:excerptstartCarlton ReidThe U.K. government looks set to scrap many of the large road schemes being planned from 2025. The DfTs top civil servant told MPs yesterday that, for financial reasons, the “headroom for new projects will be very limited.”Dame Bernadette Kelly, Permanent Secretary at the DfT, was grilled by members of the U.K. parliament’s transport committee.There are 32 schemes included […]
An interactive ‘car-free vision’ presented at Soho Road shows a way to reduce pollution and improve quality of life
“A car-free city is free of the dangers of pollution and emissions caused by mass private car ownership,” she said. “It’s not a city with no cars at all.
“There are many people – including some disabled people – who can’t get around without a car, but reducing the number of cars in cities will make their lives easier.”
Nick Fletcher, the first Tory MP to represent Don Valley in Doncaster, said that the concept stems from socialist ideology and is an infringement on individual freedom.
Speaking on Thursday, he demanded a debate on the “international socialist concept of so-called 15-minute cities”, and said that the schemes could “take away our personal freedom”.
“Sheffield is already on this journey and I do not want Doncaster, which is also a Labour-run socialist council, to do the same,” he added. Fletcher’s demand for the debate is yet to be realised and he was greeted with laughs and jeers in the House of Commons.
The group was commenting on changes to the Welsh Transport Appraisal Guidance (WelTAG) which may prove to be a pathfinder for changes to appraisal guidance elsewhere. The Welsh Government is overhauling WelTAG so that the guidance better reflects its commitments on climate change and in other policy areas.
When I’m cycling with my 15-year-old, I like him to go in front so I can see him, and he likes me to go in front, so he doesn’t have to make a judgment call about whether to overtake buses. We both like to spend the first five minutes of any journey arguing this point, to the extent that we lose any time advantage conferred by the bikes in the first place. On shorter journeys, it would definitely be quicker to walk. It’s not a bad parable for the maternal experience: you worry about them and think of it as altruism, but to them, it looks like you are ferociously prioritising yourself, fuming, “You go in front, you nitwit”, before eventually surrendering. This is why people can’t stand their mothers, then feel bad about it. This is what keeps psychoanalysts in business, and also Moonpig.
Met highlights big fall in anti-social behaviour in Tower Hamlets area where council wants to ditch Liveable Streets scheme
The appeal was made in their response to a consultation into removing the low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) scheme around Arnold Circus on the fringes of the popular night-time area of Shoreditch.
The Arnold Circus Liveable Streets initiative was put in place in 2021, along with similar initiatives elsewhere in the borough, with the council controlled by Labour at the time.
In last May’s local elections, however, the Aspire Party won 24 of the 45 seats and since then the borough’s pro-car Mayor Lutfur Rahman has been rolling back initiatives aimed at reducing motor vehicle traffic and promoting active travel.
It is “highly likely” that boundary roads will remain polluted, unsafe, or difficult to cross or cycle on, the report warns. “Removing LTNs is unlikely to alleviate these issues so it is vital for local authorities to consider other measures that could. For instance, expanding low emission zones, road user charging, increasing the number of bus lanes and public transport provision, urban greenery, widening pavements, and protected cycle lanes could all make a contribution.”
British people appear to have an in-built acceptance of risks and harms from motor vehicles that they would not accept in other parts of life, a study has discovered, with potentially widespread repercussions for how policy decisions are made.
Such is the cultural ubiquity of these assumptions, described by the researchers as “motonormativity”, that politicians are less likely to try to tackle issues such as pollution from vehicles or poor driving, they warned.
25th January Andrew Napier
It happened 30 years ago and now the memories have inspired a book of poetry.
Emma Must was a young librarian in Winchester when the construction of the M3 through Twyford Down started in 1992.
She joined the campaign to stop the work and was so committed that she was jailed for contempt of court.
Now decades later The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday is a poetic account of that unsuccessful battle but which in the long-run helped persuade the Government to abandon much of its road building programme.
