News

The government’s chief medical officer for England, Sir Chris Whitty, has urged people to get cycling. Speaking at the annual conference of the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Public Health, Whitty said people should be encouraged to incorporate walking or cycling to work into their daily lives to help...

In news that will surprise nobody who ever walks or cycles, research from America has found that SUVs and vans are substantially more likely than cars to hit pedestrians when making turns. “We already know that larger vehicles cause more severe injuries when they strike pedestrians,” said Jessica Cicchino, one of the authors of the research...

The law on people using their mobile phones while driving becomes stricter from 25 March 2022. Drivers can now be fined up to £1,000 and receive six points on their licence for any hand held phone use. Since 2003, it’s been an offence to use a hand-held mobile phone for 'interactive communication' while driving. However, over the last...

We've collected all manner of weird and wonderful cycling-related goodies over the years so we're having a spring clean clear-out. The good news is we're packing the good stuff into a series of mystery boxes that you can win. This week's box will contain brand new cycling-related items worth at least £100. We're not going to list the...

Now that every man, woman and child seems to have their own smartphone, why don't we help prosecute dangerous drivers by paying a bounty to those who catch them in the act? After all, our police is overstretched and crimes such as driving while using a mobile phone have become endemic. The law on mobile phone offences is being tightened...

We've known for decades that higher traffic speeds increases road danger. As a general rule for every 1 mph reduction in average speed, collision frequency reduces by around 5% (Taylor, Lynam and Baruya, 2000). It's the reason the ETA helped found 20s Plenty to campaign for a speed limit of 20mph to be normal on residential streets and in...

As the price of a litre of diesel this week topped £1.75, video surfaced of a driver in a supermarket car park filling his car's fuel tank with bottle after bottle of vegetable oil - footage which quickly went viral on social media. Vegetable oil from the supermarket costs as little as £1.15 per litre, and you can use up to 2,500 litres of...

In response to soaring oil costs following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, New Zealand is to halve public transport fares for three months. The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said: “In the long term we need to build greater resilience into our transport system so we are less vulnerable to spikes in the price of petrol, but for now halving...

Mass use of electric bicycles could create more than £2bn in health benefits and cut one million tonnes of emissions annually according to an evidence review by academics at Westminster University, commissioned by the campaign group Bike is Best. Grants of £1,500 are available for low-emission cars but there is no such 'plug-in' grant for...

How much does you to run a car car day-to-day, month-on-month or over the entirety of your adult life? Cars are a major household expense, yet there is limited comprehension of their private (internal) and social (external) cost per km, year, or lifetime of use. So says 'The lifetime cost of driving a car' by Stefan Gossling, Jessica Kees...