Author name: Steven Edwards

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Greater danger from SUVs and vans | ETA


eta.co.uk 24th March 2022
In news that will surprise nobody who ever walks or cycles, research from America has found that SUVs and vans are substantially more likely than cars to hit pedestrians when making turns.
“We already know that larger vehicles cause more severe injuries when they strike pedestrians,” said Jessica Cicchino, one of the authors of the research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “The link between these vehicle types and certain common pedestrian crashes points to another way that the increase in SUVs on the roads might be changing the crash picture.”

News from Elsewhere

Cycling to work uptake held back by significant obstacles – Workplace Insight

Neil Franklin A new poll from Direct Line Cycling Insurance claims that commuters are being increasingly discouraged from cycling to work by a number of factors, and those who do ride in face a dilemma on where to store their bike. While an estimated £1 billion worth of bikes are used to commute every day across the UK, the research suggests that as many as 1.5 million cyclists are deterred by the lack of bike storage facilities at their workplace

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London councils pledge 30,000 new bike storage spaces amid four-year wait lists | Evening Standard


Joe Talora

Newly-elected councillors in London have pledged to install a total of 30,000 new cycle parking spaces across the capital in a bid to cut long waiting lists.
The Standard reported in March that some Londoners were facing waits of up to four years for secure bike parking, with waiting lists topping 60,000 across the capital’s boroughs.

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Views sought on legal framework for Williams-Shapps Plan for rail – Transport Xtra


The DfT has launched a public consultation that sets out plans for legislative changes needed to reform the railway. This follows publication of the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail in May 2021, and announcement in the Queen’s Speech on 10 May 2022 to introduce a Transport Bill to Parliament to modernise rail services. 

Control of rail infrastructure and trains will be brought under the control of new public centralised body Great British Railways (GBR). It will own the infrastructure,…

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It’s Cars That Done It – billmckibben.substack.com


Bill McKibben
For the second time in my lifetime, we’re about to make a crucial political mistake as a nation based on high gas prices. In 1980, after the oil shocks and gas lines of the previous decade, we elected Ronald Reagan, ushering in forty years of a world where “government is the problem, not the solution”—and therefore ushering in ecological crisis, cartoonish inequality, and racial backsliding. And now, even as the January 6 hearings definitively uncover the rot at the core of the Republican party, we’re about to return them to control of Congress mostly because gas is five bucks a gallon. 

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Lower Thames Crossing? No. Stop this road-building madness – peopleandnature.wordpress.com


The UK government is planning a gigantic new road project – a six-lane, 22-kilometre motorway with a tunnel under the river Thames near Gravesend, Kent – while, laughably, claiming to be acting on climate change.
The Lower Thames Crossing would be the UK’s largest road project since the M25 motorway ring around London was completed in 1986. Cost: an estimated £8.2 billion.
It is the largest project envisaged in part 2 of the government’s Road Investment Strategy (RIS2) that covers the period 2020-25.
The Kent Downs area of outstanding natural beauty would suffer a “large adverse” impact from the Lower Thames Crossing, according to National Highways. Photo from the Kent Downs site
And it would blast another hole in attempts to meet the UK’s own inadequate greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, let alone meaningful targets set by climate scientists.

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Professors at odds over transport decarbonisation costs – Transport Xtra


Rhodri Clark reveals how a Welsh parliament committee session on how best to make the transition to electrification and decarbonisation sparked a difference of opinion between eminent transport professors

Two academics who advocate measures to reduce car use have expressed contrasting views over the costs of such actions.
Prof Graham Parkhurst, of the University of the West of England, told a Senedd committee hearing on bus and rail in Wales: “It’s going to be very expensive to deliver the decarbonisation of public transport, and the revenues from passengers will be a relatively small part of that
Prof John Whitelegg, visiting professor at Liverpool John Moores University, took issue with the form of words used by Parkhurst.

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