I never thought I'd agree with a Tory MP but...

Cressers

...I think that rickshaws should be banned as well!

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetai ... ESSION=899

eternal_headwind

I am afraid I must disagree. Firstly, the details of the american accident are not supplied. Secondly and most importantly, one accident?

Here is one report, no doubt there are others.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... ab08m.html

Lee Scott is conservative MP for Ilford in North London. The EDM has suport from 13 MP's and doesn't seem polarised to one party.

There may be an argument for phasing in 'pedicabs need some sort of commercial vehicle check'

This is one incident and it doesn't warrant a knee jerk response. Parliment says of EDM's

Early Day Motions
Early Day Motions (EDMs) are formal motions submitted for debate in the House of Commons. However, very few EDMs are actually debated. Instead, they are used for reasons such as publicising the views of individual MPs, drawing attention to specific events or campaigns, and demonstrating the extent of parliamentary support for a particular cause or point of view.

psychiatricblues

With no reference to any information on the incident that led to this EDM, I can only assume that this was a collision between a pedicab and a motor vehicle. Given that about 3,500 people died in the UK annually in collisions involving motor vehicles, and, as far as I am aware, nobody in the UK has ever died after being involved in a collision with a pedicab, shouldn't Scott Lee be using his EDM to ban motor vehicles from our roads?

eternal_headwind

I tend to agree with you psychiatricblues. You don't need to look too hard to see the major cause of transport related injury and death in the UK (or the world for that matter).

The basics of the case are this: Pedicab drver with two passengers goes downhill and suffers a brake failure. Zoom through a crossroads at the bottom of the hill and gets smacked hard by a van.

An EDM seems to be a paper based chatroom for MPs. If you think th house should debate something then this is one way to get the ball rolling. Most fall flat very quickly.

Most interesting is the anti pedicab sentiment from Cressers. Please explain...

Cressers

I object to those symbols of third world poverty clogging our streets because they effectively turn humans into draught animals. IMO they are a wheeled human rights abuse and give other forms of pedal powered transport a bad name. Clear the lot off the roads I say!

eternal_headwind

Bizarre.
And an offensive use of the word symbol too.

Come on, what's your real reason? Do tell...

chuckcork

Hundreds of thousands of people dead and considerably more injured in the world due to motor vehicle collisions, let alone the reduced life expectancy due to pollution caused by same, and he is worried about pedicabs?

Seriously?

Cressers

Yes. They are the thin end of the wedge... Ironic isn't it that as Delhi is clearing out the rickshaws and tuk-tuks out of it's city centre in favour of electric busses, the UK is seeing them appear on our streets. Perhaps it's a sign of our changing economic circumstances...

eternal_headwind

Come on, really. You don't honestly believe your own posts. Not every job on earth involves clicking a mouse. And just because a job involves exerting yourself physically that doesn't make it demeaning. There are pleny of sedentary jobs that much better descibed human rights abuse definitions.
Dehli/Mumbai is hardly a shining example of transport planning even with respect to more modern initiatives. Political aspiration is more of a driving factor than logical town planning.

I would accuse you, Cressers, of having a 'if it isn't a ford mondeo it isn't respectable' attitude. At best your concept of symbolism is very teenage.
You have an internet connection, if you want some real third world symbols you need only ask someone out there.
In the meantime tough, some suggestions
http://www.newint.org/
http://www.amnesty.org/

Cressers

Rickshawing is not a victimless offence. Like prostitution it degrades both the parties involved.

eternal_headwind

I bow to your superior knowledge of prostitution, but not rickshaws

passout

ONE accident! Come on, this should not be taken too seriously.

Cressers

One accident indeed but it's the underlying principle of rickshawing that is the issue. Do we really want to see the impermanent, insecure, day labouring that is entailed in rickshawing? With busses, taxis, and the underground. is there any reason to have these wheeled steps backward slowly congesting the streets and causing pollution from the slow traffic backed-up behind them?

eternal_headwind

Impermanent, insecure day labouring. Hmmmm. Yes. We always need quick work. The alternative for people needing money fast is crime/dole or worst still call centres. Okay, maybe not call centres. Even if a person finds a regular job quickly payday may be a month away. Day labouring can get you around this problem. I have used the day labour market in this fashion myself after a large company I had a regular respectable job with collapsed overnight. By day and evening I laboured and by night I filled out job applications and all the other stuff needed to find regular work.
I don't want to sound like Norman Tebbitt or anything but I wonder, Cressers, a little about your background given that you turn your nose up at some jobs so readily. Do you feel perhaps that a job can dehumanise or do you believe the worker to be inhuman? Please ask yourself that question next time you stand in line at the tesco's checkout.

A person working is always better than a person claiming or committing crimes. Your own arguments are making rickshaws sounds better all the time.

As for the pollution argument, do you also believe women are responsible for rape? The person who commits the offence is responsible for the offence. The rapist rapes and the person with the four stroke combustion engine pollutes.

I agree with you if you ask for regulation, but not removal. If anything, and I a not saying this to be provocative, I would like to see an increase in their use.

Cressers

So against the grain of taking the human element of of modern life (ATMs replacing bank staff, Self-Scan replacing checkouts, directly inferacing with companies via the internet, bypassing call centres) it is desirable to have human power replacing more efficient forms of transport? Even the rickshawists disagree, as evidenced by the recent Met crackdown of power-assisted rickshaws. One must wonder what goes through the mind of someone, given all the choices of urban transportation available, who chooses to hire a rickshaw. I suspect that there is an underlying element, a subconcious desire to 'own' another, if only for a short while, and in at present, a socially acceptable manner that avoids all the embarrassment of seeking out S&M society. Or are the rickshaw pullers engaged in a subtle form of exhibitionist public gimpism?

I hope that in a more enlightened future rickshawing will be thought of with the same distaste that we have for the previously acceptable practises of sending young children up chimneys or down mines. We no longer employ miserable pit ponies in our mines, and if it were proposed thaat horse-drawn taxis were to introduced into an urban environment there would be a justified outcry from the animal rights lobby. So do humans matter less?

chuckcork

I would think the people who hire pedicabs on Central London are not doing so because the want to get anywhere in a hurry, but because they are tourists and want to see and experience the city while moving through it, including the sounds and smells, with the wind on their faces.

Can't really get that same experience in the back of a black cab.

Cressers

err... walking?