The coronavirus lockdowns created a cycling boom in England, with record numbers of people out on their bikes to get exercise and fresh air.
However, official data from the Department of Transport also shows that many more cyclists died on rural roads in 2020 than in the previous two years.
89 people lost their lives on countryside roads last year – up by almost 50% from 60 fatalities in 2019.
In 2018, 48 cyclists were killed on rural roads.
This was despite fewer vehicles using rural routes, and a marked drop in the amount of traffic during the pandemic restrictions.

Jessica Murray
They cut speed limits, changed street design, removed space for cars and generally made life harder for motorists.
Now it appears the work is paying off. Two of Europe’s smaller capital cities – Oslo and Helsinki – are reaping the rewards of committed action on making their roads safer, reducing pedestrian fatalities to zero last year.
Helsinki recorded no deaths for the first time since records began in 1960, down from an average of 20-30 a year in the 1990s. In Oslo, there were also no pedestrian or cyclist deaths in the city, which has a population of 680,000, and no children under 16 died in traffic crashes in the entire country.
In comparison, 57 pedestrians died in London in 2018; 2019 figures have yet to be released.
The Nordic achievements beg the question: what did they do to achieve such dramatic improvements?

Gemma Bowes
A new train ticketing platform launching today is promising to plant a tree for every booking, which it hopes will appeal to passengers who care about climate change. Trainhugger says it will use 50p out of each £1.50 booking fee to pay for a young tree, in partnership with the Royal Forestry Society and Royal Scottish Forestry Society.
The website will sell the same UK routes and fares as other rail websites, such as Trainline, which charges a web booking fee of 80p-£1.75 per ticket (and advance booking fees of 35p-£1.75, free on day of travel). Passengers who book directly with a rail provider such as Southern or Virgin don’t usually pay a booking fee, but Trainhugger’s founders believe they will be able to win enough business from its rivals to make a considerable contribution towards combating climate change. They hope to plant 10 million trees by 2025.

Vans, up by 71% since 1996, are the fastest growing vehicle type in UK. They are nearly all diesel-powered and share the same nitrogen dioxide exhaust problems as diesel cars.
In 2015, 73% of UK adults did Christmas shopping online and 88% of these used home deliveries, causing concerns about traffic pollution. 
However most of the increase in vans pre-dates internet shopping. Van growth since 2006 was 23%, much less than the decade before. In 2008 most vans were used to transport equipment, perhaps reflecting changes in self-employment. 

There are obviously many mediums through which we can draw, but I tend to use CAD (computer aided design) or hand drawn sketches. For this blog, Microsoft Paint was originally my go to package for quick little diagrams, but once you had committed yourself, editing became tricky. I use the industry-standard AutoCAD for work, but it is incredibly expensive and certainly out of reach for the enthusiast and indeed small business. Luckily, I found NanoCAD a few years back which has a free version that I tend to use for most of my drawings for this blog as well as it being my tool of choice for freelance work I undertake as City Infinity.

Gary Fuller
Improving the air that we breathe is an opportunity for our politicians to save lives and for each of us to have better health.
In September the World Health Organization (WHO) revised its guidelines for air quality. Following this announcement, two studies have estimated the health benefits from implementing these guidelines across Europe.
The first study came from the European Environment Agency. It found at least 177,300 early deaths in 2019 could have been avoided if EU countries met the new WHO guidelines. The UK would have saved 17,200 people in 2019, representing nearly half of the 35,700 pollution-related deaths that year.

Write to your council’s transport lead
Blah, blah, blah
On Saturday evening, Alok Sharma’s gavel came down to end COP26. Delegates and the media went home, and Glasgow started getting back to normal.

People in cities often choose how to travel based on how long it will take. In recent years, navigation apps such as Google Maps and CityMapper have enabled people to decide between various modes of transport by seeing which one most quickly gets them where they want to go.
Cities of course have long dedicated a disproportionate amount of space to cars. Although in some parts of the global north – and in certain demographics – car use is declining, elsewhere it has, unsurprisingly, increased.
In a recent study, we modelled what would happen to average travelling times in a city if people were given only one other option – using the car or using another mode of transport – and if they acted only in their own interest (getting to their destination as fast as possible).
We wanted to see what would happen if everyone acted selfishly. How would that compare, we wondered, with a theoretical case in which people chose their mode to minimise travel times for society as a whole and not only for themselves.