> You can't enforce a speed limit by simply placing a speed sign and hoping everyone is going to magically follow them.
It's not flawless but sticking up signs has a reasonable effect. I'd say at least 50% of the people who drive on the local 20mph roads near me abide by the speed limit (that has not active enforcement) and this prevents quite a few others from speeding.
A lot of 20mph limits as enforced simply by some motorists driving at <=20mph. This prevents anyone behind from speeding unless they go for some stupid overtaking manoeuvre.
So, yes, simply sticking up a sign and not actively enforcing it (Police, speed cameras) can have a pretty good effect.
Refresher tests every 10 years would do more to solve the current driving standards problem in the UK. But it'd be political suicide for any Government that tried to introduce it.
There are three speed cameras in 20mph limits near me in my area of London. Whenever I'm near them I see someone flashed by them about once every 5 minutes (one is opposite a bus stop that I often wait at).
It's surprising just how many people will continue to speed past these very visible cameras.
Possibly, but it's a dangerous long game to play. You're at the mercy of pretty much every Police patrol car with ANPR once the cloned plates are tagged as such. Getting caught with cloned plates is far more serious.
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Do slower speeds cause congestion and pollution?
Imperial College London's research into the impact of 20mph speed limits suggests they have no net negative impact on exhaust emissions. Results indicated clear benefits to driving style and associated particulate emissions. The research found that vehicles moved more smoothly, with fewer accelerations and decelerations, than in 30mph zones, reducing particulate emissions from tyre and brake wear. We have undertaken an Environmental Evaluation and are satisfied that the lowering of speeds will not have an adverse impact on the environment or air quality. The Environmental Evaluation recommendation was that no air quality modelling was therefore required.
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Useful reminder to sort out my AoC++ donation for this year. Done.
Being in the UK I've never bothered attempting to target the global leader-board as 5am is just too early.
According to my research I probably could scrape in here or there (looking at the time between the timestamp on my input file - which I download by running a script manually - and my solution times) but then I assume I'd be one of thousands who could also do the same but are hampered by timezones.
I think the "Please don't" wording of the policy is pretty much all that Eric can do.
People will always try and game the system, but I doubt they can consistently game it for the number of days required to appear on the final leaderboard. I think the problems will just be too big/varied for LLMs to consistently solve.
Depends on the elevation gains in your 100km ride but I think that 3,300kcal for a 100km/4h ride is generous.
800kcal/hr is hard work and keeping that up for 4h is even harder. 25kph does not sound like 800kcal/hr unless there was some reasonable elevation gains. I’d expect at least 1000m elevation gain over that 100km for those numbers to at least approach something sensible. If it was a flatter ride than that then Strava is just lying to you.
But, yes, long distance cycling is an awesome way of burning calories. When I used to do Brevet/Audax riding I was the closest to my old teenage weight as I have been in the last ~30 years.
Yeah, 25km/h requires less than 150W [1], so it's 600Wh total, the efficiency of human metabolism is about 20% [2], so it's 3kWh of total energy input = 10.8MJ = 2600 kcal. (I have been using generous estimates, so this should be an upper bound)
Given that we're talking about cycling, the solution is to buy a power meter and measure rather than estimate. Unfortunately that's a rather expensive option for all but the most committed cyclists.
Being someone who has a power meter, I can say that strava's estimates over a long time period aren't that terrible, but if you're riding in a group, or there was a some wind, or a million other reasons they can be absolutely miles out.
That's hardly strava's fault, it's more about what's actually possible with an estimate.
What is completely made up and should be ignored is the calorie burn estimates you get from gym equipment.
Re-reading your post made me think: I bet this is intentional design -- overestimate number of calories burned. Then, people will tell their friends about this amazing device from Strava that burns an unreasonable number of calories...
Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it.
I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventually) but getting better is on my big long list of things to do.
> You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours
So first off, you're assuming that they live in London, as that is the only place with a direct train link to France. Second, the Eurostar website has ticket prices "from £39" which equates to €45. But that's the "from" price. Looking at all availability up to the end of October, there is one day where you can get a £63 ticket, another day where you can get an £86 ticket and all other days are £97 or over. So just "jumping on the train" isn't the cheap carefree jaunt you're making it out to be. The average full time salary in London is £37,000[1] and average rent in London is a staggering £31,524[2]. Those numbers only work because a lot of people are house sharing - it is impossible to live in the UK on £5476, especially in London. That one way ticket to France is approximately 1/7 of the average Londoner's weekly wage.
Living in London is horribly expensive, but being so close, European travel from the UK is often similar in price to travel within the UK. As well as Eurostar there are many cheap flights and both can be similar to the costs of train travel within the UK.
Brexit has sunk the pound so the costs of holidays abroad will be relatively more expensive now, but as kids we often took summer holidays in France because it cost less than going somewhere in the UK.
I get that but, unless you're earning £100k+/year, hopping on the train to France every weekend to go practice your French is prohibitively expensive and not realistic
Doing it every weekend would be prohibitively expensive, but then so would taking the train to Manchester or anywhere else a similar distance within the UK.
Now living in the west coast of the US I really miss the freedom to visit so many different places for so little, whether that be cheap Eurostar fares or cheap budget airline flights.
How expensive is plane travel in the US compared to the EU? The language won't change, but the variety of the US is pretty immense. You could hop on a plane from LA and be in the Texas desert, or the peaks and snow in Colorado, or the Great Lakes, or the swamps in the South. And even leaving the States, tropical islands of the Bahamas are only 5 hours away, Canada is three or four, and Mexico is even closer. I would have expected air travel to be cheaper relatively speaking in America than Europe, especially with the higher salaries. The environmental impacts of all the flying aren't great though obviously.
Where budget airlines exist in the US the fares are comparable, they just fly far fewer routes than in Europe so you often end up paying standard airline prices.
The variety of the US is immense, but its size is immense too! San Francisco-New York is three quarters the distance of London-New York and the western half of the US is practically empty other than the coast.
Looking at my old email receipts I have a lot of £50 each way tickets from RyanAir and EasyJet. My last trip to Mexico was $200 each way (though that was at least twice the distance, Mexico is huge too!)
No need for a train. I could find conversational French/Spanish/German really easily where I live now in London. I have at least 5 native speakers of each of those languages who are friends and live within a mile of me. Right now it is just laziness.
Finding local language communities locally might be harder in less cosmopolitan areas but it just takes a bit of effort.
As an 11-16 year old learning those languages at school it was a lot harder to do so.
I call this the "I don't understand why Europeans don't go for lunch in Paris" puzzlement. I've had variations of this conversation with many American friends over the years ... :)
Distances just hit differently on their side of the Atlantic.
It’s considerably less tiresome and costly to cover long distance in cars.
I noticed that a 500km ride in France is very long distance. A once in a summer thing. While a 350miles trajectory in the us is something I can do with less friction.
This is a big factor, but living in the US I do miss the cheap flights that made weekend city breaks within Europe cheap and easy. From San Francisco it seems like the only place you can get a similarly cheap flight to is Las Vegas and I've never understood the attraction of gambling...
It's not flawless but sticking up signs has a reasonable effect. I'd say at least 50% of the people who drive on the local 20mph roads near me abide by the speed limit (that has not active enforcement) and this prevents quite a few others from speeding.
(I agree on the road design point though...)