As a child in the 50s, I lived in Bradford where we still had woollen mills and most of the workforce, usually including the managers if not the owners, lived in estates built round the mills. They walked / cycled / took the bus to work. Most didnt have cars. My three uncles, all tradesmen, had motorcycles and sidecars to carry tools and materials. The city had an electric ie trolleybus bus system. Yes the environment was heavily polluted by coal fumes but from heating and power.
The end of this approach is what has brought many of our problems. The mills shut, people moved into office jobs, increasing prosperity allowed the workers to do what the mill owners always had done and live far away from work. That continues today with the "barn conversion" approach. It requires transport and public transport doesnt fit well with high levels of dispersal.
I live in one such "village". No bus service - it wouldnt be economic. Ditto the rail line. I used to work before retirement in a city some 30 miles away and had to commute by car. 85% of the working population of my village do just that - and its not a figure picked out of the air but the result of work done on our local Long Term Development Plan.
Why am I writing all this? Simple really. The economic development of the industrial revolution was based on people leaving peasant style work in the country and coming into towns where their output was far greater because of working together. Its what has powered Chinese economic development in recent decades. And its what IMO we need to get back to. Maybe not so much in the cause of efficiency at work but certainly for economic efficiency in travel. I used to commute maybe 90 mins per day - all wasted time using a machine wasting energy, my car.
There is a delicious irony in the modern man convincing himself that he is living the life of a country gent in his converted pig stye in the middle of nowhere, going to work by car whiclt his wife takes the kids to school in the 4x4. Both of them wasting hours per day out of the maybe 8 hours when they arent at work or asleep. Trashing the environment whilst doing so.
Last edited by howard; 08/12/24 08:59 AM.
