News from Elsewhere

As Dom Hallas leads me towards his block of flats, he glances up at the exterior, an endless expanse of dull, brown bricks interrupted by a few tiny windows and a curious-looking zigzag design picked out in lighter stone. “It’s true,” Hallas admits, opening the heavy security door with an electronic fob. “When I tell people where I live, some do say: ‘Oh, I always thought that was Brixton prison.’”
It is an easy mistake to make. Southwyck House, only nine storeys high but almost 250 metres long, looms like a gigantic wall just outside the centre of Brixton. It is one of south London’s most obvious and, it has to be said, forbidding landmarks.
Known locally as the Barrier Block, the building looks that way for a reason. It is an almost accidental relic of an alternative history for London, one that would have made the city very different and, as most people would probably agree, significantly less appealing.
This slab of roadside frontage was designed to be not just social housing but also a vast acoustic shield, screening the neighbourhood from the deafening roar of an elevated, eight-lane urban motorway.

Oliver Milman

They are grey, rectangular and if you lumped their population of up to 2bn together they would cover roughly the same area as Connecticut, about 5,500 sq miles. Car parking spaces have a monotonous ubiquity in US life, but a growing band of cities and states are now refusing to force more upon people, arguing they harm communities and inflame the climate crisis.
These measures, along with expansive highways that cut through largely minority neighborhoods and endless suburban sprawl, have cemented cars as the default option for transportation for most Americans.
From January, though, California will become the first state to enact a ban on parking minimums, halting their use in areas with public transport in a move that governor Gavin Newsom called a “win-win” for reducing planet-heating emissions from cars, as well as helping alleviate the lack of affordable housing in a state that has lagged in building new dwellings.

“I could get going easily, I could get up the hills easily. It just didn’t feel there was any sort of limitation,” says Gemma Loveless to explain how a free month-long loan persuaded her to invest in not one but two e-cargo bikes

E-Move is a Welsh Government-funded pilot project, delivered in partnership with Sustrans, that enables people to borrow an e-bike or e-cargo bike for 30 days free of charge.
It’s currently being run in Aberystwyth, Rhyl, Barry, Swansea, Newtown and their surrounding areas with 20 e-bikes are available at each location.
E-cargo bikes are available to businesses and organisations in Aberystwyth, Swansea and Newtown for up to three months.
Sustrans’ project co-ordinator Emily Sinclair told the BBC: “Obviously it’s very hilly and the electric bikes can be a great way to bridge that gap between people that want to be travelling more sustainably but find that these hills make it impossible to do that.”

From January 2023, parking in Berlin will become more expensive – for cars. This week, the Berlin Senate passed a bill from the Senate Department for Urban Mobility outlining the new rates – but bicycles, pedelecs, cargo bikes, light motorcycles and motorcycles are excluded from any parking fee and will be able to park freely in spaces designated for car parking (“traffic areas of stationary traffic”) from next year.

“I’m no eco-warrior but I really have become a convert. I enjoy cycling past motionless traffic.” So says Shane Topley, a self-employed plumber based in West London who switched a couple of years ago to using an e-cargo bike for most of his work trips

In the past two decades, the number of vans on our roads has almost doubled. While car emissions are coming down, albeit slowly, emissions from vans are going up, with a 56 per cent increase in between 1990 and 2019, alongside the air pollution and congestion they also cause.

As Green Alliance has highlighted before, a strategy of switching to alternative modes of transport, combined with technological change, is needed to cut carbon emissions. When it comes to technology, electrification is the clear solution for vans. Electric vans can replace diesel models like for like, leading to four times fewer emissions.

The incident is believed to have taken place overnight

Cars have been smashed into and spray painted with the word ‘MOVE’ during an overnight spree of vandalism in Leigh.
Residents of Glover Street have woken up to their car windows smashed, and the word ‘MOVE’ spray painted onto it in bright yellow. Images posted in a local Facebook group show at least three cars affected.
The incident has sparked discussion about ‘pavement parking’ in the comments, with some suggesting the cars were targeted because of their placement on the pavements. But others have lashed out at the vandalism, calling it ‘appalling’.
One commenter said the way the cars are parked meant buggies and wheelchairs would not be able to get through, branding it ‘not acceptable’.