Tax cuts for the wealthy? We can't even afford a second range-rover

One of the cycling troublemakers -a northerner too, we should add, is running a weekly caption competition -last week's was won by one of the team members, Rhode Long.

This week Karl has a photo of Samantha Cameron, descendant of King Charles II of England and wife of David Cameron (bastard descendent of King William IV) in search of a caption.

Here is our submission:

 "Tax cuts for the wealthy? We can't even afford a second range-rover"'

The cyclists probably think it is something witty, but no, it is the truth.

For someone earning a modest £250K a year, say someone who writes a weekly article for a murdoch newspaper,  a cut in the top rate of tax from 50% to 45% will only generate another $17K a year of income. That's not enough for a second Range-Rover, so we'll have to make do with something smaller.

 
This completely misses the point is that the tax cuts are to let us trickle-down some of our wealth. If we can't afford to buy high end British-made cars, Range-Rovers, Jaguars, etc, then who will?

A second Range-Rover would have been an investment in the country to bring much-needed wealth to the midlands. Now it is not going to happen. We are not getting much of a tax break, and shall certainly be cancelling our premier-league relationship with David Cameron. David: consider yourself relegated to the scottish premier league; you can be rangers.

On the topic of tax, can we discuss fuel prices. The AA have been saying in interviews that fuel prices were "forcing more and more people who need their cars off the road."

Sorry, this just shows the AA are making things up again. If fuel prices are forcing people off the road -well, they clearly didn't need them, did they? It would have been better to say "forcing people who cannot conceive of a life that doesn't involve driving everywhere to discover what it is like"

This is better, because then the AA spokesman can go about how miserable it is. No more AA membership. No more AA insurance. No more need for the younger generation to take lessons from the AA driving school. Such a nightmare scenario threatens the entire leveraged purchase of the AA, so we wish they'd come out and say it. Something like "fuel prices may impact AA revenue to the extent that we cannot sustain our highly leveraged debt and we will collapse as dramatically as a US bank, only with less people caring".

That  would be a statement worth making.

High Kingsdown Shared Space Proposals

There are proposals afoot to turn Kingsdown by (the excellent) Highbury Vaults into a shared space. We somewhat support this.

Looking at the Lockleaze shared space, they've completey managed to eliminate the pavement area.

This avoid the problem of not being able to park right next to your front door, being forced to leave a small gap just for the sake of politeness, as the AA driving school car GD11ETF has had to do.

It also avoids the conflict between people cycling on the pavement

Where they are risk of damaging our vans

Discussions with the BSM and other Bristol Driving Schools

We always have a special place in our coverage for driving schools, as they have to teach beginners the hard art of driving and parking in a city which, excluding Clifton, is anti-car.

Here, up in Filton. Evolution WM10YHO show that the way to park is up on the pavement.

In front of it, a shared space. This eliminates the pavement entirely, and makes for some fun high-speed chicanes.

Speaking of driving schools, our ongoing discussion with one has had a new comment. The instructor does provide some good insight into what it's like driving a bus in the city, so those commenters slagging off FirstBus drivers should really save their anger for FirstBus management.

He also raises the issue of which laws should be ignored first:

I completely agree with people should not park on double yellow lines or zig zags or to close to junction corners all of which cause a danger to other road users but I do not count parking 2 wheels on the pavement in a very narror street that was never meant for parked cars in the first place as the same level of offence.

We don't bother with making decisions about which action is more defensible than others. We ignore them all, hence save time thinking about which action is more right than others.

We also note that we haven't seen that particular driving school in our database. The driving school that most pops is the British School of Motoring. The BSM may have more market share, but they are to be commended for something else: they are the only driving school that we have documented teaching people how to park in Montpelier. The other schools, they pick you up, then take you somewhere safe to learn to drive. The BSM actually hold their lessons in Montpelier.

In-town, in Richmond Road, Montpelier, we have a heartwarming sight. No, not the cyclist going up the hill with the Sainsbury's bag on the handlebars -it's the BSM instruction car WV60WJF.

We don't think driving and parking in Monty has its own test yet, so we're assuming it's a lesson. As Richmond Road is one of the hardest to drive and park on, we congratulate the BSM for showing their pupils the way forward -or at least the way up on the pavement without damaging your wheels, hitting the wall or paying the wingmirror tax on the way up the road.

So far, nobody from the BSM has got in touch with us. However, we are pleased to have video coverage of a discussion between some under-employed tax-dodger and the BSM car WR60CUY, which can be seen driving into the ASL on the red light: the bicycle doesn't get their green light until Shaldon Road is on red, so the car has had five seconds of red before it comes to a halt.

When queried about what the driver thinks the penalty for driving into an ASL is, the driving instructor comes back with the correct answer: anyone who cares about such things doesn't have a life. We actually think this summarises the entire country's cycling activist groups: they only do it because they don't have real lives.

Congratulations to the BSM for putting this tax dodger in their place!

The AA street watch

Apparently the AA were doing some study last week, trying get some statistics on what people in cities do that is technically "illegal", despite the war on motorists being over.

We think their crowd-sourced approach, while clearly based on our own world-leading experiment, is valid, we do like asking the machines for the data too. It scales better in space and time, generates more defensible data,  suffers from less self-selection bias, and is easier to go through in bulk.

This is why we think the best way for the AA to gain some statistics of where drivers bend the "so called law" would simply be to collect the satnav statistics of their own vehicles, correlating vehicle speeds and parking events with the "legacy" speed limits, double yellow line map, yellow-boxed junctions, etc. This would provide a year-round source of data, completely independent of any selection bias of the reporters.

We invite the AA to provide the Bristol Traffic team with an anonymised copy of such a dataset. Even if our multi-terabyte distributed filestore lacks the storage and compute capacity, we are sure that our strategic partners like Yahoo!, Google and Facebook,  do, and we will apply our world class datamining and Hidden Markov Modelling techniques to show the AA we are pretty good at guessing where their vans and driving school vehicles will park (hint: double yellow lines and pavements, such as here, the double yellow lines of St Michael's Hill).

A lot of people dismiss the AA for being lost in time, pining for the 1950s when cars only made it ten miles before a breakdown, and you'd send a telegram to let your family know you'd made it all the way from Bristol city centre to Filton without a catastrophe. We criticise them for something else: inability to grasp the opportunities that modern technologies bring. Never ask the people, when you can ask the machines.

AA supporting driver safety

There is lots of coverage today in the cycling world that the AA is giving out free helmets and hi-viz tops, to reduce the risk of them being run over as they ride their Boris Bikes around.

Some people are dismissive of this, implying that the AA is doing a publicity stunt that is really a form of blaming-the-victim. Not at all.

The AA is equally concerned about the safety of motorists. Look here, in the junction of Cheltenham Road and Arley Hill at 18:11 on a weekday evening. This van OU10FYG is stationary in the middle of the junction, held up by the vehicles in front; the cars coming up from Bath Buildings or Arley Hill are at risk of running into the van, given that they have both had green lights while this van is busy blocking the junction.

The hi-viz top the driver is wearing will reduce this risk, as it will be easier for cars crossing the junction to see the vehicle blocking the do-not-enter junction, so the driver will be safer. And presumably the AA's insurance costs will be reduced accordingly.

The AA driving school: for the road ahead

The AA driving school car GL60JHH says "for the road ahead" on the back of it.

Technically, up here in Northville, it should say "For the road and half the pavement ahead"

But there probably isn't room for that.

We hope the AA will be on our side, resisting government plans to fine people for parking on the pavement. It's in their interest, not just because increased car ownership increases their breakdown revenue fees, but because their driving school instructors clearly depend on the right too.

AA: putting the customer first

We've not seen this AA van, EJ08XMD, before. Here it is, on Ashley Road. Or to be precise, Ashley Road's Pavement.

As you can see from the cars behind it, the driver could have parked further out, and still not inconvenienced passing cars. Well, probably not. But those AA van wing mirrors, they do stick out, they could brush against someone important driving past: a customer.

The people on the pavement -they don't count. The aren't revenue streams. Every person who chooses to not own a car is lost forever. Every household that opts to go from two cars to one: the revenue drops in half. And in today's troubled economy, customers are not things you don't want to lose.

That's why when Edmund King gets up on TV to speak up for us, "the motorist", he's really thinking of us "the customer", and our cars, "the revenue stream. We know this because whenever he's on telly, he's going on about outrageous fuel costs, road tax costs. Not once does he ever complain about the excessive cost of Car Insurance in this country, because that's the AA. Similarly, no discussion of how much full AA breakdown cover costs, or whether, given the improved reliability of motor vehicles since the days of British Leyland, whether it makes any sense. You can tell people who grew up in those days as they are the people who phone you when they get to some destination twenty miles away. "I got home", they say, as if we still worry that the Allegro or Mini will not get that far.

For that reason, we don't trust anything Edmund King says. The van drivers may be on our side, but management isn't.

AA in stokes croft

Lovely to see the AA van EU08CMD out rescuing someone whose car had broken down in the stokes croft "bike lane"

We use quotes around "bike lane" as we have never once seen a cyclist using it.

We do not understand why not, or why they are so ungrateful for all that our road tax does for them.

The Stokes Croft Bike Lane! Sponsored by the AA!