Our Chairman Bob McCloy’s Travels in the Valleys has been shortlisted for the Railways & Canals Historical Society Book of the Year Award, now in its tenth year – www.rchs.org.uk/trial/gwpf.php?wpage=Books1. The list of past winners makes impressive reading.
The Award is funded by the David St John Thomas Charitable Trust, www.dstjthomascharitabletrust.co.uk.
Carolyn Rice Technology reporter, BBC News
Cycle Eye was born out of the Bristol University innovation centre.
The unit is fitted to the outside of a bus on the driver’s left hand side. Using radar and camera sensors it identifies whether an object along side the vehicle is a cyclist and gives the driver an audio alert, typically “cyclist left”.
The team say technology like this is only used in the military. The system is different to others already on the market, they say, because the detection algorithm allows the device to differentiate between a cyclist and other objects on the side of the road such as lampposts, railings and other vehicles.
“We’ve developed a very intelligent system using radar and image processing. We can tell what objects are and the system can still identify cyclists in poor visibility and bad conditions,” says Mr Hutchinson, chief executive of Fusion Processing, the company which created Cycle Eye.
The device was involved in a trial by Transport for London and over 3 days of testing had a 98.5% success rate at identifying cyclists.
The team hope that after another round of intensive trialling they will go in to production next year.
Kevin Clinton, head of road safety at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), said: “With technologies of this type, the key thing is to trial them to make sure they work reliably. It’s also important to make sure that they do not overload the driver with too many things to check and too many alerts to interpret.”
See the full story at www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25316837.
The BBC web site carries a video report by Duncan Kennedy – www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25246378.
The Times on 4 December carried an article and an editorial on President Maduro of Venezuela’s plan to fix the price of cars.
President Maduro of Venezuela has announced plans to fix the price of cars amid a deepening economic crisis — a problem illustrated by a power blackout during the middle of his four-hour televised speech.
Mr Maduro was using his address to outline the latest unorthodox plans to tackle galloping inflation using a newly acquired power to rule by decree, granted by Congress last month.
The Socialist successor to Hugo Chávez ordered that “car production be regulated and strengthened in Venezuela ….. to lower the prices of new cars made in Venezuela, and of imports and of used cars”.
The country’s car crisis comes about due to an acute shortage of supply, caused by strict controls on dollars used to bring in foreign-made vehicles. As a result, Venezuelans often have to wait months for cars and sometimes find that the price increases after they have bought a vehicle. Under Mr Maduro’s plans, resale prices are to be limited to 90 per cent of a car’s original value.
The President has taken ever-more desperate measures to control the economy, which is in trouble despite the country’s huge oil reserves, as ordinary Venezuelans struggle with shortages and inflation tops 50 per cent. Last month, he sent troops into electronics goods shops to sell off the wares at a fraction of their listed cost, and arrested about a hundred businessmen on charges of profiteering.
Mr Maduro hopes that the sell-off of cheap white goods, which coincided with an early payment of part of the annual Christmas bonus, may give him a boost in Sunday’s local elections.
Returning to the airwaves after the blackout, the President blamed it on“live sabotage of the electrical grid” by the “fascist Right”. The Opposition blamed it on run-down, mismanaged infrastructure.
“There is no reason for today’s blackout,” Mr Maduro added. “All Venezuelans are strangely surprised.”
The frequent blackouts have left residents nervous in Caracas, which also has one of the highest murder rates in the world. “We’re afraid,” said Olinda Reyes, who had to be helped from a darkened shopping centre in the capital. “There are no buses, the subway doesn’t work and we’re in complete darkness at the mercy of God.”
Adding to the tension, an opposition council candidate was shot dead as he was leaving a radio station in the western city of Zulia last week.
In the northern city of Maracay, the opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, who ran against Mr Maduro in April, was attacked as he was making a public speech from the back of a vehicle.
Motorcyclists threw fireworks and a Molotov cocktail at Mr Capriles’s vehicles then sped off. “This is a state where, sadly, the ones who are leading are allied to violence, who want to use violence to generate fear and paralyse the country,” he told the crowd.
Sunday’s elections for mayors and city councils are seen as an early referendum on Mr Maduro’s eight months in power. Despite the endorsement by Mr Chávez, who led the country for 14 years until his death from cancer in March, Mr Maduro won the elections by less than 2 per cent of the vote.
Price controls on cars are the latest in a long line of failed economic policies.
In economics, things have to add up. The socialist Government of Venezuela is engaged in a bitter and unavailing struggle to abolish, or at least escape from, the laws of arithmetic. Though the country is blessed with abundant natural resources, its rulers have squandered its wealth and created an economic wasteland. Their efforts represent a triumph of dogmatism and ideology over sense and judgment, the costs of which are evident in the rapidly diminishing living standards of ordinary Venezuelans.
Yet things are worse even than that. Venezuela’s rulers have not only run self-destructive policies for 14 years. They have taken the extraordinary additional step of meeting systematic failure with ever more fervent applications of precisely the measures that created the mess in the first place. The latest instance is price control of cars.
President Maduro announced this week that he would use new emergency powers to set “fair” prices for all cars sold in Venezuela. It is a bad idea that will fail to deal with the problem it is supposed to mitigate. Only in the looking-glass world of populist economics would it ever be considered. In a normal economy, where the prices of goods and inputs are set by the market, a new car loses value as soon as it is driven off the forecourt. It continues for the rest of its life to be a depreciating asset until its value amounts to only what the scrap metal is worth.
In Venezuela, things are different. Cars leap in value as soon as they leave the dealer. This topsy-turvy outcome is the unintended result of government intervention. Under President Chávez, who ruled from 1999 till his death this year, and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has relied on controls rather than respect the signals provided by market prices.
Because of currency controls, there is a severe shortage of imported cars and spare parts, and long waiting lists. With a shortage of imported components, car manufacturers are operating far short of capacity. When the demand for goods exceeds supply, prices rise. Bizarrely, that applies also to used and very old cars. Venezuelans are desperate to own these unlikely objects of desire because they are durable assets.
This demand is, again, the unintended outcome of government policy. With loose monetary policy and profligate public spending, Venezuela has an endemic problem of high inflation, now running at an annual rate of 58 per cent. Despite its substantial oil revenues, it runs a budget deficit of 15 per cent of GDP.
Venezuela’s rulers should have tightened monetary and fiscal policy or let the currency, the bolivar, depreciate, or done both. Instead, they have tried foreign-exchange controls and price controls, with the predictable result that there are black markets in currency and goods.
That is what will happen with cars too, as it does for goods and service where the politicians seek to control prices and rents. Instead of learning from the experience of pure economic failure, Mr Maduro and his colleagues denounce business, expropriate factories, slap on still more price and import controls and harass critics.
Venezuela’s economy is now dependent on a drip-feed of Chinese credit. It is a near-textbook case of bad policy implemented by uncomprehending mediocrities. For Venezuelans, this is not a test case for future study. The price of this revolutionary experiment is heart-rending.
UK government paves way for driverless cars – www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25230483
Letter to The Times, 4 December 2013:
It is doubtful that better rural bus services would encourage greater take-up as most households have at least one car.
Sir, Mr Sexton’s plea for rural bus services (letter, Dec 3), citing Worcestershire’s withdrawals, is based on the false premise that there is pent-up demand for improved services. In this parish of a scant 270 households, 98 per cent have at least one car. Indeed there are more cars registered than residents over 18, the result of almost every 17-year-old acquiring a car as soon as legally possible.
The average load per bus is two, or 4 per cent of capacity, so creating more CO2 emissions per passenger than a car with one occupant. It is highly doubtful that better bus services would change matters. Until 2007 our parish council subsidised an evening on-demand taxi service which charged passengers less than the fuel cost alone for a car journey. It was withdrawn because of a lack of demand.
Peter Whatley
Suckley, Worcs
Professor Sturart Cole, honoured speaker at Wales on Wheels 2013, argues that congestion on the M4 around Newport could be tackled at almost a third of the cost of the Welsh Government’s proposed relief motorway, according to a new report launched by the IWA today. The report The Blue Route: a cost effective solution to relieving M4 congestion around Newport puts forward an alternative that would cost £380 million compared with the estimated cost of a new motorway of at least £936 million.
‘The Omnibus Society is delighted to announce that its new web-site, produced by Paligap in Ayr, is now live. You can access it at www.omnibus-society.org. Our target date of 1st November has been met in most areas except two. The Photo Sales part of the site is still under construction and we are not rushing this to ensure we are able to cope with demand and to ensure the security of the photos is robust. This should be available within the next few months.
‘Many members will have renewed already using the forms sent out, however if you have not, you can renew using the link to our secure payment part of the site using your username (membership number with no spurious letters) and password.’
Philip Pank, The Times, 7 October 2013.
Automated “platoons” of up to ten lorries in a row, all controlled by computer, could be heading for British roads under a plan to revolutionise freight transport.
The Department for Transport is sending a fact-finding mission led by Bernie Frost, its chief engineer, to Sweden to assess tests of the technology on the main Swedish motorway.
The convoys of lorries are designed to cut emissions because of reduced drag and to save lives by removing the capacity for human error.
The department will publish a feasibility study for a possible trial on British trunk roads in December, despite early fears that the technology may be vulnerable to computer hackers and is likely to spread fear and confusion among British drivers.
A computerised convoy took to the E4 motorway south of Stockholm last week. Despite the initial shock at watching a driver hand control of his brakes and accelerator to a wi-fi box mounted on the dashboard of his 40-tonne truck, the system appeared to work well.
Other drivers were unfazed by passing a 120-tonne, 30-wheel road train.
Scientists from Scania, the lorry manufacturer, claim that fuel bills and emissions will be cut by 10 per cent and that the reduced gaps between vehicles will mean that more traffic can be squeezed on to congested motorways.
They are lobbying governments to change the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, which sets international driving standards, to allow automated driving across Europe.
“We can do this if society gives us the green light. Technology is safer than drivers, particularly in bad weather,” said Gunnar Tornmalm, head of materials technology at Scania.
However, safety campaigners are wary of relaxing the rules governing the haulage fleet, which is responsible for 10 per cent of the 35,000 people killed on European roads each year.
Edmund King, president of the AA, said: “While HGV platoons might work in the Outback of Australia, freeways of Nevada or deserted highways of Sweden, I don’t think they would work on the congested motorways of Britain. We have a smaller landmass, fewer roads and more motorway entries and exits.” He added: “There would be obvious dangers of long platoons blocking road signs, obstructing cars getting on and off motorways and intimidating some drivers.”
A DfT document acknowledged many of those concerns, but it concluded that “this type of transport system could have huge benefits if it could be safely implemented on UK roads”.
The main benefits are derived from technology that allows trucks to travel far closer together than at present, cutting the distance between lorries from an average two or three seconds to just one, or even half a second — less than ten metres at 50mph. This reduces drag and cuts fuel consumption and emissions by up to 10 per cent.
The lorries communicate via wi-fi so that each is instantly aware of changes in acceleration or braking of the lead vehicle and automatically follows suit.
So far, 38 trucks and 130 drivers have been used in road tests. The drivers are divided on the system’s merits.
Will Straw (Associate Director for Climate Change, Energy and Transport, Institute for Public Policy Research), The Times, 9 October 2013.
Commuters reading their morning paper could be excused for thinking that energy prices are the main cause of the cost of living crisis.
The truth is that getting to and from work costs about three times as much as keeping the lights on and homes warm. Average households spend £65.70 a week on transport but just £20.20 on gas and electricity.
All political parties aimed to address transport during their party conferences but it was overshadowed by announcements on energy prices. George Osborne announced a further fuel duty freeze for motorists and Labour announced a slew of measures to address rising rail fares.
Bus policy got left in the manifesto depot. Although they make up a small proportion of overall family spending, buses are the most popular form of public transport: 5.2 billion passenger journeys were made on local buses in 2012 compared to 1.5 billion rail journeys. These users — particularly the young, old and those from poorer families — have been subject to the fastest price rises. From 1997 to 2012 bus fares rose 28 per cent above inflation compared to a 21 per cent rise in rail fares. Meanwhile, motoring costs have fallen by 6 per cent.
So how should politicians address the “cost of buses” crisis? Lessons must be learnt from the failed free market experiment of the 1980s. The 1985 Transport Act privatised and deregulated most bus markets with catastrophic consequences. Bus usage outside London is now a third lower now than it was at the time of the 1985 Transport Act.
Meanwhile in London, which was never deregulated, bus use has doubled over the same period. Public bodies were given powers to set fares, routes and service levels. London bus usage exploded after the decision by Ken Livingstone to use public funding from Transport for London to increase provision. Because London’s market is functioning, subsidy levels per passenger are lower in the capital than in the rest of Britain.
Outside London, the powers currently available to local authorities to intervene in bus markets have never been used properly, because bus operators use their market dominance (five companies have two thirds of the market) to threaten the withdrawal of key services. Creating new bodies with the scale to challenge operators and the powers to regulate prices would be the best way to increase quality and reduce prices.
For too long trains and automobiles have dominated political thinking on transport. It’s time for politicians to get on the bus.
www.ippr.org/articles/56/11368/we-must-drive-down-bus-fares