News

An extended route and a good weather forecast promise to make this Sunday’s London Skyride the biggest and best yet. The mass cycle ride is free to enter and follows 13 similar events that have taken place around the country over the last month. Last year an estimated 65,000 cyclists took part in the ride and this year’s traffic-free route...

Toyota now sells an accessory for its Prius hybrid car that generates synthesized engine sounds to alert pedestrians to the presence of the car when it is running silently on its electric motor. Electric cars produce very little sound at speeds under 20mph and if their number increases there is concern that pedestrians and cyclists will be...

The M6 Toll road, which opened in 2003 and was intended to relieve congestion has been branded ineffective and an expensive answer to traffic problems. A report by the Campaign for Better Transport claims the M6 Toll is losing its operator, Midland Expressway, millions of pounds a year and has not significantly reduced congestion. The cost...

The taxman has decided a government scheme to allow employees to buy cheap bikes for commuting is too generous. Cycle to Work is a salary sacrifice scheme that allowed tax payers a discount of up to 50% on a bike’s retail price. Up until now, employees “hired” a bicycle from their employers for a sum taken from their salary before tax each...

With London’s ‘Boris Bikes’ now being used for 14,000 journeys each day, the need for an easy-to-use and real-time representation of which docking stations are full has been met not by the organisers of the cycle hire scheme but by a research associate at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis working in his spare time. Oliver...

Business secretary Vince Cable may feel that his decision to reduce the £230m pledged for Britain’s forthcoming ‘Plug-in electric car grant’ to £43m was unnecessary following the news this week that the Spanish government has paid a similar grant to only 16 drivers this year. If the offer of grants from the British government is received in...

A device that enables almost any bicycle to be transformed into an e-bike within minutes has reached the final of the James Dyson design awards Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Copenhagen wheel is so named because it is intended to help the city achieve its goal of becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral...

Sales of 3-seat electric bicycles are soaring in Japan as school-run drivers in congested cities like Tokyo swap their cars for bikes such as the £1,000 Angelino, pictured right. Bicycles designed to carry two children in safety are common in mainland Europe but were not legal for sale in Japan until July 2009. Since the ban was lifted,...

A car unveiled this week by Wessex Water that runs on methane gas generated from fermented human waste may have a performance comparable with a petrol-powered vehicle, but range may prove a problem; the converted Volkswagen Beetle relies on the waste collected from 70 households over the course of a year to travel 10,000 miles – an...

There are now very few parts of a cyclist’s clothing or bicycle for which there are not flashing lights available to buy. Following the development of illuminated spokes, jackets with sewn-in indicators, neon strip lights, flashing tyre valve caps and all manner of handlebar and helmet-mounted high-intensity discharge lights, some of which...