Miranda Bryant
Cyclists who kill pedestrians could be prosecuted in the same way as motorists under a proposed government crackdown.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said the law is needed to “impress on cyclists the real harm they can cause when speed is combined with lack of care”.
It comes four years after the government ran a consultation on proposals for new offences of causing death or serious injury while cycling.
Shapps wrote in the Mail+ that a “selfish minority” of cyclists believe they are “immune” to red lights.
We need the cycling equivalent of death by dangerous driving to close a gap in the law and impress on cyclists the real harm they can cause when speed is combined with lack of care,” he said.
“For example, traffic lights are there to regulate all traffic. But a selfish minority of cyclists appear to believe that they are somehow immune to red lights.
“We need to crack down on this disregard for road safety. Relatives of victims have waited too long for this straightforward measure.”
But, according to a 2020 report by the parliamentary advisory council for transport safety (Pacts), which uses Department for Transport (DfT) figures, “pedal cyclists and small motorcycles were involved in very few collisions where pedestrians were killed”. In 2019, five pedestrian deaths involved a bicycle. Meanwhile, 48 cyclists and 305 pedestrians were killed by cars.
World Economic Forum Says It Is ‘Time to Look Beyond’ Owning Vehicles – humanevents.com
The World Economic Forum (WEF) published a paper last week calling for the end of “wasteful” private car ownership. The WEF argued that communal sharing of cars would lessen global demands for precious metals and fossil fuels.
The WEF’s July 18 paper titled “3 circular economy approaches to reduce demand for critical metals” began by saying, “We need a clean energy revolution, and we need it now.”
The article continued, “But this transition from fossil fuels to renewables will need large supplies of critical metals such as cobalt, lithium, nickel, to name a few. Shortages of these critical minerals could raise the costs of clean energy technologies.”
Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos:
London mayor urged to halt Silvertown tunnel scheme at 11th hour | The Guardian
Green party’s Siân Berry says Sadiq Khan can still change his mind and prevent increase in traffic pollution
Matthew Taylor
The mayor of London is being urged to make an 11th hour intervention and halt plans for a new four-lane road tunnel under the River Thames that opponents say would worsen pollution and exacerbate the climate crisis.
Tunnelling equipment is on site on the banks of the Thames, and work on the £2bn Silvertown tunnel is due to start in the coming weeks.
But the scheme has faced widespread opposition from local people, politicians, climate scientists and medical experts who say it would increase traffic and worsen public health in some of the most deprived boroughs in the country. They also say it will lock in high carbon transport for generations to come.
Earlsfield school crash: Woman apologises for running over children in 4×4 – BBC
A woman who drove a 4×4 vehicle into children and parents outside a primary school in south-west London has tearfully apologised to those injured.
A group outside Beatrix Potter Primary School, in Earlsfield, was hit by the 4×4 driven by 39-year-old Dolly Rincon-Aguilar in September 2020.
Kingston Crown Court heard she had pressed the accelerator not the brake.
The jury is considering its verdicts on eight counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, which she denies.
Jurors were told the green Rav4 vehicle had mounted the pavement, hit a tree and then a wall before accelerating to the school entrance where the group of parents and children were standing.
Eleven people, including seven children, were treated at the scene, with four adults and five children taken to hospital. Two children were later discharged.
Children as young as six were trapped under the vehicle, the court was told.
Jurors heard that two victims had fractures to the face and skull, with one requiring emergency treatment to remove a blood clot. Others were left with “serious” fractures to the leg, arm and eye socket.
Tory police boss banned from driving after breaking speed limit five times | Police and crime commissioners | The Guardian
Caroline Henry had vowed to crack down on speeding during her time as Nottinghamshire PCC
Jessica Murray
A Conservative police and crime commissioner who pledged to crack down on speeding has been banned from driving for six months after being caught breaking the speed limit five times in a 12-week period.
Caroline Henry, the PCC for Nottinghamshire, was sentenced at Nottingham magistrates court on Monday after previously admitting the offences.
She was elected in May 2021 after a campaign in which she used the slogan “make Notts safe” and promised to “reduce crime with action, not words”.
She is now facing calls to resign, with Nottingham Labour MP Lilian Greenwood saying “it’s untenable for her to continue in her role”.
The 52-year-old, who is the wife of the Broxtowe MP, Darren Henry, was caught speeding in a blue Mercedes and a silver Lexus with a personalised number plate in 30mph zones at four locations in Nottingham in March, May and June last year.
At a hearing earlier this year, magistrates were told that Henry had written a letter to the court saying she was “very sorry, embarrassed and ashamed”. Two of the offences were committed on consecutive days, the court heard.
Department for Transport data shows 2022 cycling rates rising sharply – Cycling Industry News
Though by many accounts the marketplace is slowing, aligning to a trend of dipping consumer buying power, cycling rates have flourished as other transport forms have become expensive and impractical when weighed against cost controls for families (though the data sadly does not confirm whether the cycling is leisure or transport cycling).
Put into the graph at the head of this article by bike business development specialist Mark Brown, English cycling rates got out of the blocks early this year and continued a steep trend into early summer; now shown to be north of 150% up against the first weeks pre lockdown in 2020.
The findings have been reaffirmed by Cycling UK today, who have trends against last year (not pre-pandemic) as 47% ahead on weekdays and 27% on weekends in the five months to the end of July. This arguably suggests greater commuter cycling increases, which would align to petrol price increases and rail disruption – from January to June the cost per litre on petrol has jumped by around 30%.
Bikes get slighted in compromise climate deal – washingtonpost.com
Dino Grandoni
Wind turbines. Solar panels. Electric cars, nuclear reactors, geothermal energy.
The $369 billion climate package unveiled by Democrats last week is chock-full of subsidies for technologies meant to rein in planet-warming pollution. But there’s one popular, emissions-free machine conspicuously absent from what could be the nation’s most significant piece of climate legislation yet: the bicycle.
Provisions designed to supercharge the sale and use of traditional bikes and the battery-powered variety were dropped from the climate deal reached by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), the Senate’s most conservative Democrat. The absence is grinding the gears of bike manufacturers and cycling enthusiasts who pushed for months to include the pro-bike provisions in Democrats’ climate package.
“We need people not just to shift from gasoline cars to electric cars. We need people to shift from cars, period,” said David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government who focuses on urban development. “We can do that. But there’s nothing in this bill that makes that process easier or faster or more likely to happen.”
Landmark US climate bill will do more harm than good, groups say – Guardian
Nina Lakhani
The landmark climate legislation passed by the Senate after months of wrangling and weakening by fossil-fuel friendly Democrats will lead to more harm than good, according to frontline community groups who are calling on Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
If signed into law, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) would allocate $369bn to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy sources – a historic amount that scientists estimate will lead to net reductions of 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.
It would be the first significant climate legislation to be passed in the US, which is historically responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country.
But the bill makes a slew of concessions to the fossil fuel industry, including mandating drilling and pipeline deals that will harm communities from Alaska to Appalachia and the Gulf coast and tie the US to planet-heating energy projects for decades to come.
High [petrol] prices are revving up this online anti-car movement – CNET
July 20, 2022
Jason Slaughter began making YouTube videos to document his family’s move from Toronto to Amsterdam a few years ago. That’s how the 45-year-old IT professional became an inadvertent hero of the growing anti-car movement online.
Posting to his orange-themed channel, Slaughter focused on the differences between transportation in North America and the Netherlands, which he chose for its car-free lifestyle. One video details a short but treacherous walk in Houston that required pedestrians to inch over a bridge with little separating them and speeding traffic.
The 17-minute video, which was uploaded about a year ago, struck a nerve with r/fuckcars, a vehemently anti-automobile Reddit community advocating for urban design that’s less reliant on driving.
Consultation 🔴 Help stop the south east being swamped with even more traffic – Transport Action Network
Transport for the South East (TfSE) is consulting on the types of infrastructure it wants built in the South East over the next 30 years.
With the climate and ecological emergency, road building should be the last resort after all other measures have been tried. It is incredibly damaging, increasing traffic, congestion, air and noise pollution, carbon emissions and with negative impacts on nature and our precious countryside.
Unfortunately, TfSE’s plan contains over 90 road schemes, over 50 of which it wants built by 2030. In contrast, while the plan contains ambitious ideas for public transport, these are far less developed, have no delivery plan and risk never being built.
TfSE hides the plan’s true impact on climate change. Even when it admits that its proposals are inadequate, it fails to adjust them to reduce the plan’s carbon footprint (e.g. by cutting the road building programme).
Please help us get this plan back on track. At a time when we are experiencing record temperatures and Europe is once again on fire, this is not the time to be building more roads which will make the problem worse. The consultation ends on 12 September.