Adam Tranter
@adamtranter
Active travel advocate. Founder Fusion Media, co-host Streets Ahead Podcast. Was West Midlands Cycling & Walking Commissioner. Views all mine. Substack:
Mature trees provide the shade and shelter required to make cities liveable during extreme heat. Given how long it takes for trees to grow enough canopy cover, cities should be urgently planting tens of thousands more of them. 📸 Thermal camera in Lisbon, showing 59.5°C ground.
Tech companies: Our pavement robots are safe for pedestrians and don't get in their way! The robots:
Humans should not be forced off pavements by delivery robots, but that's exactly what's happening. The people who pay the price are those with the least room to give it up.
This urban chicken has learned to cross a busy road during the green pedestrian phase.
Bicycles are hugely space efficient, which is why they make a lot of sense in congested cities. This video demonstrates why there aren’t traffic jams in bike lanes. Just imagine the traffic queues if every bicycle here was a car.
This is the former Birmingham Labour Transport Cabinet member, responsible for declaring a “road safety emergency” and reducing 40mph urban main roads to 30mph, now immediately calling for his *own* policy to be reviewed. Deeply unserious and, worse, actually dangerous.
So disappointing to see the lack of political will now in Birmingham for safer streets. After questions from Babiker Yahia, whose 4-year-old daughter Mayar was killed by a driver in April 2024, only one candidate (after quite a pause) backed 20mph limits on all residential streets.
This is the UK premiere of a new genre of video. Robotaxi companies will rush out excuses. There will be many, many more examples of this kind.
Portugal has one of the worst road safety records in Western Europe. You're 1.7x-2x more likely to die in a road crash in Portugal than in neighbouring Spain. Faced with rising deaths and growing anger, the Government is now victim-blaming vulnerable road users instead of tackling the danger.
This is exactly how this street should be. It is not a street designed for motor vehicles, which are guests. Already, people are demanding in these videos that the tech becomes more assertive against pedestrians and cyclists. This is the beginning of a slippery slope for human-scale cities.
These Tesla Full Self-Driving videos really do highlight how counterintuitive it is to drive a large motor vehicle in cities.
Deep in the Government’s new integrated transport strategy is a truth at odds with the rhetoric you hear in the media: driving a car has gotten cheaper in real terms, while public transport has gotten more expensive. The Government is also clear that this will mean more traffic and more congestion.
Good news for walking! The Government has confirmed in its new "Better Connected" strategy that it will enable new simplified zebra crossings. Many campaigners have, for many years, been advocating for this change. Here's the case I made in 2022.
The cheapest petrol is the petrol you don't use. As fuel prices rise once again, it could be a good time to consider switching to an e-bike, as these ads at pumps in Bristol suggested. (Campaign by Fusion for Specialized from a few years back)
These four photos were taken from the same location in Manchester. We should make buildings beautiful again.
The Vegas Loop carried 16,400 passengers per day during the expo. For context, London’s Elizabeth Line carries ~800,000 per day. Even Victorian steam trains in 1860s London moved 3–4× more people per hour than Elon. In case you didn’t already know: cars in tunnels aren’t the future of transit…
Police in Birmingham held a roads policing operation, supported by volunteer Special Constables. In one evening on one road, they pulled over 166 vehicles and took action in a staggering 1 in 3 stops. Imagine if Roads Policing was properly funded!
Motonormativity is not clearing snow from the sidewalks and then doing an Instagram post telling pedestrians not to walk in the road.
Samson Leonard Biddle, 37, failed to stop for police, driving extremely dangerously. Eventually, tactical contact stopped him. Upon being arrested, he refused to give a specimen. You might not be terribly reassured to learn that he received just a 6-month suspended sentence and 4-year driving ban.
Cycling and walking could help deliver almost everything Brits say they want to achieve in 2026 — if we design streets to support them. Getting fitter, losing weight, being healthier, saving money; enabling active travel quietly does all of it. With no gym contracts.
You might think that a man who drove into 100 people, using his car as a weapon, would NEVER be allowed to drive again. It turns out he will be able to, around three years after leaving prison by taking an extended retest. Why should he ever be able to get behind the wheel again?
NEW: 50+ transport and health groups have written to the Government calling for clear targets in the upcoming Cycling & Walking Investment Strategy 3, as well as a comprehensive plan for a national active travel network, matching the long-term strategic focus given to roads.
Just as you thought food delivery companies couldn't inflict any more misery on society: Instead of using lowly-paid gig economy contractors to deliver groceries, they're replacing humans with robots, who, in turn, force humans off the pavement into road traffic.
