Richard Masoner 25 February, 2014

Petition update 9 Mar 2022 — 
The Secretary of State for Transport wants to make a new decision on the Stonehenge road scheme. He first asked National Highways for responses to five matters he wishes to consider i.e.  Alternatives, Policy, Carbon, Environmental Information and Any Other Matters. 
National Highways has responded. (See “Documents” tab in this link) and the Secretary of State for Transport has now invited comments on those submissions and any other relevant information.
The submissions by National Highways are technical and lengthy.  The Stonehenge Alliance and its expert advisers are preparing a full technical response which we will share in due course.
However, it is important that the Secretary of State for Transport hears from the wider public on these issues.  We’re therefore asking as many people to respond as possible, to raise some or all of the points below.

3/3/22 Simon Cox
Having estimated the cycling sector could potentially create upwards of 100,000 jobs by 2050, French government minister Guillaume Gouffier-Cha has been tasked with exploring possibilities to “rebuild an economic sector of cycling”.
This comes after a December 2019 conversation with French Prime Minister Jean Castex, which resulted in a request to assess the impact of cycling on the economy, the environment, and a wider French society.
For historical context Guillaume Gouffier-Cha states, “At the end of the 1970s our country was one of the world leaders in the bicycle industry. Everything collapsed in the space of a few years to the detriment of an almost total dependence on Asian countries.”

The information National Highways wants to present to you, to persuade you to support this damaging development, with dates for local exhibitions, some of them staffed by National Highways’ staff and consultants, can be found on their Arundel webpage www.nationalhighways.co.uk/our-work/south-east/a27-arundel-bypass.  Our recommended way to respond is to send your own comments in your own words either via email or post:

About 40 residents of Kensington and Chelsea, Dulwich, Primrose Hill and Marylebone wake to find their tyres flat
Helena Horton
The cars have been issued with fake ‘parking fines’ on their windscreens informing them that ‘if SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have been ranked as the seventh biggest emitter of CO2’. Photograph: The Last Gasp
Climate activists have deflated the tyres of SUVs in some of London’s wealthiest postcodes to protest against the emissions from such vehicles.
About 40 SUV-owning residents of Kensington and Chelsea, Dulwich, Primrose Hill and Marylebone woke to find their tyres flat, with fake “parking fines” on their windscreens informing them that “if SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have been ranked as the seventh biggest emitter of CO2”.
The cars are often nicknamed “Chelsea tractors”, since although the vehicles were originally intended to be used on difficult terrain, they have become ubiquitous in well-off urban areas.
A recent study found that three-quarters of the 360,000 SUVs sold in 2019 in the UK were bought by people living in towns and cities, and the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea is in the top three districts for the sale of large SUVs. 

Please sign our Petition to Save Arundel’s Countryside by rejecting National Highways’ Grey Route for the A27 Arundel Bypass and preferring the Arundel Alternative. 
• RECOMMEND that another option, less damaging to countryside and villages, should be preferred by the Department for Transport: the Arundel Alternative, a short, wide-single carriageway bypass. The Arundel Alternative provides all we need to keep traffic sufficiently moving – and it doesn’t cost the earth. Reasons: 
• The Grey route, Highways England’s fourth attempt at a long new Preferred Route for the A27 around Arundel, is disproportionately expensive and damaging.
• The 8km dual new Grey Route will cause local species extinctions, wreck local rural communities, and make the climate and environment emergency worse.
• The Arundel Alternative is affordable and supported by the environmental organizations
• I care about future generations, species loss and climate change

Peter Walker, Adam Barnett and Rich Collett-White Wed 2 Mar 2022
A lobbyist who has worked with Conservative MPs to argue that the development of as yet unproven fuel additives means it is unnecessary to phase out petrol and diesel engines is the director of a firm developing such products, it has emerged.
Howard Cox, who runs the FairFuelUK campaign, is heavily involved with the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on fair fuel, which recommended last year that ministers urgently look at fuel additives, saying these reduced emissions by more than 50%.
Cox is one of two directors of a company called Ultimum, which markets an additive that it describes as “the 21st-century vehicle emissions solution”.
The other Ultimum director is the former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik..
Craig Mackinlay, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party group on fair fuel, also heads the new Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), which climate scientists have accused of seeking to derail green policies.

Thor Hanson
When Did You Last Clean Bug Splatter Off Your Windshield?
It’s probably been awhile — and that’s a problem, Oliver Milman writes in his new book, “The Insect Crisis.”
March 5, 2022
Anyone with a car has gathered data on insect declines. Entomologists call it “the windshield effect,” a relatable metric neatly summed up by a question: When was the last time you had to clean bug splatter from your windshield? This ritual was once an inevitable coda to any long drive. Now, we’re far more likely to watch those same landscapes pass by through unblemished glass, mile after empty mile.
The trend is more than anecdotal. When the ecologist Anders Pape Møller began systematically driving two Danish roads in 1996 and counting the windshield splats, many people dismissed his project as a lark. Twenty years later, the results showed something deadly serious: Collisions with insects had declined 80 percent along the first roadway, and a staggering 97 percent along the second.