The London Borough of Haringey has halved the depth that potholes must reach before they are repaired to 25mm on main roads as it increased the highways maintenance budget by £1.5m. Haringey said that the late snow and freezing spring temperatures had caused unprecedented damage to its roads, and that halving the intervention threshold to 25mm on main roads and 30mm on residential streets would "ensure that damage to roads can be dealt with before faults get out of hand"....

Sydney is Australia’s largest and most densely populated city, with a population of 4.6 million. The city’s central business district (CBD) covers an area of approximately 2 square miles, is bounded on two sides by water and contains 32 million square metres of floor space. More than 180,000 people live in the city of Sydney, sharing the space with about 20,000 businesses. Every day approximately 400,000 people arrive to work in this area, and another 500,000 travel to the city for...

Transport for London and TRL are trialling a range of cycle safety features on the test track at TRL’s Berkshire headquarters. Volunteers are testing the features, which, if deemed successful, could be trialled on London’s roads next year. Measures include new ways of segregating cycle lanes; changes to traffic signals; revisions to junctions and roundabouts; and bus stop ‘bypasses’. A summary of each trial is given below. Future trials will test different road markings...

Transport for Greater Manchester is pushing stalled plans for collaboration between highways services across the conurbation. The DfT-supported Highways Maintenance Efficiency Programme last year sought to establish a co-ordinated programme of work for Greater Manchester’s highways authorities following a review of the supply chain (LTT 30 Mar 12). A review of how much the conurbation’s individual authorities are spending on resurfacing materials was subsequently commissioned by...

The last spending review gave local transport spending outside London a good hiding. Local transport lacked political clout and there were built-in funding commitments that applied to London and national rail; and the evidence base for the benefits of local transport spending also had too many gaps. Worse for the big regional conurbations was that, by accident or design, a significant shift has also taken place within local transport spending as decision after decision on funding formulas has...

The recent All Party Parliamentary Cycling Inquiry – well reviewed in the last issue of LTT – had results that will continue long past the initial boost it gave to information and policy development for cycling. This month I’d like to comment on two of the less obvious implications – the role of the sponsors; and the disparate experience we are now seeing at local level. The sponsors included The Times, which, with other media giants contributed untypical evidence on...

LTT's coverage of Bedford Borough Council’s plans to improve cycle safety at a busy roundabout have sparked huge discussion on Twitter. They claimed that the design is based on a ‘turbo roundabout’ design in the Netherlands that is meant for cars, not cyclists. Cycling campaigners on Twitter challenged the idea that the turbo roundabout design that Bedford says has “revolutionised roundabout design in the Netherlands” (LTT 19 Apr) can be described as a...

Three months ago, I wrote about the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group’s inquiry into the barriers that are preventing more people from cycling in the UK. I’m glad to say that the report of the inquiry, Get Britain Cycling – written by fellow LTT columnist Phil Goodwin, was published on 24 April; and indeed it was the basis of the keynote speech that Phil gave the following day at the Cycle City Expo, organised by the editor’s chums. So, now we know what the report...