Stuart Hay

Fabulous transformation.
Hopefully coming to a street near you, quite soon 🙂
Also it's proof positive that legs are mightier than the car!

SUVs are the second-largest cause of the global rise in emissions over the past decade – more than the entire aviation industry.

Great campaign from @cleancitiescampaign.org highlighting the many dangers of the growing appetite for bigger cars 👇

Brake pad dust can be more toxic than exhaust emissions, study says - only traffic reduction not just EVs will tackle the air quality health crisis

Lasdun portrait

Lasdun quote

NEW on Substack, my post on Keeling House, Bethnal Green. Denys Lasdun's brutalist masterpiece, designed for the East End working class; sold off to the private sector in 1999.
municipaldreams.substack.com/p/keeling-ho...

UK’s 20mph speed limits ‘are cutting car insurance costs’ Controversial safety policy has helped drive down premiums to 18-month low, says Confused.com

In the UK, auto insurance prices dropped 16% in a year.

A big reason: Lower urban speed limits

Industry analyst: "Areas where 20mph zones have been introduced result in lower levels of claim frequency – a key factor in the cost of car insurance."

Never forget, the electric car is here to save the car industry, not cities or the planet.

Barcelona bets on green to boost city’s mental health Plans to expand low-traffic, green zones are targeted at reclaiming streets for residents — and lifting their spirits in the process.

READ: Barcelona has a plan to create a city-wide network of quieter streets that are easier and safer to travel on foot or by bike. Instead of bumper-to-bumper cars, streets will be lined with trees, play parks, bike-lanes, benches and green people-places. #Barcelona
www.politico.eu/article/barc...

5 steps to making better cities Before you can do the right thing, you have to do the right thing badly. And before that, you have to do the wrong thing.

Where is your city on this 5-step journey?

Helpful from @brenttoderian.bsky.social

Popular to “do the wrong things ‘better’”!

I see Sheffield in the “have cake and eat it” of steps forward and back at same time.

“Grey to Green!” because “bigger ring road!”

www.fastcompany.com/90278237/5-s...

800 year old York Minster now has 184 solar panels installed, which will generate 70,000 kWh of energy, enough to deliver a third of the Minster’s electricity requirements

www.maxfordham.com/practice-peo...

Am live with Matthew Wright on @lbc.co.uk shortly talking about Elon Musk's proposed funding for Nigel Farage and Reform - and why Britain's election finances laws have been so broken for so long, but neither Labour nor Conservative has even tried to fix them.

Screen shot from bbc report - Sheriff Recommendations section on route risk assessment

Has anyone checked that councils have learnt the lessons of the Glasgow Bin Lorry Crash Tragedy www.heraldscotland.com/news/2481081... this includes sheriff recommendations on routing bin lorries alway from busy streets & times ????

No street cleaners’ no enforcement and then this 🤔 …https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/news/article/14124/bin-it-to-win-it-litterlotto-rolls-out-in-edinburgh

'This is too big a matter to be determined on the basis of a consultation alone.' Division is building in the proposed Galloway National Park area. Outside Dumfries council, the call is for a referendum. Is that the solution?

It seems the development of National Parks in Scotland has all the symptoms of shambolic top down public policy making. Another postive environmental policy done very badly www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/2479...

JLR whistleblower sacked for publishing concerns about VinFast cars Mechanical engineer Hazar Denli lost his job after publishing online concerns about an electric car.

A lesson in auto industry ethics, on par with big tobacco #roadsafety #whistleblowing www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Barcelona street full of cars

Same street photographed by me. Pedestrians and a bird.

It seems to be working: "Air pollution in Barcelona has fallen by more than 30% in the last 8 years." www-publico-es.translate.goog/public/conta...

Always enjoy starting the day with Edinburgh thanks to Mike trawls through social media at silly O’clock to get curated highlights for subscribers - check it out

Princes Street Edinburgh from Calton Hill with the tower of the former North British Railway Hotel (Now the Balmoral) Spires of St Mary’s Cathedral towards the Horizon #edinburghviews

NEW STARTER PACK! Who are the most creative, persuasive people and organizations that are truly CHANGING THE BROAD CONVERSATION ABOUT BETTER CITIES? The game-changers & mind-changers? This one I teamed up with superb marketer/brander @tomflood.bsky.social to curate. Please share! go.bsky.app/7iNmiCU

Air pollution 'linked to increased hospital admissions for mental illness' Air pollution linked to increased hospital admissions for mental illness as well as physical illness for the first time according to new research…

LEZ benefits become even more compelling, with every piece of research www.heraldscotland.com/news/2479730...

‘Noting disappearing a driver has a profound impact on readers, causing them to instead focus away from drivers, and towards those injured, like pedestrians and cyclists, by as much as 30%’ as per @lauralaker.bsky.social research

'Beloved son' who died after being struck by Volvo named by police The 20-year-old pedestrian was pronounced dead at the scene of the incident in Edinburgh.

‘Young person run into and killed by car driver’ - as correctly headline news.stv.tv/east-central...

Handbook & Research | RC-RG

You can read the report, and my new handbook for police forces, here: www.rc-rg.com/handbook

We know disappearing a driver has a profound impact on readers, causing them to instead focus away from drivers, and towards those injured, like pedestrians and cyclists, by as much as 30%

However more than two thirds of police news stories still refer to a vehicle rather than a person,'i.e. a car crashed' and 23% refer to that vehicle as active, and almost sentient, such as ‘the car attempted to drive the wrong way’.

I've been working on this project for over a year, so it's great to finally publish it. In 2021 I authored the UK's first Road Collision Reporting Guidelines. But media uptake was patchy. We know press language comes, sometimes verbatim, from police, so...I looked at police language this time.

Mass migration, war and poverty: How Scotland provides the remedy for bad capitalism Two of the world’s brightest minds have diagnosed what’s wrong with the world and the solutions needed to take us back from the cliff edge. They…

Worth a read on economic underpinnings of today’s economic and political crises www.heraldscotland.com/news/2476296...

Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tons of tire fragments. These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in ...

"Tire particles are a significant but often-overlooked contributor to microplastic pollution. They account for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally."

Comparison of older and newer pick-up truck. Although the truck bed is essentially the same, the overall truck size is substantially larger and higher.

Trucks have been getting bigger, more energy & space consuming, more polluting, and much deadlier to everyone around them including kids. Not because most of us actually need bigger vehicles, but as ego boosts, status symbols & “indicators of male virility.” Note the truck bed is basically the same.

Until transport planning is properly integrated with land use planning, we’ll continue to have to try and make transport work far too hard in an attempt to treat symptoms that need not have arisen, had we treated the cause.