A series by award-winning engineer Corey Boyle in the Edinburgh Inquirer. Well reasoned and well written. Some of the cited facts blew me away. ("Road traffic is the single biggest killer of 5 to 29 year olds on earth, and kills around 500 children every day. In 2024, 161 people, three of them children, died on Scotland’s roads, up 13% in a year. Twelve were in Edinburgh and the Lothians.") Spotted on edi.bike, via the Edinburgh Minute.
Corey Boyle’s three-part, evidence-rich series for the Edinburgh Inquirer on pushing the city towards a more sustainable future wrapped up this week with some practical approaches that could move the needle.As always, it’s been refreshing hearing a new and well-informed voice calling for change - links to all three chapters are below, on the Inquirer’s SubStack:Part 1 — 🌐 Even ‘the world’s worst cycle lane’ worksPart 3 — 🚲 How we could turn Edinburgh into a real cycling city
Here's a bit from the intro.
The car was sold to us as freedom. For most of us, it has become the opposite, without us even realising.
There is a name for that. Psychologists call it motonormativity, or “car brain”: the unconscious habit of excusing from driving the harm we would never accept from anything else. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.
Dr Patrick Miner at the University of Edinburgh has helped calculate the human cost. The result? The car has killed somewhere between 60 and 80 million people, around the same as both world wars combined, and it injures roughly 102 million more every year.
Over three parts, I want to take apart the car-centric society we accept as normal, confront Edinburgh’s disgrace, its poverty, and show that a cycling city, where the bike is how most people make most journeys, is the healthier, fairer alternative.
Caption to the photo above.
The same 69 people, and the road each takes: one bus, 69 bikes, 60 cars. Sixty, because that is how many an average 69 people fill: Credit: We Ride Australia, 2012, recreating a City of Münster original
No comments:
Post a Comment