transport for London finally admitted recently their own restrictions are designed to get cars off the roads by making it unappealing) every other vehicle uses the roads as well. Barnet council have a list somewhere (I read it in the local paper so can't dig up an instant link) and there is a number of deaths caused annually from emergency services missing their dying patients and burning buildings as they can't drive over 20mph where they exist, and then the patients who die in the ambulances as they can't get to the hospital in time and the humps stop certain equipment being set up as the needles may go in someone in the wrong place if the vehicle is being thrown up and down every few yards.

How many people knew that? Certainly everyone who read that edition of the Hendon Times, but who else? They don't just kill people in Barnet, they do everywhere they exist, but which other papers reported it?

This goes for banning cars altogether, something the EU are planning by 2050 in urban areas, while the London congestion charge which charges drivers again for driving through the centre stopped my neighbour leaving his children with his mother each day in the school holidays as he couldn't afford to take them there and had to arrange alternative means of childcare rather than their own grandmother. I have already demonstrated so called renewables such as wind, solar and biofuel either waste money for nothing or cause starvation now to stop something possibly happening in a hundred years but we'll never know anyway because we'll all be dead before it can ever be known for sure.

I am old enough to remember roads before any restrictions, people did not aim for children crossing, and believe it or not the winding country roads outside cities have 60mph speed limits, but people do not drive at 60 even though they can, as unlike Ken Livingstone, they are responsible people and drive at a speed safe for the road conditions, as nearly everyone did in the past. And making it almost impossible to drive above 10 mph on many roads with more coming every week is not going to save a single child but ruin every user's quality of life. But they do cause more accidents with idiots trying to swerve to avoid them and hitting parked cars or traffic coming the other way.

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