Bristol Cycling City? Let's See...

Hot on the news that the city is planning to turn our Malago greenway into a high speed bus lane comes the announcement that this same city, ie Bristol, has been named the UK's first Cycling City. Lots of fanfare, promises and a fair amount of cash accompany this accolade, but what will it mean?

I posted some thoughts on the Guardian blog, and I hope my first attempt at a cyber-linkage-doodad will take you there with One Click. Sorry if it doesn't work.

Here's a snippet from How to Turn Your Parents Green:

Funky Bike Facts
- You can park 18 bikes in the same space as one car
- In motion, 30 bikes take up the same space as one car
- If 40,000 people needed to get across a bridge in one hour, by train they’d need two lanes, by bus four lanes, by car twelve lanes, but by bike only one lane.
- The bicycle is the only form of transport that doesn’t create barriers for pedestrians.
- Riding a bike makes you incredibly fit and healthy, as long as you don’t get splattered all over the road.

How Green is Rapid Transit?

Sorry, rather a dull title, but the subject is anything but... The thing is, we all want our cities to be Greener, and in transport terms that means getting people out of cars and onto buses, trains, bikes, scooters, heelies, flying carpets, etc. With rocketing oil prices even Groans are becoming quite keen on forms of transport that don't involve them shelling out for petrol that will soon cost as much as wine. Imagine - a wine-drinking car, tooling along with a tank full of claret...

So we're all agreed. Every city needs a good transport infrastructure, with affordable buses, trams or what have you whizzing in all directions.

But where do these vehicles go? In our city the roads are already horribly congested, so any new bus or tram or 20-person electric scooter will have to crawl along at the same speed as everyone else. So our elders and betters hired professional plan-makers (a species in no danger of extinction) to make some plans for new routes that would unroll across the city like so much red carpet, allowing buses, trams, etc, to zoom at will.

These highly-paid professionals looked at the map and found a network of ready made corridors, where there were few houses and few roads. Quite an achievement in a built-up 21st century city. They marked out nice new transport routes in coloured felt tip pen and went away to count their loot. Job done.

One of these proposed routes runs not a million miles from my house. It comes rushing out of the city centre, over a new bridge, across a busy shopping street, under a railway bridge and then along a stream called the Malago, using a route known to people round here as the Malago Greenway. I say along. In fact the stream will most probably disappear under the new road. The trees along the stream will be cut down. Oh, and the many uncounted, quiet, non-motorised people who walk, ride and play along this mile-long ribbon of green will have to find somewhere else to go instead.

Except that there isn't anywhere else. We're surrounded on all sides by busy roads and railways. What these planners have found and seized upon with glee are the only remaining paths people can follow at their own pace and under their own steam. Yes, these are also wildlife corridors - places where slow worms and bats eke out a meagre urban existence - but they are, first and foremost, human corridors. You can't measure the value of city children being able to walk to school beside a stream under the shade of big trees - no one's cutting four and a half minutes off their journey time or earning an extra £3.75 - but we all know deep down that this is important.

Further along the Malago flows through a poorer neighbourhood, and city officials are keen to point out that the new route will bring prosperity to its people. Will it? And at what price? Aren't the stream and surrounding greenery already giving people there a kind of prosperity?

The truth is that city officials and planners have goals and targets. They want to get certain numbers up and others down. They think in traffic volumes and journey times, and their thinking is constrained by ingrained beliefs: you can't interfere with motorists' freedom; bikes and pedestrians are always less important than cars; a piece of land that doesn't have a measurable economic output needs to have one.

So how Green is Rapid Transit? If it replaces cars on the same roads, it gets my vote. Otherwise, it's just another Groanish scheme designed to speed things up for no good reason.

Five Reasons to Build a Severn Barrage (Not)

Being opposed to things can become very dull. People who are Greenish or Reddish or a mixture of the two always seem to be anti-this and against that, fighting this development or opposing that policy, and frankly I've had enough. I want to be on board. I want to be on the team. I want to start saying Yes.

So how about the Severn Barrage? What's that? I hear you say. The Severn Barrage is basically a dam, which will stretch across the mouth of the river Severn between the Welsh city of Cardiff and the English coast about ten miles away. This particular stretch of the British coast has a huge tidal range (at most about 15m or, whatever it is, 45 feet between high and low tides), which means that hydroelectric turbines set into the dam will be able to generate 5% of the UK's electricity.

That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? In fact the whole idea sounds fabulously Green and lovely. I want to be a supporter. I really really want to say Yes to the Severn Barrage.

But I can't. I have to say, once again, NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! That's Nein, Non, er Nul Point.

It's a terrible idea. A monstrously Groanish, ghastly and despicable idea. Why? Oh dear, I'll have to add a (Not) to the title. I meant to have five Pros, but it looks like a fistful of Cons instead:

1. The people who want to build the Barrage aren't in it for the Green power. They're in it for the development potential upstream. With the tidal flow reduced the river will flood less and the water will be clearer, making it more conducive to watersports and luxury waterside apartment blocks. The Severn has never been a river that likes to stay within its banks - the Barrage will finally tame it.

2. At the moment the Severn Estuary is one of the world's most important stopover points for migratory wetland birds. At Slimbridge, a ways upriver from the proposed Barrage, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust is like a motel and gas station for tired geese. Any reduciton in the river's tidal flow will have an impact on the birds, but no one knows exactly what it will be.

3. Migratory fish species are already declining around the rivers of Europe. The salmon and the eel were once both plentiful in the Severn, and their decline is at least partially because of ever more efficient flood defences. Weirs block the main stream and floodgates prevent water flowing from the main river into its tributaries. Since few people now make a living from the fishery there are few who care whether fish live or die. A barrage, even if navigable by fish, can only make the situation worse.

4. The Severn Bore is one of Britain's natural wonders. Formed by the incoming tide as it piles into the funnel-shaped estuary, the Bore is a wave up to six feet high, which travels miles upriver. Surfers travel from all over the world to ride on this most determined of rollers, and at present the unofficial world record for the longest single ride on a surfboard is held by a veteran Severn surfer Steve King. The barrage would of course kill the Bore.

5. There are alternatives. One is to build lagoons which will trap water as it flows out with the tide and use it to power turbines. These wouldn't block the river, which is good news for the river. However, this means developers or investors won't have the incentives outlined in (1) above, so it ain't likely to happen. Another option is to invest more money in developing free-standing tidal turbines - like wind turbines underwater. These have been developed on a shoestring (no, not literally) by some of the UK's amazing renewable energy boffins, and a couple of models are being tested right now. Will the inventors find UK investors? Or will they sell their fantastic ideas abroad, while we continue turning our beautiful island into a giant waterside housing development in which rivers are lifeless pools and wildlife clings for dear life to the tiny patches of SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning)?

Nature is soft, not hard. Rivers like the Severn are supposed to change with the tides and seasons. The regular flooding has given the Severn vale the rich agricultural land farmers have valued for centuries, but now we are only interested in bricks and mortar - which are hard and don't respond well to immersion in brackish water. We've tunnelled and bridged the Severn. Now the engineers want to finish the job and dam it.

Time to bring back the Monkey Wrench Gang.