Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Car-bloat and the council
LIKE some of their owners, cars have put on weight over recent years.
The phenomenon of carspreading likely began a couple of decades ago in the US with sports utility vehicles (SUVs). Bigger vehicles justified higher prices, bigger margins and bigger profits for US auto makers. This trend was then picked up by European car manufacturers.
Bigger vehicles offer more protection in a crash and may be fine on motorways (although high slab-sides are more vulnerable to side-winds and rollover). However in built-up areas like Haringey, they also offer more danger for pedestrians and cyclists and take up more room on our largely Victorian-era roads.
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For transport planning, policy and practice, Haringey Council is surely among the most backward local authorities in Greater London.
Their Highways team is ill-equipped to respond to the phenomenon of more and more cars and to more bigger and heavier vehicles. If highways staff have noticed this trend then—given their lack of imagination—they may be thinking in terms of lengthening and/or widening parking spaces to accommodate Haringey's minority of car owners.
It's equivalent to a fat person loosening their belt, rather than going on a diet and taking exercise.
Apart from their designing tiny, tinkering tweaks to junctions and carriageways, the Highwaymen's goal is to enable as much parking as possible for the car-owning minority and preserving official pavement parking on more than 100 roads. Widespread, council-approved pavement parking is the evidence, if not proof, that the Highwaymen see their client-constituency as car-owners. It was ever thus.
Each extra parking space tends to increase council parking-income, but each such space adds to Borough congestion and pollution for residents. The council's decision-making organ (the cabinet) has always been unable to reconcile this tension.
There is no prospect of improvement. Via social media, the Cabinet Member for Highways has repeatedly heaped praise on her team. There is net zero political will. In practice, the cabinet is content with the status quo.
The cabinet's attitude is and has always been, leave it to the experts!
Tags for Forum Posts: Cabinet, Haringey Council, Highways Team, bloat, car, cars, carspreading, experts, parking, policy, More…
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ruben on
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I am not sure what you are on about, but carspreading has been ongoing for much longer.
If you look at long-standing models (e.g. Honda Civic) it was a 3.4m long car in 1972, but it's now a 4.5m+ long on its eleventh generation. You can see pretty much across the board on every space.
This growth, manufacturers will tell you, is consumer driven. To the point that they have had to create super-mini classes to fill the void left by cars shorter than 4m.
Having said that, car ownership in London (unlike the rest of the UK) has been falling slowly for quite some time and is roughly around 1/3 of the population. I presume this number will be lower as you get closer to the centre.
As a non car-owner (I presume) you may feel like car drivers are getting it easy, but there's nothing further from the truth. If your car is over 4.5m long, your parking permit has a surcharge. If you drive a diesel, then a different surcharge. If it's a petrol, the statistics say it pollutes more than diesel (yes - I am also in disbelief - they only consider CO2 and not NO2) so there's a high likelihood of falling in the higher bands.
If you drive electric and you can't charge at home, the public posts (Source London) are actually more expensive than the cost of petrol. That's even without factoring in the new tax per mileage (I used to drive a PHEV and just gave up on charging).
add to that the ULEZ, LTNs and 20mph roads, not to mention the potholes, which make the experience of driving in London quite a miserable one. Paradoxically, the same measures are driving people off the buses, as was recently reported in the BBC, since traffic speed has dropped quite dramatically.
So, I think there is quite a lot of proof that Haringey, the GLA and the central government are quite actively introducing measures to deter from car ownership, particularly in London.
As a car owner, I share your frustration about car sizes. I have been driving for over 30 years and grew up in an apartment block with a designated underground car parking space per flat. It was built in the 70s and the present cars don't fit anymore (normally because of width). It's tragically humorous.
Yet, with the cynicism that can grow from true idealism, I have too succumbed to the SUV fad. I no longer get blinded by the lights of oncoming traffic. I ride more comfortably over potholes and speedbumps. By the way, you wouldn't believe the amount of pedestrian-safety features that new cars have. My car would stop on its own if someone were to jump in front of me, and it's a 2018 model.
Going back to car sizes, this probably should be a national regulatory issue, where a B driving license would only allow you to drive a car up to 2m wide and 4.7m long and whichever height, with anything bigger requiring a "van" driving license. That would force manufacturers to stay within the lines. the parking lines. Haringey's hands are tied there.
And the other thing that is missing is a holistic approach to london transport. As long as every borough does its own, we'll always fail. Road speeds go on changing from 20-30-40. Bus lanes appear and disappear. Parking is allowed in red routes at certain times. It's completely chaotic. Yet, you only get sticks without carrots. We have deterrents for cars, but no incentives for public transport. Most of the london underground is not accessible for wheelchairs and a pain for prams. I could go on.
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Permalink Reply by Paul Soper
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I suspect Clive hasn't renewed his car's (if he has one of course) parking permit recently - there is now a surcharge for cars in excess of 4m in length - my wife has a 10 year Renault Clio - not a very large car but the length just exceeds 4m and so there was a surcharge (only £2.75 but it exceeds 4m by millimetres) added. The problem however is no so much the length but the width of these obscene Chelsea tractors - but fair's fair it is a start...
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter
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Paul, I sold my hatchback and then my motorcycle several years ago.
The various charges (the sticks) levied on the gross-mobiles don't seem to be effective.
I cannot imagine what the carrots Haringey might try, such as improving public transport. The council has always been unwilling to take practical steps, for example, to speed bus journey times along Green Lanes by removing parking. This suggests to me that the sticks are not hard and heavy enough.
Some German autobahn cruisers are approaching the size, if not the weight, of half-tracks.
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Since discovered the details with a maximum size -
- Size Surcharges: A 5% surcharge for vehicles 4m to 4.499m long, and 10% for those 4.5m or longer.
- Maximum Size: Vehicles over 2.27m high or 5.25m long cannot get a permit
You can't have a long wheelbase Range Rover then...
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There's a guy with a Mercedes G-Wagon who parks on our street. Takes up a load of space. Why does anyone spend or rent a 150k van to potter around Haringey ? It's completely lost on me,
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THE reason is likely to be Conspicuous Consumption.
Due to the Total costs of ownership, the owning of a costly car in a built-up, urban area tends toward economic irrationality. In my view there are psychological factors at work as above. The council is content to pander to this phenomenon.
Average cars sit parked for more than 90% of the time and is one of the reasons why the ZipCar withdrawal is regrettable.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson
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But that doesn’t make sense. Larger parking spaces mean fewer parking space so lower income.
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It's not the length of the parking space it's the length of the car - the only parking spaces that are getting larger are disabled spaces which seems reasonable to me...
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris
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Speaking of the weight of new technology cars, I can report that during a recent visit to Powys, I was given a ride in a Riversimple Rasa (see:https://www.riversimple.com/). This is an electric car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. It is a prototype for which a unique power train has been developed. It works a treat. The body is made of carbon fibre and the whole vehicle weighs about 600kg, ie about one third of a fully electric battery car. It is as quick and easy to fill the tank as it is with petrol, the exhaust pipe emits only water, the tyres are as narrow as motorbike tyres, its braking is mainly by electrical retardation (which stores and reuses the energy recovered) and it produces far less road and tyre dust. I should be delighted if this kind of vehicle is launch in London before we have to replace our old petrol cars. Adding a hydrogen pump to Sainsbury's filling station would do wonders for the ladder. In my view, fully battery powered cars are a technological dead-end which should be trashed as soon as possible.
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Thanks Dick, interesting. Our council is committed on paper at least to (half-baked) plans for battery powered cars. The commitment to walking and cycling is much less. The actual commitment has been to talk and to net-zero change, led by the Cabinet Member for Highways.
Sheer weight is a feature common to today's bloat-mobiles and electric cars.
Musk's ugly struggling electric battery Cybertruck weighs three tons. It is so pedestrian unfriendly (along with other faults) that fortunately it is not allowed on UK roads. That marque is on course for a pothole deeper than any in the Borough.
Increasing weight damages our roads for all road users. The most consistent evidence for the effects of heavy vehicles can be seen in the eighteen inch wide margin by the kerb, on the footpath.
This is used by poor-to-average drivers manoeuvering to park, using pavements as an extension of the carriageway. Footpaths are not designed to carry such weight. Broken and cracked paving slabs can be seen all over the Borough. The council's Highwaymen appear to accept the damage to pavements and of course, maintain official pavement parking on 100+ roads.
Between the Cabinet and the conservative Highways Team, the council has been unable to come up with any policy to reduce the cycle of damage. Despite many pages, the Highway Team's Parking Action Plan was one of the council's most worthless that Haringey has published. It represents "vision" looking 360° … and then around again; has contradictory goals and no leadership. As there was no clear plan and something for everyone, the Cabinet Member for Highways would have been satisfied.
When operating their transport normally, even the most overweight cyclists don't cause road damage as do the current crop of cars.
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Hi Dick, sodium solid state batteries are entering production now. The technology is transformative. There's lots of content on youtube about this.
Hydrogen is highly combustible, takes a lot of energy to produce. needs to be stored at very low temps.
The big money is on sodium batteries now.
EVs weigh a ton. Damage to road is proportional to 4th power of vehicle mass.
- SUVs vs. Light Cars: An average SUV is heavier than a standard light car (e.g., a 2-tonne SUV versus a 1-tonne car). According to the fourth power law, this 2-tonne SUV exerts roughly 16 times more damage to the road surface than the 1-tonne car (2⁴ = 16).
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Sodium is clearly preferable to Lithium for environmental reason and perhaps for better safety but what's imorportant here is weight. Whatever type of batteries an EV uses, the damn things add weight to the vehicle and have to be carried around. I have not seen your fourth power assertion before but if it's true, a 2 ton EV causes over a 100 times more damage to the road than a 0.6 ton hydrogen fuel cell car!
Hydrogen is no more flammable than petrol and, if it leaked, would dissipate instantly unlike petrol vapour which falls to the ground and remains a hazard for longer. Of course, much will depend on how the hydrogen is obtained, long term, and the answer to that can only be from electrolysis of water by solar energy gathered by one of the obvious ways (wind, tidal, photovoltaics, hydro) or even some yet to be developed mobilisation of photosynthesis. I am convinced that no vehicle should be carrying its energy on board. It's wasteful, unnecessary and can be dangerous, witness the Challenger disaster.
As to the 'big money' it seems at present to be desperately seeking to milk the enormous capital that has been sunk into the current obsession with battery cars (and previous technologies too).
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