Stephen Chitty, 70, from Watford raised about £2,000 for Mercy Ships on ‘tiring but rewarding’ journey
A 70-year-old man has raised almost £2,000 for charity by completing a 40-day challenge to travel the length and breadth of England entirely by bus.
Stephen Chitty, from Watford, Hertfordshire, travelled 1,650 miles on 117 buses. He started and finished his ambitious journey in Watford and travelled to English cities including Newcastle and Norwich.
Continue reading...London mayor to expand charging zone for drivers after high court win and rejects pressure from Labour leadership to think again
Sadiq Khan has vowed to press ahead with the expansion of London’s low emissions zone saying tackling the climate emergency and air pollution are “bigger than party politics”, despite the Labour leadership urging a rethink of the policy.
After the high court dismissed a legal challenge brought by five Conservative councils, the Labour mayor said he understood concerns of some Londoners but it was right to charge the most polluting vehicles £12.50 a day to drive in the capital’s outer boroughs from the end of August.
Continue reading...Voicing support for traffic schemes has no statistically significant effect on re-election chances, study finds
Councillors who publicly declare support for low-traffic neighbourhoods do not suffer at the polls as a result, research suggests, indicating that the schemes might not be as politically divisive as is often believed.
The study also indicates that local politicians who openly express displeasure about LTNs do not suffer consequences in elections, although Labour councillors may benefit from a slightly positive effect.
Continue reading...Chief medical officer says move to electric cars can reduce impact of exhausts, but may bring different problem to the fore
Ministers need to start looking seriously at the health risks from vehicle tyre wear as the impact of pollutants from car exhausts gradually reduces, Sir Chris Whitty has told MPs.
Giving evidence to the environmental audit committee, England’s chief medical officer said improvements in emissions from petrol and diesel vehicles, and a shift towards electric cars, were reducing the extent of dangerous pollutants such as nitrogen oxides.
Continue reading...Family calls for more restrictions on underage access to electric scooters after Mustafa Nadeem was killed last December
A 12-year-old boy was killed while riding a hired Voi e-scooter unlocked by a 14-year-old friend using their father’s account, an inquest has heard, as his family called for stricter measures to prevent children using loopholes to access them.
Mustafa Nadeem suffered fatal injuries when he rode an e-scooter along the pavement and accidentally collided with a pedestrian causing him to fall on the road into the path of a bus in Birmingham on 6 December last year.
Continue reading...Biden hails ‘proud union workers’ for speedy reopening after stretch of I-95 collapsed following tanker fire earlier in June
Pennsylvania’s “road to hell” reopened on Friday less than two weeks after a tanker fire caused traffic misery for millions.
Joe Biden praised engineers, laborers and “many other proud union workers” for fulfilling his promise to “move heaven and earth” to reopen a busy stretch of the I-95 east coast interstate artery that had been closed since it collapsed in the incident earlier this month.
Continue reading...Tony Burke says Labor committed to strong consumer protections regarding online gambling and does not oppose principle behind independent’s bill
‘A sackable offence’
Here is how that “conversation” played out.
What we want understand now is whether this Labor minister was in fact complicit in politicising this event. That is unforgivable.
Not only that, misleading parliament is a serious offence, a sackable offence and standing by this minister, if she has misled parliament, has consequences.
You were in the Senate yesterday when Katy went through what happened and what I’d like to understand from you is how is it the two years after this event you are trying to make this somehow the problem of the current government when we were not even in government, not four years after this event occurred.
The real issue is the fact that a woman was allegedly sexually assaulted in our workplace and I would really like to focus on that is the main issue here because that is the main issue here, because that is the subject that matters.
What we are finding out now is what the minister knew and why her testimony to the Senate as different from that. There’s a lot of considerations here, I know people are talking about how this information came into the media and certainly the media has a lot of considerations to make.
There has to be respect for the parliament and the court and the law but that information is now out there and journalists need to make decisions about whether it is in the public interest.
Continue reading...Two men in their 20s were pulled from the sea near Torbay as boy who died in Carlisle named as Lewis Michael Kirkpatrick, 15
At least three people have drowned over the bank holiday weekend as the UK experienced the hottest day of the year so far on Sunday.
Two men in their 20s died after being pulled from the sea off the coast of Torbay, Devon and Cornwall police said. Officers were called to assist the coastguard at about 9am on Saturday after reports of concern for two people off Oddicombe beach.
Continue reading...More than 3,000 planes scheduled to take off on Friday, with road traffic peaking as leisure trips coincide with commuting
The start of the May half-term holiday for many schools will see “hectic” roads and the most flights departing the UK since before the pandemic, according to industry estimates.
About 19m leisure journeys by car are expected on Britain’s roads over the next four days, and more than 3,000 planes are scheduled to take off on Friday.
Continue reading...Scheme on certain streets including near beach makes it as costly to park for 10 minutes as for whole day
Whether for 10 minutes or a whole day, it now costs a flat fee of €50 (£43) to park in certain streets in The Hague, including roads around the popular Scheveningen beach.
The pilot scheme in the Dutch city on the North Sea coast, which will last a year, aims to discourage tourists and visitors from blocking up the historic centre and seaside roads, particularly on sunny days.
Continue reading...Fourteen smart motorways removed from government road-building plans over cost and safety fears
The building of new smart motorways is being cancelled as Rishi Sunak acknowledged concerns about safety and cost.
Fourteen planned smart motorways – including 11 that are already paused and three earmarked for construction – will be removed from government road-building plans, given financial pressures and in recognition of the lack of public trust.
Continue reading...While many operators still ply the cross-Channel route, some businesses are focusing instead on domestic trips
It was once the staple for group travel abroad, favoured by school trips and touring retirees alike, but it now looks like Britain could be falling out of love with the continental coach journey.
Many are likely to have been put off for life by chaos at Dover, as people try to get away for the Easter holiday. An estimated 20,000 people got caught up in gridlock last weekend alone after delays in border processing that forced vehicles to queue for up to 14 hours.
Continue reading...Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo supports ban after three people died and 459 were injured in accidents during 2022
Parisians are voting on Sunday on whether to rid the streets of the French capital of electric scooters, although some say the city’s leaders ought to be focusing on more pressing issues.
Paris was a pioneer when it introduced e-scooters, or trottinettes, in 2018 as the city’s authorities sought to promote non-polluting forms of urban transport.
Continue reading...School holiday delays of up to 14 hours blamed on ‘French border processes and sheer volume’
Extra sailings are to run overnight at the Port of Dover to try to clear a backlog that left passengers stuck in Easter school-holiday traffic for hours on Saturday.
A spokesperson for the port, which declared a critical incident on Friday, said it was hoping to clear the backlog by lunchtime on Sunday as some travellers said they had been held up for 14 hours.
Continue reading...‘Nonno Sprint’ avoided paying by nipping in behind prepaid Telepass customers before barrier descended
An 80-year-old Italian man nicknamed “Nonno Sprint” (Granddad Sprint) risks going on trial after he brazenly dodged paying €4,000 (£3,514) worth of motorway tolls using a technique more frequently reserved for metro fare hoppers.
In his Fiat Punto, the man, whose real name is Mario, “travelled far and wide” on Italy’s motorways for two years without paying a single euro, arguing that the charges were too pricey and not worth it for the poor service, according to Corriere della Sera.
Continue reading...The research group that first exposed the scandal say ‘it’s not over’ and that governments must act
Thirteen million diesel cars producing “extreme” levels of toxic air pollution are still on the roads in Europe and the UK, according to a report, seven years after the Dieselgate scandal first exploded.
The non-profit research group, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), revealed in 2015 that many diesel cars were highly polluting, emitting far more nitrogen oxides on the road than in official testing. The scandal led to a more rigorous test being introduced in the EU in 2019.
Continue reading...Experts liken act known as ‘ICEing’ to parking at a fuel bowser, and say high penalties are necessary to encourage EV uptake
Drivers could be fined as much as $3,200 for parking in spaces for electric vehicles as part of little-known penalties introduced in four states and territories.
The fines, some of them added to road rules late last year, range from $3,200 in the Australian Capital Territory to $369 in Victoria.
Continue reading...Temperatures could plummet to -15c in some sheltered Scottish areas with snow cutting off some rural areas
Tuesday night could be the coldest this year so far, the Met Office has warned, with fears that Arctic air could cut off some rural communities and cause power and transport chaos.
Temperatures could fall as low as -15c in some sheltered Scottish areas, with locations that have seen snowfall especially vulnerable.
Continue reading...Popularity of sport utility vehicles driving higher oil demand and climate crisis, say experts
The continued global rise in the sale of SUVs pushed their climate-heating emissions to almost a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.
The 330m sport utility vehicles on the roads produced emissions equivalent to the combined national emissions of the UK and Germany last year. If SUVs were a country, they would rank as the sixth most polluting in the world.
Continue reading...National Highways faces third intervention by a local authority over infilling, after burying Congham bridge in Norfolk in tonnes of concrete
A controversial practice by the government’s roads agency of burying historic railway bridges in concrete has been dealt a fresh blow after a third council intervened over another infilled structure.
King’s Lynn and West Norfolk council has told National Highways it must apply for retrospective planning permission if it wants to retain hundreds of tonnes of aggregate and concrete it used to submerge Congham bridge, a few miles east of King’s Lynn.
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