Air quality

No smoke without ire 27 October 2021

London's Ultra Low Emission Zone has just expanded to cover the whole inner city, and across the UK, other cities are implementing their own Clean Air Zones. Is this the future?

What's new

The road that made no sense

It was the UK's only single-carriageway motorway, and twenty years ago it ceased to exist. This is the story of the strange fascination it held, and of my place in history.

The forever bottleneck, part 2

The second part of the story, where we learn why exactly the M4 gets narrower on the final approach to Europe’s biggest city.

The forever bottleneck, part 1

The M4 into London was one of the UK's earliest and most ambitious motorway projects. It was bold, pioneering... and almost instantly regretted.

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Have you seen...

Operation Stack

If there's trouble crossing the Channel, you'll see the lorries queuing on the M20. What is Operation Stack? Why does it cause so much trouble? And why, more than twenty years after it started, are we still using it?