Author name: Steven Edwards

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Please take the Bloomsbury2030 SuperBlock survey – London’s first pedestrian priority SuperBlock? — London Car Free Day

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We were thrilled to start 2021 by collaborating with the Great Ormond Street Hospital and Bloomsbury Air on a new project to reimagine the future of Bloomsbury as London’s first pedestrian-priority neighbourhood that places young people, environmental and social resilience, and active mobility at the heart of urban design. The project brings together young patients at GOSH, artists, architects, planners and other community stakeholders to re-imagine what Bloomsbury could look like if pedestrians, shared public realm & an ambitious landscaping strategy were prioritised this year.
On 29 April 2021 we ran an online roundtable to discuss how Bloomsbury could build on international examples including Barcelona’s SuperBlock concept, Milan’s conversion of road space into public plazas, and the traffic-free city centre ambitions of Paris, Oslo, and Edinburgh. What would it take to turn Bloomsbury into London’s first pedestrian-priority, landscaped neighbourhood? 
Please take the Bloomsbury2030 SuperBlock survey below. We will launch the survey results and an update on the project at this year’s World Car Free Day Summit SuperBlock session on 21 September. In the meantime, please stay tuned for more updates and do share your ideas with us on social media #Bloomsbury2030.

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After the failure of Cop26, there’s only one last hope for our survival | George Monbiot | The Guardian

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Our “clean, green” transport revolution is being built with the help of blood cobalt, blood lithium and blood copper. Though the emissions of both carbon dioxide and local pollutants will undoubtedly fall, we are still left with a stupid, dysfunctional transport system that clogs the streets with one-tonne metal boxes in which single people travel. New roads will still carve up rainforests and other threatened places, catalysing new waves of destruction.
A genuinely green transport system would involve system change of a different kind. It would start by reducing the need to travel – as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is doing with her 15-minute city policy, which seeks to ensure that people’s needs can be met within a 15-minute walk from homes.

It would encourage walking and cycling by all who are able to do so, helping to address our health crisis as well as our environmental crisis. For longer journeys, it would prioritise public transport. Private electric vehicles would be used to address only the residue of the problem: providing transport for those who could not travel by other means. But simply flipping the system from fossil to electric cars preserves everything that’s wrong with the way we now travel, except the power source.
It is not hard to envisage a low-carbon economy in which everything else falls apart. The end of fossil fuels will not, by itself, prevent the extinction crisis, the deforestation crisis, the soils crisis, the freshwater crisis, the consumption crisis, the waste crisis; the crisis of smashing and grabbing, accumulating and discarding that will destroy our prospects and much of the rest of life on Earth. So we also need to use the properties of complex systems to trigger another shift: political change.

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Pedalling back to childhood dreams | Cycling | The Guardian

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Seeing Grayson Perry sitting astride his motorbike (Grayson Perry on art, cats – and the meaning of life, 9 November), I was immediately reminded of the Triumph Pink Witch bicycle of my youth as it also was pink and turquoise. How I longed for one! I was lucky enough to be given a new bicycle for my 11th birthday. There was not a lot of money around, and I was thrilled to have it, but I always coveted the Pink Witch!

Jill Hughes Cranbrook, Kent

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We Can’t Stop Climate Change Without a Transport Revolution – Tribune

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06.11.2021

To combat climate change, we need to decarbonise all sectors of society as quickly as possible. At 27%, transport is the UK’s largest emitter of CO2, compared with 16% globally. It is also the sector that is decarbonising the slowest, at just -5% since 1990

The bulk of the emissions come from our dominant mode of transport: cars. The dominance is so complete that many of us reflexively get into our cars, without considering alternatives, even when more than half the time we drive alone, and as 60% of our trips are shorter than four miles.
The dominance of cars is in part the result of an ideology that pushes aside social and environmental consequences. Motor manufacturing became the most important industry of the 1950s and 60s, largely because its significant exports helped to stabilise the post-war economy, and it grew domestic consumption.
New advertising techniques created attachments to cars, driving so-called consumer demand. Car ownership became, for a time, a marker of affluence. By 1970, the motor industry and road haulage association, together with the AA and RAC, had become the most influential lobbying block in parliament. They still have significant influence today.

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Mile-long rural bypass is first casualty of Welsh roads review – transportxtra

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Rhodri Clark 17 November 2021
A mile-long bypass in rural Gwynedd has become the first casualty of Wales’ review of road schemes. The rationale for abandoning the scheme signifies a major shift in how road proposals will be assessed and developed in the future, with greater prominence for land-use planning and carbon.
The Welsh Government announced in June (LTT 28 June) that it would subject all road schemes where construction work had not commenced to a review. Deputy climate change minister Lee Waters told LTT the review’s main significance was not for current proposals but all future ones, and said that Wales might build no more bypasses.

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Zebras on side roads ‘change driver behaviour’ – transportxtra

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Deniz Huseyin 17 November 2021
Side road zebra crossing trial in Moss Side, Manchester 
The presence of zebra markings on side roads in Greater Manchester resulted drivers giving way to pedestrians 65% more often than on other side roads, according to a study by TRL.
The results showed that vehicles giving way to people on foot went up from 4 in 10 to 7 in 10 when the zebra markings were in place. 
TRL looked at the use of non-prescribed zebra crossings at side roads. A prescribed zebra crossing has black and white stripes with give way lines, yellow globes on striped posts, and a line of studs and zigzag markings. A non-prescribed zebra crossing uses the black and white markings without the other features. Until now, the DfT has stated that under UK law zebra crossings must be wired to the electric mains and have Belisha beacons and zigzag markings.  Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) is asking for regulations to be amended to allow non-prescribed zebra crossings at a larger number of sites for long-term monitoring. 

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