28/7/22
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.
Meet the Numtots: the millennials who find fixing public transport sexy | Cities | The Guardian
Elle Hunt 5 Jul 2018
The year is 2025. There are no cars, only public transport and bicycles. Four-lane highways have been replaced by bike paths. Pedestrians share the pavements with cyclists. The air is clean (because the buses are electric), and the living is easy.
This is the future the Numtots want.
Predominantly millennials with a passion for public transport, urban planning and internet humour, Numtots’ interests intersect in New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, the Facebook group from which they derive their nickname. There, nearly 100,000 of them discuss and debate their perfect city, or transit lines in their area, or perpendicular traffic flow and improvisational vehicle pathing.
I wonder if Twitters’s LTN opponents … recognise this? – Jon Burke FRSA – Twitter
@jonburkeUK
I wonder if Twitters’s Low Traffic Neighbourhood opponents – who’ve spent two years haranguing Councillors, calling them liars, claiming they’re ‘anti-democratic’, accusing them of ‘taking backhanders’, and making vexatious complaints – recognise this?
UK heatwave: Weather forecasters report unprecedented trolling
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62323048
Extreme weather means re-think needed on transport funding – Transport Xtra
He made his comments after temperatures rose above 40°C in in some parts of the UK on 18 and 19 July. Rail services were heavily impacted after rails buckled and overhead wire systems failed. A new record rail temperature of 62°C was recorded in Suffolk. This is over 20°C above recorded air temperatures.
Marsden, a professor of transport governance at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, told LTT: “Given the size of our networks and the increasing unpredictability of extremes in weather we can only adapt small parts of the network. These are likely to be those most frequently impacted or where there are no meaningful alternatives and where wider system resilience is low.”
Are we turning the corner on road building? – Transport Action Network
The recent Climate Change Committee (CCC) 2022 Progress Report to Parliament criticised the Government’s road building plans for increasing demand and emissions. It stated that they should not be encouraging unconstrained traffic growth and needed to be compatible with net-zero. Could we finally be turning the corner on road building in England?
In its report, the CCC, an independent statutory body, applauded the Government’s ambition on climate change, but was very critical on the lack of delivery and progress in many areas, including transport. It also made a number of new recommendations, including the need for targets for reducing car travel. It noted that both Scotland and Wales had adopted such targets and saw this as important in bringing about immediate carbon reductions while the vehicle fleet is still transitioning to electric vehicles (which of course is no silver bullet).
Bicycle graveyards: why do so many bikes end up underwater? | Cycling | The Guardian
Every decade or so, the city of Paris drains the Canal Saint-Martin. The nearly three-mile-long waterway, which runs south across a swathe of the Right Bank, was originally constructed to keep Paris clean, supplying fresh water to a city plagued by cholera and dysentery. But for the two centuries of the canal’s existence, it has often served a different – in fact, opposite – function. It is a dumping ground, a big liquid trash can. The periodic draining is therefore also an unveiling. The water recedes, and the stuff kicked or heaved or furtively dropped into the canal over the preceding few thousand nights is revealed.
It’s now over two weeks since my favourite cycle lane, #C9, fully opened along its entire length from Hammersmith to Kew Bridge… – Leo Murray – Twitter
@crisortunity 28/7/22
It’s now over two weeks since my favourite cycle lane, #C9, fully opened along its entire length from Hammersmith to Kew Bridge, so I wanted to do a quick thread about Network Effects and the politics of road space reallocation in London and elsewhere 1/n
Rethinking road safety – part 1 – Nicer cities, liveable places
Can you imagine how much more dangerous it would have been working in a factory 200 years ago, in comparison to what it’s like now (in the UK at least)?
Shared bikes to integrate with Solent’s MaaS app – Transport Xtra
Portsmouth City Council and Solent Transport will introduce a Department for Transport-funded bicycle and e-bike rental scheme this summer. Southampton City Council and Isle of Wight Council will also join the scheme, with Beryl as the approved supplier for the Solent region.
Reclaiming the roads – Works in Progress – Carlton Reid
Carlton Reid 21st July 2022
Road space is a special good. Some ways of using it have huge impacts on other road users. Until relatively recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, but with no dominant user. Today the road is almost completely dominated by the car.