Stephen Frost

Highlights For marginalised street users mode separation is the key to human-scale movement. Streets conducive to walking and cycling have functional, safe and accessible design. Professionals must approach street design, regulation and user behaviour holistically. Combinations of influencing factors persuade people to either use or avoid a street. There are no easy fixes to the public realm that will work for all non-drivers.

"The single most important behaviour, design or regulation for creating streets conducive to walking and cycling, was physical separation between the modes"

We've got a new study out, learning from a broad mixture of street users, planners and designers

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This just makes me so sad. People have been trained to hate the sound of other people. Meanwhile we all are marinating in the drone of motors all the time.

‘Fiery and spectacular’ rainbow of autumn colour set to bloom across UK National Trust gardeners expect vivid hues and bountiful fungi, nuts and berries thanks to recent weather conditions

‘Fiery and spectacular’ rainbow of autumn colour set to bloom across UK

- National Trust gardeners expect vivid hues and bountiful fungi, nuts and berries thanks to recent weather conditions

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Handlebars of this e-bike are too wide to fit through the entrance meant for bikes

Also… this kind of thing is just frustrating. On several greenways (which are signposted traffic-free cycleways) near me the A frame barriers are far too narrow for this e-bike. I imagine anyone with an adapted cycle would find this impossible to get past.

Good thinking. That might work, as long as it didn’t get in the way of our kids buggies, but I’d still struggle to get it through our narrow corridor & find somewhere to put it

E-bike leaning against a front porch with steps up to a front door

This particular e-bike model isn’t for me in the longer term though and this picture shows why. It is a lot heavier and bigger than is comfortable lifting up into our house + finding a place to store it is tricky.

Only a few days into loaning this e-bike and the cycling experience is everything I hoped - getting around is both easier and more fun. The only negatives are the same as for other cyclists: eg potholes, dodgy infrastructure. Finding traffic less worrying with the added confidence in my acceleration

E-bike parked at the top of Park Street, Bristol

Giving the e-bike a proper runaround the south & centre of Bristol today. I was keen to see how it handled the iconic Park Street hill. Answer = incredibly well. Still had to work enough to raise my heart rate but nowhere near the level when trying it on my regular bike.

‘This is real progress’: airlines on sustainable aviation fuels and the chances of net zero flying The EU and UK have imposed mandates, and investors see its value – but the industry has mixed views

"Today’s [aviation] collective act of faith – amid much scepticism – is in following an uncertain path to sustainability, through green fuels that are yet to be widely produced."
www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Situating the E-Cargo Bike in an Emerging Cycling Network: A Qualitative Study In many low-cycling contexts, cycling is routinely marginalised in transport planning practice while, in everyday traffic interactions, cyclists are frequently disregarded as legitimate road users. E-...

📣 New research just published. Thank you @seai-ie.bsky.social for supporting the work

To increase e-cargo bike uptake, we must focus on:

1. Network Planning & Safety
2. Maintenance & Surface Quality
3. Design & Exclusion

activetravelstudies.org/article/id/1...

Me too. Unless someone comes along with a secure way to park one in our street (or we move) there’s not a lot of chance of us getting one

We live in a city and have an e-cargo bike to transport small around, and it's great!

E-cargo bikes as a personal transport mode in the UK: insights from surveys and suburban trials This paper explores the potential of e-cargo bikes as a personal transport mode in the UK, reporting on a series of surveys and trials. Hypothesising …

Interesting research on attitudes towards & use of e-cargo bikes in the UK.

Particularly noteworthy for demonstrating the level of interest in e-cargo bikes nationally and the extent to which they replace car journeys. In a trial in suburban areas over 50% of the distance travelled replaced car use

Mum passed away two years ago today. This poem has stuck with me over those years and helped me recognise & make space for grief.

“When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish…”

How do you know your city is a healthy habitat for people? A decent place to start is whether children can play freely in their neighbourhoods and get around independently.

This is an excellent introduction to Tim’s work and the benefits of shifting away from car centric urban spaces.

Love it! We’re car free and getting an e-bike that can ferry kids & stuff about would be transformative. Finding a way to store it in our narrow house with no front garden and steps up to the front door is our biggest challenge

Enjoy! My wife has already borrowed this one for a ride back from town (whilst I jumped on a Dott bike) and found it worked well for her too. She’s starting a job out in Stockwood soon and cycling up the hill from Bedminster doesn’t appeal but with an e-bike should be ok

There didn’t seem to be, or at least I wasn’t offered a choice beyond making sure it was the right size for my height. Ideally I’d have a lighter/smaller model as lifting this up the steps to our house was a bit awkward

Great tip, thank you

One ride in and I’m already in love!

E-bike parked at the start of the chocolate path (Bristol)

Taking advantage of Bristol’s try a bike scheme to give an e-bike a go. I rarely cycle so looking forward to exploring bits of the city I don’t normally get out to and testing it on a few hills

More details on travel support available in Bristol & West of England: travelwest.info/for-communit...

It’s just possible that the Labour voices who urged Khan to ditch Ulez expansion after the Uxbridge by-election were not, after all, strategic geniuses.

London Ulez reduced nitrogen dioxide to legal limit, mayor says The mayor of London says the fall in airborne toxins is due to the Ultra low emission zone expansion.

184 years earlier than predicted, London has met the legal limits for toxic NO2 for the first time.

This historic milestone proves that bold action like expanding ULEZ works, protecting children’s health and giving millions cleaner air to breathe.

Does compact development increase car use among car users? One of the goals of compact urban development is to reduce driving and increase the use of sustainable modes of transportation (public and active tran…

New evidence from Montreal of the benefits of compact communities

Study finds a 10% increase in compactness results in a marginal (0.62%) increase in car trips amongst some car users but a substantial (c.25%) increase in sustainable mode trips and much lower distance travelled by cars (c.10-14%)

Between or Beyond Bicycles and Cars? Navigating E-Cargo Bike Citizenship in the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility E-cargo bikes have gained academic and policy interest for their potential to replace car trips in cities. Like bicycles, they require pedaling, produ…

Interesting paper exploring the concept of ‘e-cargo bike citizenship’. Struck by how central these vehicles become to family life & identity.

“… e-cargo bike citizenship is often family citizenship, contrasting with individualised cycling, and contesting the norm of motorised family mobility”

The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices at Victoria Art Gallery This magical exhibition showcases artworks by Jackie Morris and poems by Robert Macfarlane, from their best-selling book The Lost Spells.

This exhibit in Bath is wonderful. Lovely to spend some time amongst wild words and artwork with the kids. Both disappeared into the badger sett with a torch for long enough for us to enjoy the poems = winning.

‘It’s the best feeling’: how Copenhagen gave cyclists a green wave Traffic lights are synchronised so a rush-hour cyclist at 20km/h can catch green lights all the way

Traffic lights in Copenhagen are synchronised so a rush-hour cyclist at 20km/h can catch green lights all the way.

“It’s so important to have the freedom on a bike to just ride along at a good speed… You can feel the city wants you – and supports you – going on a bike.”

The more in favour of welfare you are, the more likely you are to support cycle lanes Findings show that the most political people have the strongest views on green transport infrastructure, potentially skewing the debate.

An interesting finding but one we should be cautious in over stating. Most of my public engagement experience speaks to attitudes towards transport being grounded in practical concerns not “deeply held values”. Public debate is shaped by car centric thinking (ie motonormativity) not political views

I was walking down a street in New York and I thought how lovely it was, with the trees and the light. Tried to take a photo and this came out. It’s incredible how blind we become to the ugliness of cars. They really do mess things up. Yet somehow we manage to filter them out.

People of all ages and abilities wearing regular attire ride sturdy, upright bicycles on the streets of central Osaka.

People of all ages and abilities wearing regular attire ride sturdy, upright bicycles on the streets of central Osaka.

People of all ages and abilities wearing regular attire ride sturdy, upright bicycles on the streets of central Osaka.

People of all ages and abilities wearing regular attire ride sturdy, upright bicycles on the streets of central Osaka.

With 29% of all trips made by bike and 64% of bike trips made by women, Osaka is a cycling city beyond compare. What makes it even more remarkable is these gains were made in spite of very little dedicated infrastructure. So what can we learn from a place that didn't build it, and they came anyway?🧵