News

Changes to mobile phone law for drivers

The law on people using their mobile phones while driving becomes stricter from 25 March 2022. Drivers can now be fined up to £1,000 and receive six points on their licence for any hand held phone use. Since 2003, it’s been an offence to use a hand-held mobile phone for ‘interactive communication’ while driving. However, over the last decade the…

Greater danger from SUVs and vans

In news that will surprise nobody who ever walks or cycles, research from America has found that SUVs and vans are substantially more likely than cars to hit pedestrians when making turns. “We already know that larger vehicles cause more severe injuries when they strike pedestrians,” said Jessica Cicchino, one of the authors of the research by the Insurance Institute…

Camera justice: Get paid for filming law-breaking drivers in the act

Now that every man, woman and child seems to have their own smartphone, why don’t we help prosecute dangerous drivers by paying a bounty to those who catch them in the act? After all, our police is overstretched and crimes such as driving while using a mobile phone have become endemic. The law on mobile phone offences is being tightened…

Can you run your car on vegetable oil?

As the price of a litre of diesel this week topped £1.75, video surfaced of a driver in a supermarket car park filling his car’s fuel tank with bottle after bottle of vegetable oil – footage which quickly went viral on social media. Vegetable oil from the supermarket costs as little as £1.15 per litre, and you can use up…

The time has come for lower speed limits

We’ve known for decades that higher traffic speeds increases road danger. As a general rule for every 1 mph reduction in average speed, collision frequency reduces by around 5% (Taylor, Lynam and Baruya, 2000). It’s the reason the ETA helped found 20s Plenty to campaign for a speed limit of 20mph to be normal on residential streets and in town…