Henry Ford is often quoted as saying: If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse”. VAT and fuel duty have just risen, while petrol prices continue to rise as it becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous to source at the same time that global demand […]
On Sunday I took a look at Glasgow, a town I have previously only passed through without stopping. Here’s my commentary: a mix of cameraphone and proper camera photos; some of the commentary comes from the live tweets that accompanied the cameraphone pictures. Continue reading at At War With The […]
The Lake District is generally agreed to be England’s finest national park. Unlike last week’s Scottish Highlands suggestion, though, during spring and summer in the Lakes you won’t be alone in the wilderness: you’ll meet hundreds of others out enjoying the countryside. Which is great, except that most of the […]
I’ve not had a moment to write anything this week. Instead, here are some more videos, from monday morning between 8 and 8:15. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
It’s hard to define what you mean when you ask whether something helps — whether it is helpful to do something. What I mean is, whose lives will be better when HS2 is running? That question isn’t really any less ambiguous, is it? What positive effect might HS2 have on […]
I’ve just been scrolling through Google Reader clearing a couple of months worth of posts with videos that got saved-for-later when using a mobile connection. Peter at Pedestrian Liberation asks whether we are winning, citing London Bridge as evidence that maybe we are. Continue reading at At War With The […]
“Pickles and Hammond to end the war on motorists.” The Department for Communities and Local Government put these words in a press release and today 221 national and local newspaper journalists* copypasted them into their newspapers, noticing nothing nonsensical in their conjunction. Great job, The Media. Continue reading at At […]
It’s January and all the magazines are overflowing with supplements trying to sell you Mediterranean cruises and horrible beach holidays 4,000 miles away. AWWTM will therefore overflow with easy-to-organise alternative holidays, giving far greater satisfaction at a fraction of the price. They involve no sweltering traffic jams, no crowded beaches, […]
Way back in July, when the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme launched a couple of months late, we had a little play around with the bikes to get our first thoughts. Just a quick back-and-forth beside the BFI. The bikes were fun and sturdy, just right for their particular job. It […]
I’ve been meaning to write a bit more about the M4 bus lane, and the interesting things it says about psychology, but haven’t had the time, so here’s a rather crude brain dump while I sit in the dark on a bus somewhere on the A9 in the snowy Cairngorms. […]
Last week I posted about tracked hovercraft and straddling buses — a tongue-in-cheek look at how through the ages engineers have proposed ever more overcomplicated engineering solutions in an attempt to manage our out-of-control transport problems. I assumed that my learned readers would get the point without labour. WordPress.com very […]
I’ve been away from London for three weeks now, taking a break from the noise and the taxi drivers. I needed to eliminate distractions to get a couple of work and writing projects completed, so I’m doing an extreme telecommute experiment for the winter, while observing the transport and environment […]
In the 1960s, people were convinced that there was a huge and growing problem with transport. The then Ministry of Transport commissioned engineers and economists to look at those problems and suggest solutions. The Beeching Report recommended closing all except the very core main lines of the railway network. The […]
I bought a second hand copy of Traffic In Towns, the 1963 Buchanan Report to the Minister of Transport on the future of urban mobility and development. It’s fabulous sci-fi full of depictions of the future of British cities, except that it was never intended as sci-fi but as a […]
That’s the most common question asked by people who responded to the GLA survey of London cyclists. Looking into the raw data I find out just how little the cycle superhighways have achieved, and the one thing that London cyclists say over and over again makes them such a joke: […]
Way back at the start of October we mentioned that the London Authority’s transport committee were seeking your views on the hire bikes and the two trial cycle superhighways. The results are in, and we must have had a massive influence because the results seem to match what we were […]
Most road “accidents” may be accidental in the sense that they are unintended. But few, if any, can be considered accidental in the sense that nobody was to blame. In road accidents, somebody did something wrong, and it’s almost always a driver doing some wrong. It’s bad driving that causes […]
Despite being fully up to date with the latest city driving rules, the Serco/Barclays hire bike relocaters are worrying the Evening Standard today: Cyclist David Ellis, who was knocked over by a trailer used to transport the Mayor’s hire bikes between docking stations, today branded the vehicles “ludicrous”. Continue reading […]
Prominently reported in the Camden Cycling Plan update: The latest update from Spring and Autumn 2008 shows a positive growth in cycling. Between 2007 and 2008 there has been an increase in numbers cycling by 44.6% and the estimated modal share for cycle use is 11.19%. An impressive achievement that […]
The M4 bus lane was a fascinating thing. Introduced in 1999 by John Prescott, ostensibly as a “green” policy to allow buses to pass the traffic jams into London, it became the icon of the so-called “war on the motorist”. At At War With The Motorist I explain why, despite […]
Epidemiologists at a London medical research institute have looked at the police records of fatal accidents involving cyclists on London’s roads between the late nineties and mid noughties, and notes some interesting trends in where they occur and who is involved in them. At At War With The Motorist I […]
Over at At War With The Motorist, I take a skeptical look at the Mayor’s latest brilliant idea for solving London’s car problem: charging utilities companies by the hour for road words. You can read it here.
In April 2008, the science writer Simon Singh wrote in The Guardian that chiropractors “happily promote bogus treatments”. Singh was outlining the serious concerns he had about practitioners of unproven alternative medicines encouraging people with serious diseases to pay for expensive consultations and therapies with poor evidence basis, rather than […]
So I mentioned that Carlton Reid and I both like the idea of mass bicycle use, and that we agree that high volumes of fast moving motor vehicles are a barrier to it. But while I have drawn the conclusion that high-quality conspicuously safe dedicated cycling infrastructure is a pressing […]
The bicycle blogosphere has been buzzing about bike paths lately. It’s an old argument in the UK, where nine out of ten bike paths are so badly designed that bicycle users conclude that they would always be better off on the road. Many have taken to actively campaigning against them, […]