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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]