h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has not escaped my attention that the prices of fuel in the U.K. are not only the highest in Europe but that they are also the highest in the Western World. What kind of government do we have, that would deprive people the right to travel in their own cars by taxing them off the road. What are the alternatives - Prescott reckons that we should be travelling by bus - I would suggest that would be fine in a city where the gentleman in question lives, but why does he have two Jags to ride in? Anyone living in the out in the country must use their cars there are no viable alternatives save perhaps the horse and cart. There lies the possible answer, why don't the horse owners of Britain ride and drive their horses into Westminster one working day and show Prescott and Brown what alternative transport really means!! The "Daily Mail" is running a campaign against the rising cost of fuel at the moment, there are reports that there are plans to blockade London and the major cities - Brilliant, we should all support that. It's OK to tax fuel if you are a politician and don't pay the exhorbitant prices yourself it seems. A message to Mo Mowlam "Keep your hair on and stop knocking the Royal Family"

What's wrong with knocking the royal family?

I'm assuming there's no bus service where you are, and you are too far away to bike it?

You could always use car-sharing type techniques. Of course - that would involve chatting to your neighbours, and in todays world that's rather difficult. Alternatively, you could move closer to a town, and leave the countryside for the stupidly rich. Neither are great options, are they? A more economical car would be the other plan - but only if you're currently driving a 4x4 or some other gas guzzler.

I suspect that horses do fewer miles to the pound than cars...

Hmm, perhaps the government could give a different rate of petrol tax for those living out in the countryside? That would solve the problem admirably, it would appear. Then we could tax people like Prescott off the road, while allowing countryside dwellers to continue to live there at a decent price. Perfect!

Anything supported by the Mail is well worth avoiding! Isnt this the place for people with open minds? Does not compute...
As to leaving the country to stupid rich people, I think that anyone silly enough to live in London deserves what they get. Me, I cant afford expensive cars, holidays, clothes, nights out, hobbies... but I can afford (just) a small piece of the countryside that is full of biodiversity & dont miss any of the above 'luxuries'. My nearest neighbours are buzzards, my human neighbours are mostly OK but I'm too busy to see much of them. My evenings & weekends are taken up doing things that most people can only do on holiday - why work long hours to save up for holidays when you could earn less & enjoy more? I'm only online cos its raining too hard to plant the plants I've just been given.
Let's forget the American dream & build a European one - hooray for French peasants closing down mcdonalds... Avoid prepacked predigested food, drink milk/wine/beer from small manufacturers, buy bread from bakers, meat from butchers who raise their own stock, vegetables from greengrocers when you cant grow your own, cut out the middlemen! Down with superstores, shopping malls & such. It doesnt take much more time, it doesnt cost more (have you seen the price of pre-prepared pizza!!!) and ITS FUN!

What is the price of fuel in the UK ? Here in Canada we're all whining about the price of gas, which you more aptly call petrol. It's now 71.9 cents per litre, so you get about 14 litres for ten dollars.
Ten dollars is about five pounds. 14 litres weighs 30.8 pounds, so we can buy over 30 pounds of fuel for five pounds. Is this good value?

Here it is currently 90 pence a litre. And rising towards a pound.

If every car journey taken by those who complain about high fuel prices was truthfully 'essential' then their complaints would have some validity. They might even gain some respect if they were honest enough to admit 'I'm using my car because I'm a bone idle layabout and can't be arsed walking/going by public transport.' Car use in the crowded UK is poisoning our kids, creating social division and turning our cities into concrete wastelands. To all those who advocate lower fuel prices/taxes: How would YOU stop the inevitable gridlock?

I'm told by relatives in Darlington that we live in "the country".
I don't want to destroy the planet either, but it is 30 km to work and back, so I'd have to get up in the morning before I went to bed to walk to work. Also there isn't public transit in our area. Anyhow, it sounds like it costs you folks about double for fuel compared to us so I can't complain. I was just curious. I do try to car-pool, though, just to show I'm not a horrible person....

They all do it by advocating better public transport. Yeah - like they'd then use it if you let them use cheap petrol.

Thay say: 'Give us better public transport and we'll use it.' Then they park in a bus lane... at 5:30pm.
Morons

I don't know the conversion rates between pounds and dollars works, but fuel prices where I live (Detroit, Michigan) are about twice as expensive--about $2.10 a gallon. Fuel prices have skyrocketed in the midwest U.S., and a lot of states have removed the state fuel tax because so many people complained that the politicians had no choice. So if the U.K. is facing a similar situation, do not underestimate the power of a lot of people whining. ~Wayne

Given that a US Gallon is 3.785 litres, and 90 pence Sterling is US$1.36, this means that the current UK fuel price is equivalent to US$5.15 per US gallon...or about 2 and a half times more expensive.

This situation comes about because the government has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions which also means reducing the amount of petrol used by the car driving public. The only means available to a democracy to so do is to increase the real cost of driving which is what has happened. If you add to this the cartel nature of the oil producers you have a situation in which the consumer will be over charged but can do little about it...apart from tele-commuting, of course.

I guess I was a little ambiguous... My wife has relatives in Darlington, we live in Robson, BC (unincorporated) in Canada. (When I was going to college in the city I used buses and trains exclusively.) I can't park in a bus lane, 'coz there are no buses to have lanes for.
Public transport isn't available, it's not that I choose not to use it. Not that we're isolated, it's just not the city. I didn't like living in a city and I've tried several. Small inconvieniences include boiling our drinking water and having to drive to town and/or to work.
I would submit, however that my "commute" of 16km to work is apt to be considerably less than that of a lot of urban dwellers.
What you got me thinking about, though, is an interesting little conundrum I think we all have in one form or another.
One, in our area, is trying to find some balance between ecology and economics; between parks and protected areas and what are called "tree farm licenses" or "managed forests" on Crown land. Are we harvesting a renewable resource or strip mining the forests and destroying biodiversity?
Each side of the debate can present equally credible reams of statistics supporting entirely opposite positions.
On one hand you have "X-percent" of forests logged and "X-million"
trees planted to replace it; on the other you have the outrageously arrogant proposition that we, as tenants, can "manage" a forest.

In a similar way, I want to have my patch, but I somehow don't necessarily want everyone else to have theirs, right. For example, there is a particularly beautiful spot I love. It's a mountain-top
from which one can see both the Selkirk and Purcell mountain ranges, with Kootenay lake in the valley between. This time of year the alpine meadows are flourishing with all colours of wildflowers (which only lasts about 3-weeks at altitude) .
If ever there was a place to constuct a church out of nothing but nail-holes, this is it.
You want to go, don't you? If I can get there,so can everyone else.
Which is the precisely the problem, no? If everyone went, it would cease to exist.
So.
Castlegar, (www.castlegar.com) the town we live near, has a sawmill and pulp mill as it's sole economic engine. No one wants to decimate the forests, yet no one wants to be unemployed, whether they are in forestry, the service industries, retail or Freelance Hitchhiker Guiding.
On any given day in any given pub, it's non-stop platitude-spouting and attitude-pouting without accomplishing much more in an afternoon than Parliament does in a year.
Anyone who can elucidate a Standard Unification Theory without resorting to the Mystical or Mathematics (even more mystical) would
doubtless be conferred HYEDT* status at minimum, if not Grand Poo-bah Lord King Wizard-in-charge-of-things status;( which, while possible, would take years to get through the Senate as most of them refer to time in chambers as 'nap-time').

*HYEDT: pronounced 'huh-yet';
"How'd You Ever Do That?" something like a knighthood, I suppose, excepting the proviso that you have demonstrably done something worthwhile at least once.

PLT, Mick

I was gonna start this very topic a few days back.

I for one am really annoyed by the "trying-" (and probably succeeding) "to be middle class" type of people who INSIST on driving huge petrol-guzzling RangeRovers to take their kids to school or pop to the shops. You do NOT NEED a 4-wheel drive in an urban environment. I don't care if it's a status symbol. Just because you can afford a huge car it doesn't mean you have to buy one.
Think efficiency, and environmentally kind, THEN think about image, consumers!

Hmm - as with many issues there are a large number of facets to this argument too.
Firstly, a car uses more energy (and thereby produces more pollution) in its manufacture than in its lifetime of use. The Range Rover has a significantly more robust build than most smaller cars and retains its original classic looks and so does not need to be replaced as often as - say, a Rover 200.
The larger car is also much safer for the occupants. If you _are_ driving your kids to school you want them to be safe. The higher driving position affords better visibility and so helps too reduce accidents and the top speed is not stupidly high and dangerous as is the case with the Astra or Ford Puma type of car.
Also - if cost is the primary factor in reducing unneccessary journeys (although I would argue that there are other ways) then the more expensive each extra mile is the less extra miles there will be...
The real problem here is that people are driving their kids to school at all - surely there's a better way of doing that, rather than each family doing their own school run?

The first point is somewhat dubious - energy used in manufacture is likely to be of significantly lower pollution than energy used when out on the road. Power plants and manufacturing plants can afford much better anti-pollution measures than catalytic converters which don't work for the first 30 minutes.
That said, I've not done the sums, so it may work out that Range Rovers are more efficient in the long term. Or it may not.

Don't 4x4s make life less safe for non 4x4 owners, by blocking off the view like crazy, and having nice bonuses like bull bars?

If it weren't for all the murderers, rapists, muggers, bandits and skinheads with baseball bats that so often wander the tiny green suburbs of the UK, I'd tell parents that it's safe to let their kids walk half a mile to school, if they do it in a group.
I did, and I'm not exactly old enough to remember the 'good old days' (when boys _were_ boys, and the bombs were still warm fresh from the blitz).

You're the first I've ever read to have known that fact about cars using more energy to build than they ever use during their life. It came from some reliable source and illustates the stupidity of some statements made by so-called experts. When this subject cropped up last, one idiot of a Euro MP said that while many european countries had more cars per head of population, they actually did fewer miles in them and used public transport more. He wanted Britain to follow that example.

It doesn't take much of a mathematician to work out that having more cars to do less miles actually uses more energy and causes more polution than fewer cars doing more miles. Those two car families that have one car to drive to the station car park where it is left all day and another to do the school round and the shopping are using more energy than if they only had one car and were able to drop the kids off at school on the way to drive all the way to work and do the shopping at in the evening. Simplistic but often possible.

Regards the argument about 4x4's like Range Rovers and their safety and suitability cannot have seen the many TV shows showing the statistics of how dangerous 4x4's are. As they are not classified as family saloon cars they do not have to conform to the safety regulations. Even dear 'ol Jeremy Clarkson, bless his socks, on TV this evening brought up the subject of their poor cornering ability and inability to stop and if their danger wasn't a big enough deterrent, the fact that he only got 9 mpg from his Range Rover around town, simply showed the selfishness, thoughtlessness and stupidity of their owners.

Back to the fuel cost debate - any one that understands human nature will know that you can only force people against their will for a short time. The fact that the ridiculous fuel costs have made it worth while for criminals to weld larger fuel tanks into their cars to use to steal petrol and that more and more filling stations are being robbed by drivers leaving without paying (police statistics out today), should be telling someone that this is not the way to stop people driving cars and force them to use public transport.

If you want people to use public transport it must be easier and more comfortable than the private car. The only town I've been in where I did not miss having a car was Rio. Here the public buses run continual circuits around the town at a fixed fare of about 20p. They were fast and frequent and if you were unemployed there was no charge.

Having grown up when there were more trams and trolley buses around, it seems that modern transport has taken a step backwards. Most buses are noisey both inside and out and give a terrible ride. Trams and trolley buses gave off no fumes and whirred along.

When I went to the Turin exhibition with my parents in the early sixties we rode the "transport of the future" - the monorail. It was silent fast and smooth. Modern trains are noisy and give a poor ride. Even standing on a platform I find the noise and diesel fumes intimidating and I use the trains as little as possible.

The worst thing done in this country was to loose the railways network. The trackbed should have been saved for new technology. Trains still run on steel rails on big heavy iron wheels, little changed since Brunel's time. No end of new technology will overcome gravity without expending energy. Railway engineers toiled for years to build tracks as level as possible, avoiding as many hills as possible so what do we do, we build motorways over the hills for jugernauts to slog up belching deisel fumes everywhere. The railway network should now be a system or silent monorails that silently move around the countryside. They run on pneumatic tyres on smooth concrete tracks. I don't blame anyone from fighting to avoid the deafening roar of a passing train near their home. Make them silent, fumeless and cheap to use and we'd all welcome them back. The monorails to whisk us from town to town and trams to whisk us around the town. Park and ride systems using noisy, exhaust belching mini buses filled with litter and taking you from one graffitti riddled, wind tunnel of a bus shelter (if you're lucky) to the next is not going to intice me out of my car.

Cities like Exeter in Devon are supposed to have pedestrianised areas - exept for hundreds of noisy buses that often form a constant line trundling slowly through the town centre. The increased insidenc of childhood asthma is probably a direct result of too many vehicles like this in the urban environment.

I can't wait to get my first fuel cell powered electric car. Only a few months ago we heard that the Americans had cracked the problem of having to use so-called clean fuels like pure hydrogen with its cost and storage problems and could now use 'dirty' gases like butane and propene to fuel these electric cells but I bet the oil companies are trying to hinder their development somewhere along the line. Clean and dirty in this context is hardly relevent when you compare the fumes from petrol to the water given off by a fuel cell.

I think I'll just go to sleep and dream about silent fuel efficient vehicles. Those self levitating discs used by the Mekon in Dan Dare stories would be quite good. Just place a plastic garden chair on one and you could even sit down at the same time!

Anyone who has gone past Scunthorpe steelworks will know that the energy used in the manufacture of cars is pretty dirty stuff...its just that the polution doesn't happen in leafy middle-England and so isn't worth getting all hot and bothered about.

Well - the best way to get good public transport is to increase the number of people using it. If the number of people using trains doubles, then the time you have to wait between trains, OR the price you have to pay per mile, on average, halves. Sure - this is hugely simplistic, but it's true... public transport used to be good because people were too poor to own their own car.

The thing that stops me using trains more is that it costs more than a car - still. Going to my parents this weekend it's going to cost me loads more if I go by train than by car, and the train could be luxury class all the way, and silent as night, but that would make absolutely no difference. Now, if you triple the price of petrol, then I'll use the train. Alternatively you could cut the price of trains by three, but that's blatantly not going to happen, is it?

Regarding human nature, and so forth. If it's a choice between taking a chance that human nature will change, or that the laws of physics will change, I'll bet on human nature every time. When my parents where young it was socially acceptable to drink-drive. Now it is not. Human nature changes, and the main way it changes is by being forced to change. Might be worth the government's while advertising, though - I'm sure they can find sufficiently heart-wrenching stories.

Aside from anything else, people are going to have to learn to take increased petrol prices sooner or later - we don't have an infinite supply of the stuff. If it really will cause a breakdown in society, and the end of the world as we know it... well, I feel sorry for how addicted we've become.

Blaming buses for asthma is a nice trick, but I don't think it'll hold up in court... oh, and last I checked diesel was more efficient and less polluting than petrol... it just looks uglier...