Birmingham University is now home to Britain's first hydrogen filling station, part of a dozen planned to be installed by 2010. So far there are only a handful of hydrogen-fueled cars in the country but the university will be using this station to support ongoing research into hydrogen vehicles. Although Honda hasn't yet indicated any plans to offer the new FCX Clarity in the UK, Transport for London is pushing hard to get more stations opened in the area of the capital next year. If that happens, Honda may reconsider and offer the right hand drive Japanese version of the Clarity in Britain.


[Source: AutoCar]

I picked up this little story from The Scooter Scoop, which I can always count on to have funny little blurbs of interest. It seems that UK Transportation Chief Martin Mullaney has been chided for not taking his own advice, which is to ride the bus to work. The problem? He rides his scooter. I can appreciate the Lambretta myself, being a lover of most things on two wheels, but those old two-stroke motors are quite the polluters. Modern scooters are almost all four-strokers these days, and the two-strokes often have catalytic converters on them, despite being very small in displacement.

Martin says that if more people were to take him up on his suggestion to take the bus, then he would too. He says that there are too many cars on the road, making the trip by bus take too long. I think that people are probably making too much of the whole thing, but perhaps that is understandable, as the committee that Martin is chief of recently published a pretty harsh report claiming that the wealthy and middle-classers are too "snobbish" to take the bus. The same report suggested a congestion charge like that of London in Birmingham, U.K.

The picture with this post shows Martin riding his very nice vintage Lambretta.

[Source: Tony Collins / Birmingham Mail via The Scooter Scoop]