How to fix inflation

It is fashionable for wannabe Government Ministers and so forth to tell us that they want to bring inflation down, and the only way they can think of bringing it down is increasing the mortgage interest rates — which, as Christopher Robin observed, hasn’t worked yet. For some reason the idea of cutting the prices of food, gas and electricity by fiat doesn’t seem to occur to them. In the long run, and quite possibly in the short run as well, increasing mortgage interest rates will cause thousands of deaths as people starve and freeze to death in unlighted houses, or on the streets. Another way to take money out of the economy, which is the ostensible purpose of raising mortgage interest rates — nothing to do with giving our chums in the banks huge bonuses, honest, Guv’nor — has to be found fast.

Therefore, I am posting an alternative way to take money out of the economy. Bring back the sixpence.

If every household in the UK were to save sixpence a week in a piggy bank, that would take more than £36 Mn out of the economy in every full year. (28.2 Mn households × 52 weeks × 6d = £36.66 Mn.)

On the other hand a 1% rise in interest rates raises only £16.75 Mn. (£1,675.4 Mn total mortgage debt × 1% = £16.754 Mn.)

Of course, the plan will work only if people want it to work. That’s why I’m not calling for compulsory saving. Under compulsory saving, people feel, rightly, that they can’t get hold of their sixpences should they suddenly need them. So the sixpenny coin has to be psycho-numismatically designed so that people will want to keep it and not spend it, as they did with the old sixpences. ‘Save two new pence and three new pence on alternate weeks’ is arithmetically the same, but doesn’t cut it.

Likewise, people have to not want to take money out of their piggy banks. Fortunately this problem too has been solved. The piggy banks are made of pottery and don’t have an opening for taking the sixpences out. You have to drop it or break it, so usually the coins stay in the piggy bank and they aren’t taken out and spent. Those sixpences are just as far out of the economy as the money you hand to the banks instead of spending it on food and clothing.

What of those who are too poor to save 6d per week? They can save 6d per fortnight. However many people can’t pay the full whack, the total saved in piggy banks will be at least £18 Mn, which is still more than is raised by a 1% rise in mortgage interest rates.

So there you are, Mr Hunt. As Mr Punch would have said, that’s the way to do it. My bill is in the post.

Long distance bike paths

Let’s waste a few million on very long distance bike paths

I no longer seem to be strong enough to ride a bicycle, but I used to cycle often, and occasionally I rode long distances. I went 100 miles from Edinburgh to Newcastle upon Tyne in about 16 hours on one occasion and I rode the organised double marathon from Edinburgh to St Andrews on two others. But for the purposes of this article, one hundred miles is a mere bagatelle. I am writing about bicycle paths that go all the way across Europe.

So, when I learned that the Channel Tunnel has not just the two bores for trains, one in each direction, but also a ‘service tunnel’ which runs the full length of the tunnel and allows access for repair, maintenance and emergency exit, I thought it unfair that cyclists were not allowed to ride through the service tunnel. I still think it is unfair that cyclists are not allowed to ride through the service tunnel — even on days when nobody else is using it — but as the service tunnel is 31½ miles long, riding through it would take your average cyclist two or three hours without rest stops, and there are no toilets or seats along the way, so the ride is an unattractive prospect. Even the 2007 Tour de France, which started in London, did not ride through the tunnel.

Click on the pictures to view the full size versions.

The Channel Tunnel is made up of two railway tunnels and a service tunnel which runs between them and doesn’t take bicycles

Therefore I am not about to found a campaign to have cyclists allowed through the Channel Tunnel, although the addition of lighting and art to the 90 yard Colinton tunnel in south west Edinburgh shows that tunnels can be made into attractive cycle routes. I leave the important duty of opening the Channel Tunnel to cyclists to anyone who wants to take it on.

Colinton Tunnel in Edinburgh has been fitted with lighting and decorated with a mural, and has become a joy to ride through

Instead, I will allow the cyclists to choose between taking their bikes on Eurotunnel (bizarrely, cyclists are banned from the Shuttle unless they have their cars with them) and riding one of the many attractive ferry services which still operate across the English Channel.

The interesting question — to me, anyway — is, if you are going to take a cycling holiday, what dedicated, peaceful, scenic routes are available to you. I found it interesting that since the Middle Ages there has been a network of scenic low speed paths all over Europe. Those are the pilgrimage paths.

Here is a map of the European pilgrimage paths, which for some reason leaves out all the pilgrimage routes in Great Britain and Ireland. I copied this map from Traildino’s web site.

Scenic low speed routes across Europe: the Pilgrimage Paths

Of course, many of these routes are not suitable for cyclists, or at least not suitable for cyclists of average ability riding average bicycles. My point is that there exists a network of low speed, traffic free scenic routes all across Europe, and those paths have existed for centuries. For centuries, therefore, there have been travellers who wanted to go slowly and enjoy the journey, rather than to arrive at the end of the path as quickly as possible. There is actually a need for slow roads as well as fast ones.

All over the world for the last hundred years or so, Ministers of Transport have encouraged faster and faster cars by building faster and faster roads, yet we have ended up with cars which spend nearly all their time (96·4% according to Reinventing Parking) standing outside their owners’ houses impressing the neighbours. Do things have to be this way? Can’t we look again at the possibility of making travel a pleasure?

Of course, making travel a pleasure does not just mean building cycle paths, as hikers, ramblers, passengers on many steam railways and those drivers who rattle around the streets in vintage cars will probably agree. It means that over the next hundred years those same Ministers could gradually, incrementally, construct a bike path network of long distance paths. I mention the hundred years because that is how long it has taken the Netherlands to construct the spectacular cycle provision which it has today. Whatever the people who installed cycle routes in completely unsuitable places in Edinburgh may think, it takes years for an attractive, usable network of bicycle paths to develop.

What can we expect of a long distance bike path

A long distance bicycle path needs to be:

1. Continuous. The design of a path needs to allow for very young cyclists. Any interruption to the path, for example expecting the rider to dismount and walk across a busy road, or operate a traffic light, or cycle along a busy road for half a mile, renders the path useless or even worse to small cyclists.

2. Level or gently graded. Fortunately, this too has been done before. The flight of locks at Caen Hill on the Kennet and Avon canal rises 237 feet over two miles, which is a gradient of 1 in 44½. It is the steepest gradient of any canal in Britain. The railways regard 1 in 50 as a steep gradient. Hills are one of the most effective deterrents to cycling, and bike paths should avoid them by taking paths along flat (ish) landscape features like rivers, canals, coasts and railway lines.

What is noticeable here is the similarity of a gradient regarded as steep by two completely different means of transport. It gives me confidence that the steepest acceptable gradient on a long distance bicycle path will turn out to be 1 in 50.

3. Away from big roads. The bike lanes recently built in Edinburgh, like the one on Crewe Road North, in the picture, miss the point of cycling. The paths are built along the edges of busy roads, instead of supporting the use of old railway lines, canal towpaths, footpaths and back streets, all of which Edinburgh has in large numbers. Cycle lanes are never swept or gritted in winter, are often blocked by parked cars and leave the riders inches away from cars which almost always defy the speed limit. The idea of imposing a low speed limit in order to protect cyclists doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody, and wouldn’t work even if it had. Motorists regard obeying a 20 mph speed limit as a ridiculous thing to expect them to do.

4. Close to services. Long distance bike paths are too long to cycle end to end, out and back in a day, carrying everything you need. You need bicycle parks, border posts, cafés, cash dispensers, chip shops, drinking fountains, fizzy drink dispensers, hostels, hotels, picnic tables, postcard vendors, police posts, pubs, restaurants, schools (you don’t really need those along the bike path but it’s a good place to build them, because they offer safe access on foot as well as by bicycle,) shelters, sweet shops, telephone boxes and shops offering bicycle hire, repairs and spares.

Those would make the paths interesting, useful and lively places near cities.

5. Lit at night, swept regularly, gritted in winter and free from parked cars. (The picture shows the Pescara Path, in eastern Italy, at night.)

6. Free to use.

 

Where will the long distance paths go?

I found myself eager to draw at least one map. I drew it because I like drawing maps. This map is only conceptual: it is not supposed to form part of any project. The paths shown on it are the V1 (2800 miles,) V2 (1400 miles) and V3 (2600 miles.) I chose the letter ‘V’ to stand for ‘Velocipede,’ a word which exists in pretty much every European language except, I think, Basque, Hungarian and Welsh. Numbering the bicycle paths systematically is the least of the problems. They could instead be named after men and women who have performed some meritorious service, like ‘Kenneth Johnson Way.’

While I’m on the subject

Building a level (or almost) path across open countryside may be easier and require less earth moving if the path shares the route of some utility which is level anyway. But you have to share it in a way which does not expose cyclists to the risk of being struck by a car or a train. This is how to lay a cycle path beside a canal or a river, beside a railway, or beside a main road.

If there is no alternative to taking the cycle path along a road that passes through a built-up area, here are a bad way to do it and two good ways.

Do not do this. Sooner or later it will kill someone.	Cyclists ride on extended pavements, one on each side of the road	Cyclists ride in both directions on an extended pavement

It is better to route cyclists away from the main road. If there is no convenient railway, river, canal or other route which can be used for traffic free cycling, then maybe you can create a cycle route along back streets where there is little traffic and it doesn't go very fast. As an example, in the old council housing estate at Craigmillar there is a back street route which avoids the main road. In the more recently built Niddrie Mains estate, because the designer felt the need to avoid creating ‘rat runs,’ there is apparently no back street route along which to continue it.

How to improve mobile phones

Mobile phones have, for years, had a wide choice of ring tones to choose from, so when someone’s mobile phone rings, it makes a sound which its owner recognises immediately, because nobody else’s phone plays the same tune or makes the same noise, while those sitting nearby hear it and, privately, draw their own conclusions about the personality and interests of the owner based on whether he (or she) prefers to be alerted to an incoming insurance salesman by The Mickey Mouse March or The Chicken Song. or The Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé, which was made so popular by all those British Airways advertisements, and manages to be both tear-jerkingly beautiful and frenetically irritating at one and the same time.

Yet although the tones you hear when someone else receives a phone call are varied, interesting and informative, the tones that you hear when someone else makes a phone call (let’s call them call tones) have been the same since mobile phones first appeared, back in 1985. And although it’s almost second nature for mobile phone owners to set up one ring tone for callers they like and a different one for callers they don’t like, whoever you call, whether it’s your girlfriend, your mum or the income tax office, your phone always plays the same call tones.

When you, or anyone else, dial a number on your mobile phone, provided it’s the sort of mobile phone that has keys, and sometimes even if it doesn’t, you hear a DTMF tone every time you press a number key, or an ikon that looks like one.

The DTMF tones are close to, but not exactly the same as, the musical notes ↑D (which plays when you press button 1), E (2), #F (3.) A fourth pitch, #G, is reserved for special signals which control equipment, route the call or set its priority. The other numbers use the same three notes, but they add a second note so that the software that receives the call can tell the difference between 1, 4 and 7, which all play ↑D.

Mobile phones are unique, by which I mean that I can’t think of any other machine that does it, in that pressing different buttons evokes different tones. The microwave and the washing machine play the same note for every button. Even Start and Stop play the same note. It’s a miracle that the machines don’t confuse the two.

If we could somehow de-couple the musical note from the number on the button, storing the string of musical notes elsewhere and playing them one by one as you dialled telephone numbers, it would be possible to play an arbitrary series of musical notes. If you dialled, say, 0141 496 0787, the phone could send the correct DTMF tones, but play a completely unrelated musical note every time you dialled a digit. Every time you pressed a digit, the phone would play the next note of some piece of music, be it Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or The Birdie Song

But there’s more. The tune doesn’t have to be the same for every number that you call. Most mobile phone users, most of the time, don’t dial numbers at all. They choose the person they want to call from a list: boss, curry house, doctor, landlord, massage parlour. The phone knows the phone number and transmits the DTMF tones to the nearest mast in the right order. At the same time, it could find the call tone that puts you in the right mood for talking to that person and play that music as it dialled the number. That would put you in the right mood for speaking to that person, and you wouldn’t have to listen to all those tuneless DTMF squawks.

Since it is widely believed that three pictures are worth three thousand words, here is an explanation in graphical form:

Out with the old	In with the new	What are all the other buttons for?

Here are the DTMF tones 0141 496 0787 in Wav format, which works on most browsers, and in Ogg format, which works on Chrome.
 ,
Here too are the same DTMF tones, or at least the musical notes nearest to them, woven into five seconds of music.
 

So you could dial 0141 496 0787 and the phone could play the first eleven notes of Twinkle, twinkle, little star, which would get it as far as ‘wonder’, but no farther because the phone number only has eleven digits.

If you don’t like listening to Twinkle, twinkle, little star, and I don’t blame you, you could make the phone play anything you wanted. For instance, while it dials your boss, you could make the phone play The Imperial March (that’s Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars,) or Elvis Presley’s Big Boss Man?

Which means it is possible to make a mobile phone which plays God save the King as you dial. It sounds just the right thing for brightening up those tiresome quiet coaches on long distance trains — but, sadly, those four DTMF tones will only get you through the first six notes of the National Anthem.