Toronto City Council Removes Most Minimum Parking Requirements
The parking reform movement has a major new feather in its cap: the Toronto City Council has this week adopted sweeping changes to the parking requirements of the city’s zoning bylaws. www.planetizen.com
Drivers of luxury cars found to give pedestrians the right of way 3x less than those driving less expensive vehicles – Taras Grescoe – Twitter
@grescoe
STUDY: Drivers of luxury cars found to give pedestrians the right of way 3x less than those driving less expensive vehicles; 4x more likely to cut off other drivers. Call it the “Audi Effect.”
The Othering of Cyclists – Medium
Karen Liebreich
Everyone loves a good scapegoat. When your business is faltering because of Covid, or your shop is losing trade because of the internet, or when you simply can’t turn left outside your house as you have done for the last twenty years to drive to your local shops — blame cyclists. When you’re stuck in traffic and someone sweeps past without a care in the world (and without paying for road tax or insurance) — blame cyclists.
Urban Age Debates: Cities in the 2020s | Localising Transport – Youtube
May 21, 2021
Live Event Recording | Urban Age Debates: Cities in the 2020s Localising Transport: towards the 15-minute city or the one-hour metropolis? Hosted by LSE Cities, the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and the LSE School of Public Policy For urban transport, the early 2020s are going to be an inflection point hard to overestimate: digital connectivity will increasingly substitute physical access, public transport finance will require new business models, and fiscal recovery packages have the potential to either entrench transport-intense urban development or accelerate progress towards urban patterns based on density and mixed use.
Public must be told about Highway Code changes, says Cycling UK – road.cc
Simon MacMichael Thu, Dec 30, 2021
Cycling UK has urged the government to launch a properly funded and ongoing awareness campaign over changes to the Highway Code due to come into effect at the end of January, with the charity saying that “now is the time to right the misunderstanding on our roads.”
> Highway Code changes aimed at protecting cyclists to become law next month
The changes, primarily aimed at protecting vulnerable road users including cyclists, were drawn up following a consultation held by the Department for Transport (DfT) last year.
But the charity says that without people being made aware of the changes, and what they aim to achieve, the revised Highway Code will only be of “limited benefit.”
> Highway Code changes aimed at protecting cyclists to become law next month
The changes, primarily aimed at protecting vulnerable road users including cyclists, were drawn up following a consultation held by the Department for Transport (DfT) last year.
But the charity says that without people being made aware of the changes, and what they aim to achieve, the revised Highway Code will only be of “limited benefit.”
“It’s the most profound issue in the history of civilisation and it requires a complete transformation of everything we do from top to bottom.” You’re calling for system change @LeoDiCaprio – Extinction Rebellion – Twitter
Extinction Rebellion @ExtinctionR
“It’s the most profound issue in the history of civilisation and it requires a complete transformation of everything we do from top to bottom.” You’re calling for system change @LeoDiCaprio but you’re not going to get it by voting.
#CivilResistanceNow
Andreas Malm interview: Why climate protesters need to embrace unrest | New Scientist
Given the scale of threat and the size of the organisations they are fighting, climate activists must move beyond civil disobedience to property destruction and even sabotage, says controversial campaigner Andreas Malm
Environment 27 October 2021
By Rowan Hooper
WHAT is it about Sweden and climate campaigners? It has produced Greta Thunberg, of course, but also Andreas Malm, a writer and human ecologist at Lund University and a long-time climate activist. You might think of him as Greta turned up to 11. His controversial new book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to fight in a world on fire, has a deliberately provocative title, but in it he makes the point that escalating environmental protests, from mass civil disobedience to property destruction and even sabotage, look necessary.
Rowan Hooper: Your book isn’t a manual about how to literally …
Electric vehicles — the political cop-out – Financial Times
Cameron Allen December 19 2021
This article is part of the Financial Times free schools access programme. Details/registration here. Students were asked to write on how transport changes for either food or people might help the world to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.Most people believe the future of transport is electric vehicles. Their uptake has been increasing rapidly and governments are starting to create policies to encourage their use. But they are a cop-out which avoids difficult decisions by governments.
From a political standpoint, EVs are very easy to implement. They require no change in culture, comparatively little investment from central government and use existing road infrastructure. Most importantly, their adoption makes governments seem environmentally friendly.
The End of [car parks] – The Urbanist – Medium
Eric Carlson Is it time to change the face of parking in the U.S.?
“It’s no secret in the development world that parking lots are just land banks just waiting to be turned into something else…”
Eric Scharnhorst, Data Scientist at Parking Mill
One byproduct of the time the United States has spent in quarantine are the empty roads, parking lots, and parking garages. All of a sudden, people are driving, parking, and moving around less.
One of the few benefits of this crisis is that cities once clogged by pollution have seen clear skies and better air. Places choked with traffic and road rage are now wide open and generally less busy. Once full parking lots in urban areas are now just strange, empty swaths of asphalt gleaming in the sun.
An extreme example of this is one particular city in India, where residents saw mountains in the distance that some lifelong residents of the area had never seen before. The Himalayan mountain range had been obscured for nearly 30 years by pollution:
Pity the poor, oppressed driver forced to share their roads with the rest of us | Catherine Bennett | The Guardian
Reports from the frontline of the war on motorists have made distressing reading for some vehicle owners. With low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) surviving both physical and media assault, improved protections for pedestrians and cyclists in a revised Highway Code will weaken still further, they discover, a right to road domination long understood to be, if not divinely ordained, something even better: unassailable.
Membership
