@lwvsf this is your reasoning:
After discussion, our board of directors decided to be neutral on Proposition G.
puhlease. that's after your previous paragraphs discussed only positives about keeping the park and negatives about removing it. and then you summarily remain neutral.
#London 's fight against 'hidden' #river #pollution as homes unknowingly flush waste into them Volunteers have uncovered dozens of polluting outfalls in rivers across the capital through the Outfall Safari programme led by ZSL, and you can join in #nature #brent CURB
The fight against London's 'hi...
Time for 2026 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread, now with storage. If you like these, you might like edition 2 of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website til end-November 2026.
It's the book I should have read before trying to get a job in renewable energy. Reviewers say it is “to the point, important, and taught me a lot” and “surprisingly entertaining, don’t be put off by the title”.
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0437#t=aboutBook
Over 1,000 dockless bikes seized in Westminster
Caroline Sargent: "Behind each of these 1,000 seizures is a resident who has been inconvenienced by a bike left where it shouldn't be.
"That could be a parent...or someone forced to step into the road."
Note the assumption that pedestrians don't belong on the roads. How much more space is taken up by cars than poorly parked bikes?
The solution is very clear: More docks. Fewer cars.
When you buy diesel you ride with Putin.
Image from @bikeportland.org@bsky.brid.gy
Watched a guy yelling at a cyclist pulling onto the curb to go to work today, watched an old white lady on a bike asking a traffic cop to ticket a food delivery guy’s e-scooter, all right next to four whole lanes reserved for cars.
People: know your enemy.
Battery powered trains are coming to Chicago on the Beverly Branch of Metra Rock Island Line.
"A Metra spokesperson said the battery-powered commuter train is planned to begin operation along the Beverly Branch of the Rock Island Line at the start of 2028. The train will service between Blue Island and LaSalle Street stations."
At the tram stop just now, right next to some of the best bicycle infrastructure you'll ever see, an American tourist came to me to ask me if the Dutch government was doing anything about "this terrible bicycle problem" we have in the Netherlands. 🙃
To carry 50,000 people per hour in each direction, a city needs a 175m wide road for cars.
Even if those cars are electric.
And then there’s all the parking.
OR a city can move A LOT MORE people in a lot less space, with A LOT LESS public money, emissions, pollution, noise etc.
Choices.
Simple.
"Cars replaced horses"
This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth.
Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary.
In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690
This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick.
Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting.
Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home.
Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.
Transport emissions, road traffic keep on increasing in Britain
"Incredibly, in the white heat of this climate emergency, transport emissions actually increased in the latest recorded year. Road traffic increased too, with car traffic up 2.5% in 2025. At a time when we have just experienced another extraordinary summer of heat, that should be a wake-up call. Government needs to get serious about changing the way we travel"
Cleaner air makes kids smarter
A 20 year study of over 1,100 children in New York found that their memory and sensory skills improved fastest during the periods when local air pollution fell fastest.
Improvements in London Air Quality Shows Why Cities Need More Safe Cycling Infrastructure
"The bigger challenge is often giving people somewhere they feel comfortable riding.
Build a painted line beside fast-moving traffic and many people will quite reasonably decide cycling isn’t for them. Build a connected network of protected, legible routes and the potential audience changes dramatically."
All I ask is that if I have to pass a car parked in the bike lane I’m allowed to use a hammer to take one swing at their hood. “Just one dent” to balance the “just one minute” excuse. Hey bud, if traffic regulations don’t apply to you, misdemeanor vandalism doesn’t apply to me. Fair is fair.
Today is #carfreesunday in Brussels. Largest pedestrian area in Europe, for one day a year.
Everyone's out on their bikes, roller skates, or just running or walking.
But the most impressive part are the children. So many! Children of all ages, on tiny bikes, steps, skates, skateboards... You can really see how the automobile did not replace horses. It replaced children playing in the street.
Update on the drainage the hobbit (operations & traffic control) and I (H&S & general labour) dug to get rid of water on our cycle lane.
Most important: it works. No more standing water. This will be easy to maintain.
The video also shows what creates the problem: the car road, which drains onto the #cycling #infrastructure.
It's one of the symptomatic little things which make DK infrastructure less welcoming than NL. I bet @TheWarOnCars talked about this.
I just encountered #bikemaxxing as a phrase and am happy to peddle it.
Bikes use a tiny fraction of the resources that go into a car: by weight relative to an average European car, in the region of 1/100th. With a human onboard they have an impact on the road surface that is by weight about 1/20th.
As the oil economy descends into a pit of unaffordability in years to come, bikes will be a way to extend the use of roads. There will come a time where they are the most important mode of travel
Antwerp's Zuidpark was built on the site of a former car park. Gorgeous!
"Two years after its opening in 2024, Zuidpark is lined by double rows of 500 new trees that provide shade during heatwaves...(Rain gardens) filled with old bluestone blocks unearthed during construction and vegetation that can grow in a wet environment, these wilder spaces have become popular play areas for children."
@urlyman The e-bikes seem to be much better solution, then electric cars.
They are marketed mostly as recreational and sports equipment, but actually: micromobility solves high percentage of use cases for individual mobility.
Maybe what we need is 100% replacement, but just replacement that works in typical weather, on a typical distance, with typical amount of baggage (eg. small backpack). And we need them to be somewhat clean amd shiny, to show some limited social status (because this is how things work, unfortunately).
I would think about design e-bikes just like design glasses. It may work, actually. It probably already works in many European towns (I am riding just repurposed electric MTB ;-)
AI summaries at the head of Google search results have decimated web traffic to railmaps.com.au
Traffic from Google search is now down by 95% compared to pre-covid. Traffic from other search engines is unchanged, but they're so minor in comparison as to be more or less insignificant.
5/10