It?s this great new form of transport. You create a vehicle with three or, more likely four or more wheels, and power it with a motor of some sort that, if it?s powerful enough, could make the vehicle travel really quite fast ? perhaps a mile a minute or more. The vehicle would have a passenger cell and maybe another for luggage and stuff.
It would be a great way of enabling people to move about, over great distances if need be, with all sorts of paraphernalia. And suitably designed, this type of vehicle could carry heavy loads of goods as well.
A ?driver? using suitable devices would control the speed and direction of the vehicles, which would run along the ordinary roads. Some sort of code of conduct would be required to ensure chaos didn?t reign.
Yeah, great idea but:
· Entrust the control of these vehicles, with their huge capacity for destruction and mayhem, to humans instead of some guided system like a railway? No way.
· They would come far to close to pedestrians, unless there were an effective physical barrier to separate this ?traffic? from people.
· They would pass far too closely to each other for safety, even if vehicles going in one direction were all on the same side of the road. Imagine, a closing speed of, say 60mph in towns and villages, or even at 120mph on the open road? Unthinkable.
The authorities would never allow it. And people would think it?s far too dangerous. Look how we all view railway safety. That?s already brilliant but can never be good enough. This ?road vehicles? idea is a non-starter.
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Driving on motorways, risks assess that!
Just like tobacco and alcohol, if it were invented today it would not be allowed.
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Don't forget:
kitchen knives
lawnmowers
glass windows
hobs & ovens
mains electricity
garden tools in general
matches
candles
fire generally
stairs
fatty food
rat poison
Best we risk assess that lot.
I'd stay in bed all day if I wasn't frightened the roof would fall down.
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I guess it depends on how you present the idea of "road vehicles".
If, as it first, appeared, these machines were likely to be a bit of rarity, then it wouldn't be much of a problem. In fact, it could actually be quite useful, as rapid door-to-door transport.
However, if you had a better crystal ball, you'd have to consider what would happen if nearly every adult owned one. The idea would rapidly turn into a nightmare.
The roads would be jammed with them, both when moving and when out of use. A quick look at the size of urban steets would rule out the option of allowing them in existing cities, and the idea of gobbling up masses of the countryside to make space for parking them would be universally denounced.
The massive resources required to build, maintain, and fuel them would be absurd, before you even started to consider disposing of the worn-out ones. A few quick calculations would demonstrate how much fewer resources could be used to provide much faster and cheaper mobility for everyone.
If the idea still had any supporters left, the clincher would be when the cystal ball revealed that these "road vehicles" would become the biggest single cause of accidental death, and that the air pollution they caused would inflict massive damage on public health.
By the time the cystal ball was revealing how the proximity of speeding "road vehicles" to houses would end up depriving most children of the chance to move freely around their own neighbourhoods, the crystal-ball-reader would already be locked up.
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There should be a big cutback with some state benefits and a crackdown on crime, so that the lower classes gey back onto the buses.
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There should be a big cutback with some state benefits and a crackdown on crime, so that the lower classes gey back onto the buses.
That wouldn't reduce the numbers enough. The only way to restore equilibrium would be go back to the old notion of aristocratic privelige, and adopt rules which would ensure that car ownership followed a similar pattern to ownership of a posh covered carriage.
Something like no car unless:
a) you have a title;
b) you hunt with hounds; and
c) you can prove direct descent from at least one named person who climbed off the boat with William The Conqueror
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I can see this could get silly very quickly ..... Oh, it already has!
No Dosh
Backroom Moderator
mailto:moderators@honestjohn.co.uk
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Yeah, bring back nobs and serfs. Solve a lot of the UK's problems (the world's?) at a stroke...
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Bagsy I be a nob.
Eh? What's that you say? I already am? I don't know what you mean.
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No - much better to adopt a more meritocratic approach - remember this is New Britain under New Labour.
Just ban the sale of any car with a list price below £50k.
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