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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
There was a bit of a monkey fight over the nascent Cycling Embassy of Great Britain recently thanks to an article by Carlton Reid on Road.cc (since rebutted by Jim). Given that the organisation in question has only had a preliminary meeting and has not even launched yet, I don’t […]
I’ve been working on organising monthly pub gatherings for people who are interested in the past, present and most importantly, future of London’s transport, streets, built environment and public spaces. It’s basically a rip-off of the Skeptics In The Pub format for cycling and street design nerds. The first one […]
It’s another frequently raised fact in comment threads and pub agreements. Everybody knows it’s true. If it wasn’t true, why would everybody know it and repeat it all the time? They can’t all be wrong. You would think though that such a fact, with all of the resources of the […]
“End to the war on the motorists? No, driving’s never cost more,” declares Mark King, Money Editor, in The Observer today. To be fair to King, he doesn’t actually say anything as absurd as that driving has “never cost more” in his article — but newspaper headline writers have never […]
Apparently Steve Coogan is a huge fan of Top Gear. I’m told by many that, whatever you think of the presenters’ contributions to xenophobia and misogyny, you have to admit that the show is funny and entertaining. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
Boris Johnson thinks that he can solve all of the barriers to cycling just by splashing some paint on one or two roads. As anybody who does not cycle could tell him, what is needed if we are to achieve mass cycling is infrastructure that is complete, conspicuously safe, enjoyable […]
So much of our understanding of the city — its areas and their relationships and divisions — have been determined by the traditional motorist’s road map. (London is luckier than many cities because its river and tube lines also help define its structure in people’s minds.) Continue reading at At […]
Boris Johnson is “doing an awful lot to try to encourage cycling“. He’s doing Skyrides. Did he mention that he’s doing Skyrides? He is, you know. He’s doing Skyrides. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
The Mayor of London is “doing an awful lot to try to encourage people to cycle”: telling us that there is a cycling revolution going on and all he needs us to do is get on out on the lovely London streets to be a part of it. Meanwhile, York […]
“The great highway will never look empty again.” When they opened, the first motorways were the sparsely populated playgrounds of the privileged few — the few who could afford a car. They could drive as fast as they liked and would never meet a jam. But perhaps they could see […]
Central government have decided to roll back their red tape and give power back to the people! In reality, this is power going to the county and borough councilors (who don’t have the budgets needed to do anything productive with their new powers), or in some cases it could amount […]
It was Transport Question Time at City Hall this week: the 25 London Assembly members’ monthly-ish check up on the chair and the commissioner of Transport for London — Boris Johnson and Peter Hendy respectively. If you’re as big a loser as me, you’ll want to watch it here. Alternatively, […]
I stopped off at Ludgate Hill one morning in October, after reading this on Cyclists in the City: …most of the elected politicians [in the square mile] don’t seem to care about cycling or walking. What they do care about is this zebra crossing opposite St Paul’s on Ludgate Hill. […]