Arwa Mahdawi

I’ve been a mum for a relatively short time; I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to this whole parenting thing. Still, there is one piece of advice I can confidently dole out: don’t instruct your child to run in front of a moving vehicle so that you can win an argument with strangers on the internet. Elon Musk obsessives, I’m looking at you.

This month, a software CEO called Dan O’Dowd, who is hellbent on trying to ban Tesla’s “full self-driving” programme, launched an ad campaign claiming that if you put a Tesla in this mode it will mow down children. He based this assertion on a test he ran using a child-sized mannequin dressed in a safety vest, which came to a sticky end in the middle of a road in California.

Fiona Harvey

In 1970, the young Prince of Wales made a speech warning of the dangers of pollution, and said society must deal urgently with the cost of cleaning it up, and preventing it in the first place.
“We are faced at this moment with the horrifying effects of pollution in all its cancerous forms. There is the growing menace of oil pollution at sea, which almost destroys beaches and certainly destroys tens of thousands of seabirds,” he told the Countryside Steering Committee for Wales. “There is chemical pollution discharged into rivers from factories and chemical plants, which clogs up the rivers with toxic substances and adds to the filth in the seas. There is air pollution from smoke and fumes discharged by factories and from gases pumped out by endless cars and aeroplanes.”

During those long pandemic days, when we had nowhere to go and nowhere to be, my kids and I used to hit the road on our bikes. We would head out on a brand new cycle lane that popped up on a high-traffic road in Shoreham-by-Sea, where we live, as part of government measures to help more people walk and cycle during the pandemic. We would nip to the shops, down to the river or to the local library, and weekend activities were interspersed with quick rides. At the height of the Covid restrictions, taking off spontaneously as a family offered us a sense of freedom that felt liberating.

US study found SUVs were involved in much fewer crashes than standard cars – but in twice as many fatal ones

Published in the Journal of Safety Research, the study comes at a time when such vehicles are getting increasingly large, and as SUVs make up an increasingly large proportion of new cars sold especially in affluent urban areas.
Many are bough by parents, with SUVs being seen – and widely promoted – as the perfect vehicle for families with children, but researchers from the University of Illinois in Springfield have established that they are posing an increasing danger to kids, or at least those on the outside of the vehicle.

Traffic filters are designed to reduce traffic, make bus journeys faster and make walking and cycling safer, said Oxfordshire County Council. During hours of operation, private cars will not be allowed through the traffic filters without a permit. All other vehicles including buses, coaches, taxis, vans, mopeds and HGVs will be allowed at all times. Permits will be available for Blue Badge holders, health workers and professional and non-professional care workers.

Last year, the studio of the Lyon-based artist known as Ememem received an urgent call from an architectural firm close to the city’s Place Sathonay. Someone was in the process of dismantling a mosaic he had installed on the pavement in front of their offices. By the time he arrived, the culprit had fled with half of it

The climate crisis has driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, according to a major study.
It shows five dangerous tipping points may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating caused by humanity to date.
These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.

International trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan is new transport secretary, following the sacking of Grant Shapps by newly appointed prime minister Liz Truss.

Shapps, who became transport secretary in 2019, had backed Truss’s rival Rishi Sunak in the Conservative Party’s leadership election.
On Twitter Shapps said: “It has been a privilege to serve as transport secretary; a job I loved. Now I look forward to being a strong, independent voice on the backbenches, developing policies that will further the Conservative cause and the interests of my constituents in Welwyn Hatfield.”

In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.

“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”