While urban campaigners cry “save the trees” to halt re-development of city centre car parks, volume housebuilders are covering fields and woods on the far side of the greenbelt with little boxes for commuters to meet housing demand.
As active travel and liveable city campaigners, it’s tempting to portray our own city as falling behind while others forge ahead with brave and progressive plans, as a tactic to nudge our own leaders into similar action. But we should be careful not to fall for our own myths, hype […]
No construction or utilities crew in Bristol cares about pedestrians, cyclists or disabled street users, and the council are making no effort to change the situation.
Why is there an advertising van, promoting patios and driveways, abandoned on the Cumberland Basin road system? How long has it been there? It has the look of something that has been abandoned there for a long time with nobody doing anything about it. Is it supposed to be there? […]
South Gloucestershire are proposing road building to solve climate change. It’s what council highways departments do.
This week, the Department for Communities and Local Government put out a press release about town centre parking. Unlike last time, they didn’t even have to announce that Pickles is ending The War On The Motorist™. On that point, their work was done for them, by 36 newspapers and the […]
In reviewing the Radio 4 documentary Bristol: Cycling City (I didn’t hear it and was too slow on the iPlayer), the Guardian‘s radio critic Elisabeth Mahoney once again revealed the bizarrely muddled thinking of a nation so thoroughly addicted to its car culture. The Cycling City project, in which a […]
Over at cotch dot net, I’ve thrown together a quick photo essay on the Victorian park cemetery at Arno’s Vale in Bristol, which until recently was rather derelict and overgrown. You can read the while post at Arno’s Vale Cemetery.
Every journalist and cycling campaign group can cite one great example of a town where the simple switching off of every set of traffic lights has transformed it overnight into a transport utopia: Drachten, half way between Amsterdam and Groningen in the Netherlands. Here in the UK, Drachten’s experiment is […]
On At War With The Motorist, a short review of the London “cycle superhighways”, after a quick go on “CS3”. They’re exactly what you’d expect from the sort of “super” infrastructure that can be installed for pennies within a couple of months of being announced: pointless. Read it here.
A short early-morning photo-walk around Bristol’s Floating Harbour — an account of how I first came to be spending my time taking photographs — is available to read at cotch dot net.