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Anyone passing Barrowford Locks?


LadyG

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19 hours ago, IanD said:

No, but certainly more -- especially in locks where two narrowboats can share, or busy moorings where two narrowboats can breast up -- and these are really the only places that matter. +20% seems too small for this but +100% seems too much, so maybe +50%?

 

This isn't about punishing owners of long or wide boats, it's just trying to get some fair fee for the extra space they take up where it matters, which is locks (and water usage) and busy moorings.

Ian they don't use extra water, or extra space at moorings. Like Alan I have boated for many years both narrow and wide, wide is better on waterways designed for them. In reality I don't think a widebeam uses any more resources from CRT than a narrowboat  in fact its probably less as a lot don't move in some areas. I use mine regularly probably more than the narrowboats on our moorings, all our locks up here and any other wide canals are made for widebeams so why should they pay more for that infrastructure? Remember the advice from CRT is open both lock gates for narrowboats

Edited by peterboat
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The thing is, the size of the boat is a very loose proxy for ability to pay, so charging by length x beam is undoubtedly fairer than just by length. 

 

It's how its been done on The Thames for as long as I can remember and it works very well. 

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2 minutes ago, MtB said:

The thing is, the size of the boat is a very loose proxy for ability to pay, so charging by length x beam is undoubtedly fairer than just by length. 

 

It's how its been done on The Thames for as long as I can remember and it works very well. 

Yet the plans to bring the same to other EA waters has hit problems very unpopular it seems. Maybe if widebeam owners hadn't been stopped like I was CRT wouldn't have got its plans through!!

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4 minutes ago, MtB said:

The thing is, the size of the boat is a very loose proxy for ability to pay, so charging by length x beam is undoubtedly fairer than just by length. 

 

It's how its been done on The Thames for as long as I can remember and it works very well. 

 

I'm never sure about this, simple area is not the best metric. Once a boat is too wide to share a lock then that's more water usage and so going from 10foot to 12foot is not that important. Very wide boats intruding into the channel are bad news, but a fair few narrowboats do this by mooring in daft places.  Length is a factor when mooring space is at a premium. I am very aware that we wipe out two or even three "plastic spots" when we stop on the Thames.  There is a good logical argument for charging for deep draft but that could be a potential disaster (price deep boats off the cut and let it silt up).

 

I personally would introduce a window tax (portholes exempt) :clapping:

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57 minutes ago, dmr said:

I think that rather than CRT trying to raise all of the money to maintain things that it would be reasonable for the government to take responsibilty for funding  major infrastructure such as reservoirs, and bigger bridges and embankments, but I think CRT asked for this and got turned down.

C&RT requires £800 million over the next 5 years to enable them to do the necessary maintenance - they have applied to the Government for an extra £220 million but this seems to have been rejected.

 

Some interesting facts and figures in the attached word document - C&RT had not even told Defra or the 'Council' about the "Critical Infrastructure resilience Programme'

C&RT have massaged the figures provided to Defra re the condition of the assets by changing the criteria, so maybe Defa will now be wondering why they need to provide another £220 million if C&RT are already improving the condition of the assets with what they have got.

 

Sometimes 'cooking the books' can come back and bite you in the bum.

 

More info :

 

 

CRT Ask for extra 220 million.docx

Edited by Alan de Enfield
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23 minutes ago, dmr said:

I personally would introduce a window tax (portholes exempt) :clapping:

 

I think an aesthetics tax would be more widely supported.

 

Some of the new boats, both wide and narrow are seriously fugly. 😄😂

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18 hours ago, Midnight said:

 

Or the money they do have better managed.
For example some of the recent big cost failures and short term stoppages could have been avoided. Toddbrook is an example. I'm confident that better maintenance wouldn't have cost £16m and avoided evacuating a town and bringing in the RAF. Even with Figure of Three the warning signs were there. The towpath was washed out several times in years preceding 2020. Had the wash walls and bridges along the upper Calder been maintained the huge cost of repairs following the 2015 flood would have been lower. What about the theory that if the inside bend on the Aire and Calder had been dredged the returning commercial vessels wouldn't have needed to turn so close to the outside wall causing the culvert collapse? Take a look at the nearby A&C banks now, slippage caused by lowering the water level? Maybe another breach in the making and all for the sake of a bit of dredging.

 

It's the wait until it's completely f**ked policy that causes the majority of stoppages. Why wait for contractors when there are bank staff frustrated because they aren't allowed to make even small repairs. Dewsbury double top lock is an example where the offside hydraulic required a cheap valve replacement for years yet the local locky told me he could have easily fixed it himself. Then there's the both paddles broken situation - why fix just one? Surely it's cheaper to fix both at the same time rather than requiring another visit and another stoppage - same cost overall. Watford Locks are another good example. Three weeks stoppage to bodge a heel post. Had the bodge plate been added before the post completely rotted through,  same cost - no stoppage. And then there's those bloody blue signs grrrrr!

 

Yes increase license fees (length x width seems fair to me) but don't waste the extra on poor management practice.

 

 

This is always a tempting argument, but is usually wholly fallacious:

 

If you could predict exactly which asset is going to fail in the next 12 months then a pre-emptive repair is likely to be cheaper than waiting for it to fail with secondary damage (your argument). However, if such prediction was possible then we would not have this debate. In practice, the ratio of surviving to failing assets is so large that pre-emptive maintenance is stratospherically expensive and unaffordable. The basis of decision making reverts to budget limits rather than individually efficient choices.

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32 minutes ago, dmr said:

 

I'm never sure about this, simple area is not the best metric. Once a boat is too wide to share a lock then that's more water usage and so going from 10foot to 12foot is not that important. Very wide boats intruding into the channel are bad news, but a fair few narrowboats do this by mooring in daft places.  Length is a factor when mooring space is at a premium. I am very aware that we wipe out two or even three "plastic spots" when we stop on the Thames.  There is a good logical argument for charging for deep draft but that could be a potential disaster (price deep boats off the cut and let it silt up).

 

I personally would introduce a window tax (portholes exempt) :clapping:

How about using engine size/power as was done on the roads in the 1930s? High powered engines can certainly do more damage to the canal infrastructure than low powered ones, and a single horse power 'engine' could be best of all.

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2 hours ago, peterboat said:

Ian they don't use extra water, or extra space at moorings. Like Alan I have boated for many years both narrow and wide, wide is better on waterways designed for them. In reality I don't think a widebeam uses any more resources from CRT than a narrowboat  in fact its probably less as a lot don't move in some areas. I use mine regularly probably more than the narrowboats on our moorings, all our locks up here and any other wide canals are made for widebeams so why should they pay more for that infrastructure? Remember the advice from CRT is open both lock gates for narrowboats

It seems you didn't actually read what I said... 😉

 

I said that a wideboat used twice as much water in locks compared to two narrowboats sharing, which I believe is correct.

 

I also said that they used twice the mooring space in popular areas where narrowboats can breast up but wideboats can't. It's areas like this (e.g. in Bath, London, other popular towns) where the demand for moorings is highest -- out in the sticks or on super-wide canals (like where you are) they don't, but this isn't where the problems are and where the license fee needs to reflect use.

 

Yet again you're taking your own personal circumstance -- which is certainly in a very small minority given your boat and where it's moored -- and using this to imply that's how it is for everybody. It's the same story as you've trotted out for electric boats, lithium batteries,solar panels, composting toilets, shortages in shops, NHS stress/operation cancellations, BEV use...

Edited by IanD
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20 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

If you could predict exactly which asset is going to fail in the next 12 months

 

Surely the C&RT inspectors that go around assessing the state of the infrastructure will have a very good idea if not they are in the wrong job.

Then there's those locks with only one working paddle.

Those eleven cancellations from the winter works programme which the inspector probably already flagged up as urgent.

 

 

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19 hours ago, IanD said:

Allowing people who might be able to fix a problem but are not officially qualified to do it sounds great, until somebody who doesn't know what they're doing screws it up.

 I never mentioned contractors

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1 hour ago, Midnight said:

 

Surely the C&RT inspectors that go around assessing the state of the infrastructure will have a very good idea if not they are in the wrong job.

Then there's those locks with only one working paddle.

Those eleven cancellations from the winter works programme which the inspector probably already flagged up as urgent.

 

 

 

The key word @Mike Todd used was "exactly". There are many organisations with far greater liabilities than CRT who would love to be able to do that.

 

The problem is that the risk of failure for any group of assets is on a long scale of shades of grey. It's pretty easy to define the risk of any single asset and put them on that scale and then draw a line at what you consider to be the boundary of high risk. Inevitably the number of assets above the line is a small proportion of those below the line such that the collective risk of failure of all the lower risk assets is still higher than that of the collective risk of the high risk assets. Of course you could tailor it to be the same risk either side of the line by changing the parameters but then you'd have more high risk assets than you're likely to have resources to remediate, and it possibly wouldn't be good use of public money to do so anyway. That's where criticality comes into things and in reality not many of CRTs assets are critical.

 

Then add in the fact that assets generally fail in response to an event rather than purely from absolute condition, such as Toddbrook failed during an abnormal weather event and Middlewich because the bank was over-topped. Those events would not have happened at that moment in time without extraneous factors but the view of the asset inspector would not be any different. There were also potentially other locations with the same risks that weren't exposed to the those factors and hence didn't fail at that time.

 

Inspection is also just the starting point of gathering information from which risks are calculated and priorities determined, and I doubt CRTs inspectors do that bit, and although it's beloved of canal folk as the answer to CRTs supposed woes anyone who does this stuff seriously knows how unreliable many forms of visual inspection actually are.

 

Edited by Captain Pegg
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9 minutes ago, Captain Pegg said:

anyone who does this stuff seriously knows how unreliable many forms of visual inspection actually are. 

Many years ago when I was working on the preliminary design of a tunnel project I came across a comment to the effect that the only site investigation which would deliver a complete picture of the ground conditions to be met, and which would completely avoid any risk of unknown features, would be a horizontal bore hole along the axis of the proposed tunnel and twice the diameter!

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11 minutes ago, David Mack said:

Many years ago when I was working on the preliminary design of a tunnel project I came across a comment to the effect that the only site investigation which would deliver a complete picture of the ground conditions to be met, and which would completely avoid any risk of unknown features, would be a horizontal bore hole along the axis of the proposed tunnel and twice the diameter!

 

It always makes for an interesting moment when some self-important manager pronounces "I want you to guarantee to me that it won't fail".

 

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1 hour ago, Midnight said:

 I never mentioned contractors

No, you mentioned your local lockie. Lockies may actually know what they're doing about fixing things or just think they know, like lots of people who overestimate their knowledge... 😉

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20 hours ago, IanD said:

Was this the report which referred to the cost of fixing the maintenance backlog, I thought that was earlier than 2012?

 

Yes, the 2012 KPMG report referred to the maintenance backlog - but maybe you were thinking about this one from 1975, or there was an earlier one that reviewed the canals situation in light of the 1962 Act. "The Facts About the Waterways 1965".

The Government of the day considered the situation (Cmnd 3057 of 1966 and the Cmnd 3401 of 1967 refer) and the result was the new remit given to BWB by the Transport Act, 1968. 

 

It is interesting to note that following the 1968 Act, BWB / BW / C&RT have no obligation to maintain the towpaths and "no one has cause for complaint if a towpath falls into disuse or become impassable".

 

Screenshot (851).png

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2 hours ago, IanD said:

It seems you didn't actually read what I said... 😉

 

I said that a wideboat used twice as much water in locks compared to two narrowboats sharing, which I believe is correct.

 

I also said that they used twice the mooring space in popular areas where narrowboats can breast up but wideboats can't. It's areas like this (e.g. in Bath, London, other popular towns) where the demand for moorings is highest -- out in the sticks or on super-wide canals (like where you are) they don't, but this isn't where the problems are and where the license fee needs to reflect use.

 

Yet again you're taking your own personal circumstance -- which is certainly in a very small minority given your boat and where it's moored -- and using this to imply that's how it is for everybody. It's the same story as you've trotted out for electric boats, lithium batteries,solar panels, composting toilets, shortages in shops, NHS stress/operation cancellations, BEV use...

I suspect that there are more wide waterways than narrow so as I have said before how about widebeams use the wide ones and narrowboats stick to the thin ones! No complaints then about widebeams then? 

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9 minutes ago, peterboat said:

I suspect that there are more wide waterways than narrow so as I have said before how about widebeams use the wide ones and narrowboats stick to the thin ones! No complaints then about widebeams then? 

So, boat apartheid then? How about another suggestion which is just as sensible and practical, and probably easier to police -- ban *all* widebeams? 😉

 

To repeat what I said earlier, charging a 100% premium for widebeams (because of the cases I quoted) seems unfair and too high, but equally the current 20% premium seems too low given the number of widebeams moored in popular places where the problems exist, hence suggesting 50% as a reasonable compromise.

 

Before you say "but there's no need for this where I am, me and my mates are moored where there's plenty of space!" -- how many widebeams *are* moored where you are? On my cycle along the GU Paddington arm yesterday I gave up counting at 100...

Edited by IanD
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6 minutes ago, IanD said:

To repeat what I said earlier, charging a 100% premium for widebeams (because of the cases I quoted) seems unfair and too high,

 

Disagree. I think this would wholly fair and reasonable.

 

Another idea I've not seen mentioned is charge by displacement. That just HAS to be 'fair'.

 

 

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22 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

Disagree. I think this would wholly fair and reasonable.

 

Another idea I've not seen mentioned is charge by displacement. That just HAS to be 'fair'.

 

 

Great idea, now where can I get helium to fill my top box? And a few party balloons for decoration, honest guvnor!

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3 hours ago, IanD said:

It seems you didn't actually read what I said... 😉

 

I said that a wideboat used twice as much water in locks compared to two narrowboats sharing, which I believe is correct.

 

I also said that they used twice the mooring space in popular areas where narrowboats can breast up but wideboats can't. It's areas like this (e.g. in Bath, London, other popular towns) where the demand for moorings is highest -- out in the sticks or on super-wide canals (like where you are) they don't, but this isn't where the problems are and where the license fee needs to reflect use.

 

Yet again you're taking your own personal circumstance -- which is certainly in a very small minority given your boat and where it's moored -- and using this to imply that's how it is for everybody. It's the same story as you've trotted out for electric boats, lithium batteries,solar panels, composting toilets, shortages in shops, NHS stress/operation cancellations, BEV use...

That surely cannot be anywhere near true. The amount of water used is the capacity of the lock plus or minus the displacement of the boat (at its simplest) - which is a fraction of the lock capacity. Insofar as a WB is more than two NB then they will use a different amount but only by a very small amount, probably much less than any of the other second order variables

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28 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

Disagree. I think this would wholly fair and reasonable.

 

Another idea I've not seen mentioned is charge by displacement. That just HAS to be 'fair'.

 

 

If the premium was also location-based then 100% premium in areas where widebeams do cause congestion or use locks would be reasonable. But then the premium would have to be 0% in places like where Peter is where they don't cause any problem. And CART enforcement would need to detect where boats were at all times, log this over the year, and then somehow calculate a premium between 0% and 100% -- which is indeed fair, but also completely impractical 😞

 

Similarly any accurate value-based premium would require each boat to have an accurate valuation of market value every year, which is similarly fair but impractical 😞

 

Displacement is not "fair" as far as water usage in locks is concerned, any boat above 7'+a bit width which can't share locks uses double the water of a narrowboat -- to be "fair" an 8' slightly-wide boat and a 14' mage-fatty would both accry the same (+100?) premium.

 

The challenge is to find some calculation method for the license fee which brings in more money to CART (e.g. +50% to improve maintenance), is realisable without an enormous (or impractical) cost/effort, but goes some way to linking it to the strain the boat puts on the system and (arguably) how much people can afford to pay -- this element seems to be what many people object to, though nobody argues that income tax works this way which is how the government grant to the canals is paid for.

 

Basing the fee on length/width is already done, but it looks as if the +20% "widebeam premium" is too small.

 

Adding a value criterion -- perhaps via insurance value, defaulting to length/width/age for 3rd party only -- would help prevent lower-income boaters from being badly hit by a big fee increase by moving more of the increase onto those on more expensive boats. Whether this is seen as a good thing or not seems to be more political than factual, it's the old socialist vs. neoliberal problem all over again...

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1 hour ago, IanD said:

No, you mentioned your local lockie. Lockies may actually know what they're doing about fixing things or just think they know, like lots of people who overestimate their knowledge... 😉

Now let's think who would be more experienced at fixing paddles a locky with 30 years experience or a road contractor?

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