From the Pankhursts delivering newsletters to a racing team in Saudi Arabia … an engaging history, full of colourful characters, of women and cycling

I’ve been cycling for decades – as a student, commuter and partygoer. I’ve sallied forth in strappy heels and dorky helmet: returning home late, I’ve dodged foxes while flying drunk and euphoric down deserted streets. I’ve cycled with one hand holding closed my wrap dress, and with skirt tucked into tights, or tied in a knot. I’ve fallen over at the lights, slowly and to the side, because my skirt has been hooked over the back of the seat. I’ve cycled into a lamppost at the side of the road while admiring spring trees in bloom. I’ve carried a boxed trumpet and a large houseplant in my basket, and flashing bike lights in my mouth. I’ve balanced a week’s shopping on handlebars, and kneed myself in the bump when pregnant. And many journeys have been spent furiously pondering esprit de l’escalier retorts following altercations with taxi drivers.

Having a flush dropped kerb at crossing points really shouldn’t be a point for debate and frankly, it’s not. If you disagree with flush kerbs then you are purely and simply wrong.
The photograph above shows the offending kerb and before I talk about why kerbs should be flush in these situations, it’s worth exploring a couple of other points. Notwithstanding drawings and scheme specifications, the actual type of kerbs we have available make kerb upstands more likely simply because the units are not designed to be laid flush.
However, this is the situation during a downpour with water running along the road channel and so in both cases, if the rain is that heavy, pedestrians are still going to have to deal with water. A well-designed crossing will have involved the designer looking upstream (hydraulically speaking) to see what the drainage is like. Having a gully just upstream of the crossing will help reduce the amount of water passing the crossing point.

President Joe Biden today unveiled his $2 trillion infrastructure bill, labelling it as the American Jobs Plan. He said it was a “once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we have seen or done since we built the Interstate Highway System and won the Space Race decades ago.”
He added: “It’s big. It’s bold. And we can get it done.”
“President Biden’s [infrastructure] plan is the most visionary proposal for the nation’s transportation network since the dawn of the interstate highway system,” agreed Janette Sadik-Khan, chair of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).
Speaking from Pittsburgh, the U.S. president pledged to double transit spending, upgrade 20,000 miles of roads in a $20 billion plan to make them safer for all users—including those not in motor vehicles—and spend an additional $20 billion reconnecting neighborhoods cut off by highways; these have historically been neighborhoods where the majority of the residents have been Black.
The plan will also boost existing road safety programs and see the creation of a new Safe Streets for All program to fund state and local “vision zero” schemes which aim to reduce fatalities, especially among cyclists and pedestrians.

Three stone blocks enforcing the ban on carriage traffic travelling between the Forum, ahead, and … [+]
Google Street View
“All across London a quiet, little-reported ‘war’ is raging,” claimed a writer for British political magazine Spiked Online, August 24. “Barricades and roadblocks have been erected,” continued Niall Crowley, “as council officials impose increasingly draconian measures to stop people using their cars.”
These “draconian measures” include the creation—with bollards and numberplate recognition cameras—of “Low Traffic Neighborhoods” (LTNs), where roads are closed to motorists but left open to cyclists and pedestrians.
Councils say these LTNs prevent the use of local roads as rat-runs but some die-hard motorists view such closures as attacks on driving. The co-founder of British motoring magazine Auto Express claimed on August 23 that “motorist-hating fundamentalists” were “stooping to a new low” by “temporarily banning or severely restricting cars on certain roads.”
Mike Rutherford continued that “under the cover of COVID they have struck, cynically seized their moment, tried to make the road network so bloody unbearable that car users will throw in the towel.”

Automated computer accounts have been found to have generated thousands of comments in a bid to hijack a consultation on bridge closures.
A six-month public feedback exercise on Newcastle City Council’s decision to ban traffic from five small bridges in residential areas closed on Monday.
More than 7,000 responses opposing the closures were linked to one computer server.
The council said it was a “malicious attempt” to disrupt the consultation.
Salters Bridge, Castle Farm Road bridge, Haldane Bridge, Argyle Street bridge and Stoneyhurst Bridge have been closed to vehicles since August as the council said it wanted to stop high levels of traffic cutting through residential streets.
Opponents claim it has caused congestion on surrounding roads, blocked routes for emergency vehicles and been harmful for elderly and disabled residents who rely on car travel.

Significance
Active travel makes people healthier and creates a wide range of additional social and environmental benefits. The provision of dedicated infrastructure is considered a crucial policy to increase cycling. However, evaluating the impact of this type of intervention is difficult because infrastructure changes are typically slow. The rollout of so-called pop-up bike lanes during the COVID-19 pandemic is a unique empirical context to estimate the pull effect of new cycling infrastructure. We show that the policy has worked. We find large increases in cycling. This result is robust for a variety of empirical counterfactuals. Further research is needed to investigate whether this change is persistent and whether similar results can be achieved in situations outside the context of a pandemic.

Abstract
The bicycle is a low-cost means of transport linked to low risk of transmission of infectious disease. During the COVID-19 crisis, governments have therefore incentivised cycling by provisionally redistributing street space. We evaluate the impact of this new bicycle infrastructure on cycling traffic using a generalized difference in differences design. We scrape daily bicycle counts from 736 bicycle counters in 106 European cities. We combine these with data on announced and completed pop-up bike lane road work projects. Within 4 mo, an average of 11.5 km of provisional pop-up bike lanes have been built per city and the policy has increased cycling between 11 and 48% on average. We calculate that the new infrastructure will generate between $1 and $7 billion in health benefits per year if cycling habits are sticky.