Nuxx:4e247163$0$2949$fa0fcedb@news.zen.co.uk

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!goblin2!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!dedekind.zen.co.uk!zen.net.uk!hamilton.zen.co.uk!reader02.news.zen.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <4e247163$0$2949$fa0fcedb@news.zen.co.uk> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: The July-August issue of World Carfree Monthly news is out! Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:46:07 +0100 References:  Lines: 55 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110616 Thunderbird/3.1.11 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To:  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: Zen Internet NNTP-Posting-Host: 313fff1c.news.zen.co.uk X-Trace: DXC=m;J3534Y]@a\J=\Ho9ch?jYjZGX^207Pk`_c1YQ<7S2`IFYk You may read it directly here: http://worldcarfree.net/bulletin/archives/june_11.html." > It should be of special interest to cyclists, given the problems they > face from cars.

LOL! "World Carfree Monthly"? Sounds like a joke publication that one would accuse Chapman of reading. I'm sure that he and the other car-haters, and the likes of Tom Crispin and Simon Mason for that matter, would agree with more of "World Carfree Monthly" than, say, "On The Road" from the ABD.

The sad thing is that if they're correct about their figures, the number of "World Carfree Monthly" readers is more-or-less the same as the number of (albeit paying) members of the ABD. As the ABD just talks common sense most of the time, and one will find that most ordinary people (in, say, pubs) will agree with most of the views that it voices, whereas those who want a "car-free world" are most certainly not ordinary and are thankfully few and far between (and would rightly be laughed out of most pubs), this highlights a common problem: the ordinary, pro-motorist majority is very poor at organising and mobilising itself into any coherent force, having never been under such attack before, whereas the car-hating freaks are sinisterly organised and crazily, obsessively determined, meaning that despite many millions of people broadly agreeing with the ABD versus just a few thousand nutters who want to bully all motorists off the roads right now (I don't think even Chapman wants *everyone*, including himself, to stop driving), the actual number of people who are prepared to spend time speaking out, campaigning, etc is roughly equal on each side.

So despite having a massive numerical advantage, the ordinary car-driving man in the street is allowing himself to be screwed over by minority groups of car-hating fruitcakes, hence the fact that we (for example) have speed cameras when every *unbiased* survey with cameras?" shows that around 80% of people oppose them*.
 * unloaded*, non-sneaky questions like "Are you in favour of speed

It's a problem which is particularly bad in this country: in the US, for example, drivers see right through and "don't take no shit" with anti-motorist, anti-public, deceitful crap like cameras, and, time and time again, quickly vote them out when the usual vested interests try to introduce them (purely for reasons of safety, of course...revenue is never, ever the driver behind it...only every single time). The US isn't perfect but it's pleasing that democracy works so well there in that way, and the people are actually listened to...I know that most camera supporters dislike that and think that "People should be controlled and told what's good for them, and if they don't like it then tough...treating everyone like children is the way forward".

-- that, and have questions like "If cameras saved lives then would you support them?". Most people say "Yes" to that and those behind the survey then say "Well cameras *do* save lives [even though they don't of course] so most people support cameras". Those with vested interests in cameras acting dishonestly? Whoever would have thought?
 * The surveys which "show support" for cameras are designed to show