‘I decided not to jog here after dark’: new English council guidance prioritises women’s safety
Reetta Vaahtoranta used to go running in the evening along the Greenway, a four-mile (7km) pathway stretching across east London,But increasingly, she found herself receiving unwanted attention from lone male passersby,She switched her running clothes to baggier options, because “the less attractive and weirder you look, the less likely you are to get people following you”,“In the end, I just decided it was not worth it to come jogging here after dark,” she said,“If I know it can be a bit dodgy, then I just stop doing it.
Which is a shame because in the centre of the borough there aren’t that many green spaces.”Vaahtoranta’s experience is not unique, and has driven her to become a campaigner for her home borough of Newham with Living Streets, a national charity that aims to improve the walking environment.This week, new official guidance for English councils, produced by Active Travel England (ATE) in collaboration with Living Streets, put women’s safety while walking on streets and in public spaces at the top of the agenda.Vaahtoranta, who is a software developer at the Guardian, notes that the dimly lit Greenway, which has no exit points for a person to make a quick escape if they are being followed or harassed, would not reflect the guidance.She contrasts this with the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Olympic park, which was built on brownfield land to house key sites in the 2012 Olympic Games, and was designed with walking, socialising, running and cycling in mind.
The park’s wide avenues thrum with people at all times of day: parents pushing prams, schoolchildren working on projects, friends meeting for coffees, and – unusually for a London park – joggers and cyclists who feel safe to be there from morning until late at night,This is not accidental, but rather the outcome of intentional design and consultation with women and girls,“It’s just really mixed use,” said Vaahtoranta,“So it has a lot of reasons for people to come there and it means that it’s always used,You need quite a density of people to feel that if something happened to you, someone would step in and help.
“It’s really well lit as well.So I don’t have a problem walking through it to get to the train station at night.”In future, more public spaces will be redeveloped this way, in line with the guidance on how to create streets that are safer for women and girls, which aims to address a fundamental issue of fairness as well as boosting levels of physical activity.The guidance being drawn up by ATE is expected to include measures such as better lighting and CCTV, and replacing dark underpasses with street-level crossings.Councils will be able to bid for public money to fund improvements.
The approach takes inspiration from other countries, for example schemes in Spain and Sweden that allow women to ask bus drivers to drop them between stops at night.It will also build on pioneering schemes nationally, such as Liverpool’s “halo points”, which are well-lit, highly visible devices linked directly to emergency services and CCTV.Tanya Braun, the director of external affairs at Living Streets, said their research had involved speaking to women and girls to understand what made them feel safe, something she felt was not done enough when public spaces were being developed.“We know that lighting’s really important in terms of women and girls feeling safe getting out and about, passive surveillance.There being lots of people on the streets and things like benches, well-connected walking routes and CCTV has been cited as something that’s quite important as well.
Just that feeling of someone’s watching you,” she said.“I think there’s a growing understanding that more needs to be done.A lot of our towns and cities have been built without consultation with certain groups of lived experience.That really needs to happen, because without consultation how is a designer supposed to know what that local community needs?”
Oil on track for record monthly surge as Iran war disrupts markets
The Brent crude oil price is on track for its biggest monthly gain on record in March after the Iran war caused mayhem in the markets.Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed by 51% since the start of March, LSEG data shows, beating the previous monthly record of 46% in September 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf war.Brent closed at $112.57 a barrel on Friday, up from $72.48 a barrel on 27 February, the day before the US-Israeli war on Iran began
War in Iran erodes the chancellor’s headroom and exposes our fragility | Heather Stewart
It is with no pleasure that I must report a depressing domestic byproduct of the war in the Middle East: headroom chat is back.Of course, shifts in investors’ appetite for gilts – UK government bonds – are trivial in the context of the bloodshed in Iran and beyond. But as a result of the economic chaos unleashed, gilt yields, which determine the interest rate on government borrowing, have resumed their grip on British politics. And one of Rachel Reeves’s proudest boasts, the £23bn in “headroom” she had built up against her fiscal rules, is in jeopardy.Less than a month ago, the chancellor was able to stand up in the House of Commons and report that her headroom had increased since November’s tax-raising budget
How Meta’s victim-blaming failed to sway jurors in landmark social media addiction trial
When Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, sought to defend itself in the landmark social media addiction lawsuit alleging its products caused personal injury to a young user, it went on the offensive. The mental health problems that the 20-year-old known as KGM suffered since she was a child were not the result of exposure to harm on Instagram, Meta’s lawyers and public relations team argued, but instead linked to her mother’s parenting and her offline social problems.In a bench memo filed before the trial began, lawyers for Meta quoted excerpts from KGM’s teenage text messages, personal writings and social media posts complaining about her mother. They combed through therapy notes and called on doctors to testify to examples of personal conflict. Throughout the proceedings, Meta’s communications team sent reporters repeated updates from the trial and quotes from testimony that highlighted her familial issues
‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books
Recently, the literary agent Kate Nash started noticing that the submission letters she was receiving from authors were becoming more thorough – albeit also more formulaic.“I took it as a rise in diligence,” she said. “I thought it was a good thing.”But then she had what she described as her eureka moment: the letter with the AI prompt right at the top. “It read: ‘Rewrite my query letter for Kate Nash including a comp to a writer she represents,’” she said
Kimi Antonelli goes back-to-back with victory in Suzuka – as it happened
But that’s about all that’s needed from me. I’ve been Joey Lynch and it’s been great to have your company once again, watching on as Kimi Antonelli won his second-straight race, became the youngest driver to ever lead the F1 Championship, and flirted with breaking Japan’s underage drinking laws.Stay tuned for Giles Richards’ full report from Japan.Due to the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi races, the F1 season will now go on a one-month break until it returns on the first weekend in May from Miami.Until then, thanks and success!Youngest
Kimi Antonelli wins Japan Grand Prix to become youngest F1 championship leader
There was an element of good fortune for Kimi Antonelli in taking victory at the Japanese Grand Prix but the youngster demonstrated emphatically that given a sniff of a chance, he is ready to close out with the precision of a veteran. A champion’s trait which was suitably marked as in so doing the 19-year-old has become the youngest driver to lead the Formula One world championship.Antonelli, still a fresh-faced youth, whooped and hollered with abandon when he took the flag, having claimed the win after dropping from pole to sixth at the start. His sheer, unrestrained joy at delivering on his undoubted talent, and the pleasure he clearly revels in when competing, is positively infectious. With two straight wins now Formula One not only has a new star to celebrate but one who has unmistakably staked his claim to be considered as a potential champion
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