Just banking a quote for future reference on the idea that we are “cyclists” or “motorists” or “pedestrians” — groups competing with one another. It’s from the Understanding Walking and Cycling report, of course, and still a source of upset for a…
It’s a nice day outside, I’m not sure why I’m flicking through the Blueprint for a Green Economy paper prepared by the party’s Quality of Life Policy Group. Just one of the competing views within the party, obviously. We believe that a Conservativ…
the other thing that caught my eye in Attitudes to cycling was the behaviour change section. These behaviour change models have always struck me as pretty wishy washy stuff that contribute little to our understanding of the problem or its solution…
scrolling through the TfL Attitudes to cycling report while citing some numbers, I spotted these ones, unrelated to what I was writing about, which hadn’t caught my eye before… Cycle training increased the confidence of 76% of attendees. The tra…
regarding my last note: a variety of additional ways of visualising the issue of modal split and short journeys.
This is what I was actually after from NTS, for use in the context of barriers to cycling and excuses for why cycling is impractical and mass cycling impossible. I couldn’t find an existing graph to show what I wanted to show, so here is one. Cons…
This caught my eye when I was citing some unrelated stats about travel distances in the NTS (PDF). I must have seen it before, but perhaps just skipped over it and didn’t notice what it was saying. Or perhaps others have already commented on it an…
I flicked through the Cycling Cities and Towns evaluation report that the DfT released yesterday. Not all that interesting, entirely unsurprising, little if anything that hasn’t been said before. Indeed, I think bits and pieces were probably alrea…
This exchange in the same 1963 Buchanan Report debate made me giggle. I guess jokes about Tory shire county MPs write themselves. Mr Simon Digby (Conservative, West Dorset)The Report expresses the idea that there is something very unsightly in pri…
Continuing my filing — the long list of pages bookmarked for future reading and tagging. The 1963 Buchanan Report, Traffic in Towns, is generally treated as an object of derision these days. Architects and urban designers (and bloggers) display i…
Tidying up my bookmarks and clippings, I thought this one, from 23 June 1937 — 75 years ago — might be of wider interest/amusement to those observing TfL’s, uh, unique state-of-the-art solutions to the junctions problem. Oral Answers to Question…
Joe Moran’s On Roads quotes Fred Inglis’s 1975 essay “Roads, office blocks and the new misery”, presumably (but not necessarily) referring to construction of the M32, which destroyed, amongst other things, the St Annes neighbourhood of Bristol. It…
This paper looks nice. Like so much research it’s not exactly “news” in the way that news outlets would like science stories to be. Research supporting what was already suspected. The most important specific example of a broader principle that was…
Just clipping this comment for the scrapbook. Not really news, but some good detail to look up later. The point of Cycling England was to have expert oversight of the spending, rather than just giving the money to local authorities to launder into…
don’t think I bothered looking at the most recent of TfL’s annual Attitudes Towards Cycling report when it came out. They tend to say much the same thing each time: only a small portion of the population, disproportionately male, disproportionatel…
crappy posterous ignored this one first time…———- Forwarded message ———-In genetics, “Mitochondrial Eve” is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of living humans. She’s not the “first” or “oldest” female. Obviously she had anc…
has posterous stopped working again? why did i pick this platform?
In genetics, “Mitochondrial Eve” is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of living humans. She’s not the “first” or “oldest” female. Obviously she had ancestors and contemporaries. And her contemporaries had descendants, and her contemporar…
Catching up with podcasts, the diabetes genetics and cell biology expert Frances Ashcroft, director of Oxford’s Centre for Gene Function, explains on The Life Scientific half of the reason why I mostly blog about transport and towns instead of gen…
I forgot to file away this bit from Ian Kennedy’s 1980 Reith Lecture. Again, nothing that isn’t basic public health stuff, I just liked the way he put it. It seems like a good moment to mention that Ian Roberts is booked in for September’s Street …
from Ian Kennedy’s 1980 Reith Lecture, just rolling past on random play. This is nothing exciting — totally basic public health stuff, the same thing Goldacre was saying about “the deserving poor” — I’m just saving the quote for potential refere…
Joe Moran in On Roads has a chapter on road rules and road rage — specifically, the peculiar British approach to them — entitled “please don’t be rude on the road”.On Lord Cottenham in 1928: Cottenham believed that most motorists, cyclists and p…
random playing through a massive podcast backlog, I got this from David Aaronovitch on Little Atoms, presumably the episode from March 2007. Last year, in the borough that I live in, Camden, which was a well run borough, not– you know– council m…
Just making a note of “Mayor Culpa”, p38 of Private Eye 1300 (28 October 2011), for future reference. Thank Free OCR for the typos. BORIS JOHNSON ls forever on his bike posing as a modern environmentally conscious man. But when it comes to stoppin…
Another note from Tolley in Docherty and Shaw, discussing the failure of the National Cycling Strategy — which was left to be implemented by local authorities — to deliver the national targets for growth in cycling: More optimistic — and realis…