News from Elsewhere

A study into road safety behaviours surrounding the overtaking tendencies of motorists has concluded that a wider berth is given to cyclists seen to be carrying a child.
Dubbed The impact of a child bike seat and trailer on the objective overtaking behaviour of motorized vehicles passing cyclists the research sought to understand what effect on passing motorist the carriage of a child had on passing distance.
Compiling data from 19 cycling journeys on a single road with variables including time of day, type of child seat or trailer, infrastructure provision and traffic density, the findings were very clear, with a mean lateral clearance over ten centimetres larger where a child was present. The mean lateral overtake distance with a child was 128.8cm, versus 117.3cm without.

Stefano ValentinoWed 21 Oct 2020 07.00 BST
The health costs of air pollution from roads are higher in London than any other city in Europe, a study has found.
Two other urban areas in the UK, Manchester and the West Midlands, have the 15th and 19th highest costs respectively among the 432 European cities analysed.
The research puts a figure on the social costs of car emissions at local level at an unprecedented number of sites across 30 countries – the EU27 plus the UK, Norway and Switzerland.
The costs measure the overall erosion of public welfare, defined as living a long and healthy life in a clean environment. The research quantifies the monetary value of premature death, hospital treatment, lost working days and other health costs caused by particulate matter, ozone and nitrogen dioxide. Indoor air pollution was not taken into account.

Advertisements for new ride hailing app Bolt are now present in many of London’s tube stations, but increasingly it’s the firm’s electric scooter hire that customers are seeking for short journeys.
Research by the firm, whose electric scooter hire arm is not yet in the UK, has found that 50.4% of the 1,800 customers surveyed would choose an electric scooter over a private-hire vehicle for journeys ranging up to five miles in distance.

Agence France-PresseLast modified on Tue 20 Oct 2020 21.22 BST
A young woman has been arrested in central Iran for “insulting the Islamic hijab”, state media said on Tuesday, after a video appeared to show her cycling without a veil.
“A person who had recently violated norms and insulted the Islamic veil in this region has been arrested,” Mojataba Raei, the governor of Najafabad, told the IRNA news agency.

Peter WalkerLast modified on Wed 21 Oct 2020

MPs are to hear evidence on road safety from a campaign group that dismisses warnings about global heating and wants higher speed limits and fewer cycle lanes, prompting alarm from environmental and active travel organisations.
The Commons transport committee will take oral evidence on Wednesday from the Alliance of British Drivers (ABD), which says it represents mainstream views but accepts its membership is “tiny” as a proportion of drivers.
The ABD’s formal position is that human-created global heating is a myth, and that many concerns about the health impact of vehicle pollution represent “scaremongering”.
ABD’s policies include raising all speed limits to 85% of actual average speeds and abolishing urban 20mph zones. It believes that cycling and walking are “not a credible transport policy”.
In May, the ABD’s official Twitter feed argued that the UN and other groups “have been captured by One World Global Marxist sympathisers, whose gradual aim is to gradually pauperise and depopulate the west and the developing world”.

Oct 20, 2020,

As part of her campaign to be re-elected as Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo pledged to carve out more space on the streets of her adopted city for pedestrians and cyclists. She said she would do this, in large part, by removing car parking spaces. 

On January 29, Hidalgo revealed at an election hustings (the first round of voting took place in March) that the space required to make Paris more people friendly would come at the expense of motoring. She told electors she would remove the great majority of the on-street car parking spaces in Paris. And despite car parking being the supposed “third rail” of urban politics—touch it at your peril—she comfortably won a second term.