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Back in the 1960's, the Netherlands had the same problems with burgeoning road congestion as we did. By the 1970's the Dutch public, fed up with being prisoners of car traffic, started to rebel. The fight back against car domination has continued relentlessly since then. The result is a huge improvement in the urban fabric of their cities, suburbs and small towns. For more and more Dutch people, the bicycle, often in conjunction with the train, has become their preferred mode of transport.

The first thing that the authorities had to take was to liberate large amounts of road space from car domination and return it to its rightful owners.

Meanwhile, in London, the number of journeys undertaken by cycle varies from about 7% in Hackney down to about 1% here. Despite meaningless "targets" and completely useless token "cycling facilities", nothing will change until local councils, the jurassic TFL and and national government summon up the courage to put our quality of life, the autonomy, safety and the future health of our children, and the the congeniality of our surroundings before the right of a minority to sit in traffic jams.

There is an excellent new piece by Dave Hill on guardian.co.uk: This expensive, ineffective tranport system is ruining London.

Cities can be transformed, even in hard times. The Economist Conference website has a video of a talk, given in January by architect Jan Gehl. Gehl who was one of the people responsible for the transforming Copenhagen into quite possibly the world's most liveable city explains how it is done. Definitely worth a look!

A couple of extremely interesting posts in Futilitarian's Cycle of Futility blog. The entry from two days ago explains one of Boris Johnson's methods for smoothing traffic flows; chasing pedestrians across the road with countdown timers and shortened pedestrian phase timings. 

The Horsham based cycling blog has an interesting piece on Shared Space. Focusing on Exhibition Road, he shows why the current scheme converting it to shared space will be a failure. Apparently but unsurprisingly, the research shows that shared space ceases to be shared when the traffic level rises above somewhere between one and three cars per minute. The backers of these schemes somehow just wish away the traffic, take their fees, then move on to the next scheme.

The IMPROVING OUR PLACE site now has a couple of pages. As well as the blog, which should keep you up to date with what the supporters are doing, there are discussion forums. Once signed-in, click on the Create content on the left-hand side.

• A feature on the Community Orchard in Broomfield Park
• A section devoted to the 20mph proposal
• A section for local cutural organisations, with a diary of forthcoming events.

Watch this space!