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Cutting a ribbon is not unusual, but doing that with a huge pair of scissors is. Lot van Hooijdonk, the executive council member for sustainable mobility of the city of Utrecht, did have to focus, but she managed to skilfully …

Last Friday, a few dozen people cycled along in a “social cycling tour” organised by the city of ʼs-Hertogenbosch. They visited a number of places, organisations and initiatives that help people to connect and interact socially with each other. The …

This week’s ride takes us from one blog post location to another. Starting just south of Soesterberg Air Base, featured in last week’s post, on the provincial road N238 in the province of Utrecht. Officially that is in a town …

Whenever I show a cycle route on a former railway line there are always people who bemoan that lost railway. In this case that may be different: Soesterberg has a cycle route on an old air base runway. The entire …

In my series of ‘real rides’ this is one I had rather not taken. Last week I had to collect the ashes of our dear little cat which had been with us for over 17 years. She died unexpectedly, less …

Back in 2011 I wrote about the success of the Stop De Kindermoord (Stop Child Murder) campaign in the Netherlands. This presumably had been covered by English language press in the distant past, but by 2011 it had been forgotten about so my blog post got quite a lot of attention at the time and encouraged other people to write their own versions of the same story. The success of that campaign David Hembrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14543024940730663645noreply@blogger.com0http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2021/09/stop-de-kindermoord-revisited-is-new.html

A colourful procession of people on city bicycles, tandems, e-bikes, cargo bikes, public transport bicycles and racing bikes opened a fast cycle route last July. Together they symbolised that the F261 fast cycle route from Tilburg to Waalwijk is there for …

On the day the schools started again after the summer holidays, two aldermen of ʼs-Hertogenbosch and Vught opened a better cycling connection between their municipalities. They cut a ribbon to open a cycling viaduct over a -soon to be- turbo-roundabout …

When I rode home to ʼs-Hertogenbosch from work in Utrecht unexpectedly – quite some time ago – I found that a provincial road in the province of Gelderland had been upgraded with a separate bi-directional cycleway. I did not film …

The city of Utrecht is known for its exceptional cycling infrastructure, but even in Utrecht things aren’t all perfect. The city has to deal with a legacy of old infrastructure too. Infrastructure that was maybe fine at the time it …

A very pleasant cycle route was created in the early 1990s on a former railway line in the province of Noord-Brabant. That railway line had connected Lage Zwaluwe (which was in turn a gateway to the port of Rotterdam) to …

Cycling infrastructure is ubiquitous in the Netherlands. There isn’t a place in the country that you cannot safely reach by bicycle. That doesn’t mean the quality of the nationwide cycling network is excellent everywhere, there certainly are municipalities which could …

For this week’s ride I stayed close to home but we went back in time for a couple of centuries at Ammersoyen castle in the present day town of Ammerzoden in the province of Gelderland. This archetypical medieval castle was …

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 …