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.
Earlsfield school crash: Woman apologises for running over children in 4×4 – BBC News
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.”
Membership
