An online community questions society’s obsession with automobiles.

July 20, 2022
Jason Slaughter began making YouTube videos to document his family’s move from Toronto to Amsterdam a few years ago. That’s how the 45-year-old IT professional became an inadvertent hero of the growing anti-car movement online.
Posting to his orange-themed channel, Slaughter focused on the differences between transportation in North America and the Netherlands, which he chose for its car-free lifestyle. One video details a short but treacherous walk in Houston that required pedestrians to inch over a bridge with little separating them and speeding traffic.
The 17-minute video, which was uploaded about a year ago, struck a nerve with r/fuckcars, a vehemently anti-automobile Reddit community advocating for urban design that’s less reliant on driving.

A woman who drove a 4×4 vehicle into children and parents outside a primary school in south-west London has tearfully apologised to those injured.
A group outside Beatrix Potter Primary School, in Earlsfield, was hit by the 4×4 driven by 39-year-old Dolly Rincon-Aguilar in September 2020.
Kingston Crown Court heard she had pressed the accelerator not the brake.
The jury is considering its verdicts on eight counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, which she denies.
Jurors were told the green Rav4 vehicle had mounted the pavement, hit a tree and then a wall before accelerating to the school entrance where the group of parents and children were standing.
Eleven people, including seven children, were treated at the scene, with four adults and five children taken to hospital. Two children were later discharged.

The year is 2025. There are no cars, only public transport and bicycles. Four-lane highways have been replaced by bike paths. Pedestrians share the pavements with cyclists. The air is clean (because the buses are electric), and the living is easy.

This is the future the Numtots want.
Predominantly millennials with a passion for public transport, urban planning and internet humour, Numtots’ interests intersect in New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, the Facebook group from which they derive their nickname. There, nearly 100,000 of them discuss and debate their perfect city, or transit lines in their area, or perpendicular traffic flow and improvisational vehicle pathing.

In the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather incidents, transport funding may have to be re-prioritised in preparation for “catastrophic disruptive events,” transport academic Greg Marsden has warned

He made his comments after temperatures rose above 40°C in in some parts of the UK on 18 and 19 July. Rail services were heavily impacted after rails buckled and overhead wire systems failed. A new record rail temperature of 62°C was recorded in Suffolk. This is over 20°C above recorded air temperatures.
Marsden, a professor of transport governance at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, told LTT: “Given the size of our networks and the increasing unpredictability of extremes in weather we can only adapt small parts of the network. These are likely to be those most frequently impacted or where there are no meaningful alternatives and where wider system resilience is low.”

In its report, the CCC, an independent statutory body, applauded the Government’s ambition on climate change, but was very critical on the lack of delivery and progress in many areas, including transport. It also made a number of new recommendations, including the need for targets for reducing car travel. It noted that both Scotland and Wales had adopted such targets and saw this as important in bringing about immediate carbon reductions while the vehicle fleet is still transitioning to electric vehicles (which of course is no silver bullet).

Everything is far from perfect nowadays, but we all understand that many years ago industrial safety was seen very differently. We’ve heard about how many people were killed while building a famous bridge, or a tall building. We know that it was much more common for people in factories to lose arms or fingers.