Transport Findings
December 16, 2020 AEST
The Impact of Introducing a Low Traffic Neighbourhood on Fire Service Emergency Response Times, in Waltham Forest London
Anna Goodman, Anthony A Laverty, Rachel Aldred
RESEARCH QUESTION
‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’ (LTNs) are area-based interventions that remove through motor traffic from the area’s residential streets, for example via modal filters that restrict motor vehicles while allowing pedestrians and cyclists through. In 2020, Covid-related emergency active travel funding has led to LTNs being more widely implemented across the UK (Aldred and Verlinghieri 2020).
Greta Thunberg: ‘It just spiralled out of control’ | ft.com
Leslie Hook March 31 2021
Greta Thunberg turned 18 a few months ago but occasionally she forgets that. “I actually can vote now,” she grins. But the words “we children” still sometimes slip into her sentences, out of habit. She is sanguine about the change, but it is a bigger shift than she lets on: that phrase has been a core part of her message.
$2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan Most Radical Transport Shift Since 1950s, Says President Biden – Forbes
Carlton Reid Mar 31, 2021
President Joe Biden today unveiled his $2 trillion infrastructure bill, labelling it as the American Jobs Plan. He said it was a “once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we have seen or done since we built the Interstate Highway System and won the Space Race decades ago.”
He added: “It’s big. It’s bold. And we can get it done.”
“President Biden’s [infrastructure] plan is the most visionary proposal for the nation’s transportation network since the dawn of the interstate highway system,” agreed Janette Sadik-Khan, chair of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).
Speaking from Pittsburgh, the U.S. president pledged to double transit spending, upgrade 20,000 miles of roads in a $20 billion plan to make them safer for all users—including those not in motor vehicles—and spend an additional $20 billion reconnecting neighborhoods cut off by highways; these have historically been neighborhoods where the majority of the residents have been Black.
The plan will also boost existing road safety programs and see the creation of a new Safe Streets for All program to fund state and local “vision zero” schemes which aim to reduce fatalities, especially among cyclists and pedestrians.
Aug 2020) U.K.’s ‘Low Traffic Neighborhoods’ Nothing New: Ancient Romans Blocked City Roads To Carriages – forbes
Carlton Reid Aug 26, 2020
Three stone blocks enforcing the ban on carriage traffic travelling between the Forum, ahead, and … [+]
Google Street View
“All across London a quiet, little-reported ‘war’ is raging,” claimed a writer for British political magazine Spiked Online, August 24. “Barricades and roadblocks have been erected,” continued Niall Crowley, “as council officials impose increasingly draconian measures to stop people using their cars.”
These “draconian measures” include the creation—with bollards and numberplate recognition cameras—of “Low Traffic Neighborhoods” (LTNs), where roads are closed to motorists but left open to cyclists and pedestrians.
Councils say these LTNs prevent the use of local roads as rat-runs but some die-hard motorists view such closures as attacks on driving. The co-founder of British motoring magazine Auto Express claimed on August 23 that “motorist-hating fundamentalists” were “stooping to a new low” by “temporarily banning or severely restricting cars on certain roads.”
Mike Rutherford continued that “under the cover of COVID they have struck, cynically seized their moment, tried to make the road network so bloody unbearable that car users will throw in the towel.”
19 February) Newcastle bridges consultation hijacked by ‘fake accounts’ – BBC News
19 February
Automated computer accounts have been found to have generated thousands of comments in a bid to hijack a consultation on bridge closures.
A six-month public feedback exercise on Newcastle City Council’s decision to ban traffic from five small bridges in residential areas closed on Monday.
More than 7,000 responses opposing the closures were linked to one computer server.
The council said it was a “malicious attempt” to disrupt the consultation.
Salters Bridge, Castle Farm Road bridge, Haldane Bridge, Argyle Street bridge and Stoneyhurst Bridge have been closed to vehicles since August as the council said it wanted to stop high levels of traffic cutting through residential streets.
Opponents claim it has caused congestion on surrounding roads, blocked routes for emergency vehicles and been harmful for elderly and disabled residents who rely on car travel.
Provisional COVID-19 infrastructure induces large, rapid increases in cycling | PNAS
Sebastian Kraus and Nicolas Koch
Active travel makes people healthier and creates a wide range of additional social and environmental benefits. The provision of dedicated infrastructure is considered a crucial policy to increase cycling. However, evaluating the impact of this type of intervention is difficult because infrastructure changes are typically slow. The rollout of so-called pop-up bike lanes during the COVID-19 pandemic is a unique empirical context to estimate the pull effect of new cycling infrastructure. We show that the policy has worked. We find large increases in cycling. This result is robust for a variety of empirical counterfactuals. Further research is needed to investigate whether this change is persistent and whether similar results can be achieved in situations outside the context of a pandemic.
Abstract
The bicycle is a low-cost means of transport linked to low risk of transmission of infectious disease. During the COVID-19 crisis, governments have therefore incentivised cycling by provisionally redistributing street space. We evaluate the impact of this new bicycle infrastructure on cycling traffic using a generalized difference in differences design. We scrape daily bicycle counts from 736 bicycle counters in 106 European cities. We combine these with data on announced and completed pop-up bike lane road work projects. Within 4 mo, an average of 11.5 km of provisional pop-up bike lanes have been built per city and the policy has increased cycling between 11 and 48% on average. We calculate that the new infrastructure will generate between $1 and $7 billion in health benefits per year if cycling habits are sticky.
Climate Mission Submission | Medium
It is encouraging to see the work of the CCC and it’s draft recommendations. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this. It is beyond time that we were having these important discussions and enabling the opportunity to form a more meaningful strategy for our national response to the ecocidal trajectory of climate breakdown.
The proposed methods for reducing emissions from transport are woefully inadequate and disappointing.
Replacing much of the fleet of cars in New Zealand with electric private cars is a narrow, dangerous strategy. The mode share targets in the draft report are insufficient to deliver the absolute emissions reduction aims of a net zero carbon future.
Aim higher and set some absolute targets.
A doubling of the share of people cycling by 2030 is way too low. The current growth rate in cycling is already following this trend. The advice to the government from this body should supercharge efforts in this area to enable far more than just doubling what is an abysmally low amount of 1%. The target should be at least 15% of all trips nationally by bike by 2050. This target is advised in Turning the Tide – from Cars to Active Transport which the CCC references.
Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities – The Conversation
Christian Brand March 29, 2021 3.59pm BST
Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK. Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars were electric now, it would still take
15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.
The emission savings from replacing all those internal combustion engines with zero-carbon alternatives will not feed in fast enough to make the necessary difference in the time we can spare: the next five years. Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.
This is partly because electric cars aren’t truly zero-carbon – mining the raw materials for their batteries, manufacturing them and generating the electricity they run on produces emissions.
Transport is one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonise due to its heavy fossil fuel use and reliance on carbon-intensive infrastructure – such as roads, airports and the vehicles themselves – and the way it embeds car-dependent lifestyles. One way to reduce transport emissions relatively quickly, and potentially globally, is to swap cars for cycling, e-biking and walking – active travel, as it’s called.
Rethinking London’s Red Routes: From red to green – globalcleanair
New health index highlights need to tackle air pollution from major roads
Araceli Camargo, Lab Director & Co-Founder, Centric Lab
Oliver Lord, Head of Policy and Campaigns, Environmental Defense Fund Europe
Traffic wars: who will win the battle for city streets? | The Guardian
Niamh McIntyre Thu 25 Mar 2021
Radical new plans to reduce traffic and limit our dependence on cars have sparked bitter conflict. As legal challenges escalate, will Britain’s great traffic experiment be shut down before we have time to see the benefits?
On an overcast Saturday afternoon in December, a convoy of 30 cars, led by a red Chevrolet pickup truck, set off from the car park of an east-London Asda with hazard lights flashing. The motorists, who formed a “festive motorcade”, wore Santa hats as they made their way slowly through the borough of Hackney before coming to a halt outside the town hall a couple of hours later.
They had gathered to register their outrage at being the victims, as they saw it, of a grand experiment that has been taking place on England’s roads since the start of the pandemic. As the national lockdown eased last summer, swathes of Hackney, stretching from Hoxton’s dense council estates at the borough’s western border with Islington to the edge of the River Lea marshland near Stratford in the east, had been closed to motor traffic (with exceptions made for delivery vans, residents’ cars and emergency vehicles).