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What would happen if everybody in the United States cut back on driving?
We’re not talking about getting rid of your car, just using it a little bit less. It turns out that even driving just 10 percent less — if everyone did it — would have a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions. 

Fiona Forster had never felt comfortable cycling on the busy roads near her home in St Albans, but when the cars disappeared during lockdown last year it opened up a whole new world.
“I would never have gone out in the traffic levels like they are now. I was too worried that I’d get knocked off by a car or someone would drive past me too quickly, I just never had the confidence,” said the 40-year-old who is self-employed. “But I never saw a car probably for most of April.”
She started cycling longer distances, taken part in a 100km sportive, and over a year later she continues to cycle twice a week, despite traffic levels going back up. “I don’t feel vulnerable now on the road where as I would have before,” she said. “And without the lockdown, I don’t think I would ever have done it.”

The government is to press ahead with a £27bn programme of roadbuilding over the next five years, the chancellor has confirmed, with a wider infrastructure strategy to be unveiled at a later date. Rishi Sunak billed the move as “the largest ever investment in English strategic roads”, and pledged additional funding of £500m a year to top up a pothole fund.

The road investment strategy will see all vehicle excise duty hypothecated for roads. The policy was first announced by George Osborne in 2015 and the sum pledged on Wednesday was about £2.1bn higher than the funds earmarked by the Treasury last autumn.
Sunak said the £27.4bn from 2020-25 would “pay for work on over 20 connections to ports and airports, over 100 junctions, 4,000 miles of road”.
Among the schemes he promised to deliver was the controversial work to expand the A303 at Stonehenge, described as catastrophic by environmentalists and archaeologists. Sunak said it was “one of those totemic projects symbolising delay and obstruction”.

Damien Gayle
A British Paralympic gold medallist has been jailed for a year for glueing himself to the roof of a passenger jet in an Extinction Rebellion protest – the first custodial sentence for any action linked to the group.
XR said it was “shocked and devastated” by the sentence handed to James Brown, 56, at Southwark crown court in London on Friday afternoon, by a judge who warned that protesters who disrupt people’s lives “will face serious consequences”.

Hundreds of thousands of people in 99 countries have taken part in a coordinated global climate strike demanding urgent action to tackle the ecological crisis.

The strike on Friday, the first worldwide climate action since the coronavirus pandemic hit, is taking place weeks before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK.
In Germany, two days before the country’s general election, Greta Thunberg told a crowd of more than 100,000 people that “no political party” was doing enough.
The Swedish activist, whose solo strike in 2018 inspired the global Fridays for Future movement, told cheering supporters they needed to keep up the pressure on Germany’s political leaders past election day.
“Yes, we must vote, you must vote, but remember that voting only will not be enough. We must keep going into the streets,” she said.

Motorists driving into Oxford “have to own” problems of traffic gridlock after waterworks caused misery across two days, a council traffic chief said.

Drivers have been subjected to long delays on Tuesday and Wednesday after Thames Water carried out emergency work on the Southern Bypass.
Tim Bearder apologised but said motorists are “part of the problem” if they are not using public transport.
Thames Water said work should be complete by 13:00 BST on Wednesday.
The company said it had been repairing two leaks found in key mains on Monday but work has caused long delays along the Southern Bypass, A34 and Hinksey Hill.
Councillor Bearder, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for highway management, said the city needs “radical change”.

This problem is called congestion. When it happens, a city’s options are to:
(A) Stop growing — because congestion has become terrible and growth will make it worse.
(B) Widen streets. This requires huge amounts of land, and land in cities is very expensive. What’s more, if you tear down enough buildings to widen streets, you are effectively destroying your city in order to save it.
(C) Focus on helping people get around using less space than cars require — through walking, cycling and mass transit.
Given the options, it’s not surprising that urban leaders — regardless of political ideology — eventually decide that C is the only real answer.

Larry Elliott

It all seems so simple. By the end of this decade the government will ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles. Cars will be greener and cleaner, making it easier to achieve the goal of a net carbon zero future.
Boris Johnson will no doubt impress on fellow world leaders the rapidity of Britain’s transport revolution when he hosts the Cop26 meeting in early November. Rishi Sunak may even be persuaded to announce measures to speed up the transition in the budget in October, carefully timed for the week before the international gathering in Glasgow.
There are two ways the government’s plan could run into trouble. The first is if the transition happens more slowly than expected, because new battery electric vehicles are too expensive or if the infrastructure to keep them charged is not put in place again.