Author name: Steven Edwards

Guardian community team
Share your photos and stories of examples of car-led redevelopment where you live
Wed 9 Jun 2021
We’d like to find out how your UK town or city was redesigned for road vehicles.
From the 1950s onwards many towns and cities across the UK adopted car led planning in line with rising car ownership. Today, many residents in urban areas hope to have more environmentally friendly spaces and cleaner air which is at odds with past car led redevelopment.
We’d like to find out from readers about the worst examples of past car-led planning, that should be rethought now.
Share your photos and stories

Letter Wed 16 Jun 2021

Those behind the recent “coup” in the National Clarion Cycling Club (Keir Hardie’s cycling club jettisons socialism, 14 June) have, like so many others nowadays, misunderstood the concept of inclusion, treating it like a mantra to be trotted out without actually thinking. Inclusion can only be invoked in order to remove irrelevant obstacles to joining an organisation.
For almost all organisations, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and many other attributes are irrelevant, so they should not be an obstacle. Not so when it comes to political leanings in the context of an overtly political cycling club. One might as well try to persuade the Spurs supporters’ club to admit a card-carrying Arsenal fan. Those who are so unaware of the current political situation as to think socialism “irrelevant” should do the decent thing, leave the Clarion and form their own club, to which they would then be free 

In a letter sent to councils this week, DfT deputy director Rupert Furness underlined that applications for grants from the government’s Active Travel Fund involving cycling schemes need to comply with the LTN 1/20 standard, reports transport journalist Carlton Reid on Forbes.com.
In May last year, as the government made encouraging active travel a central part of its plans for the country’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic, the DfT made £250 million available for cycling and walking projects.
At the time, it said that “to receive any money under this or future tranches, you will need to show us that you have a swift and meaningful plan to reallocate road space to cyclists and pedestrians, including strategic corridors.”
Inviting councils to apply for a fresh wave of funding this week, Furness told them that the DfT “only intends to fund schemes which comply with the Cycling Design Standards set out in local transport note LTN 1/20.

Just one in six think motorists would be caught and punished for careless driving because there aren’t enough traffic officers to police these types of crimes, a poll of more than 15,500 licence holders shows. 
Similarly, just a fifth would be caught for drug driving and a quarter would be caught driving without insurance, the AA found.

The National Trust and Raleigh Bicycles have announced a collaboration which will see £42,000 of electric bikes and electric cargo bikes donated to National Trust properties, as the charity looks to reduce its reliance on traditional vehicles and reach carbon net zero by 2030.

The National Trust is collaborating with UK-based Raleigh to trial e-bikes and e-cargo bikes to help them meet their climate change objectives. The bikes will be used by park rangers as they go about their stewardship duties.

Hear more about e-cargo bike development in our free webinar, June 17, 14.30 -16.00: register here
‘Climate change is the single biggest threat to the precious landscapes and historic houses we care for,’ says the National Trust. ‘We’re tackling the causes of climate change by reducing our own emissions and, as a conservation charity, we’re always searching for greener ways to get around the places in our care.’ 

The legacy of the radical bike-riding clubs of a century ago lives on

Wed 16 Jun 2021
Cycling’s radical traditions are part of Britain’s social history. Recalling her teenage years in the 1890s, the great suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst wrote beautifully about the band of carefree lefties with whom she rode out of Manchester each weekend. Criss-crossing rural Lancashire and Cheshire, her cycling club was one of many associated with the Clarion, a popular socialist weekly newspaper. The more earnest socialists of the time saw this crowd as ideological dilettantes, too keen on having a good time. And their trips do seem to have been rather fun.