After an 81-year-old’s fatal collision with a cyclist in London’s Regent’s Park, calls have risen for stronger sanctions

It is a bright early spring morning in central London, and inside Regent’s Park the birds are chirping as the sun rises sleepily over the lawns and lake. On the road which encircles the park, however, the mood is anything but lazy.

Scores of cyclists are riding on the 4.5km Outer Circle – some of them clearly commuters, others on racing bikes and dressed in Lycra or the colours of a cycling club. In one five-minute period before 8am, travelling anticlockwise alone, more than 150 riders pass, some in clumps of up to 15.

• Lidl-Trek’s team tactics work to perfection after sprint
• Pogacar maintains firm grip at head of overall standings

Jonathan Milan of Lidl-Trek maintained his excellent form at the Giro d’Italia to win stage 13 in a sprint finish, the Italian’s third stage victory. His team’s tactics worked perfectly, leading him out into the last kilometre with Milan well placed in second as they rounded the final bend.

It initially looked as if Fernando Gaviria would grab the win as he took to the front, but Milan showed why he is the points classification leader as he pounced late on, with Poland’s Stanislaw Aniolkowski finishing strongly in second and Phil Bauhaus third.

Neoprene is made from toxic chemicals, hard to recycle and, with 400,000 tonnes made a year, a growing problem. So can surfers and swimmers find green wetsuits?

I have been hesitating for months. The wetsuit I swim in every week to keep me toasty warm in the winter and safe from jellyfish stings in the summer is riddled with holes. Yet I can’t bring myself to buy a new one because I’ve learned that comfortable, flexible and insulating neoprene is manufactured using some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

Neoprene, a synthetic foamed rubber, is made from the petrochemical compound chloroprene. Exposure to chloroprene emissions, produced during the manufacturing process, may increase the risk of cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The Strawberry Line network of paths in Somerset has found a way to speed up planning permission and harness the goodwill of the community

In the past two years, multiple sections of a hoped-for 76-mile rural cycling and walking route spanning Somerset have sprouted up around the small town of Shepton Mallet, seemingly every few weeks.

These new routes are popular. One 300-metre section of path in the heart of the town, for example, uses one of Historic Railway Estates’ bridges for the first time for a cycle route (an organisation usually more given to infilling its structures).

Polytag system prints invisible tag on to containers, which can be picked up by readers located at recycling centres

Marks & Spencer is teaming up with a recycling technology group to enable the retailer to trace what happens to its drinks bottles, cartons and other plastic packaging.

The Polytag system prints an invisible tag on to containers, which can be picked up by electronic readers located at recycling centres.

Law change not ‘anti-cycling’ says Iain Duncan Smith, who brought the amendment to the criminal justice bill

A new offence of causing death or serious injury by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling is to be introduced.

The law will be changed after a deal was reached between the government and the former Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, whose amendment to the criminal justice bill was backed by 37 fellow Tory backbenchers.

Enlarge / A C-V2X bicycle can alert a C-V2X-enabled car to its presence—note the large yellow icon on the screenshot of the Audi's digital instrument display. (credit: Audi)

There's a fundamental flaw in current car safety tech: It's limited to line of sight. Or, perhaps, line of "sensing" is more accurate, because the way cameras and lidar work is to inspect the perimeter of a vehicle and use predictive algorithms to understand the motion of an object in relation to the motion of the vehicle itself. Which is good, because as carmakers have added elements such as pedestrian and cyclist detection, they're trying to prevent drivers from hurting the most vulnerable road users. And unfortunately this is necessary, because even though 2023 saw a slight reduction in drivers striking cyclists and pedestrians, according to the most recent data from the Governor's Highway Safety Association, since 2019 pedestrian fatalities are still up 14 percent—and cyclist deaths are up 50 percent since 2010.

That doesn't mean lidar and cameras have "failed," but because they rely on what the sensors can pick up, they cannot necessarily ID hazards (and alert drivers) as quickly as we need them to, particularly if that's a cyclist in your lane 300 feet down the road, just over the next rise. Yes, current sensing works well now with figuring out the pace of a traffic jam, and automatic emergency braking can step in to stop your car if you fail to. But for non-automotive obstacles, they're still limited.

For that, we need better tech, which is emerging and is called Connected Vehicle to Everything (C-V2X). The idea isn't that complicated. Boiled down, it's a chipset that operates on a portion of the cellular bandwidth, and vehicles with this tech embedded (say in an e-bike or car) monitor anything with a C-V2X chip as well as broadcast their own location at a pulse of 10 times a second. This precision location system would then warn a driver of a cyclist on the road ahead, even beyond line of sight, and in an emergency—possibly because a cyclist was right in a car's path—could prevent a collision.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments