politics


Politicians need to own their choices for our street space 2

The transport and streetscape proposals coming from Bristol’s councils and councillors reveal their priorities and choices. So why are they so reluctant to take ownership of them? Bristol is once again making the news for the poor quality of the cycling and walking infrastructure that it’s building and proposing. First […]


Elvis has left the collective consciousness

Of all the depressing, startling, and often eccentric soundbites that scrolled past during budget day afternoon, the one that really stood out for me was the chancellor boasting that he is spending £2 million to create a Beatles museum in Liverpool. Boomers warping the national demographics is a helluva drug […]


We must all shield vulnerable older people from this novel threat: delete their facebooks

Before SARS-CoV-2, there were already several coronaviruses that infected humans. They circulated in the population giving us colds. What’s so different about the novel coronavirus that makes it cause potentially deadly Covid-19 instead of a cold? There are a few hypotheses being explored, but the frontrunner is the idea that […]


Cotch: Flashride for Blackfriars

In 2000, London’s previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, began the process of fixing forty years of mistakes that had been made in the pursuit of the impossible — the comfortable accommodation of mass motor vehicle use in a dense city centre. He recognised that cities are supposed to be places for […]


AWWTM: This pretense of neutrality

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 […]


AWWTM: Second hand; unused

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 […]


AWWTM: DafT’s deeply regressive fantasy formula

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 […]


AWWTM: Streets versus Democracy

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 […]


Simple rules

This is another archival repost, originally written for the old blog in november 2007. The main driving force for creationists is not science, but ethics. Their trump card is that “evolution is immoral”: they cite “might makes right” and eugenics, quote Darwin’s supposedly racist terminology in The Origin and Voyage, […]


AWWTM: Are we winning?

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 […]


Church leader declares crackpot ideas, gets free air time

This is another archival repost from the old blog — this one from March 2008. Wow, a slow news day, eh? The BBC, shunning predictable Chinese military aggression, another turn of the tides in Iraq, and yet more boring news about the economy, lead with “Brown criticised over embryo bill“. […]


Hey, look at this social media clown 3

I have an underused “I get mail” category over here, which could easily get filled with sarcastic posts about the incompetent and irrelevant marketing crap with which I am constantly bombarded.  Instead, I’ve been saving up for the truly special ones: the delightfully, spectacularly, jawdroppingly incompetent marketing idiots. People like […]


Cotch: Victory Flashmob

With Section 44 stop-and-search found to be in contravention of the declaration of human rights this week, the people of Photographer Not A Terrorist organised a victory flashmob at New Scotland Yard.  For pictures, and to find out what it was all about, go over to cotch dot net.


AWWTM: When you start paying road tax…

London’s authorities are to be fined £300 million for failing to prevent the serious air pollution that we’re experiencing.  More importantly, an estimated 4-5,000 people will die prematurely this year because of the city’s polluted air.  But nobody seems quite able to name the source of the problem.  At At […]


Help! Help! I’m being repressed

(This is another archival repost of something written on the old blog a few years ago.) I’ve been catching up with about a month of blogosphere this weekend, after travelling, and other distractions. I managed to catch a discarded copy of G2 with Ben Goldacre’s homeopathy article, so I was […]


New blog: At War With The Motorist

At War With The Motorist reports from the front line of the civil war for Britain’s city streets.  We will uncover the bollocks public transport, bullshit cycling infrastructure, bad town planning, and injustice, given out by the Motorist government and local authorities.  We’ll also be taking a skeptical, evidence-based, sometimes […]


Cotch: Tough on crime in fantasy land

The first post on the new photography-oriented cotch dot net is up.  It’s a quick review of the police stop-and-search policy, in place across London as a counter-terrorism measure, and in particular the decision to consider photography to be a suspicious activity worth stopping.  Of course, it takes the skeptical […]