RE: point 1, I'm a fan of Vivaldi, a privacy-focused highly modified chromium build developed by former Opera developers who were disillusioned by the direction that company went in.

Have you looked into withings? They're analog watches with a small lcd for notifications, fitness tracking, etc. They last a month between charges and are not too big.

Law GL(GP)A is the Greater London (General Powers) Act, it has no bearing on what happens outside of London. "Should" instructions in the Highway Code are guidance for best practice and are not enforceable in and of themselves.

The law is NOT there for "should" statements in the Highway Code. "Shoulds" are considered best practice, and can work against you in a careless/dangerous driving case if you didn't follow them, but they are not themselves tied to any specific legislation. "Must" statements ARE backed up by legislation, and so can be enforced.

The highway code is not law.

As a bald man I sometimes wonder if I'm missing out on a part of British culture by not going to the barber, but if this is what it's like then I'm glad I don't have to go through it.

My city has a door-2-door system of minibuses that are a bit like the missing link between taxis and buses. They pick you up from wherever you are and take you to wherever you're going, they just pick up other people on the way too. It's generally marketed towards the disabled/elderly, but I don't see why it couldn't be scaled up and be marketed as either a bus+ or a taxi lite.

There are always going to be edge cases where personal vehicles make sense, but no serious proponent of better public transport is ever going to propose an outright ban on private vehicular use.

The fact is the majority of people in the world live in urban areas, where there shouldn't be the excuse of "oh I live hours away from the nearest station and too few people to justify adding a bus route."

It certainly made things easier over lockdown!

Thank you for pointing those out, I had no idea fairphone had expanded into headphones!

They're now on my radar for my next pair, but I'm going to run my current headphones for as long as possible before making a new purchase (5 years with my wireless in-ear buds and still going strong!)

Slightly boring answer perhaps, but Danny Dorling, a professor at Oxford, wrote a paper on the subject during his time at Sheffield and came up with his own border between North and South.

It basically starts at the Severn estuary just north of Gloucester (which I expect we'd all consider south) and makes its wiggly way north-east, ending just south of Grimsby (clearly a northern town).

Taxis exist.

A quick search suggests that here in the UK the average driver is spending up to £200 per month on their car (excluding any financing to pay for it in the first place). That much money would easily cover a monthly travel pass in most cities I've lived in, with plenty left over to pay for taxi rides when you need the convenience of door-to-door travel at a time that suits you.