Erik Kirschbaum – Copenhagen
Soren Jensen sold his car six years ago and joined the rivers of rolling humanity who bicycle through Copenhagen every day. He quickly lost about 50 pounds on his hour-a-day bike commutes, while saving time and a small fortune.

07/01/21
One legacy of lock-down has been the boost it gave to cycling and walking; now we are almost back to normal what’s has been done to sustain the boom ? The UK’s biggest cycling and pedestrian lobby groups tell us what’s on their agenda for 2022.

7 January, 2022
Temporary Spaces for People schemes, introduced to Scotland during the 2020 Covid lockdown, delivered some impressive outcomes. Taking a broad overview of the measures:
Scale

The Spaces for People programme, funded by the Scottish Government, managed by Sustrans Scotland, oversaw installation of 178 interventions within the first two months of the programme, with 316 installed by the end of the first six months.
Walking and Cycling impact
Sustrans has revealed 94% of survey respondents in Aberdeen City agreed that the Spaces for People measures have made it easier to walk or cycle. Also reported, a 25% increase in pedestrian use where Spaces for People measures (such as pavement widening) were introduced, when compared with control sites.

Ryan Mallon 4/1/22
Complaints about a BBC report which blamed London’s position as the world’s most congested city on an increase in cycle lanes have led the broadcaster to amend the article to “better reflect the range of factors impacting congestion in London”.
In early December traffic firm Inrix named the UK capital as the city in which motorists lost the most time stuck in traffic jams last year in its Global Traffic Scorecard (link is external). “Incredibly simplistic” to blame cycle lanes for London being named world’s most congested city
While Inrix operations director Peter Lees attributed the rise in congestion to the city’s rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, many mainstream media outlets, including the BBC, preferred to focus on Lees’ claim that the reallocation of road space for pedestrians and cyclists in response to the Covid crisis had a “negative impact” on traffic in the capital.

@_dmoser Replying to @_dmoser
 Air Pollution is responsible for 1 out of 9 lives lost every year! We can solve this. It’s our obligation to do so. @attn

Gemma Toulson – Nottingham Post

@jdavey_2
Glaciers are melting faster than cities are adding zero-emissions cycling infrastructure.
Because “people don’t like sudden changes”

There is a pothole on the Bristol Road just north of Nailsea, north Somerset, which I cycled over at about 30mph back in June. It casually blew out both my tyres; somehow I managed to skid, on my two flats, to a stop. It is in moments like this that your vulnerability as a cyclist comes into focus, and you realise how little there is between you and death: a bit of plastic on your head, a thin bit of Lycra, your wits and skill on the bike.

Peter Kalmus
The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.
The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Dibiasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.