Powerful stuff!
I've just attended a public safety meeting called by @Brent_Council to address local concerns in Willesden Green after a recent murder in the street locally.
180 residents attending with well articulated and emotive concerns voiced to local Councillors
1./ including veteran leader @MAsgharButt and local MP @DawnButlerBrent.
You could feel the passion about the crime problems in the area: mainly crack/heroin users and their dealers, and gangs "enforcing" in the area - linked in with an air of the area "going down".
A few points
2./

Nothing shows the futility - and downright misleading and dangerous approach - of looking at road danger in terms of reported deaths of cyclists than last year's (provisional) total of 83 dead cyclists, the lowest ever recorded in GB
Why?
A 🧵
1./gov.uk/government/sta… The fall of some 22% over the previous year is related to there being FEWER CYCLISTS ABOUT.
Casualty figures should always use a measure of exposure, with what is sometimes referred to as a "rate-based" number. So there were FAR more people cycling in e.g. the early 1950s with 2/

A 🧵 (or rant if you prefer) inspired by this headline:

What doesn't "feel like England" to me is the destruction of swathes of English countryside - and is there anything more English than the mythical "green and pleasant land"? - during my lifetime, with the massive
1./ increase in car ownership and use, as well as the local environmental destruction of gardens lost to car parking etc.

Of course it is "English" to have a good old self-pitying WHINGE about what will (in most cases) be an inconvenience which is trivial compared to widespread
2./

I note the responses online to Katie Price being found drink-driving as follows:
A. Many are seeing this as a case of her being a victim (of her drinking behaviour/addiction/condition or whatever), and as such as a type of VICTIM.
B. This in turn stems from seeing d-d as
1./ an ALCOHOL problem, rather than one of numerous types (albeit a serious one) of law breaking driving which increases the the threat of injury or death to other road users - which I think is what it should be seen as. I'm pleased to see numerous tweeters, including those
2./

So it's a special FIVE MONTHS since lockdown special for my "Active Travel in the time of #Covid19UK " update on the weekly (Tuesday at 5pm) Zoom edition of #ideaswithbeers.

As you know, schools (and some businesses as well) starting up soon is going to show just how little
1./ has been done to support walking and cycling (and deter drivers) in the UK.
Where good things HAVE been done (and I have highlighted some of them over the past months on #ideaswithbeers and the RDRF site since April, starting with this piece rdrf.org.uk/2020/04/11/tra… ) these
2./