Basic Statistics Method (BSM)

BSM on Housing

There are 25 million homes in the UK. With a population of 60 million people that means that each home needs to house 2.4 people. With children being unable to live alone and the elderly often moving out of single accomodation, with pairing being an important structure in UK society and with the population fairly stable where is the suggestion here that we need new homes in the UK?

As we have seen recently houses have become an important part of the UK economy. And, as I hope has been made clear in the blog all things economic are idiotic not least because economics is based upon made up cultural rules (like the concept of employment) with no sound reality.

The concept of "housing" which I've challenged by an alternative means by making a garage into my house, and the concept of poverty (likewise) is gaining deeper and deeper economic and hegemonic bias. As the end of the day it is anything which keeps the rain off and somewhere to maintain the concept of "property" (if you subscribe to that).

BSM on Cars
According to What Car in 2006 there are 33 million registered vehicles in the UK. Each one needs a driver so that at any one time half the population could be behind the wheel of a vehicle. With children and the very elderly unable to drive that means that most of the population can be on the road taking a separate journey.

Of this in 2004 the car population was 26 million. There is one car for every house in the UK, and one car for every 2.4 people. This means that each house and family can take a unique journey at the same time.

This seems a vast over allocation of resources. Most journeys (or portions of journeys) are similar or share largely similar routes (e.g. with buses taking more than one passenger). And not everyone takes a journey at the same time. You only need to see a car park, or the road verges in domestic areas after dark to see the huge redundancy of vehicles. Even after the pulse of transportation that is required at certain times due to social "serialisation" (synchrony) as people go to and from work for example - there is still huge over allocation. Simple staggering of opening hours would save vast amounts of energy and time all by itself.

The model of private ownership again proves inappropriate here.

In UK there are 8,000 cars for every km of its motorways, that is one car every 125m nose-to-tail or every 500m with 4 lanes. Or if you sit by any stretch of motorway anywhere in the country that would be a car passing every 4 seconds all day and all night every day on average.

The article argues this is less than elsewhere in Europe - but if you sit or live by a road this seems far too excessive already to me!

randon facts for comparison:
A car uses 1.6 million joules/km (50ml petrol/km)
A walker uses 294 j/km (112.5 cal/mile)

That means that the energy that powers a car could power 5442 walkers ... or 5% of the UKs cars would power the whole world to walk the same distance!

Except that 4 times more fuel is used to make crops than is available to eat after harvest ... so really if that petrol was used for intensive agriculture it would fuel 1360 walkers... or the 20% of the UKs cars would fuel the whole world to cover the same distance... still a lot!

Bicycling is even more efficient. I now consider cycling 30 miles with a backpack as normal. Time was when a 10 mile run to the pub I considered normal too. It really is just a matter of culture and what we are used to. Most people just learn to jump in a car - its not better just what they are used to.

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BSM is now the name here for the method that I used as a child to frighten myself by the world population - that we each have only (137 metres) squared of land each. This led immediately to an awareness of the impact of mankind on the planet and the need for conservation, and also the impending problems of environmental catastrophy and human starvation. All I didn't know was how this was going to hit the news. The details are that "global warming" was the media story some 10 years after this school boy took a calculator and the Boys Book of Facts! That's how simple these issues are at root.

Often we can't see the wood for the trees in statistics so its good to ignore the minutae and start again with the braod facts. This seems to rather efficiently simplify the picture in many cases... (obviously with treated caution in case the details prove to be relevant to the overall view)