Author name: Steven Edwards

A driver has been fined almost £400 and given nine points on his licence for a ‘careless’ close pass on a group of cyclists.
The impatient motorist was trying to get past the riders as they approached a traffic island.
One of the cyclists even had to swerve to avoid being hit as the driver sped by on the A4054 in Pontypridd, Wales. 
GoSafe, which aims to ensure safety on Welsh roads, said the manoeuvre ‘severely increased the risk to the safety of the cyclists involved’.
The motorist pleaded guilty to driving without due care at Cardiff Magistrates’ Court, where he received a fine of £386 and was given the maximum amount of points you can receive for that offence.

Lauren Wise
A driver who mowed down and killed a 15-year-old boy riding his bike has been jailed.
Leo Meek ‘took out’ Jack Jones while driving a Volkswagen Tiguan on Manor Drive at around 9.40pm on April 26 this year.
The 15-year-old from Moreton had been cycling the familiar route to his aunt’s house after spending the evening watching a film with his little brother.
Meek, 22, left Jack with fatal head and neck injuries while speeding at between 53 and 55mph on a 30mph residential road.
He then fled the scene, and didn’t even apply his brakes, ditching his friend’s dad’s car and getting a taxi home, where he went to bed.

Gary Nunn
One of the world’s most feted pieces of transport infrastructure currently lets down an increasingly popular mode of transport: the bicycle.
Currently, the 2,000 cyclists who cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s dedicated cycleway daily must dismount and battle 55 steps on the north side. The number of cyclists struggling on the stairs looks only set to grow: cycling in Sydney’s inner city has doubled in the last two years.

A memorial to the 10 men known to have died during construction of the Queensbury tunnel has been installed.
Work on the now disused 1.4-mile (2.3km) railway tunnel between Bradford and Halifax began in 1874 and was completed in July 1878.
Now campaigners hoping to reopen the disused tunnel as a cycle route have remembered the navvies who built it.
Two rows of wooden railway sleepers stand either side of the path and each is dedicated to a man who died.
The tunnel was delayed by two years despite a 600-strong workforce, with dozens of injuries, many of them life-changing, and 10 deaths, said the Queensbury Tunnel Society.

Spend  on active travel initiatives in Scotland is set to more than treble to nearly £60 per person per year – an unprecedented sum for anywhere in the United Kingdom – within the next two years following the publication today of the draft shared policy programme by the SNP and the Green Party
The SNP won 64 of the 129 seats contested in May’s elections to te Scottish Parliament, one short of an overall majority, while the Green Party won eight seats.

Of course, there is always enough space if we are willing to be radical, but for lots of reasons, a road may still be needed to move motor traffic and making wider network changes may be way beyond a project scope or funding. It would be better to be working to detailed plans, but we have to be pragmatic. 

A sleek, shiny car breezes along an open road, zipping easily through narrow city streets. Its paintwork is pristine, its electric engine is clean and silent. When it arrives there is parking right outside the front door. 
So much for the advert. In reality, traffic in the UK is often slow and the roads can be clogged. A 60-mile (96km) journey on 60mph roads is reckoned to take 85 minutes – an average speed of 42mph (67km/h).
Drivers already own 32 million cars – that’s up 28% since 2001, during which time the population has only risen by 13%. And by 2050 there will be 44 million cars in the UK – so start looking for that parking space now. 
Last year, the government announced a £2.8bn package to encourage drivers to switch to greener vehicles. This included a £1.3bn investment in charging infrastructure as well as discounts of up to £2,500 on low emission vehicles costing under £30,000.

Tom Standage17 August, 2021

• Car production may never exceed its level in 2017.

• Car usage has been falling in Western countries, particularly in cities.

• Ride-hailing and public transit likely are the future of transportation.

The following is an excerpt from the book A Brief History of Motion.
In the 2020s there are clear signs that enthusiasm for cars is finally waning. Even some people within the industry now acknowledge that the world is now at, or has passed, “peak car” — the point at which car ownership and use level off and start to decline. Car production may never exceed its level in 2017. “It could well be that we passed the peak in global automotive production,” said Volkmar Denner, chief executive of Robert Bosch, the world’s largest maker of car parts, in January 2020. And that was before the coronavirus pandemic whacked car sales.