Nov. 25, 2021
Chris Hayes and opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang discuss how electric bikes could help save the planet—and why cities should be giving them away for free.

Hounslow’s Hanif Khan 03 December 2021
Hounslow Councils’ cabinet member for transport told delegates at the Local Transport Summit how re-discovering the joys of cycling has improved his health and the quality of his life.

“In my childhood I liked cycling around – it gave me a bit of freedom. But then I stopped and didn’t touch my cycle for 30 years,” said Cllr Hanif Khan.
He said he saw using his car as more convenient, even for short journeys, and got into the habit of eating in his car. 

Nissan’s former chief planning officer Andy Palmer, poses with the company’s new commercial electric
Zero tailpipe emissions and net-zero are not the same things, says Andy Palmer, the veteran automotive executive responsible for launching Nissan LEAF, the world’s first mass-market electric car.

“Policymakers haven’t grasped this [fact] yet,” he said at a COP26 fringe event in Glasgow.
“I see the terminology of zero emissions being misunderstood over and over again,” he told the event, co-sponsored by Autotrader magazine.
“If you buy an electric vehicle, you’re not buying a zero-emission vehicle,” he stressed.
“It takes about 70% more carbon to build an electric vehicle than it does an internal combustion vehicle.”

James Harris11 hr ago

The concept of expertise has become a tricky one; how do you identify it across a sea of competing voices? How do you identify experts when everyone has the capacity to set themselves up with an online megaphone? It’s worth saying though that, although many people want to establish their own personal internet publishing brand, the majority of don’t, and remain instead happy to trust to expertise. The daily SAGE briefings in the pandemic demonstrate this. Who amongst us does not feel reassured and oriented by those dull men and their PowerPoints? But that’s in a crisis. Outside of one, such expertise is rarely given such a public platform, and in areas where there is less public interest, consensus can easily form around more ill-considered positions. For less sensational debates, the difficulty is that the only people who feel strongly enough to try and convince others are those with extreme views, which means that quite easily a marginal opinion becomes the default one for a person who takes just enough interest in a thing to make conversation.

The case for building a road tunnel near Stonehenge is to be re-examined despite a judge overturning planning permission for it last year. 
Campaigners fighting the £1.7billion plans celebrated when the decision to approve the scheme was quashed.
But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has now published a “statement of matters” inviting the case for the two-mile tunnel to be made again.
National Highways said it was “pleased” the scheme could be re-examined.
It wants to build the tunnel, which has the backing of Wiltshire Council, to reduce traffic and cut journey times on the A303, the most direct route for motorists travelling between the South East and South West.

Mark Sweney and Sarah Butler
TfL has halted an ad campaign promoting road safety that featured a driver and cyclist making up after the latter was almost hit, following a backlash accusing the ad of “victim blaming”.

The TfL campaign, called See Their Side, was launched during Road Safety Week last month as part of the London mayor Sadiq Khan’s long-term goal of having no deaths and serious injuries on the capital’s roads by 2041.
TfL had planned that the campaign, which includes a 60-second television ad that has already been showing on channels including ITV, would run for “a number of years”, but a backlash has prompted the mayor’s cycling and walking commissioner to pause it.