"Robin" wrote:
Or maybe people should just do
what almost everyone does here and realise that life is about more
than the daily grind, and an opportunity to stand outside in the sun,
drink a cold beer, meet people you'd never normally meet, and to cap
it all get to watch some entertaining sport is worth more for your
longterm wellbeing than worrying about ambulance response times*.

I accept that having sat in the back of an ambulance trying to keep
someone conscious while it makes an emergency transfer (with blue lights
and sirens) through London traffic gives me a possibly biased view. The
more so as the route would have been blocked by the TdF route

Seriously? Grief top trumps? If you want to compare notes on the number
of hours spent sat outside intensive care/HDU, or the number of ambulance
trips or deaths in the family required to have an opinion, I'd suggest it's
a pretty ****ty way to try and argue (and don't assume you'd come out on
top, either.)

But it
is indeed a matter of balance. I am glad you are able to be so
nonchalant.

Of course it may just be that when you've watched enough people die you
realise it's not the way you go that's important, it's actually living a
life beforehand that matters. If a few hours of road closures is enough to
raise your blood pressure this much, and your life is so utterly joyless
that you can't embrace the opportunity instead of focusing on the
inconvenience, I'd suggest that when that final curtain does fall and your
life flashes before your eyes the least of your regrets is going to be that
the ambulance took a minute longer.

And odds are you wouldn't even get to know if some poor sod
died as a result of delay getting to hospital so people can watch the
TdF go by - not even it were one of your friends/family - as the
ambulance service and NHS will of course have made plans.

If they've made plans (which I'm quite sure they have,) then it's likely
that in fact nobody will die as a result of delays getting to hospital,
isn't it?

By the way, you do know how easily London's roads are disrupted, don't
you, so as to give informed consent?

I've lived most of my life there, own a house in south London and am there
pretty much every week. I even cheerfully paid (indeed still pay I
believe, not that I pay a lot of attention to my council tax bill) the
extra on my council tax to pay for the olympics while listening to people
like you moan for five years about what a disaster it was going to be. So
yeah I think I have a pretty good idea - and the answer is that amazingly,
despite what the sort of people who call a traffic jam "chaos" would say,
the wheels of commerce keep turning, the city keeps on growing, and life
keeps on being lived. (I also know that the only people who drive in
London are bloody fools to start with, but that's by the by.)

Great cities are resilient. The idea that Al Qaeda can stop worrying about
bombing because actually all they need is a few guys with HiVis and a Road
Closed sign to bring the city to its knees is beyond absurd...


So the traffic will be a bit ****ty for an afternoon. Seriously, deal with
it. If it really bothers you that much, take a holiday - it might well be
what you need to postpone that ambulance journey...

In message
-septemb
er.org, at 23:36:21 on Sun, 30 Mar 2014, Clank
remarked:
So the traffic will be a bit ****ty for an afternoon.

Not really.

In Cambridge, the closures start at 5.30pm on Sunday, the core closes at
4am and whole route through Cambridgshire is pretty much locked down
from 7am.

In Essex it looks like this:

Uttlesford and Braintree: 7.30am to 4pm
Chelmsford: 8am to 5pm
Epping DC: north of the A414 closed 8am opened 5pm.
Epping DC: south of the A414 and including the A414 closed 9am opened
5pm."

Seriously, deal with it. If it really bothers you that much, take a
holiday

It would be nice if the schools had an amnesty that day for parents
taking their children out of school; after all quite a few won't have
the means to get there anyway, let alone the idea of being a spectator.

Some schools, and many businesses, are of course on the route, and will
be landlocked all day.
--
Roland Perry

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 09:00:26PM +0000, Clank wrote:

I invite anyone who finds this all so life-changingly inconvenient *not* to
come to live on the Isle of Man, because by then end of TT an apoplexy
induced heart attack is guaranteed ;-).

At least with the TT and the Manx GP you know that it's going to happen
every year before you move to the island.

Or maybe people should just do what almost everyone
does here and realise that life is about more than the daily grind, and an
opportunity to stand outside in the sun, drink a cold beer, meet people
you'd never normally meet, and to cap it all get to watch some entertaining
sport is worth more for your longterm wellbeing than worrying about
ambulance response times*.

Unless you're the sort of anorak who cares passionately about lap times,
there's precious little entertaining sport at the TT. You see someone go
zoom past, then you wait a bit, then you see someone else go zoom past,
then you wait a bit, repeat for several hours. That's it. You're
extremely unlikely to see any overtaking as you can only see a tiny
fraction of the whole course. If you want to see entertaining sport,
you're better off watching the bike racing at Silverstone. But even that
is better seen on TV for the same reason.

* in fairness ambulance response times are actually rather important during
TT for spectators as well as riders, if you're standing in the wrong place
at the wrong time. But the TdF is a little less deadly on the whole.

But the surrounding houses and streets are just as perilous as normal.
And cutting a large densely populated area in half is obviously going to
cause more problems than cutting a sparsely populated area in half while
leaving all the surrounding more densely populated areas intact.

Perhaps if the mayor wants to show how cycling is normal and safe, the
race could be run in normal traffic. Loads of cycling clubs do this
already.

--
David Cantrell | semi-evolved ape-thing

More people are driven insane through religious hysteria than
by drinking alcohol. -- W C Fields

On Monday, 31 March 2014 13:16:56 UTC+1, David Cantrell wrote:
Unless you're the sort of anorak who cares passionately about lap times,

there's precious little entertaining sport at the TT. You see someone go

zoom past, then you wait a bit, then you see someone else go zoom past,

then you wait a bit, repeat for several hours. That's it. You're

extremely unlikely to see any overtaking as you can only see a tiny

fraction of the whole course. If you want to see entertaining sport,

you're better off watching the bike racing at Silverstone. But even that

is better seen on TV for the same reason.

TV doesn't give you atmosphere, a sense of event and occasion. You could say the same
about football, you'll mostly get a better view on TV but watching at home or in a stadium
are incomparable.

For the same reason people go to concerts when they could just listen to some CDs at home.

In message , at 18:11:02 on
Sun, 30 Mar 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:
I would expect bus routes to be split so they run in sections either
side of crossing points with people transferring via pedestrian
crossings.

That rather assumes bus routes at perpendicular to the main road, rather
than run along it.

The long standing tradition in France is for the passing of Le
Tour to be an excuse for a party but perhaps you'll be in the "party
pooper" category?

That's be great out in the countryside, or even at the weekend, but
cutting the commuter belt in two on a normal working day seems a bit of
an ask.

In Cambridge, for example, three of the four vehicular river crossings
will be shut, which would cause chaos on a normal day even without lots
of other roads closed too. I can't see a way to make the cross-City bus
routes "join up" without a two mile gap between the severed ends.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 01:13:15 on
Mon, 31 Mar 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:

In Cambridge, for example, three of the four vehicular river crossings
will be shut, which would cause chaos on a normal day even without lots
of other roads closed too. I can't see a way to make the cross-City bus
routes "join up" without a two mile gap between the severed ends.

I am not intimately familiar with Cambridge's road layout or bus
network so can't comment in any sensible fashion.

Here's the closures:
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News...r-road-closure
s-announced-for-central-Cambridge-20140320143455.htm

With the only road bridge still open about 25% off to the right
(Elizabeth Way, see the next map).

Here's the bus map:
http://www.stagecoachbus.com/uploads/cambridge_mar14a4.pdf

With routes exclusively using the three bridges that are closing. The
whole area marked "City Centre" is closing.

On top of that you have the longer distance buses (including the Guided
Bus) and buses serving five P&R dotted round the perimeter. Of that lot
lot just one (A P&R from beyond the Science Park) uses the Elizabeth Way
bridge.

http://www.thebusway.info/central-cambridge.aspx

Shows the problem with using Elizabeth Way as al alternative route
because the cross-roads at Parkside/East Rd (just left of where it says
"Cambridge City Centre"[1]) is where the race starts and is closed the
longest. The area under that CCC name is a maze of Victorian Terraces
that you can't use as alternative vehicular routes.

[1] That's the name of the map, not a place; the actual centre is more
like Arts Theatre/Corn Exchange.

I watch the TDF every year and see it whizz its way through hamlets,
villages, towns and cities across France (plus Belguim / Spain / Italy
/ Switzerland as required). The thing that always strikes me is the
fact that people love to watch the race and in the larger conurbations
you can see people still managing to get around and going about their
business. I accept the UK does not have the same level of interest in
cycle racing as France does but the TDF is a spectacle and I, for one,
am happy to see it back in London.

I'm not against the race as such, I'm more against it cutting so many
large and busy places in half on a weekday.

I think people are forgetting that we have had the race in the UK a
few times before and certainly in London. I have no recollection of
mass complaints the last time the Tour was in Central London or the
ride out through South East London into Kent.

People like the London Marathon too, but that's on a Sunday.
--
Roland Perry

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 06:11:02PM +0100, Paul Corfield wrote:

I think you are underestimating the extent to which people will wish
to view this event and that includes the schools right along the
route. The long standing tradition in France is for the passing of Le
Tour to be an excuse for a party but perhaps you'll be in the "party
pooper" category?

I fail to see what there is to celebrate about a few sweaty oiks zooming
past for a few minutes.

I am afraid I do not understand the raging contempt people have for an
event if they can't get out of their house for a few hours. The
reaction from people in Surrey is somethng I just don't get given the
ability to plan around the event months in advance and the guarantee
that anyone suffering an emergency will get the help they need.

How about the fact that, just like the Olympics, it's a pain in the
arse, and that the powers that be can't be arsed with actually talking
to the people affected, they just impose these events on their home
towns. At least the Olympics was long enough that it made sense to
avoid it by going on holiday.

I spent a week of them in north Wales, where it seems that almost all
the other tourists were Londoners escaping from the sportsgasm.

--
David Cantrell | top google result for "internet beard fetish club"

Perl: the only language that makes Welsh look acceptable

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 07:42:32PM +0100, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:03:21 +0100, David Cantrell
wrote:
On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 06:11:02PM +0100, Paul Corfield wrote:
I am afraid I do not understand the raging contempt people have for an
event ...
How about the fact that, just like the Olympics, it's a pain in the
arse, and that the powers that be can't be arsed with actually talking
to the people affected, they just impose these events on their home
towns.
OK you don't like big sporting events or the Tour de France. Message
received and understood.

Received and misunderstood.

I have nothing against big sporting events. I'm looking forward to the
rugby world cup, for example. What I'm against is events that massively
inconvenience large numbers of people who aren't interested in them and
can't reasonably avoid them. If, hypothetically, the rugby world cup
were to be held in temporary stadiums erected on the spaces normally
occupied by roads, I'd be against it. But it isn't, because it's not run
by selfish gits.

--
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age

"Cynical" is a word used by the naive to describe the experienced.
George Hills, in uknot

Well said, sir! I couldn't have put it better myself.