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.

Travelling Greenly

So Christmas is over and everyone's thinking about the summer holidays. I suppose it's pleasant to think about blue skies and hot sunshine when the weather outside is cold and grey, but for budding Greens the subject of travel is tricky. I mean, we like to travel as much as the next person, but we feel bad about the consequences.
Mostly people worry about carbon emissions from flying, driving long distances and so on, but there's another side to the story. Here's a little snippet from 'How to Turn Your Parents Green':

The Plane Truth about Stonehenge
You know the story of Daedalus and Icarus? Dad makes wings. Son gets over-excited and flies too close to sun. Wings fall to pieces. Son plummets to death.
Moral: THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE LEAVING TERRA FIRMA.
In the old days flying used to be dangerous, but now it’s safe and cheap, and Groans love it. They love buzzing over to Paris or Prague for the weekend, and because everyone else is doing it too they assume it must be a good thing to do. Of course people used to feel like that about sending little boys up chimneys and putting little girls in charge of dangerous machinery.
The trouble with flying is that it uses an amount of energy way out of proportion to the benefit gained, ie a Groan lying by a pool or trawling around the shops. And there are Hidden Costs.
Take Stonehenge. I don’t mean literally. Just as an example. Not so long ago you could wander among the stones, but now there’s a huge fence round them. Why?
1. Because otherwise the stones might escape?
2. Because a gang of dastardly international criminals is planning to steal them? Or
3. Because so many people come to see them that if there wasn’t a fence the stones would be worn away like the noses of cathedral saints?
A trip to a foreign country used to be a rare adventure, but now you just drive to the airport, hop on a plane and hire a car when you get to the other end.
Groans may grumble about how they used to wander round Stonehenge but they themselves want to go everywhere and see everything. They want More, Cheaper.
So Stonehenge is now hidden by a giant car park full of coaches and a fence, and none of you will ever see the old stones sitting quietly on the grass.

Still, even the Greenest among us will be thinking wistfully of a sun-soaked beach right now, because that's what we do in winter when we're hunched in our woolly hats and scarves. As we dream of the sun, travel agents offer to make our dreams come true. We book our exotic summer holidays so that the thought of them can sustain us through the winter. But when the summer comes around we don't really need to go anywhere. England (or any other northern country) is beautiful in the summer, wet sometimes maybe, but green and temperate when more southerly countries are roasting.
So what we need is a new way of dreaming through the winter. We need to invent imaginary journeys, magical cities, fantastic voyages. We need to read Marco Polo or Gulliver's Travels or The Odyssey. These adventures have helped people cope with hundreds of winters, and they can help us now.
In the future, when the human race has grown bored of zooming all over the place and Stonehenge is open to all again, people will sit in their gardens imagining fantastic journeys. Travel guides will no longer be published. Instead, there will be books full of imaginary journeys, while visitors to unfamiliar cities will be given puzzles instead of maps. Travel will be a test of character, undertaken only by those with a genuine thirst for knowledge and adventure.
In the meantime, try reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - you'll never need to leave home again.
PS The exotic desert island in the picture is called Steep Holm. Can you find it?