On the launch of the UN decade of action on road safety (which I wrote about here), Kim Harding questioned the choice of frontmen for the campaign: a pair of racing drivers with numerous convictions for driving offences. Exploring further the British method of treating bad driving with driving license […]
So Philip Hammond’s policy — his one lonely policy* — of encouraging people to drive electric vehicles has been cut. The government are still wasting money giving £5,000 subsidies to people who are already able to afford expensive new electric cars (though it will be interesting to see how much […]
A draft of the National Planning Policy Framework has been leaked. This is the document that Eric Pickles’s department, Community and Local Government, has been preparing to replace some of the previous government’s policies, rules, and guidelines on development and planning. It’s supposedly prompted by the Treasury’s belief that economic […]
Thinking about how the Cycling Embassy might go about trying to generate political will to progress cycling, I’ve been researching previous failed attempts to advance cycling in this country. So on Amazon I snapped up a second-hand copy of an out-of-print British Medical Association book written in 1992: Cycling: towards […]
This was during the first of the student protests last year, when Conservative Party HQ was smashed up for the cameras. It was long over by this time, but there was still a large backlog of arrests being processed in the background and obviously it was still the top story […]
Before the last random meandering tour of the hills and mountain ranges of England and Scotland (idea for a book: find the least flat end-to-end route) I briefly mentioned the latest accessories with which I had pimped my ride. A few people asked questions about both the handlebar smartphone mount […]
Brian Haw had a few weird ideas amongst the good ones in his head — in that he was not unusual. But the weird ones do not mean that we don’t all owe him thanks for the good ideas and the way he acted on them. For ten years he […]
You can hardly walk anywhere in the countryside ’round here without your way being blocked by some anti-social motorist who has left a vehicle on a footpath… Even after all this time, I still find it so bizarre that in any mainstream media discussion of cycling and related policy, somebody […]
I stumbled upon this infomercial from BBC World while looking for something to entertain me over dinner: Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
I went to school in a small Westcountry market town — Shaftesbury, in Dorset. Built on a chalk hillside, Shaftesbury’s claim to fame is a steep cobbled street of simple picturesque cottages, a street you might recognise from one of the most memorable adverts in British history: Continue reading at […]
While working on my photography stuff, it occurred to me to add a new recurring feature here… A cloud of single occupant vehicles. This is London’s Silk Road — Theobald’s Road for the West End on the right, heading into Clerkenwell Road for the East End on the left, […]
Since the 1950s, bicycle use has declined. The one overwhelming reason is that decades of road construction, widening, and “improvement”, coupled with the advances in car technology that put machines designed for the autobahn on British city streets and country lanes, have given us a network of hostile and frightening […]
The sky lightening, I head for a bridge with a scene that would suit a subtle sunrise photograph, as Big Ben rang for four fifteen. Bored policemen loiter beside their van, parked in the Westminster Bridge bike lane. Tired taxi drivers inch across advance stop lines and cautiously through red […]
This evening Andy Cameron, an engineer who advised the last government and has written standards for transport and urban design, will join us in the pub to talk about making streets for people. That’s upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey on Theobald’s Road at 7pm (bar open from 6 with excellent […]
The ABD tries very hard but is often dismissed as a bunch of fanatics and speed freaks (which it is are not) [sic]. — Honest John The Association of British Drivers — the group that is to mainstream motoring organisations what time cube is to mainstream cults — have made […]
Flicking through Google Reader, catching up, something caught my eye in George Monbiot’s latest: Cost-benefit analysis is systematically rigged in favour of business. Take, for example, the decision-making process for transport infrastructure. The last government developed an appraisal method which almost guaranteed that new roads, railways and runways would be […]
Sorry, I failed to post much because I’ve been on the road. And sometimes the Sustrans paths. This is a forestry track, NCN 68, Kielder Forest, Northumberland. I hesitate to criticise Sustrans because I know that they are good people, with an excellent idea — the National Cycle Network — […]
The British have a bizarre habit of going on holiday by car, as though rolling down a bland motorway and sitting in smelly smoggy traffic jams to queue for car-park blighted destinations is an attractive way to spend leisure time. Previously I’ve given a couple of suggestions for really simple […]
“The ideal of the ethical man,” wrote the great Victorian scientist and liberal Thomas Henry Huxley, “is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of others.” At Bath Skeptics in the Pub in April, Ian Walker talked about transport-related […]
Like my googlereader and my drafts folder, my podcast app has a frighteningly large backlog. This evening while on random play it stumbled on an episode of Little Atoms from 2008, with Ben Goldacre, in which he talks about the media’s obsession with simple, glamorous and individualistic quick fixes to […]
I did mention that I quit my job six weeks ago, to be a full time bicycle touring landscape photographer for the summer, right? I’ve been on a short break between tours — a few days to catch up with bike hacking before the next one. One problem with being […]
According to SCIENTISTS, “pollution is not improved by c-charge.” (“Improved”? These scientists are so sloppy with their language.) Journalists all over the city are this week reporting that the congestion charge has not reduced air pollution problems in central London, and that’s a fact, proven by science. (As far as […]
It’s 1.1 miles north to south. It’s 0.9 miles west to east. A small and dense market town of just under 7,000 people. There are a few small villages but also several large towns all around it, many a short hop away on the mainline railway, so its wider catchment […]
The doctor’s representatives BMA and the “Road Safety” charity Brake both say “yes”. The Automobile Association and the cyclists say “no”. They can’t both be right. Unless the answer is “yes and no”. Find out how that could be so, at At War With The Motorist…
A good review of a medical intervention starts by explaining the population being studied. The Cochrane review of helmets for preventing head injuries in bicyclists explains that its population is the set of bicyclists who sustained an injury that was sufficiently major to make them go to the ER for […]