The Highwire with Del Bigtree - END OF THE AUTOMOBILE AGE?

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

What started as government mandated lowering of speed limits is revealing a war on cars and people’s ability to keep their independence of mobility in line with Agenda 2030 goals. Will automobiles be a thing of the past?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

If you're in Wales, you're seeing this headline here recently, Wales first UK nation to drop speed limit from 30 miles per hour. And so you start to look into this. We're going to pack this story a little bit. Why are we talking about speed limits? Well, there's a little bit of a story beyond this. And just to get into this a little more, let's hear from some of the people in Wales. And how do they feel about this? Take a listen.

All right. Speed limit in Wales, as you know, has been slashed on all residential roads as of yesterday. In a UK first, the Welsh government has lowered most speed limits in urban areas to a default 20 miles an hour, or 32 kilometres an hour. For the Welsh government, it's about improving safety, with a change expected to result in 40% fewer collisions and encourage people to get around in other ways, like cycling or public transport. It's very frustrating. I've noticed on my commute to work, even on roads that are not 20 miles an hour, the traffic is backing up. We've now got a petition of 450,000 people who say it's a bad idea, get rid of it. It's keeping the traffic really terrible.

Anywhere you travel like maybe 10, 5 minutes, it takes you like over half an hour. I'm rather skeptical since they slow down things like commutes and emergency services and can ultimately reduce the productivity of the nation. With any traffic jams, anything like that, it'll be going along as a snail space. People have been driving in these areas for years. It's just going to be too hard to change, and it will cost a lot, I think, to get all the remapping and all the signs. And I just think it's overall not a good idea. I don't know what they're complaining about.

If you pass it 20 miles per hour zone all over America, I'm sure we'd be just fine. God, they're so up Titan whales. Where do you got to be? It's very difficult to go 20 miles an hour and not go over the speed limit. There is. Anybody's ever tried that. So there is a petition. It's it's petition here. We want the Welsh government to rescind and remove the disastrous 20 mile per hour law for almost 470,000 signatures there. That's a huge population, huge part of the Welsh Welsh population, the working population, especially that's commuting.

And so you're seeing this here. And of course, the government's coming out as quickly as possible. And they're saying this in the headlines, Welsh 20 mile an hour speed limit is a success. Claims government. Yeah, we made it. We did it. How are they measuring? success, go in the article, they're saying, well, people are starting to slow down a couple miles an hour here or there. So the whole idea of this, the proposed idea on the front end was slow people down, there'll be less traffic accidents. That's the idea. So it's a health benefit. That's the front end. But then you start looking at articles like this. The city 30 model wants to reshape European cities. Is it working? And you go in here, it says data from cities that adopted

the city 30 model all point to improvements in terms of road safety and life quality. But listen to this. However, isolating the actual impact of the policy is a difficult task, said Anna Bernoulli, senior researcher at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She says generally the 30 kilometers per hour speed limit is part of a wider plan to promote sustainable mobility. I was researching this the first time I've ever seen that word sustainable mobility. We'll go back to that in a second, which can involve other measures such as bike sharing programs or structural changes. These measures are often enforced simultaneously, So it's hard to understand how each one of them contributes to the overall result.

So I try to say that you're going to share the road better with the bike because you're going to be reduced to moving as fast as a bicycle. Is that what I'm done? Understand is part of this process? Yes. So they're using sustainable mobility. So you look at the word sustainable, you go into the agenda 2030 sustainable development goals. It's all about sustainability, but you look in there and the word sustainable mobility is not in there. So they're actually adding this term into the popular culture to try to really shift the focus to get people out of their cars, get them on, you know, basically on public transportation or bikes.

But it's interesting because the quote in there that from the senior researcher at University of Rotterdam says, it's really working, but it's hard to quantify how it's working. So we don't really understand this. And so what this all goes into is something called climate reductionism. Sorry. I don't know. It's giving me the giggles. I'm just imagining with all the problems in the world, can you imagine everywhere you're going? You're just being forced to drive 20 miles an hour.

The drinking must be going through the room. Must be people lined up in bars like, I can't take it. I mean, it's my mind. I mean, it's so aggravating. Just everywhere you go, everyone's just, you know, crawling along at 20 miles an hour, you know. But it's safer. It's going to be safer, apparently. But we don't really know how much.

safer, but we know they're slowing down. So the word climate reductionism is thrown around a lot, but basically this is tying everything into climate. And I know a couple weeks ago you talked to Dr. Judith Curry about this, you know, anything that is a detriment to humanity, well, it's linked to climate. So this is the front cover of Time magazine and it really says it all. And this is really, 2021, time front cover. The climate is everything. So this is what we're talking about. So now Now let's wrap this in. It started out, the lower speed limit started out with, well, you know, it's going to have left traffic accidents. But now we go to this article. In a win for climate, urban speed limits are dropping. So now we're leaving the UK and coming to the US. Cities across

the US are following Seattle's lead with speed limits dropping from Denver and Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. and Hoboken. Although these changes are motivated by the need to reduce deaths and injuries from car crashes, there's a growing recognition that they also benefit the climate. goes on to say safety and environment goals go together. They're inevitably interlinked, says Vanu Nanami, the chief safety officer of Seattle Department of Transportation. So here's where it gets crazy. We're going to bring it back to California

where a lot of maybe undesirable stuff if you're a motorist happen, and here's one of them. Government is trying to propose a solution to this, not just on a road sign, in your car. California bill would make state the first to require in-vehicle speeding limit devices. This is the hill. It says this device would restrict the speed of a car to 10 miles an hour above the speed limit,

with specific exceptions as indicated by the bill. Emergency vehicles, for example, would be exempt, as the California Highway Patrol could authorize the systems disabling in certain cases. There's so much wrong with this. Intelligence speed limiters. That's what they're being called. Smart speed limiters, which the state... I don't know if you really even need this thing.

I was just in Los Angeles, and you'd be lucky to be able to hit 20 miles per hour. most of the time. The traffic there is so insane. I lived there. It's wild to go back. I even said, I'm going to meet someone at about 445 on Friday over in Burbank or something. And then I got to the traffic. It's like, no, what are you thinking? You're not going anywhere at 445 on a Friday, let alone like over the hill in the Burbank. I had to cancel and make the meeting for the next day. But I mean, people in California, they're used to, you know, five miles per hour for a few hours. Right. And God, what would you do? I mean, it seems like they probably should have some type of solution is if you're in your private vehicle and you actually do have an emergency you have to speed for. I don't know that works. But go back to this article. Intelligent speed limiters, they're called, which the state center, this is Senator Weiner, our friend, referred to as speed governors prevent vehicles from surpassing a certain speed by harnessing GPS and onboard camera data to determine limits on a specific roadway. So, and remember in this article, it says the California Highway Patrol could, authorize the systems disabling. I thought there was a conspiracy theory that they could turn your

car off. But really, we're talking about going from lowering speed limits to just getting people out of their car essentially. And this is what California is proposing. Check out this new idea that's happening in California. Caldysac is the first community in the U.S. designed specifically for car-free living. Co-founder Ryan Johnson said it's what Americans want. In the U.S., we've been building the wrong kind of housing for a hundred years. We've built sprawl and it's created car dependency and it's made us lonelier, less healthy and less happy. And what people want is to live in walkable neighborhoods. Now retail, restaurants and close to 200 apartments in the first phase, no cars means no parking, no garages, no parking spaces, so more space for social areas.

The complex is strategically located right next to the area's light rail system. All residents, get a free pass. The first 200 also get a free electric e-bike and a partnership with lifts gets them discount rides. You know, to each their own, if you want to live in a carless city, go right ahead. What it gets scary is like when you're seeing in Wales when they start mandating these things, these 15-minute cities and no speed limit, no cars. You know, it's to each their own, but keep it away from me. Exactly. One of the things we shall remember is the lesson from the COVID response was the digital passports and the ability not to use some of these public transportation systems and just even go to the store and get groceries without having your vaccine. So really what happens when there's another pandemic, which we're being told may happen. So there's a lot of questions. Yeah, public transportation is your only transportation. Guess who has to comply whatever the public mandates on you. I mean, it's, you know, it's crazy.