Straight Line Crazy – A Review
Written by David Hare, directed by Nicholas Hytner, and starring Ralph Fiennes, recounts the life and times of controversial urbanist Robert Moses
Olympic Meddles
Brave investigative journalism is essential for our understanding of what is happening in China. Unfortunately, factual accuracy can be drowned out by emotionally attached storylines and guesswork.
Not much COP
If it really is one minute to midnight, then we really are in trouble because COP26 has achieved absolutely nothing… except contributing to the problem of C02 emissions.
DRAUGHT-STRIP BRITAIN
We, the self-appointed, unelected mob of right-thinking people who speak on behalf of the majority, demand:
Mobility matters: community ideals for a feudal society
Basic choice is being undermined. Not only is our choice of transport mode being proscribed, but whether we should actually make the journey in the first place is being questioned.
Roadblock lockdown
At the time of planning LTNs, councils had little or no evidence of the economic impact. How could they? There was no data available to base any decisions on.
Infrapenny Infrastructure
The relics of disused Victorian railway lines scattered across the landscape attest to a creative spark that demanded progress and bore no sentimentality, a recognition that reaching the future required risk, demolition, casualties.
Driving the world to destruction?
‘Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability’ by Daniel Spurling and Deborah Gordon, Oxford University Press, 2010. 322pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 10 April 2010 Musing about Easter Island, Jared Diamond famously asked “what were they thinking when they chopped down the last tree?” Diamond’s polemical book “Collapse”, written five years ago (but based on a 1995 article), argues against the unthinking exploitation...
Dan Dare or Dan Daren’t
Austin Williams | 3 October 2008 Whatever happened to the jet-pack; the monorail; the personalised Lear jet; Maglev taxis; automated highways; long-haul flights by space shuttle? All of these strange and wonderful transport ideas were commonplace Utopian ambitions for the future as seen by the Sixties’ generation. Most of them were even technologically possible back then. Today, if there is ever mention of anything so fanciful, it...
The Pessimists: Putting the brakes on India and China
Austin Williams | 15 May 2008 Notwithstanding the fact that the president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, Clyde Prestowitz, says excitedly that visiting China is ‘always an epiphany’ (1), in general, when considering the Chinese ‘economic miracle’ (2), the West has developed a nagging cynicism about that country’s rapid rate of development. Undoubtedly there are clearly arguments needed against what political...
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