Forum topic: Petition against Hertford Road cycle lanes

FWIW, I quite like the moniker "juvenile superman".

Unfortunately west of the A10 there are too many highly indoctrinated individuals more than capable of compulsive doublethink, with conditioned responses to key words like "cycling", "green", "sustainable", when all common sense is thrown out off the table, much like the response many have when some idiot says you cannot do something because of some unspecified "health and safety" issue. This is why, since the early 20th century, when education shifted towards the Soviet methods of Operant Conditioning, very few people since then have ever had any independent thought of their own. Why do you think they still teach Pavlov's Dogs at school? Because that remains the contemporary approach to pedagogy.

Its fine to trash a community to save the planet. OK for a scheme that increases pollution if car use reduces, even if the Council says it will not reduce, etc. etc. Read 1984, this is the definition of Doublethink, holding two contradictory thoughts concurrently, with both cancelling each other out. I am thus committing thoughtcrime / heresy by questioning the elitist received position on the matter, which to be summarised is, "cycle lanes good, any negative impacts counteracted by the yet unspecified and vague, whatever, common good".

Fortunately the people of Edmonton, east of the A10 do not get their knickers in the twist and can distinguish between the fact that some cycle schemes are designed well, some are not and this one certainly isn't. They are not as easily fooled as the overly indoctrinated middle classes west of the A10.

None of these opinionated, generic, blancmange, vanilla, magnolia responses have even attempted to address any of the concerns raised in the detailed description of issues set out in the petition.

NIMBY isn't an insult if it's a statement of fact - the petition, and arguments presented here, quite literally say "not here, there...". That is NIMBYism.

And whilst we're talking quite literally, "main road in their back yard destroyed, but that is no cliche" is quite literally one of the biggest cliches I've ever ready. "Destroyed"!!!! Like when the anti-CS9 campaign compared CSH's to damage wrought by the luftwaffe.

As for other arguements set out:
1) Not fit enough - e-bikes. My colleague compared hers to a brisk walk. No fitness required. And before the disability card is rolled out - check out Wheels4Wellbeing and see how many people find cycling achieves a level of mobility well beyond walking (or running etc).
2) Time - worst argument yet. I say this as someone weighing 18 stone riding a sturdy hyrbid brike (no flashy race bike or lycra here), cycling is often as quick if not quicker for most journeys than private or public transport including commuting. Palmers Green to the West End, for example, 45-50 mins door to door, compared to 50-60 mins by a mix of walking, bus, tube, train etc (depending on exact start point).
3) CS1, for starters, doesn't even serve Enfield. LBE has not a single yard of CSH. I haven't cycled it as I live in Palmers Green and it is nowhere near here - north London as a whole is terribly served by CSH. But if it is fully segregated, that's great.
3)a. I actually referred to your "Quietway" comment, and provided an example of why they are such an utterly meaningless and failed road safety PR scheme. Why? Because paint is not infrastructure.
4) Do-gooders. Yes, damn the people actually trying to do some good in the world, society clearly much better with a selfish screw everyone else attitude.
5) Wreck people's lives? Citation needed.
6) Nothing you have put forward constitutes cycling infrastructure - and responding to locals will never achieve change because, as long as it is by them and interrupts their lifestyle in any way, locals will never agree anything meaningful. It will always just elicit a response of "I have no idea with the issue overall, I just think it should be watered down and placed over there, not here".

This thread is starting to become a mini-mirror of Brexit...

"This thread is starting to become a mini-mirror of Brexit..."

This is the problem with you folk. You can only think in cliches. This petition sets out clear, irrefutable design flaws with the cycle lanes on Hertford Road, but you dismiss the legitimate concerns of the working people of Edmonton and counter them with vague generalities.

You are like O'Brien in 1984, trying to convince Winston that "cycle lane" = "save the planet" even if any sensible person can see that this specific scheme is poorly designed and sited. A world where 2 + 4 is 1,2,3, 5 or whatever the technocracy deems it to be, with the public trained to salivate upon use of key mind control words such as "health and safety" or "sustainability", etc. even when those words fail to describe what is before you.

I have not seen any evidence of "clear irrefutable design flaws", I have just seen assertions without any evidence. And you continue to launch insulting personal attacks on people who disagree with you. Any more and you will be banned permanently. You are welcome to put arguments against the cycle lanes, but just making assertions proves nothing. Either post some new arguments against the cycle lanes, backed up by evidence, or cease and desist.

All the arguments are summarised in the petition pre-amble and within comments from the petitioners. It would be great to discuss some of them rather than vague generalities.

Again, genetics with no reference to this scheme. It does not reduce car traffic. It causes delays to the bus network so results in a net reduction in sustainable transport provision. The official documents point to a 20% reduction to the bus network with a combination of delays at junctions and up to 2min delay per mile. Cycling cannot physically offset that loss.

Secondly, CO2 is a colourless odourless gas that plants breathe, that is in atmospheric concentrations of parts per million. It’s greenhouse quotient (potency) is far less than water vapour (try running a central heating system on CO2 vs steam) and water vapour is 2% of the atmosphere. Water vapour (humidity) and cloud cover are immeasurably more relevant to climate and solar radiation and winds are the principle factor in affecting them and climate. Solar activity has been down recently, which is why the Met Office has reported a “pause” in global warming for the past two decades now, and this is why governments shifted the rhetoric from global warming, which you do not hear anymore, to climate change, with no use anymore of the term anthropogenic.

Many of you here may recall that in the 1970s the scare was global cooling. This was supposedly caused by nitrous oxide and dust from industry. The same folk led the 1960s green revolution suggesting we would run out of dfood to justify the introduction of dwarf whale At and synthetic fertiliser and the same organisations, such as the Royal Society promoted Thomas Malthus in the late 1800s to promote the idea that we were running out of resources. The common thread of all these things was the utilisation of ancient earth workshop techniques to provide a pretext for the implementation of Marxist policies that had to be dressed up like this because the public simply was not buying the fraudulent justifications for higher taxation and regulation from the left. The thread through all these scares is the claims are attacks on the Borgoise, calls for the taxation and regulation of all aspects of life and industry and now, through the United Nations, calls for us to be saved by world governance, even if it overthrows the Magna Carta. In Europe, when Germany was unified, the East German Communists flocked to environmentalism, because it was the best mechanism for implementing Marxism under the radar, whilst the environmentalist movement because distracted from real issues by the non issue of CO2.

Follow this link for an excellent explanation of the fraud of global warming: https://mises.org/library/fraud-global-warming