Two public meetings will launch the new organisation, and those interested in joining or learning more are encouraged to attend or visit the new website, www.london.carfree.org.uk.

Meetings
Mon 14 September: 7.30pm, Lambeth Town Hall, Assembly Hall, Acre Lane, SW2
Thurs 17 September: 7.30pm Islington Town Hall, Council Chamber, Upper St, N1

Steve Melia, co-ordinator of Carfree UK is confident of the benefits of car-free neighbourhoods:

“Carfree neighbourhoods are about freedom of choice and quality of life. If you give up your car, you should be able to give up the traffic that comes with it. We are not an extreme anti-car organisation, rather we recognise that people need cars in some situations, and accept that people should have the choice to own a car and live on a street open to traffic. We want Londoners to have the same freedom of choice available to the citizens of Freiburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Cologne and many other European cities. Even if you don’t want to live in a carfree neighbourhood, you should realise that everyone’s quality of life will benefit from their creation.”

The new movement, which aims to lobby and work with authorities and developers, is being instigated by Carfree UK (www.carfree.org.uk) with the support of: London Cycling Campaign, Living Streets, Transition Town Brixton, Campaign for Better Transport, Carplus, Friends of the Earth and Sustrans, as well as the London Boroughs of Lambeth and Islington, which have provided the venues for the meetings.

Several London boroughs have encouraged ‘carfree housing’ for several years, but these are generally small developments on conventional streets open to traffic. They are called ‘carfree’ because they have no parking. European carfree developments meanwhile are very different: the largest, Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, is home to over 5000 people; limited parking is provided on the edge of the district; vehicles may enter the carfree streets at walking pace to pick up and deliver, but not to park.

This is an exciting development for the car-free movement - we’ll bring more information and a report from the meetings as and when.

—

They damage cars and give drivers a nasty jolt, but now speed bumps have been found guilty of an even worse crime — they are helping to destroy the planet.

The traffic-calming measures double the carbon dioxide emissions and fuel consumption by forcing drivers to brake and accelerate repeatedly, according to a study commissioned by the AA. A car that achieves 58.15 miles per gallon travelling at a steady 30mph will deliver only 30.85mpg when going over humps.

The AA employed an independent engineer who used a fuel flow meter to test the consumption of a small and a medium-sized car at Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire.

The results, calculated by averaging the performances of the two cars, also showed that reducing the speed limit from 30mph to 20mph resulted in 10 per cent higher emissions. This is because car engines are designed to be most efficient at speeds above 30mph.

A motorist who observed the speed limit on one mile of 20mph road during a daily journey would produce an extra tonne of CO2 in a year compared with driving at 30mph on the same stretch.

In an unusual move for a motoring organisation, the AA called for the introduction of cameras that detect average speeds to replace humps.

Edmund King, the AA’s president, said: “Humps are a crude, uncomfortable and noisy way of slowing people down and this research has shown they are also environmentally damaging. We accept that traffic speed needs to be controlled in residential areas where there is a problem with accidents and children are playing. We think motorists are more likely to accept average speed cameras than humps.”

But he added that drivers would not support a proposal in London by the Mayor, Ken Livingstone, to make 20mph the default speed limit on all residential roads. “The AA accepts that targeted 20mph speed limits in residential areas are popular and improve safety. However, a 30mph limit on local distributor roads may be more environmentally friendly.”

Previous research by the Transport Research Laboratory found that air pollution rose significantly on roads with humps. Carbon monoxide emissions increased by 82 per cent and nitrogen oxide by 37 per cent.

The London Ambulance Service has claimed that the 30,000 humps on the capital’s roads cause up to 500 deaths a year because its crews suffer delays in reaching victims of cardiac arrest.

Mr King said: “Humps tend to breed more humps. If one street has humps installed, the adjacent street calls for humps and eventually you find no clear roads for movement of emergency service vehicles.”

Transport for London has been helping to test average-speed cameras on residential roads in Camden, North London. No tickets are being issued yet, but the mere presence of the cameras has resulted in the proportion of drivers complying with the limit increasing by a third.

The new cameras are not linked but have synchronised clocks and each separately transmits information to a processing centre. This allows several cameras to work together without the need to dig up the road between them to lay cables. In urban areas this can halve the cost of installing the system.

Putting in 50 standard humps on three or four connecting residential streets costs about £150,000. A set of eight average-speed cameras covering the same area would cost £250,000.

The Home Office has been monitoring trials of average-speed cameras for almost three years but has yet to approve them. The camera suppliers believe that the delay is due to a lack of staff to complete the approval process.

Rob Gifford, director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, said: “If we remove road humps, the clear alternative method for enforcing lower speeds is through average speed cameras. These will smooth out traffic flow and be fairer to car drivers.”

Mr Gifford said that research had shown that 10 per cent of pedestrians would die when hit by a car at 20mph compared with 50 per cent at 30mph.

Entering your route into the walkit system (central London only) gives the option of a direct, or less busy route, the time it will take, the calories burnt and the CO2 saved.

The site is an excellent resource for those short journeys which you may intend to make, and LondonUnlocked wishes it all success in the future.

—–

More than £100m was spent by shoppers visiting parts of the West End following a traffic ban in the area, according to retailers.
An estimated one million shoppers spending on average £100 descended onto Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street on Saturday.

All three roads were closed off to traffic as part of Shop West End VIP (Very Important Pedestrians) Day.

It was the third year the event had been held.

“We’re very pleased with the figures so far,” said Jace Tyrrell from the New West End Company which organised the event.

“It will be a couple more days before we get a more exact figure with more analysis but so far yes, we’re very pleased.”

Urgent changes are required!

—

The team organising the London Olympics in 2012 is adopting the most aggressive anticar policy ever applied to a major event in an attempt to deliver a permanent shift in people’s travel habits.

The eight million spectators will be banned from travelling by car and forced to take public transport, walk or cycle. Only a small number of disabled people will be allowed to park anywhere near the car exclusion zones planned for the main venues in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Weymouth and Portland in Dorset.

The Times has been given an exclusive preview of the transport plan, which describes organising the Games as the “country’s largest peacetime logistical operation”. On the busiest days, 800,000 people will converge on the venues.

The plan discloses that the Olympic Delivery Authority wants to make the Games a testing ground for a radical shift in transport planning to be extended to all major cultural and sporting events. It is even trying to deter spectators from using cars for part of their journey and has cancelled plans in the original bid for two giant park-and-ride sites on the M25 and M11.

Everyone booking a ticket will be sent a personalised, detailed itinerary, showing how to get from their front doors to the venue.

On the day, live travel information relevant to their route will be sent to their mobile phones. If there are delays, they will be advised of an alternative route.

All spectators travelling to an event in London will receive a free all-zones travelcard. Those from outside London will be able to buy discounted, flat-rate rail tickets from any station to the capital.

Even drivers not travelling to the Olympics will be affected by the plan because, for two months around the Games, one lane on several key routes in London will be reserved for 80,000 members of the “Olympic family” – athletes, officials and media. These routes, dubbed “Zil lanes” after the routes reserved for the Soviet Politburo cavalcades in Moscow, are likely to be policed by dozens of cameras and a team of enforcement officers.

The core route will run from Hyde Park Corner, to Parliament Square, along Embankment to Tower Hill, on to The Highway and out to Stratford.

In an interview with The Times, Hugh Sumner, the ODA transport director, said: “We have a very aggressive programme to make it the greenest games in modern times. We want to leave both a hard legacy in terms of infrastructure and a living legacy in the way people think about transport and about how they travel to sports and cultural events.”

He said that the Games would build on changing attitudes towards car travel since the congestion charge was introduced in London in 2003. London is the only major city in the world that has had a decline in car use and an increase in bus and rail travel.

“We want to accelerate the shift to public transport and cycling that we have seen in London in recent years.

“There will need to be traffic controls around competition venues. We will make it very plain to people that there isn’t going to be parking.”

The RAC Foundation welcomed the investment in new rail lines, such as more than doubling the capacity of the North London Line for the Olympics.

But Edmund King, the foundation director, gave warning that making the Games an experiment in mass movement without cars would deter many families from travelling to the Olympics.

“Many people will want to take their children to the Games to inspire them. But the prospect of lugging toddlers, prams and a picnic on and off buses and trains will make many abandon hope of being there to witness this historic event.

“The organisers should guard against being overzealous and too politically correct in their transport aspirations.”

—

I suppose that calling for 20mph to be the default speed limit on London’s roads, does seem a bit ironic when the media are reporting that London’s average speed is 12mph, making it the slowest city for motorised traffic in Europe. However, many of the relatives and friends of the 231 people who where killed or the 3,715 who were seriously injured on London’s roads last year would not care about the irony, or statistics on the average speed. Everyone knows that a lot of drivers go way too fast in London and something has to be done about it.

The reality is that a pedestrian has around a 50-50 chance of surviving being hit by a car driving at just above 30mph, but a 95% chance of living after being hit by a car going at 20mph. Much as we all enjoy getting to places quickly, most of us would prefer to live in a world where the odds are stacked in favour of us staying alive. As the recent Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (Pacts) report makes clear, 20mph as the norm in urban areas is the sane alternative to the blood-on-the-tarmac madness of the status quo.

Speeding traffic also puts a lot of pedestrians and cyclists off using many roads. Organisations like the London Cycling Campaign believe that the introduction of a 20mph zone across the whole of London would do far more to encourage cycling than painting new cycle lanes. We have to not only reduce road danger, we have to reclaim our streets by reducing the fear of road danger.

At the moment, Transport for London spends £10m a year on 20mph zones in London. Much of this money goes on road humps, which successfully slow traffic down and save lives, but also annoy a lot of people. While 20mph zones have halved road deaths and injuries, especially of cyclists, children and pedestrians, most of us would agree that covering London in road humps is a slow way of getting safer roads. The quicker and cheaper alternative is to have a culture shift towards slower speeds and to use cameras to enforce that change in attitudes. We now have a new generation of cameras that measure average speeds over a whole area, or neighbourhood. Next year, Transport for London will be trialling a set of wireless, time distance cameras. These have the big advantage of being relatively cheap, very flexible and digital, so no mucking around with changing films.

As part of my agreement with Ken Livingstone over his budget, I’ve asked the mayor to do a feasibility study on the introduction of 20mph as the default limit in London, with some exception for major roads. He has agreed to lobby the government to allow for a change in the rules if this report says it is a good idea.

London could have a very different feel to it in 10 years’ time, with safer streets where pedestrians and cyclists feel they are on more equal terms with the cars and lorries. We could be taking out the road humps and getting rid of some of the clutter on our streets, like the railings that herd people onto narrow crossing points. Some areas of London might even try moving towards the naked streets approach pioneered by the Dutch town of Drachten. All of this becomes possible if we adopt the same approach to urban speed limits as Holland, where the 30kmph limit forms the backdrop for all their naked streets initiatives by allowing vehicles to travel at a slow enough speed to enable eye contact between drivers and other people to become possible.

Safer streets, an end to road humps and a culture of mutual respect on the roads - all of this is possible, but it requires a change of attitude, as well as a change in the technology.

—-

Working out how people use a city’s roads and planning for it, can be difficult, but research into mobile phone use may hold the key to preventing traffic jams in the future.

If you do not like crowds, congestion, chaos - and few do - then you might want to avoid Rome’s rush-hour. But congestion in the city might be about to ease a little as researchers use Italy’s passion for mobiles to combat Rome’s daily war on wheels. Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are using data from mobile-phone networks to create real time maps of people moving around the city.

Networks keep track of subscribers to ensure signals stay strong, and because so many people have mobiles, this data can give an accurate picture of where people are in a city.

“This is really the first time that you can take an urban system, like a big city, and try to see in real time how it lives, how people move and what’s happening in the city,” says Carlo Ratti from MIT.

“In the city for example you’ve got taxis with GPS, you’ve got buses with GPS, and also you’ve got mobile phones.

“If you take that information and you apply artificial intelligence and algorithms to it, then you can understand very interesting things about the urban system,” he says.

Beating congestion

Calming Rome’s traffic is one possible application of the system.

Rome does not have an extensive underground - if it started digging holes the labourers would soon have to down tools while experts investigated whatever priceless artefact they unearthed. As a result most travel is above ground which means that many consult the web to find the best route across the city before they set out. Pagine Gialle, or Italy’s Yellow Pages, has been one of those working hard to keep the data on these sites up to date.

It is eyeing MIT’s Real Time Rome as a way to fill in the gaps in its data.

“We have already all the data about real time traffic situations in Italy, but we have just the major roads. So [with] a different source of data, such as mobile phone usage, we are going to have much more data about where people and cars are moving, even on the smaller roads in town,” says Paolo Cellini from Pagine Gialle. Informing passengers

Real Time Rome might also help with the better allocation of transport resources.

Italy’s transport agency Atac has already put route planners online. It also runs a mobile service to let people know when buses will arrive, so customers spend less of time waiting on smoggy streets. “You can find traffic information, especially if there is a going to be a diversion because of a political demo in the city or if there are road works. You know when the next public buses are coming, we can also patch you through to our street cameras so you can see what the traffic’s like,” says Fulvio Vento, Atac director.

Combine these informed passengers with real time data showing where the demand is, and in future buses might not stick to a fixed timetable or even route.

Sending buses to where the people are rather than vice-versa could mean fewer wasted journeys, so Real Time Rome might ultimately be good for the environment.

Better route planning for buses and cars could mean less time standing in traffic, pumping out noxious fumes.

—-

NEW YORK — Six years ago, Bruce Wilbur did what most Americans wouldn’t dream of: he got rid of his car. And his minivan, too.

He started taking the bus to work _ not a common sight in Rochester, N.Y. _ and loved the switch. More recently, he’s been biking to work.

Getting rid of the car gave him his sanity back, the 49-year-old Web designer said, and saved him a lot of money too.

As a driver, “I tended to be prone to road rage,” Wilbur said. “It was nice to arrive at one’s destination without feeling all tense and angry.”

He’s not quite sure what to do in winter, which can be snowy and cold in Rochester. If slush makes biking unsafe, he may go back to riding the bus now and then.

Car-free commuting is common in large cities with extensive public transportation, or in famously bicycle-friendly cities like Portland, Ore., but the surge in gasoline prices is making people across the country wonder if they can get to work without a car.

A survey by the Pew Research Center in June found 55 percent of drivers said they had cut back on driving in response to high gas prices.

However, making shorter trips or letting the car stand in the driveway isn’t a very good way of saving money. The real savings come when you get rid of the car altogether.

In 2004, U.S. households spent an average of $650 a month on transportation, of which only a fifth was gasoline and motor oil, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rest was mainly the cost of the car, insurance and repairs. Only $37 was spent on public transportation, which includes air travel.

“What the high price of gasoline has done is it’s shone a spotlight on how expensive the cars are,” said Chris Balish, a TV journalist and author of the just published book “How to Live Well Without Owning a Car.”

Balish, 39, said he’s saved about $850 a month by giving up his SUV three years ago.

“It was a big, eight-seater SUV and I was the only person in it most of the time. It was ridiculous, now that I look back on it,” Balish said, speaking by cell phone from a bus in Los Angeles that was taking him to a job interview.

“When I moved to St. Louis, everybody said ‘You absolutely have to have a car in St. Louis,’ and I found that not to be true,” Balish said. “Then I moved to L.A., and everybody said ‘You really have to have a car in L.A.’ And I found that not to be true either.”

Los Angeles is full of walkable neighborhoods, he says. When he needs to get around, he loads his bike on a bus. It takes more time to get places, but he finds riding more pleasant than driving, and he can get work done on the bus.

Kelly Rohlfs, an engineer in the relatively bike-friendly Mountain View, Calif., figures her family saved about $1,400 a month by getting rid of its BMW. Instead, they ride buses and bike to work. They got more space too: they converted part of the driveway into a dog run and put a pingpong table on another part.

“It’s been surprisingly easy” being car-free for a year, she said. “We also noticed things we didn’t anticipate. Our lives slowed down … not having a car, we’re not out running errands all the time.”

That means planning ahead for purchases. Recently, she and her husband were figuring out how to use trains and bikes to get 62 pounds of tile from a store. The solution: two backpacks. They also have a bike trailer for hauling groceries and things like a new door from the hardware store.

Rohlfs, 42, feels their social lives have gotten better too, since they car pool with friends to get to places and events, like a recent wedding.

“I think people in the United States drive solo to places instead of car pooling … They say it’s for freedom, but I really think we just hesitate to ask people to join us,” Rohlfs said.

But there are also social downsides to going car-free. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 23-year-old Andy Becker is happy going most places on his bicycle, but getting a date has proved hard.

“It just seems (women) aren’t as excited about the fact that I don’t own a car, and don’t want to own a car, as I am,” Becker wrote on Bikeforums.net, asking other bikers for advice.

Last year’s hit movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” probably didn’t help: its titular character tooled around everywhere on a very sensible-looking bike.

“Unfortunately cars have become a symbol of success, dependability, and status in America and that’s something that I can’t stop, obviously,” Becker wrote.

For him, going car-free “just kind of happened” three years ago.

“At first I wasn’t very happy about it, but over time, I’ve gotten where I don’t want to have one,” he said in an interview.

The savings loom largest among the reasons given by those who’ve gone car-free, but they have a host of others: reducing stress, protecting the environment and reducing the country’s dependency on foreign oil.

So who’s it for? Well, it certainly helps to live close to a transit stop. There may be one closer than you think, though _ most drivers just don’t look for transit stops and have no idea where they are, Balish said.

Other tips from Balish:

_ Go car-free for a week first, and see if you like it.

_ Use the Internet to figure out mass transit, find car pools and order things for delivery.

_ Use car-sharing companies like Zipcar and Flexcar to rent a car when you really need one. Or take a cab.

_ Giving up the car is easiest if you don’t have young kids, but with some ingenuity and planning, even that can be done.

—

All you need to know about Britain’s underwhelming response to the notion that we might all give up our cars for the day

1. You may have noticed that today is European Car Free Day, when we are all urged to leave our vehicles at home.

2. On second thoughts you probably won’t have noticed. Only 10 local authorities in Britain are taking part. Our European partners are much keener on the idea. Indeed, car-free days are something of a global industry.

3. We like our cars, in spite of the appalling costs of owning and running them. And, as the recent petrol crisis shows, everyone knows that the true costs of UK motoring are horrendously high, compared with other countries.

4. While organisations like the RAC huff and puff about the burden of taxes, some folk think they are just about right. Friends of the Earth (FoE), for example, is running a vigorous campaign for traffic reduction.

5. Persuading us to get our bottoms out of our cars is likely to be a heroic task for FoE. We are buying, and using, the things more and more.

6. It’s reckoned, rather conservatively, that there will be 40% more cars on the roads by 2031.

7. Investment in British roads is, at best, stagnant. In fact, it has gone down in recent years.

8. The good news is that more people are using public transport. The bad news is that they have to; the roads are jammed.

9. The new holy grail for the planners is Integrated Transport. That nice Mr Two-Jags Prescott even has a ten-year plan.

10. In spite of the torrent of available statistics, transport policy remains stuck in the make-do-and-mend mode. And we remain stuck in our cars.