ego.istic.org

The blog of trendy, upmarket London bike shop Velorution points us to a recent Guardian photo series on the motor industry's pile-up of unsold stock.

At each plant, a car rolls off the production line every few seconds, so when sales drop even a tiny fraction, the unsold stock accumulates quickly. But I can't bring myself to feel sorry for the motor industry, which is just feeling a slight acceleration in a decline that's been going on for years, unlike bicycle manufacture, which is a growth industry in every European country except Britain. The people I do feel sorry for are the skilled workers and the engineers who man these production lines, and who will find it hard to adapt to different work, especially when companies everywhere are cutting back the dead wood.

It's time people realised that, convenient as a car might be if you live in the middle of nowhere, they're completely impractical for our crowded, dirty cities. The sixth picture in the series shows well just how much space these things take up, and I for one am glad to see them staying at the factory rather than blocking our narrow urban streets, clogging our motorways, and killing our children. I hope that highway authorities, businesses, and housing developers will also see how much planning for ubiquitous car ownership costs in land wasted on parking, inefficient allocation of road space, and the debt to public safety.