Let's treat the unnecessary harms massive SUVs cause bystanders like we treat the harms caused by smoking, ie doing everything we can to limit the sales of these awful machines through taxes and regulation

I really noticed how many adoring shots of these horrific vehicles there were. Totally gratuitous.

Age yourself with gaming

So important to call out all of this "balanced" news reporting for what it is increasingly becoming (or indeed has been for a good while): client journalism.

@bmj.com, a renowned health journal, slams car bloat: "Cars are becoming steadily larger, [and] with this comes potential harms to health...Action is needed locally, nationally, and internationally to curb sales of new SUVs and to reduce their presence in urban areas." www.bmj.com/content/391/...

Led ride around Hackney this Sunday, starting at 11am from the Rio Cinema. Taking in a good portion of the borough and its cycleways / LTNs. Weather is looking, quite frankly, ridiculously good for November! See the link below to sign up:

Streetsfilms follows an urban planner around the “low-traffic neighborhood” of St. Peter’s in the London borough of Islington.

Why not tell drivers: "Take more care now conditions are more difficult because you can cause serious harm".. It is not a difficult message to convey, but don't think I've ever seen it. No, it's the kids who must be taught that they must keep themselves safe from adults who might harm them

A typical European car is parked 92% of the time. It spends 1/5th of its driving time looking for parking. Its 5 seats only move 1.5 people. 86% of its fuel never reaches the wheels, and most of the energy that does, moves the car, not the people. Sound efficient? HT @ellenmacarthurfdn.bsky.social

Which is better?

It’s that time of year again when “safety” organisations crack out their victim blaming campaigns telling pedestrians and people on bikes to dress for battle rather than their destination and wear high vis clothing to be seen instead of focusing on the real source of danger - drivers.

Camden and Islington embarrassing Hackney by doing the necessary to keep people on bikes safe from the main causes of death and injury at junctions. The Pembury Circus scheme should shame all those involved in its implementation.

Your occasional reminder that opposing #ActiveTravel is a really poor choice of wedge issue to run on.

"The appeal of endurance sports isn’t just getting somewhere that it would have been quicker to travel to in a machine. It’s about becoming the sort of person who can run [far] despite the physical toll and hardship. Our efforts may not always change the world, but they often change ourselves."

This would, at a stroke, improve our high streets immeasurably.

My kids have never said "yay!, let's go in the car", whereas they love hopping on the cargo bike

Beautifully put

This. If they aren't fucking *looking*, it doesn't matter what radioactive nonsense you're wearing.

I really hope this is a feature of the upcoming Hackney transport strategy... The double parked roads near me are getting narrower each year as the SUVs swell in size😳 Over to you @sarahwoodberrydown.bsky.social 🤞

Bravo Cardiff. “It’s only fair that those driving the biggest, heaviest and most polluting vehicles pay more for the extra space and danger they bring” - Spot on from @olord.bsky.social Important: two-thirds (66%) of respondents to the related consultation agreed larger vehicles should pay more.

Cardiff gets it!

It is possible to differentiate between DIY e-bikes and manufactured e-bikes, so says the Australian state of New South Wales, which has now banned DIY from its trains, all the while still encouraging manufactured e-bikes. www.cyclingelectric.com/news/e-bikes...

@sarahwoodberrydown.bsky.social hi- FYI the Chatsworth Road camera has been knocked off angle (it's now pointing at the sky) - there's an adjacent cctv camera on Clifden Road so probably possible to identify the vandals that did it.

This is an incredibly powerful way to frame your argument. It got me a few years ago via a Greta T speech to the UN: "My grandchildren one day will ask me about YOU (room full of powerful old men)". Not that I have much in common with them, but I quit my job and went to work for a local authority

Every morning I wake up and see various bits of horrific news from the US, and the Manics' "If you tolerate this, your children will be next" pings into my head.

Hey @teamlabouruk.bsky.social @zackpolanski.bsky.social : shout about achieving this please, while the vandals and wreckers at the Conservative and Reform parties peddle their lies ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

Cambridge again leading... we have a perfect candidate for a cycle street in Hackney, on a major cycle route through an LTN... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Welsh 20mph default reduced casualties by 25% and insurance costs by £90m. If done in England expect reductions of 15,000 casualties pa and insurance by £2bn pa. Implementation cost would be approx £0.5bn. For comparison, 1st yr depreciation on new cars registered in England in 2024 was £78bn

One of Nigel Farage's close allies of the past decade found guilty of taking Russian bribes, and barely a story. Reckon it'll come up in Laura Kuennsberg's next cosy interview? monkdebunks.substack.com/p/nothing-to...

Just imagine. Imagine how great it would be to have our public (that's right they're ours!) streets as free and open as this again.

‘Cycleway 1’ Whitmore Road in Hackney. This amount of motor traffic just can’t safely mix with this amount of cycle traffic so it isn’t safe for kids to cycle to school. It is inexplicable the planned Hoxton LTN won’t address this.

Today I had to cross Commercial St with my kids with no pedestrian crossing. Presumably this is impossible for a blind person. Can someone point me to where Vincent Stops and NFBUK have staged a video of the struggle here? Or given any indication they care at all when it’s nothing to do with bikes?

Great and sobering thread.

Thread about yesterday's counter protest. Writing it mostly to collect my thoughts and ideas. I don't have much knowledge about the organizations organizing yesterday, these are just my thoughts. 1. Yesterday we lost. We came out defiant, chanting, but we lost that day.

All avoidable injuries are bad, but context is essential. Alongside this story, it's surely essential to say that there were 133,000 car-related injuries in 2024 in the UK, including 1624 fatalities & 28k "serious" injuries. E-bikes aren't the major problem. Data: www.chas.co.uk/blog/uk-car-...

“The odds of fatal injury increased by 44% for people of all ages struck by an SUV, compared with those hit by a passenger car. Among children the odds of fatal injury increased by 82%, and among children under the age of 10 it increased by 130%.” www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/n...

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

🚲 Kidical Mass is growing fast – now 50+ groups across the UK! We’ve launched a crowdfunder to continue to provide public liability & volunteer insurance for all KM groups in the UK. Target: £2,522. Please donate! 👉 www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/km-insurance #KidicalMass #SafeStreetsNow

Remember the first thing Corbyn said he'd do if elected? End homelessness. Simple choice to make, eminently doable, as proved (short term) during the pandemic and longer term in places like Finland. So grateful the dangerous extremist never got anywhere near power and the grown ups are in charge.

The idea that cyclists are to pedestrians as drivers are to cyclists is nonsense. The relative risk posed by and to each party is worlds apart. In 2022 in the EU, the ratio of deaths in collisions between pedestrians and cyclists was 3.5 to 1. Between cyclists and drivers, it was 165 to 1.

Every word Of Brent's thread 💯

Always express it in these terms - people are blind to road violence. How many deaths should we accept as simply an unavoidable byproduct of our wish to get to work or the shops as fast as car companies and 1970s road design tell us we can?

“What is an acceptable death toll that justifies getting to work two minutes faster?” www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

SHOCKING NEWS: Business owner wants to park right out in front all day and is SAD and angry that he can't

The only way is road pricing, and giving away free E-bikes!

FACT: Electric cars will make your city more congested and worse to live in. If policy makers don't prioritise buses, trams and bikes over and above the EV transition, we're sunk.

Whenever I hear Gvt ministers talk about "deregulation" I think of these guys (and Loach's "riff-raff"). Shall we go back to the 70s, when gangmasters could throw up shitty buildings however they liked, and workers routinely fell to their deaths? Or do we try to prevent that through H&S regulation?

Imagine introducing on the market a product that is several times more fatal for children. That wouldn't work in most sectors, but it barely raises an eyebrow in the car market. And soon most cars on European roads will be SUVs.

100% agreed

This is something that the Netherlands has had sown up for decades. Development comes in locations with public and/or access travel links, or they must improve or build new links, or the development doesn't get built. The spatial planning in the UK is pathetic.