Image of parking meters having a day off courtesy of malias' Flickrstream under the Creative Commons Attribution license 50 years on London streets today.......

Westminster City Council has announced that it is trialling a budget parking scheme in its Queensway car park. Using a pricing structure based on that of Easyjet, the hourly rate will vary depending on how full the car park is when the driver enters. When it is nearly empty customers will be charged as little as 20p per hour for the duration of their stay, a price which will rise on a scale to......

Forget rivers of blood, famine and locusts; Tooting and Putney motorists, cyclists and motorcyclists are suffering the daily torment of perpetual potholes, some up to 6 inches deep. The local paper delved into council funding and found that their budget for footway and carriageway repairs was £1m less than it was 3 years ago. Wandsworth blame this on the cyclical nature of funding from central government and claim that all reported potholes are programmed......

Our environmentally sustainable Mayor is taking on the IOC bigwigs who are demanding VIP fast lanes for a fleet of up to 3000 cars "to take officials, politicians and corporate sponsors to venues" at the 2012 Games. No fool he, cunningly waiting until they'd finished their progress inspection and given a favourable verdict earlier this week. He's not diving headlong into a fight though, preferring to wait until the Beijing Olympics are over this......

Yesterday, we saw a strange sight in Soho: Cars are being lifted straight out of their parking spots onto trucks and being hauled away. Even more surprisingly, we heard reports of it happening again today, on Regent Street. Well, we can expect to see many more cars being carried by cranes, as it turns out that TfL have yet another congestion-reducing trick up their sleeves. Yesterday they announced that 21 new high-tech removal vehicles will......

So you're driving along, say, and you hear a strange hissing noise from underneath the seat. Do you (a) pull over and investigate the cause, or (b) slither to the conclusion that a sneaky snake has ensnared itself in your vehicle? Embarrassed of Twickenham opted for (b). She quickly hailed down a passing AA patrol car, the driver of which was able to locate the culprit: a can of de-icer that had lost its......

Well here's a suprise. The cost of another major engineering project (Tube refits) is soaring. Who could have predicted? Attack bus driver, hijack bus, three times over the drinking limit, with no licence, smash up 15 parked cars and a garden porch. Sentence? Oh, go home and just behave yourself. Cars are also flying around in Beckenham. More than 1% of the FA Cup crowd will be police officers. Queen mum memorial revealed. Gawd......

Grown-ups have known for years, since parents found themselves begging their kids to take them to see Toy Story again, that animation is not just for drooling infants who don't know how to read or pronounce Jan Svankmeyer correctly. Claymation, anime, CGI, stop-motion, traditional pen, paper and clever uses of transparencies... it's a big area and with the recent release of animation-a-like films such as A Scanner Darkly challenging the now extremely common CGI......

This week - CGI cars populate the earth (Cars), stylist sci-fi thriller set in Paris 2054 (Renaissance) and a computer game becomes deadly (Stay Alive) First up, Cars from Pixar, makers of Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Toy Story etc. etc. However, where Pixar's previous efforts have been recieved well by the critics, Cars dissapoints. Bradshaw in the Guardian awards it three stars writing that Cars "just doesn't have much in the tank." As expected,......

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Londonist used to be svelte enough (and poor enough) to travel everywhere by bicycle. We could pretend that this was something to do with also keeping healthy but since our route used to take in the whole of Oxford Street, behind ageing Routemasters and black cabs belching their diesel fumes, the contents of our hankies used to tell us our lungs were not......

Another Wednesday, and another salvo fired in the war between those who say 'Midweek' is one word and those who say 'Mid Week' is two words. (Don't even get us started on the 'it's hyphenated' brigade.) In this week's round up: Grass, Death, Folk and Scandinavians. Pick of the gigs in the not-quite spam we received in our inbox is next Monday's gig at Koko: Supergrass, supported by Thirteen Senses, are playing as part of......

Right, no pithy introductions this week. Let's get straight to the sensuously seductive and dirty as a tramp's trousers Goldfrapp who take to the Brixton stage on Thursday 6th October to support the forthcoming Ooh La La. We're already rubbing our thighs in anticipation. There's also still a chance to catch the Irish Nick Drake, Damien Rice who plays The London Paladium on June 20th. But hurry, tickets're going fast. Fellow troubador Tom McRae......