“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 […]
I wrote this on the old incarnation of cotch dot net in 2008, before it became strictly for photography stuff, so I’m archiving it here. I wrote it after wasting several weeks attempting to engage with an avid reader of a specific online magazine. — This totally really happened to […]
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 […]
In rare events like bicyclist injuries, odds ratios can be used as an approximation of relative risk: that is, how much a medical intervention changes the risk of a specific outcome. An odds ratio of 0.3 is interpreted as a 70% reduction in risk of head injury when wearing a […]
According to the Cochrane Collaboration — the source that most doctors will go to for their summary of the evidence — it is five studies from the 1980s and 1990s. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
I know a lot of you find the whole helmets thing — whether they “help” or “work” or not — tiresome and unimportant. Well tough. Bicycle helmets are a medical intervention — a special kind of medical intervention — and whether or not medical interventions work and are worthwhile is […]
Inspired and motivated by the Cyclists in the City blog, cyclists and bicycle and pedestrian friendly local politicians have been fighting a road redesign in London. There is nothing unusual about the road design — it is much like the road designs that we have been given for decades, which […]
London Reconnections reports that Heathrow Airtrack — the old proposal to link ready-built platforms under Heathrow T5 to Waterloo via the Windsor lines through Staines and Putney — has been quietly shelved. It was never a very interesting railway and, since I don’t anticipate using any airport in the foreseeable […]
The geology and landscape of the Scottish Highlands are famously divided by the Great Glen fault. Less famous is the Moine Thrust Belt, running almost parallel to the Great Glen a hundred miles north. Here the rocks and landscape of the northern Highlands are pushed over those of the Hebrides […]
I was sitting in a cafe on a major central London road eating breakfast and watching the morning rush go past. The sheer quantity of dangerous and law breaking motorists driving through the central zone inspired a blog post on “business models”, and the force behind bad driving. You can […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog. Wikipedia avoids weasel words. It attributes statements to their sources, rather than to “some people say”. Can you imagine a newspaper surviving five minutes with such a policy? When somebody hoaxes Wikipedia, the article quickly gets investigated and deleted within three […]
We don’t have to accommodate private motor vehicles in places like central London. The world wouldn’t implode if we did not; the economy wouldn’t collapse. We don’t have to accommodate any specific number of private motor vehicles in central London. We could choose to accommodate twice the number that we […]
It’s flattering and frightening that several people told me that they’re looking forward to my thoughts on the budget. So here they are, in a crude and hastily scrawled brain dump. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
Apologies for the extremely strained pun. In his election manifesto, Boris Johnson promised to treat all cars in central London equally: no extra congestion charge for Chelsea tractors, and no exemptions for little low-emission cars. I explore why Boris thought that was a good policy, and why he has since […]
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 […]
Continuing the exploration of the history of Motorism in the UK, a video (not mine) and commentary (mine) maps the London Ringways plan, and tried to explain what was wrong with it and why Londoners didn’t want it. You can view/read it at At War With The Motorist…
This evening, Tom from BorisWatch will review London’s transport policies over the years since the city got its elected leadership back in 2000. It’s at The Yorkshire Grey on Theobalds Road / Grays Inn Road (doors open 6pm, talk sometime around 7ish). Hopefully I’ll see some of you there. So […]
At the start of the 15th century, when the Ming Dynasty was young, Beijing was established as the new Chinese capital — a heavily planned city, a rectangle laid out on a north-south axis around the great imperial palace, the Forbidden City. Continue reading at cotch dot net…
A great limestone scarp runs the breadth of Somerset, the Mendip Hills, famous for their karst landscape — the gorge at Cheddar and the caves at Wookey Hole. Continue reading at cotch dot net…
In the winter, while I neglected to post on the blog, I spent some time out of the way to concentrate on work. Helmsdale in Sutherland was about as out of the way as I could find. Continue reading at cotch dot net…