Author name: Steven Edwards

“Just because you’ve bought a car it doesn’t mean you’ve also bought 10 square metres of public space to leave it on,” Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores, mayor of the Spanish city of Pontevedra, tells me, firmly.
Once you accept this, he explains in the week that Europe smouldered and hundreds died in an unprecedented heatwave, you’re on your way to saving the planet by challenging the entitlement felt by car owners and purging cities of their domineering climate-destroying vehicles.
Who owns public space? It’s the question at the heart of a defining battle of the climate emergency era. From London to Oslo, through Paris and Barcelona to the Balkans, the fight is on to reduce the burgeoning number and impact of cars – which accounted for nearly a quarter of the European Union’s Co2 emissions in 2019. For decades the answer has been motorists, but this has to change if humanity is to combat what United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres called the “collective suicide” of rampant climate change.

Lydia Chantler-Hicks
One thousand extra pedestrians are walking in Stoke Newington Church Street every day – thanks to new traffic restrictions that have seen the number of cars using the road fall by 60%.
A bus gate was installed under an experimental traffic order last September, to reduce the number of cars using the trendy Hackney high street and surrounding area between 7am and 7pm.
Hackney Council says the ‘low traffic neighbourhood’ scheme has seen walking and cycling surge between those times, with cycling up 38% and pedestrian numbers up 16%.

Assembly backs ULEZ expansion & road user charging option

With a clear majority, on the 17th of November, the London Assembly backed the Mayor’s revision to his Transport Strategy opening up the option to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to cover all of London and later introduce ‘Smart & Fair Road User Charging’ (SFRUC). The vote was along party lines, with Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat members voting for the revision, Conservative members against.

Isabella Kaminski
A legal challenge has been launched against a road scheme that opponents say clashes with climate goals.

Changes aimed at improving car journeys between Milton Keynes and Cambridge by upgrading junctions and building a 10-mile dual carriageway on the A428 between Black Cat and Caxton Gibbet were approved in the summer. The scheme, estimated to cost £810m-£950m, is listed in the government’s growth plan for accelerated delivery.