Jorge Fitz-Gibbon April 18, 2021 

Two men perished inside a Tesla Model S that authorities believe was set to autopilot with no one behind the wheel — when the car crashed into a tree in Texas and sparked a massive fire.
The deadly smash-up happened aroudn 11:30 p.m. Saturday night in The Woodlands, a neighborhood in Houston.
“Our preliminary investigation is determining — but it’s not complete yet — that there was no one at the wheel of that vehicle,” he said. “We’re almost 99.9 percent sure.”
The blaze continued to burn for hours, with firefighters pumping more than 30,000 gallons of water onto the flames before they were put out.

Adrian & Catherine and their two kids have recently given up their household car (Hackney)

Adrian: “Our car was quite old and we found we weren’t using it very much so we decided we’d try to manage without it when it was no longer road worthy, which actually happened a lot sooner than we’d hoped! But going car-free has been much easier than we expected. In fact, it’s relieved us of quite a bit of expense and stress.

Communities shouldn’t give back the street space that they reclaimed during the pandemic.
April 16, 2021The Biden administration can help to some degree, and it is saying the right things. “You should not have to own a car to prosper in this country,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweeted last month, “no matter what kind of community you’re living in.” President Joe Biden recently unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that would double federal spending on public transportation systems in cities, to $85 billion, and devote another $20 billion to improving roadway safety. It also includes $20 billion to undo the damage highways have inflicted on cities, particularly in Black neighbourhoods.

The climate emergency is bigger than many experts, elected officials, and activists realize. Humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions have overheated the Earth’s atmosphere, unleashing punishing heat waves, hurricanes, and other extreme weather – that much is widely understood.

If seas rise 20 feet over the next 2,000 years, our children and their descendants may find ways to adapt. But if seas rise 20 feet or more over the next 100 to 200 years — which is our current trajectory – the outlook is grim. In that scenario, there could be two feet of sea level rise by 2040, three feet by 2050, and much more to come.

A Met Police officer has been taken to hospital after being hit by a car while on duty in north London.
The officer was standing by a stationary police vehicle on Dartmouth Park Hill, Camden, when he was struck just before 15:00 BST.
He suffered injuries to his lower body and was taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service (LAS).
The Met said the driver fled the scene and officers are trying to trace the driver and the vehicle.

A Conservative politician has defended the abundance of wealthy residents in Central and West London who drive SUVs.
Research by two charities found that in 2019, Kensington and Chelsea residents were more likely to buy an SUV (sport utility vehicle) than people from anywhere else in the country.
This is despite their traditional association with rural motorists who need to negotiate uneven terrain, rather than cities with narrow streets and tight parking spaces.
They also emit higher levels of carbon than smaller vehicles.

France is on a serious roll with its new climate bill. We noted previously how it is banning short local flights; there is also an amendment to the bill that offers owners of old cars a grant of 2,500 euros (about $3,000) towards the purchase of an e-bike. Olivier Schneider of the French Federation of Bicycle Users tells Reuters that “For the first time it is recognized that the solution is not to make cars greener, but simply to reduce their number.”
This is not quite true, Finland has been doing this for a while, having funded over 2,000 e-bikes. But the French scheme and Schneider’s comment are still very significant. We have noted before that electric cars are not a silver bullet because of the upfront carbon emissions, or embodied carbon, released during their manufacture, and we have also asked if governments are going to subsidize electric vehicles, why not e-bikes?