Author name: Steven Edwards

The government must stop building roads to satisfy growing “car addiction”, clean air campaigners have said, after three-quarters of transport projects announced by Liz Truss’s administration were road related.
In Kwasi Kwarteng’s doomed mini-budget, 87 out of 117 (74%) transport infrastructure projects listed in his “growth plan 2022” related to road upgrades.
…At the Tory party conference this week, Ben Houchen, the influential Conservative mayor of the Tees Valley, called for an end to the “villainisation” of car drivers and suggested that within 20 years we may not need trains and buses because of driverless cars.

Speaking at a fringe event hosted by Transport for the North (TfN) – a body set up to advocate primarily for public transport investment in the north of England – Houchen launched an impassioned defence of cars.
..Anne-Marie Trevelyan, began her speech by raving about all the roads being upgraded in the growth plan.
“The big thing we want to do and get cracking before the next general election is to really rocket-boost those key arterial roads and some of the train projects that we can do at a greater pace,” she said, adding: “It is those key big changes to road infrastructure which change the dial for those regions and that’s what this prime minister’s vision is all about.”
…In her speech at party conference, Truss laid into the Labour leader of Wales, Mark Drakeford, for “cancelling road-building projects and refusing to build the M4 relief road”. Roads came first in her list of building priorities: “We will build roads, rail, energy and broadband quicker,” she said.

Greater clarity about the Government’s transport priorities has emerged from chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s controversial ‘Mini Budget’, focusing on achieving economic growth as the over-riding priority, including a mission to fast-track more than 100 road, rail and local transport projects by streamlining the assessment, approval and planning process. The list of schemes was set out in a “Plan for Growth”, published alongside the Chancellor’s statement.
As well as indicating where transport expenditure will be concentrated in the coming two years ahead of the next General Election, the Chancellor’s proposals have provoked concern and opposition about the way the decision-making and implementation about transport policies and projects is set to change, and what this means for those initiatives not achieving a boost to GDP – for example, those relating to decarbonisation, promotion of active travel and Levelling Up.

The 100-plus projects identified as ready to implement (see below) will be accelerated as fast as possible, with the aim of starting construction on most of them by the end of 2023, Kwasi Kwarteng said.

Maybe it is the name that is the problem. Climate change. It doesn’t sound that bad. The word “change” resonates quite pleasantly in our restless world. No matter how fortunate we are, there is always room for the appealing possibility of improvement. Then there is the “climate” part. Again, it does not sound so bad. If you live in many of the high-emitting nations of the global north, the idea of a “changing climate” could well be interpreted as the very opposite of scary and dangerous. A changing world. A warming planet. What’s not to like?
Perhaps that is partly why so many people still think of climate change as a slow, linear and even rather harmless process. But the climate is not just changing. It is destabilising. It is breaking down. The delicately balanced natural patterns and cycles that are a vital part of the systems that sustain life on Earth are being disrupted, and the consequences could be catastrophic. Because there are negative tipping points, points of no return.

Active travel charity Sustrans has urged the government and local authorities to guarantee protected cycle lanes on all main road routes to schools.
The Bristol-based charity says that a renewed focus on active travel infrastructure should be an urgent priority for Liz Truss’ Conservative government, as it would help embed new habits in people across the UK who have been forced to change the way they travel due to the ongoing cost of living crisis.
Sustrans’ call for more and better cycling infrastructure, especially around schools, comes in the middle of Cycle to School Week, when families are encouraged to ditch the car and ride their bikes to and from school.  

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has dropped its case against a cyclist who was said to have delayed traffic by a handful of seconds as he used his helmet camera to film a driver illegally using a handheld mobile phone at the wheel in Bristol, as well as another motorist subsequently driving through a red light.
During the incident, which happened on 4 March, Tom Bosanquet spotted a driver using their mobile phone when he drew up alongside them at a set of traffic lights.
He told the motorist that using the phone at the wheel was an offence and dangerous, and while he did so an impatient van driver behind starting beeping his horn due to the delay which lasted all of 9 seconds.

Male drivers are almost three times more likely than women to be involved in road collisions that kill or seriously injure pedestrians in Great Britain, a gap that has widened over the past decade.
A Guardian analysis of government road accident and journey data shows that in 2020 and the first half of 2021, 4,363 male drivers were involved in collisions that seriously injured or killed pedestrians, compared with 1,473 female drivers.
Including trips by car, van, motorbike and in other private vehicles, this equates to 2.8 serious collisions – those involving a pedestrian being injured or killed – for every 10m journeys by men, compared with 1.04 for women.
The figures – which exclude cases where the sex of the driver was not known or recorded – show that men have been more likely to injure or kill pedestrians, going as far back as at least 2002 when comparable data on the number of journeys began being recorded.

The head of the RSPB says the bird charity is ruling nothing out as it organises a mobilisation of millions of people against what it calls the government’s “attack on nature”.