Numbers

I've been pushing some web-sourced numbers around. This can bring into sharp relief stuff that might otherwise go unnoticed. I've no training with numbers, as may be obvious to anyone who has. I fret that a statistician chancing upon this blog will be snorting with derision at the clumsy missteps, spraying their laptops with a splodgy nasal mist of orange pekoe - assuming they take tea with their web browsing - and mucous. Apologies.

The US Environmental Protection Agency suggests a yield of 8.887 kilos of Co2 per gallon of petrol burnt. Those are US gallons. 

Another site, using larger UK gallons and factoring in the extraction/production and transport costs incurred in delivering the petrol to the car, that it might then be burned by the car on our streets, gives a per gallon yield of 14.3 kilos of Co2. I'll write that again: 14.3 kilos. That's astonishing. It looks like generating Co2 is the thing fossil fuels do best when burned in air; the heat and light generated mere side effects, accidents, feeble epiphenomena.

We'll stick with 14.3 kilos per gallon as a yardstick. The internet suggests a UK national average car commute distance of 10 miles. I suspect it could be fractionally higher in Northumberland, but we'll stick with 10 miles, or 20 miles round trip. There are nearly 700 parking spaces at Northumberland County Council's HQ, County Hall, regularly filled such that overspill spaces are used on the approach road, verges have been grasscreted and formerly pedestrian block paved precincts surrendered to add capacity. (As an aside, a little hands on research/direct observation suggests a single occupancy rate of vehicles parking up at CH of 98.5%) I doubt anyone knows for sure how many spaces there are. I've tried totting them up from Google maps satellite view but invariably lose count. A bit like Galleon's Lap in Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood, that mysterious stand of fir trees no-one has been able definitively to count; are there 63 or 64? Except these are dead slabs of oily concrete and tarmac to store idle heavy machinery, and not fir trees. Last time I tried I blacked out at 687, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the weeping tarmac wound. Let's, conservatively settle on 700.

700 x twenty miles x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year (there are 8 bank holidays) = 3,500,000 car miles a year. I'll write that again: County Hall generates 3,500,000 car miles - almost exclusively single occupant car miles - a year. 

We need an average miles per gallon figure to proceed. Car manufacturers are notoriously dishonest about the environmental hazard their product represents. The industry in the UK claims 50mpg, but these figures are widely understood not to translate to real world driving conditions. A US site offers 24.9mpg or something, but US gallons are smaller. Scaling up proportionately gives a UK figure of 29.9mpg. I don't know how authoritative this site - https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-mpg - is but I'm persuaded to proceed with their 38.8mpg. 3,400,000 car miles divided by 38.8mpg = 87,629 gallons, times 14.3 kilos Co2 per gallon = 1,289,000 kilos Co2, or 1,289 metric tonnes of Co2 a year. 

There are 8,760 hours in a calendar year. That's 147 kilos each and every hour of the day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Co2 emissions of 147 kilos per hour sit beyond higher end estimates of the hourly yield of a jumbo jet at cruising speed. 

The DfT's 2008 [yes, it was that long ago] Essential Guide to Travel Planning  gives the national average annual cost to the provider of a single car parking space to be around £400. See other posts for a play with this. Parking at CH is offered free to staff.

Conclusion: at County Hall alone, something like £272,000 of public money are spent subsidising the emission, by single occupant car commuters, of something like 1,289 metric tonnes of Co2 every year, comfortably equivalent to keeping a Jumbo jet airborne perpetually. For a visual sense of NCC's Green Workplace Travel Planning commitment at its own HQ, picture a Jumbo flying in circles above the battlements of County Hall, day and night, ceaselessly, never landing. 

It's been up there 40 years already.

We have all been here before

Back in 2012 we had a look at Morpeth's fantasies about itself.

Plus ca change..

Hannah Slater's original triptych painting has been replaced with another picture, by Sarah Farooqi this time, of cental Morpeth. Or Morpeth as it might appear were Morpeth a town in the Netherlands, or a town in a benign parallel universe.

Wow! Traffic absent and tamed. Two tiny cars nosing gingerly along flanked by running, unaccompanied children, kids with balloons, mums with pushchairs, pets. Visionary shared space scenario, person-centred street-scene. Safety. Peace. Clean air! War is over if you want it. Let the bells ring..

So has Morpeth's Bridge Street changed at all over the last seven years? Has it buggery: still four lanes for cars; two for moving machinery, two for stationary machinery.

We have all been here before.

Ash to ashes..

In a departure from my usual transport themed excursions we've a guest contributor denied column space on the letters page of the Morpeth Herald. We badly need an e-zine alternative to the Herald as a platform for progressive thinking in the town. Morpeth Matters, the facebook page moderated by the right wing local politicians who fronted the wretched Lights Out! campaign, does not serve.

Sent: Sunday, 3 November 2019, 18:14:33 GMT

Subject: Letters

Dear Editor,

Last week Morpeth lost an old, much loved and highly valued friend: the beautiful and historic ash tree, which had stood in Dawson Place for well over fifty years, was cut down and removed.

To describe this as an act of both civic and environmental vandalism would not be an exaggeration: the tree had graced the square for generations, and was greatly loved by the local residents and also enjoyed on a daily basis by the many schoolchildren who passed it by on the way to Middle and High schools. It was a valuable wildlife habitat, and in its lifetime must have also removed significant amounts of C02. 

And this was a healthy tree: despite being an ash, it bore no signs of ash dieback, nationally an increasing worry, and was as a result even more valuable. And it was removed under instruction of Karbon Homes without any advance warning or notification, without any discussion or consultation with Dawson Place residents. 

To describe this as an outrage is not an exaggeration: we cannot take the moral high ground and lecture others elsewhere in the world, for example those in Brazil, about the cutting down of trees when we continue to do so ourselves here. 

I called the tree a friend: that is certainly how it has felt to those of who have lived with its generous company for decades. Its loss feels like a bereavement, but it is not one that can be allowed to pass without holding to account those who were responsible. Karbon Homes have serious questions to answer for their act of wilful environmental and cultural vandalism.

Yours, 

P__ S__  

PS I have enclosed before and after photos of the tree taken only this Summer and what was left of it on Friday morning. 

The Joy of Surveillance

Perhaps for Morpeth's local polity the fictional village of Sandford, setting for the film 'Hot Fuzz', isn't a wretched dystopia but an exemplary community to be emulated. How else to explain this front page headline story, remarkable even by the standards of the Herald?

You can't not take a swing at drek like this, so:

Sir,

you report "Delight at new CCTV system for town". Only "delight"? Nowhere a spasm of disquiet or curiosity about this beefing up of surveillance in the places where we live and work?

Oughtn't surveillance in public space to be conditional on the consent of the community being subjected to it, a community first persuaded of its necessity and proportionality? Were Alison Byard and David Bawn elected to their respective positions on manifesto pledges to extend surveillance: have they a mandate? Perhaps they could clarify? 

£2,500 from the Chamber of Commerce: what was the total cost? Were there any other private contributors or was all the balance public money?

In whose office do the monitors sit: who is it that has us under surveillance? Does the harvester and processor of all this personal data have GDPR compliant structures, procedures and safeguards in place? Who should we approach with our 'subject access requests'?

And is there no flinching, anywhere, at the glib, unexamined conflation of "the common good" with the business interests of the Chamber of Trade? Might there be metrics of "the common good" in a community other than the solvency of its commercial landlords?

Faithfully

Fuelling your passion for cars..

The Morpeth Herald feels it's its job to fuel our passion for cars. Which is strange, considering. The automotive industry isn't short of a bob or two and can perhaps afford its own advertising. Anyway, the editor didn't like this:

Sir

You report (Jan 3rd) that activity levels of children in Northumberland fall well below the CMO's minimum recommendations, with damaging implications for their future health and well-being.

That motorised traffic in the places where we live suppresses levels of walking and cycling is undisputed. In 1970, 80% of 7 and 8 year olds made their own way to school unaccompanied, which figure had fallen to 9% by 1990, parents justifiably loathe to expose their children to the danger brought to our streets by rising traffic densities. Car use by adults effects a 'generational cleansing' of the street scene, for which service Morpeth rewards the car user with free parking worth - steering by figures that appeared on your pages - circa £650 per space per year. 

Given the negative health consequences of car use on children - reduced independent mobility and activity levels being just one - what should we make of the Herald's decision, in the same Jan 3rd edition, to fluff its coverage of matters automotive with a picture of a laughing child ecstatically hosing down a car?

Is this cheeky editorial sass, or disingenuous cheer-leading for car-hegemony by a sclerotic local paper? Or are you implying that children might achieve the required levels of activity by being set to work energetically scrubbing and valeting our cars?

Mind, she seems cheerful enough, unperturbed by the existential challenges to her generation posed by climate change, legacy of her forebears' feckless fossil-fuel frenzy. Perhaps she knows something we don't.. 

Faithfully

Green workplace travel plan

Underlings,

for some years now you have been parking your private cars on the lawned area at the front of the building, scarring and killing the grass and generally making the place look like the sort of crap-heap no-one should care about. We briefly entertained the idea of asking you to desist, then remembered we do the same and so are happy to report that common sense has prevailed. We understand that it would be an insufferable indignity for those of you making short visits to the site to use the adjacent, free, short stay car park. We get that using our own empty courtyard car park would be an unpardonable affront given that it stands full fifty hard yards from the front door. And the suggestion that you might use the free all day car park circa 170 yards away? I think we all recognise a puerile insult when we see one. We, your management, are not made of stone and feel your pain.

Grasscrete is our gift to you. We've ripped out tipper trucks of turf and topsoil, laid down some plastic matrix, backfilled with some sandy medium - the crete is that? - and have scattered new grass seed to create designated parking for y'all. 11.7 thousand austerity pounds sterling; don't mention it, automobilised friends, you're welcome.

And that's not all. We've anticipated this doesn't solve the problem of traversing the five yards from your vehicles to your desks. So we've installed a ramp up to the back door. How's that going to help?, we hear you quaver. Have a little faith in our strategic acuity: a couple of these are on order.

We envisage a pool of trained volunteers drawn from the local community, 'Mobility Champions' if you will, ready at short notice to come in and scoop you, like so many soft balls of over-buttered mash, from your drivers' seats, wheel you into the building up the ramp and lower you gently into your office chairs.

For those of you who may have been hoping this latest round of alterations to the site would finally include a crumb of provision for people who've been cycling, walking and using public transport to get to work for years, we've a cracking joke: What's 'green' about our workplace travel plan? Give up? Your envious faces! Boom-tish! Bet you're all GoSmarting from this slap in the chops, right!?

We're on fire and we're here all week. In fact we're here for your entire working lives.

Anyone seen my car keys?

Regards

.

Bosses

Active Northumberland: Caring about Carbon

Cycling Provision at Willowburn

To

Roger.Tames@activenorthumberland.org.uk Chris.Roberts@northcountryleisure.org.uk Chris.Horner@northcountryleisure.org.uk

CC

Peter.Halliwell@northcountryleisure.org.uk

Gentlemen,

this is a polite complaint and a suggestion.

Bikes are by definition highly mobile; valuable enough to be attractive to thieves but not valuable enough to be worth equipping with integral anti-theft systems. So good quality, secure cycle parking at destinations is needed to make the bike a viable means of personal transport to those destinations.

The bike on which I've been riding over to the Willowburn Centre in Alnwick from my home in U_____, though nothing special, would cost circa £1K to replace new. The components (pedals, saddle) and necessary accessories (lights, luggage rack, tool kit, pump, seat pack, panniers) that might readily be stripped from it by anyone with opposing thumbs and hex keys add another £250 - £300 to its value.

There's a science and evidence base around what constitutes good cycle parking. Measured against this your bike racks are, I'm sorry, pitiful. Plainly a begrudging box-ticking afterthought proposed and approved by people who will never themselves need to use them, they fail against minimum standards and guidelines by dint of their design and situation. Butterfly racks, supporting/securing the bike by one wheel (most bike wheels are quick release these days) and known un-affectionately as wheelbenders/ wheelbreakers for reasons that should be self-explanatory, sited away from the entrance where they might enjoy the security advantage of being overlooked by people entering and leaving the building, out of range of your CCTV cameras, attached to the wall by bolts that look like they might simply be spannered out, open to the elements, unlit, are not fit for purpose. Anybody losing a bike to thieves from your racks would have a tough time persuading his/her insurers that he/she took adequate measures to protect against theft. Offering this as cycling provision is akin to making it a requirement of car-users parking up outside that they leave their car doors open wide and their keys in the ignition.



Permission from manager Peter Halliwell to bring my bike in the building has proved unworkable in the long term and has been revoked, on the usual grounds that it is an obstruction and a hazard, and contrary to North Country Leisure policy. North Country Leisure believe their bike parking provision at Willowburn to be adequate and suitable. Will you confirm this?

Hazard though? While rates of death and injury from bikes being brought into spacious buildings currently run at zero per year, cars kill - outright in RTAs - circa 3,000 people annually. They inflict serious, life changing injury on circa 20,000 people a year. A further 200,000 people suffer minor injuries on the roads a year. Some 40,000 people a year have their deaths from respiratory disease caused or accelerated by exposure to traffic exhaust fumes. Of the, if I recall correctly, 110,000 people who die prematurely from heart disease, physical inactivity is a cause in circa 45,000 cases. This and other diseases of sedentariness (like Type 2 diabetes), to which the obesogenic car as default means of personal transport is a major contributor, threaten to swamp our health service. Yet you seem very friendly to the car.

The surface area of the plot on which Willowburn stands is some four times larger than the footprint of the building. There'll have been great expense in acquiring this extra acreage; not for all-weather hockey pitches and tennis courts sadly, but for storing visitors' heavy machinery. This land needed engineering; levelling, landscaping, hardcore trucking in and compacting, asphalt, paving, drainage, lighting, planting. It's a beautiful, top quality, well designed car park: there'll have been significant expense involved in creating it.

  

This generous car parking provision will incur maintenance costs. Research by the Department for Transport, quoted in their Workplace Travel Planning Guidance, showed the national average annual cost to the provider of a single car parking space, excluding opportunity cost and the cost of the original land purchase and build spread over the lifetime of the facility, to be circa £400. Regional variations mean your maintenance costs may be less than this (or they may be higher), but steering by this figure for want of one specific to your Willowburn centre gives an annual cost for the 140+ parking spaces you gift to car users of more than £56,000.

If your status as "A new joint charity.. set up.. to manage and develop leisure services in North, West and South East Northumberland on behalf of Northumberland County Council" means you are transparent to Freedom of Information requests I'd like those figures: the cost of the original land purchase, the cost of building your car park, the annual cost of maintaining your car park. May I also know your annual customer/visitor numbers?

That you make this generous provision free to the car user doesn't mean it costs nothing. People walking, cycling or taking public transport to bring you their custom pay more for your services than they otherwise would, are in effect taxed, to grease car use, while people wanting to cycle may not, for love nor money, access cycle provision that meets standards and inspires confidence.

These are disappointing priorities for an organisation ostensibly committed to promoting physical activity and thereby public health. Doubly disappointing when reading about your policy commitment to carbon reduction - the transport sector accounts for 27% of our carbon emissions - that you should strain at the cycling gnat while swallowing the motorised camel.

Solutions? The space required for one single car parking space can accommodate 8-10 bikes in covered lockable bike lockers like these http://cyclesafe.com/bike-lockers/ecopark/ . Many alternative designs along these lines are available. I'd gladly pay something proportionate to rent one of these for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. This would also make you a cycling friendly employer, if that's an aspiration for you.

Please advise when you intend to remedy the sequence of oversights that led to the inadequacy of your current cycling provision at the Willowburn centre, with some provision as inviting to cyclists as the asphalt prairie of your 'free' car park is inviting to car users?

Sincerely

NTMH

I'll be sharing their reply, if and when it comes.