Views

The gigantic wooden walls look rather intimidating when you approach them in the woods near Maasmechelen in Belgium. The cycleway between the dark trees takes you to a concrete deck between two even darker walls of almost 7 metres tall. …

In this week’s ‘ride video’ I will show how some of the students studying at Utrecht University can cycle home from the campus to one of the bigger student housing areas of the city. Strangely enough student housing was not …

There is much excitement in the transport sector, as the government has finally announced that they have published the long-awaited Transport Decarbonisation Plan. Social media is full of ministers with fancy videos claiming that they are doing something significant.

So I rushed to the Department for Transport section of gov.uk and read what they have published. And I’m afraid it will be a massive disappointment.

There is no plan to decarbonise transport.

The government has not published any new actions that it will be taking to decarbonise transport. There is no plan for modal shift, there is no plan for decarbonisation of individual polluting modes and sectors. The government have made no commitments and have no policies.

For all their talk, Grant Shapps and his ministers are doing nothing at all to decarbonise transport in the UK. It’s business as usual on the Department for Transport website.

Control your message

I am, of course, being tediously faux naive for an annoying rhetorical effect.

What the DfT have actually done is follow their established and predictable media strategy of putting out a press release, fancy social media and a statement saying they’ve published something, but conveniently neglected to actually publish it until sometime much later, hoping to saturate media with their selected talking points for long enough that the story is old news before anybody has the actual substance in their hands to read, report, scrutinise and respond to.

This kind of media strategy is insulting at the best of times.

At a time when people are desperate to hear some actual substance about how we’re going to get through the crisis we face, it deserves to be treated with the contempt that it shows us.

So please, when the DfT try to use you like this, if you’re going to run with it, at least tell it like it is. The government is all talk. It has no plan to decarbonise transport.

It’s hard to keep up with all the recent infrastructural changes in Utrecht. The changes are also increasingly harder to explain to a foreign audience. One of the latest street re-designs involves the removal of protected cycleways from a shopping …

For this week’s ride I cycled to the town of Veghel, to film the ride back from the edge of that town to ʼs-Hertogenbosch. The main cycle route runs alongside a canal named Zuid-Willemsvaart. This route was opened in November …

Utrecht has redesigned yet another public space in its city centre to make it much more attractive for walking and cycling. Almost all of the streets on the east side of the canal ring surrounding the historic city centre had …

That riding between towns and cities in the Netherlands can be just as safe and convenient as riding in the built-up areas becomes apparent from this week’s video. Last year I showed you how the station area of Bilthoven was …

South Gloucestershire are consulting on expanding road capacity, and to justify it they cite their Climate Emergency declaration and tell us that building roads will solve climate change.

As a local issue, I’ve written about it elsewhere. But it covers lots of themes that are really At War With The Motorist material: zombie road schemes, highways departments who have never yet seen a problem for which they won’t suggest building roads is the solution, no matter how absurd, and councils who sell you road building with the empty promise that it will be accompanied with investment in public transport, active travel or liveable neighbourhoods.

Read the post here.

It’s on a new blog I’ve been trying out for local things, tentatively called Bristolize (I don’t really like the name or its associations, I just haven’t thought of a better one yet). The other posts on it so far are perhaps a little bit in the style of Crap Cycling & Walking Waltham Forest, and clearly starting it is inspired by feeling a little bit nostalgic for the 2008-12 era blogosphere and very jaded with the social media that killed it off. I’m not sure I’ll keep it up for long, but I might have fun with it for a little while.

Read and subscribe to Bristolize here.

Utrecht opened the world’s longest rainbow cycle path, just in time for international Pride month. The well over 570 metres long rainbow path runs right through the heart of the university campus as a positive symbol for diversity and inclusion. …

The area around the railway station in Coevorden was thoroughly upgraded. The transformation took several years and it was finished in 2020. The new tunnel under the railway and the beautiful landscaping are what stand out most in this project, …

Happy birthday Utrecht! Today the city celebrates that it was granted city rights on 2 June 1122 by Holy Roman Emperor Henry V when he visited Utrecht, exactly 899 years ago. Next year Utrecht will celebrate its 900th anniversary in …

If slow tv is your thing this post is for you! In this week’s video I ride almost one and a half hours in the countryside just south of my hometown ʼs-Hertogenbosch. Contrary to popular belief the recreational cycling network …

Rotterdam reopened a main city centre street that was completely redesigned. It got much less space for cars, but much more space for cycling and walking. The city expects cycling to be by far the most important mode of traffic in future.

The OV-fiets system is a very popular shared bicycle scheme in the Netherlands. This last mile solution for train travellers is constantly evolving. The latest development is that the bicycles now come with an electronic lock without the need for …

For centuries there was only one safe route to cross the moor and heath between Oirschot and Eindhoven. Nowadays there are other main routes for motor traffic especially. In recent years the old and most direct road has slowly been …

Yesterday, the Dutch celebrated their national holiday King’s Day. Normally that is a day to celebrate by going out, getting together and having a drink. By turning the country into one big “garage sale” and by dressing up in orange. …

The province of Brabant is building a network of convenient long distance cycle routes. The 34km long F2 will connect Eindhoven and ʼs-Hertogenbosch. In this post I will show you what that route looks like in the before situation.

The city of Eindhoven has redesigned a street in the city centre that used to be part of the inner city ring-road. Space that was previously primarily dedicated to moving cars has been re-allocated to walking, cycling and a lot …