Prices of the electricity we use to charge

Ghost1951

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I like the appropriate name of this Company's tunnel cleaning machine, hehe :)
Don't know about all that water with electric rails though, oops, back to vacuum ;)
No those water sprays would seem to be incompatible with cleaning a 650 volt track power system. I'd have thought some sort of train mounted, stiff, rotating nylon bristle, brushes combined with a high power vacuum, hoover type contraption might do it. Like a travelling car wash, without the water.

It was noticeable how spotless the 'dirty' tracks were in this video. Did you spot that. It looked like an operating theatre in comparison to the sewer of Khan's tube, with clods of matted hair, vomit and cr ap, mixed up with dangerous micro dust from tracks and brakes - all being cleaned by a sort of sub class of toiling slaves with pathetic masks, plastic shopping bag and cra ppy gloves, scurrying about at night , on hands and knees like workers during the Industrial Revolution....

I wonder what the life expectancy is of those Khan cleaning slaves is? Did you see the dust they were working in. It was picked up clearly in their head torch beams. Reminds me of when I went down a mine on a school visit in 1966 and we reached the coal cutting face.

Is that the best we can do in the UK?

What is worse is that TFL proudly show us that archaic, horrible scene, and then expect us to pay to travel on it and leave our cars at home.
 
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Woosh

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So the more modern film says they hand clean two hundred meters of track a night if it isn't too filthy and there are two hundred and fifty miles of track. There are 1610 meters in a mile so it takes 8 nights to do a mile, so five and a half years to do the whole system. That video is showing sewer levels of filth down there. No wonder the air quality is appalling.

EDIT:

On re-watching the video or maybe a different one posted by MikelBikel, the narrator said there were two teams so we can correct and half that time to clean the totality of the system to about two and a half years to go around once - but are they that systematic? I doubt it.

He also said they were revisiting an area done only a month ago.... I'm getting bad vibes here. it sounds a bit like the disorganised chaos surrounding the building regulations department and Grenfell Tower's fire. I don't trust these smooth talking spokespersons from TFL, the Civil Service bods who decide on building material safety - or any of them.

I am going to live further into the hills if I can find the right place and I will be preparing every item of food I eat, because I KNOW that all official spokespersons will lie to me. They are far more interested in glossing over the failure and dodgy wheezes they have been up to.

'Here eat this pie. Perfectly safe!'

(sub text and full of trans fats that we know will cause heart disease.)

'Transfats are safe.... They do not exist in nature, but nosh away buddy. It's good for our profits and its really cheap sh it - so it must be good.'
You have a lot of rust coming from the trains and tracks that get deposited everywhere in the tunnels as much as passages and zillions of rooms, cupboards, racks, cable trays etc that cannot be easily kept clean. Sometimes I wish people think first about what they would do if they were in the shoes of those they criticise.
 
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flecc

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What is worse is that TFL proudly show us that archaic, horrible scene, and then expect us to pay to travel on it and leave our cars at home.
Only 45 per cent of the Underground is actually in tunnels. The longest distance between stations is on the Metropolitan line from Chesham to Chalfont & Latimer: a total of only 3.89 miles. Being London born I've had plenty of tube travel, especially when I was young, and afew years ago when I needed to travel into the centre a few times, I chose public transport including the deepest tube system in preference to driving. But at 88 years old it hasn't affected my life span.

And no-one is expected to travel on the underground system, they can travel in London in our clean, air conditioned electric buses, which are also much cheaper to travel on.

Both bus routes where I live in London have been all electric for quite a long time now and as of this week a nearby route has switched to new electric double deckers. Very nice they all are too, no exhaust, silent and air conditioned, all decades ahead of where you critics live. Of course ULEZ helps to pay for them, so having twice the air improvement effect, replacing diesel buses and taking i.c. cars off the city roads.
.
 
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Woosh

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I too use buses in London.
 
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Ghost1951

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Very nice they all are too, no exhaust, silent and air conditioned, all decades ahead of where you critics live.

Air quality?

This is where I live pal.

59578

You can stick your electric busses and ULEZ where the sun don't shine.

And by the way. Air quality in the UK is way ahead of many parts of Europe.

Take a look at this current air quality comparator:

59580

59581

These screen shots were taken right now. 0935 30th August 2024. Both current last hour.


 

Peter.Bridge

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"
...
In the UK, air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health.

The annual mortality of human-made air pollution in the UK is roughly equivalent to between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths every year. It is estimated that between 2017 and 2025 the total cost to the NHS and social care system of air pollutants (fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide), for which there is more robust evidence for an association, will be £1.6 billion.
...
"
 
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saneagle

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"
...
In the UK, air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health.

The annual mortality of human-made air pollution in the UK is roughly equivalent to between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths every year. It is estimated that between 2017 and 2025 the total cost to the NHS and social care system of air pollutants (fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide), for which there is more robust evidence for an association, will be £1.6 billion.
...
"
I've been around for 71 years. During that time, I've seen and heard of many deaths. They all had an identifiable cause. None of them were because of pollution. You'd have thought that if the above figures are true, we'd all know of someone, who died of pollution.
 

Peter.Bridge

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I've been around for 71 years. During that time, I've seen and heard of many deaths. They all had an identifiable cause. None of them were because of pollution. You'd have thought that if the above figures are true, we'd all know of someone, who died of pollution.
I don't think anyone has air pollution on the death certificate , but NOx and particulates are known from epidemiological studies to reduce the population lifespan

Here is one from 2018 that seems to be used in the figures (this is NOx only)


Also a (rather old) one from the Winton Centre

 

saneagle

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I don't think anyone has air pollution on the death certificate , but NOx and particulates are known from epidemiological studies to reduce the population lifespan

Here is one from 2018 that seems to be used in the figures (this is NOx only)


Also a (rather old) one from the Winton Centre

Did you actually read that? They didn't show anybody, who died of pollution. They figured out that more people died in polluted cities than in the country, and pollution must therefore be the cause, but they forgot to take into account blocks of flats burning down, murders, traffic accidents, electric cars burning, alcoholism, drugs, depression, suicide and all the other causes that would be higher in a city than in the country. To simplify it, they're saying that if more people die of drug overdoses in polluted areas than in clean areas, pollution must be the cause, and they'd probably argue that it must be the pollution is causing the people to take the drugs in the first place, because not so many people take them in unpolluted areas.

If we use their arguments, life expectancy in Norway is 83.16 years and their average AQI is 25. In Japan, life expectancy is 84.45 years and the AQI is 43 - sort of destroys the premise of their theory, as the RPN would be negative.
 
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flecc

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I've been around for 71 years. During that time, I've seen and heard of many deaths. They all had an identifiable cause. None of them were because of pollution. You'd have thought that if the above figures are true, we'd all know of someone, who died of pollution.
They are more common in London and they include the death of a 9 year old girl, confirmed by a coroners inquest. The medical cause of death is commonly noted as asthma, caused in turn by air pollution as the coroner confirmed in this case:

"My daughter Ella was a playful, happy child growing up in South East London. Healthy at birth, with a lust for life, she didn’t develop asthma until just before her seventh birthday. A few weeks after her ninth birthday, she suffered a fatal asthma attack. Ella is the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate. ”

Rosamund Adoo Kissi Debrah"
 
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flecc

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Air quality?

This is where I live pal.

View attachment 59578
Don't be so complacent, you're not 78 years old yet and you've much to learn:

My older brother and I were born in Central London, but at 13 and 10 years old we moved to a coastal town. He was always the fitter and healthier by far in those days. He went into farming and spent his whole life in the English countryside, mainly the West Country. I took a very different route and soon returned to London and have lived here the great majority of my life.

At 78 years old he suffered a heart attack and had to have a replacement heart valve, recovering from that ok but 4 years later went down with bowel cancer. All the usual treatments given, but never entirely successful and he's been dead a number of years.

I also suffered a heart attack, but much earlier at 70 years old, heart trouble being in our mother's side of the family, but I didn't get any drastic remedial measures, just self monitoring and some medicinal control of blood pressure to keep minor attacks to a minimum. This has been so successful that my heart is now much stronger and adverse heart events are now very rare and untroubling anyway, despite my 88 years, at which I'm setting new family records.

So my brother's much more promising health and fitness start in life and his lifetime in English fresh country air obviously didn't do him any favours eventually.

Nor has my net 75 years of living in London harmed me, despite much of it being in central and inner London and almost all of my working days and a lot of leisure time being in central London anyway.

Things aren't always as obvious as they superficially seem
.
 
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Ghost1951

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"
...
In the UK, air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health.

The annual mortality of human-made air pollution in the UK is roughly equivalent to between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths every year. It is estimated that between 2017 and 2025 the total cost to the NHS and social care system of air pollutants (fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide), for which there is more robust evidence for an association, will be £1.6 billion.
...
"
These figures are entirely spurious. I have dealt with this issue before here, but let's have another go.

Professor Spieglehalter's Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge has covered this in detail, pointing out that the calculation of this figure is entirely made up. Here is a link to the paper. The Winton Centre is a renowned, expert, statistical institution.


The claim that huge numbers of people die each year from particulate and other air pollution is derived through a convoluted process, based on a 2002 long term study, by POPE and Colleagues, which related life expectancy in districts of various US cities with different air pollution profiles to see how long people lived and by trying to estimate the different life expectancy in these different locations. The grotesque confounding error prone feature of this approach is that there was no attempt to factor in the different socio economic profiles of the populations.

As we all know (I hope), the different lifestyle and habits of people of different educational and socio-economic status, has a very large impact on how long people live. Take the differences in life expectancy in different post codes in Glasgow. In the richer post codes men live into their mid eighties (86.1) but in the poorer ones, they live on average only 72.7 years.

Ref :

The POPE and Colleagues study in the USA is fatally flawed by this neglect of socio economic status and the confounding variables connected to that which were ignored.

The Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) base their estimates on a relative risk entirely derived from the Pope and Colleagues, American study and it is there for absolutely useless.

The prestigious, statistical centre (The Winton Centre) make clear the unreliability of the numbers put about by COMEAP and point out the fundamental flaws in their process. As the Winton Centre report says:

"Can differences in mortality really be attributed to air pollution, especially when the actual exposure of each individual is not known? COMEAP suspect other factors could be at work, producing so-called ‘residual confounding’: it is notable that socio-economic status is not recorded, and this could be related to both particulate exposure and mortality."
It really does not take a lot of thought to realise that the very many confounding variables in a life time make it impossible to come to any meaningful number on the question of the degree of contribution to life expectancy of any particular factor. There are so many: diet, activity level, heritable diseases, habits like smoking incidence in different populations, drug and substance abuse, obesity levels. All of these differ in different socio-economic groups and none of this was taken into account. Add to that the very zoned nature of housing and socio-economic status in the United States where people of different financial and educational status live in very different neighbourhoods and the Pope et al data which forms the basis the conclusions of the COMEAP group is utterly compromised.

The Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants conclusion that 28,000 to 36,000 people die in the UK each year prematurely because of air pollution, is JUNK!!! And is only taken seriously by the VERY large number of statistically illiterate people who form the great mass of the media and political class of our society.

I would also point out to you the huge reduction in particulate emissions, NOX and other air pollutants in the UK over the last few decades. The fall in these pollutants is enormous. We have cleaner air than we have ever had since probably the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a fact born out by the DEFRA air monitoring network referenced above.

Take a look at this graph from a UK Government source. It shows the very steep decline in air pollution levels in the UK which are largely the result of the abandonment of coal burning in power stations and improvements in the technology of internal combustion engines on our roads.


59585

Source here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/emissions-of-air-pollutants/emissions-of-air-pollutants-in-the-uk-particulate-matter-pm10-and-pm25

Or this one on NOX:
59586

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/emissions-of-air-pollutants/emissions-of-air-pollutants-in-the-uk-nitrogen-oxides-nox


We have never ever had cleaner air in our lifetimes and not probably for two hundred years.

I rest my case - This is all hysterical bollix.
 
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Ghost1951

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I've been around for 71 years. During that time, I've seen and heard of many deaths. They all had an identifiable cause. None of them were because of pollution. You'd have thought that if the above figures are true, we'd all know of someone, who died of pollution.
And I would just add that the conclusion of that London Coroner who decided that a child had died of air pollution on the basis of insane propaganda is entirely spurious. It ought to be obvious to any sane person that if the pollution levels at the location of that child's home were so toxic, there would have been a mass disaster with at the very least, swarms of very sick people being admitted to hospital. None of that happened. That child had severe problems. She died because of those, not because of air pollution. That verdict was a disgrace and ought to be stuck off the record.
 
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saneagle

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They are more common in London and they include the death of a 9 year old girl, confirmed by a coroners inquest. The medical cause of death is commonly noted as asthma, caused in turn by air pollution as the coroner confirmed in this case:

"My daughter Ella was a playful, happy child growing up in South East London. Healthy at birth, with a lust for life, she didn’t develop asthma until just before her seventh birthday. A few weeks after her ninth birthday, she suffered a fatal asthma attack. Ella is the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate. ”

Rosamund Adoo Kissi Debrah"
He didn't confirm anything other than the girl died of asthma. People die of asthma everywhere. Different things cause asthma attacks, and there are many different things that can trigger them. The coroner didn't use any scientific method or other investigation to determine why she had that fatal asthma attack. It could have been a flea bite from her pet cat. Did he check that? You guys just don't think these things through. You read the Guardian and watch the BBC too much instead of doing the MENSA puzzle book.
 

Ghost1951

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Don't be so complacent, you're not 78 years old yet and you've much to learn:

My older brother and I were born in Central London, but at 13 and 10 years old we moved to a coastal town. He was always the fitter and healthier by far in those days. He went into farming and spent his whole life in the English countryside, mainly the West Country. I took a very different route and soon returned to London and have lived here the great majority of my life.

At 78 years old he suffered a heart attack and had to have a replacement heart valve, recovering from that ok but 4 years later went down with bowel cancer. All the usual treatments given, but never entirely successful and he's been dead a number of years.

I also suffered a heart attack, but much earlier at 70 years old, heart trouble being in our mother's side of the family, but I didn't get any drastic remedial measures, just self monitoring and some medicinal control of blood pressure to keep minor attacks to a minimum. This has been so successful that my heart is now much stronger and adverse heart events are now very rare and untroubling anyway, despite my 88 years, at which I'm setting new family records.

So my brother's much more promising health and fitness start in life and his lifetime in English fresh country air obviously didn't do him any favours eventually.

Nor has my net 75 years of living in London harmed me, despite much of it being in central and inner London and almost all of my working days and a lot of leisure time being in central London anyway.

Things aren't always as obvious as they superficially seem
.
The only conclusion to be derived from this is that both you and your brother have a hereditary heart condition.

You can not attribute a cause to your brother's shorter lifetime unless you minutely analyse, every aspect of his lifestyle and yours - particularly habits like smoking, alcohol use and BMI. But even then, since he is not your identical twin with identical genetic inheritance, you will have been faced with different genetic predispositions.

What you are trying to propose above makes no sense in determining anything at all.
 
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Peter.Bridge

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Professor Spieglehalter's Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge has covered this in detail, pointing out that the calculation of this figure is entirely made up. Here is a link to the paper. The Winton Centre is a renowned, expert, statistical institution.

Yes - I had already read that and linked to it in my post - that article was 2017 though and the evidence has "firmed up" since then.
 

flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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What you are trying to propose above makes no sense in determining anything at all.
Precisely right, just as what you were trying to propose in your countryside life as opposed to my London one made no sense in determining anything at all.

I'm glad you got the point.
.
 

Ghost1951

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Ealing Horn Lane is the only place in the UK which is registering high levels of PM10s right now. It was also registering them a couple of hours ago.

The figure is 50ugm m3. I suspect there is either some strange event like a road building machine working next to the monitoring station or a fault in the apparatus. It is shown on the map below as an yellow balloon. The map is interactive, and clicking on a balloon near you will make available a lot of data.

Get access here: https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/interactive-map

59594

Data is VASLY better than hot air and bullsh it.