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.

Turning the Parents Green? It's Eco Child's Play!

Thanks to Jennifer Lance for this thoughtful review on ecochildsplay.com:

http://ecochildsplay.com/2008/05/20/eco-kids-books-how-to-turn-your-parents-green/

Funny to think of Jennifer sitting in the wilds of northern California, in her off-grid, self-built house, surrounded by kids running about and playing American versions of the universal child games, reading this odd little book. Which was written, incidentally, in a south Bristol terrace built a year before Victoria died, with a view over the trees and rooftops and lots of sky in the window. In the summer evenings a sound like a cow snorting tells us a hot air balloon is overhead, the pilot turning on the burner to get that balloon over our hill.

It isn't what you'd call wilderness round here. Our wildlife is as urban as we are: the frogs in the pond and the swifts in the sky are city-dwellers, so are the herring gulls which started moving in when the Clean Air Acts were passed forty-odd years ago. The gulls are big, aggressive and unafraid, and they love it here. No one has any idea what to do about them, though the city has tried some strange and wonderful ideas, such as stealing the eggs and replacing them with fakes. They've tried introducing predators like peregrine falcons to scare them away, but the gulls are used to predators and don't take any notice. They've tried culling them, but more just arrive to take the vacant rooftop apartments.

We're entwined with nature, even here in the city, and all of our actions will have consequences we could never imagine.