Tom Thewlis20 October 2022
Nurses from Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London are using e-bikes to visit their patients as part of an initiative to improve sustainability and improve staff health and wellbeing. 
Members of staff within the Mawbey Brough neighbourhood nursing team usually drive, walk or use public transport to get to their patients in Lambeth, South London. 
Although they can now sign up to a pilot project using an e-bike featuring a cargo hold for any equipment they need. 
As well as reducing emissions and congestion on London’s road, the e-bike also involves fewer parking restrictions meaning the nurses can operate within the capital more quickly and efficiently. 

A trial of road safety technology being deployed in the UK for the first time has led to hundreds of motorists being caught breaking traffic laws, with a senior roads policing officer saying he is “shocked” at the number of offences recorded.

The trial, using equipment developed by the consultancy AECOM and run jointly by National Highways and Warwickshire Police on the M40 and A46, involved a “sensor test vehicle” equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that is able to recognise, for example, a motorist using a handheld mobile phone.

Temperate rainforest, which has been decimated over thousands of years, has the potential to be restored across a fifth of Great Britain, a new map reveals.
Atlantic temperate rainforest once covered most of the west coasts of Britain and Ireland, thriving in the archipelago’s wet, mild conditions, which support rainforest indicator species such as lichens, mosses and liverworts. Today, it covers less than 1% of land, having been cleared over thousands of years by humans and is only found in isolated pockets, such as the waterfalls region in the Brecon Beacons and Ausewell Wood on Dartmoor.
Two maps released by Lost Rainforests of Britain, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, show both what exists today and what could be revived in the future. The map showing the remaining fragments of rainforest in England, Wales and Scotland was compiled with the help of the public, scientists and geolocation specialists.
The second map shows that more than half of Wales and nearly all of western Scotland – as well as large parts of Cornwall, the Lake District and other pockets north of Manchester – have suitable climates for temperate rainforest.

In August TfL agreed a £1.2bn funding settlement with DfT up to March 2024 (LTT 2 Sep). This follows a series of short-term emergency deals which, said TfL, curtailed its ability to support active travel projects.
Under the new settlement, TfL must allocate £80m every year to active travel schemes. 
Funding will go to safer junction schemes at Holloway Road/Drayton Park and Battersea Bridge (subject to consultation), and pedestrian and cycling improvements at Streatham High Road and Manor Circus. 
TfL will also continue lowering speed limits across London to reduce road danger, with plans to introduce a 20mph speed limit on a further 28km of roads in the boroughs of Camden, Islington, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Haringey by March 2023. 

The president of the UK’s biggest motoring organisation, the AA, says that drivers should welcome cycle lanes because by encouraging people to get out of their cars and onto bikes for everyday journeys, they help improve motor traffic flow and reduce congestion.
Edmund King has also called on the government to protect active travel funding from falling victim to widely expected spending cuts in the Budget, which is due at the end of this month, reports the Daily Telegraph.
“Even though we’re a motoring organisation, that doesn’t mean you need to use your motor all the time,” explained King.
“Journeys under a mile and a half are in many ways the most expensive way to use a car,” he said, “because your car’s not warmed up, you’re only going a short distance, and you’ve got to pay to park.”

@DavidZipper
If you want to understand all that is wrong with the US approach to street safety,
@TheOnion is not a bad place to start