I take everything back. I was wrong. I realise now that in a place like Stamford Street, Southwark, the car offers outstanding convenience and time savings that will make my life better. Now I just need to know whether to buy the Renault, which promises to save me “secs” (a […]
This is another archival repost, written for the old blog in January 2008. The central dogma of molecular biology, first described by Francis Crick in 1958, describes the flow of information between DNA, RNA, and proteins.[1] The central dogma is interesting, but I believe that its use in teaching is […]
On the urban motorway that is Whitechapel. Whitechapel should be the quintessential neighbourhood High Street: it has the tube station, the bus stops, the shops and pubs and library — sorry, “Idea Store” — and the street market that these vans supply. As Andy Cameron would put it, Whitechapel has […]
While touring the hills of England and Scotland a month ago, I briefly stopped off again in Glasgow. I think they must have read my blog and been shamed into action. Look how the city has changed in just six months! This is new: Continue reading at At War With […]
On Saturday I wrote about the leaked draft of the Tories’ coalition’s draft new planning policy document: LAs are told to take into account existing local car ownership rates when doing this. Fair enough, but why aren’t they also told to take into account the elasticity of modal share in […]
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…
This is another archival repost, originally posted on the old blog in feb 2009, during the Darwin 200 celebrations. I wrote the majority of this post a couple of years ago, when I had the intention to do a regular “creationist claim” feature, but for some reason never got around […]
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 — […]
This is another archival repost, originally written on the old blog in feb 2009, during the Darwin 200 celebrations. For eight years, the United States was the brawling village idiot of the developed world, so far as Europe seemed to be concerned. But in Britain, we are constantly reminded that, […]
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 […]