Author name: Steven Edwards

Richard Dilks 13 July 2021
What little experience I have gleaned has taught me that far too much of the discussion and decision-making about cars in the UK falls into one of these camps: 
1. Camp Dalek: Exterminate! Cars are bad. We must price them off and design them out. There are nearly 40 mn cars and vans so we’d better get cracking.  
2. Camp Ostrich: Cars are bad. That’s why we are doing so much on cycle lanes, bus subsidy, lowered kerbs (delete/add to list as appropriate).
3. Camp Fatalist: Cars are bad. But we have nearly 40 mn of them. If we make it harder, more expensive, asocial even for people to use them then they just will not like us. 
4. Camp Vroom: Cars are good. They enable us to do all sorts of useful things, they give us freedom, protection and pride and they play our favourite music.
That’s why we have nearly 40 million of them. Anyway, aren’t they all going to be electric soon?

Deluge raises fears human-caused disruption is making extreme weather even worse than predicted

14 July 2021
A “beautiful and kind” seven-year-old girl has died after a crash with a lorry while riding her bike.

The girl, named only as Eloise, was taken to Salisbury District Hospital but died a short time later.
It happened on the A338 Church Street in Collingbourne Ducis in Wiltshire shortly before 18:30 BST on Tuesday.
She attended Collingbourne Primary School and headteacher Dan Crossman said the school sent her family “our sincerest sympathy and support.”

Letters Fri 16 Jul 2021
In his otherwise insightful article about how our interactions with strangers have changed (Remember hand shakes and small talk? The lost art of living with strangers, 10 July), Joe Moran omits to mention another important influence: cars, and our relationship to them. In the suburban neighbourhood where I now live, it is virtually impossible to encounter the strangers who are my neighbours, apart from those immediately next door.
Almost everyone else is only ever seen stepping from their front door to their car, parked a couple of feet away in what was the front garden, driving off, and then returning later to scuttle from car to front door. Few people walk to the local shops. One 88-year-old resident I chatted to at a community event confirmed this impression. When I asked why she didn’t know as many people in the street as she had in the past, she gave a one-word answer: “Cars.”
Isabella Stone Sheffield

Mark Sutton15 July, 2021

16.07.2021 | Silviya Barret
While launching the Plan the Transport Secretary was at pains to say that people’s lives won’t change much: “We will still fly but in more efficient aircraft, using sustainable fuel. We will still drive, but increasingly in zero emission cars”. The good news is that – by contrast – the Plan itself recognises the need for modal shift and to reduce how much we travel, as well as how we travel. It reiterates the government’s ambition for public transport, cycling and walking to be “the natural first choice” for people.

Outline plans for a proposed workplace parking levy (WPL) have been put out to public consultation by Leicester City Council.

The plans form part of the draft Leicester Transport Plan that focuses on the key themes and schemes that the city council proposes to deliver by 2036.   
The city council says the WPL, which could start in 2023, would support delivery of the overall transport plan, alongside other funding opportunities. 

During the first lockdown in March 2020, there was a massive increase in cycling as the roads emptied of motorised vehicles and people turned to their bikes. Pop-up cycle lanes appeared in many towns and cities and the BBC ran articles on how the pandemic had sparked a “European cycling revolution”. As lockdowns have eased and road traffic is generally back to pre-Covid levels, what has happened to that cycling revolution?

Joe Dunkley July 14, 2021

April 22, 2021
James Dyke, Robert Watson, Wolfgang Knorr 
Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps. Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us. The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out CO2 from the air.