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.

Transport policy? What transport policy?

Hot on the heels of parking being made free county wide for any driver making any journey - "a half mile commute in a single occupant vehicle? Well done madam: your free parking is this way. Is that Bergamot I can smell?" - comes news that Northumberland County Council is clawing back public transport subsidy from students, prompting:

Sir,

first, millions of public pounds a year are found to reward private car users in Northumberland with free parking; some £713,000 a year in Morpeth alone.

Then public transport subsidy is axed for students.

Are these developments by any chance related? I think we should be told.

In similar redistributive vein, might the money we currently waste on school dinners be better spent handing out free bacon butties to car users on the Telford Bridge at morning rush hour?

Sincerely

NTMH 

but this one didn't get an airing on the Herald's letters page. I'm losing my touch.

Get one free, get one free.

Sir,
during financial year 2012 - 2013, pay and display ticket machines for Morpeth's 1097 car parking spaces generated £713,315.43. This is another formula we might use to determine how generous a personal transport subsidy, to single-occupant car commuters, 'free' parking is: £650 a year. Worth having.
No justification has been ventured by Morpeth's car user lobby for this workers' subsidy being exclusive to those choosing to commute by car. A curious oversight, because those who commute to work in Morpeth other than by car need to feed and clothe themselves no less than car commuters; they're no less likely than car commuters to do their shopping in Morpeth and would, I'm sure, happily receive their subsidy in the form of vouchers redeemable only in Morpeth shops, if that would help swing it with Toad of Town Hall.
We've heard rather more than we needed to hear from Clarence the Car-Dependent Lion and co-religionists in recent years. Perhaps we could hear something from Pete the Pedestrian Potto, Buster the Bus-Riding Bonobo, Trish the Train-Travelling Tamarin and Bart the Bicycling Bandicoot. Can they pick up their £650, in whatever form, from the same distribution points as the 'Free' Parking discs? No? Where then?
Sincerely
NTMH

I work in one of the distribution points for the new 'free' parking discs. 'Free' money is proving predictably popular with the recipients. Less predictable is the boundless compassion on display. We saw it first with the Lights Out! campaign: people wanted rid not because they personally were mildly inconvenienced by an initiative to reduce the odious, hazardous hegemony motorised traffic enjoys in central Morpeth, but on behalf of other people and interests - pedestrian safety, street scene aesthetics, congestion in a general sense were their prime concerns. 

I'd dismissed it as evidence that it only takes a few determined liars to Shanghai a town, but again I'm being confronted by the warm hearted humanity of many drivers. They want multiple discs. Not for themselves, you understand, emphatically not because stockpiling them while free before they start costing a quid apiece from April, but for family and friends and neighbours, and their friends and extended families and neighbours. And one for the little boy who lives down the lane. And I'd better take a dozen for the poor ginger orphans. It's the Big Society made flesh and it brings a tear to the eye.

Don we now our gay apparel. Fa la la la la, la la la la

Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg's One False Move: A Study of Children's Independent Mobility shows reductions in child road deaths and serious injuries have been achieved, in this country, not by rendering our streets and built environments safer for the un-carred but by effectively barring unaccompanied children from public spaces now surrendered to high volumes of fast moving motorised traffic. Much as rates of child death and serious injury from alligator wrestling have plummeted since social attitudes hardened to the sport: nobody disputes that 'gator wrestling remains highly dangerous, it's just that kids aren't licensed to participate any more.

Hillman et al published in 1990. Since the seventies the Dutch and Danes, in showing how public space can be configured safely to balance the needs of car users and the uncarred, have been catalysts of an impetus, that now has global reach, towards better designed built-environments that prioritise the pedestrian and the cyclist and the public transport user. 

So how has research and exemplary practice shaped Northumberland's 2013 initiative to promote child safety on the roads now the nights are drawing in? Any major infrastructural changes in the pipeline, or proposed extensions to areas of 20mph limits, any investment? Anything structural to tame motor traffic? Or even a campaign urging drivers to take additional care when visibility is poor, perhaps, to drive within the speed limit rather than treat it as a target speed, to drive at a speed enabling them to stop within the distance they can see to be clear, not to force pedestrians and cyclists onto the carriageway by parking on pavements/cycle tracks, not to be updating their Facebook page on a laptop open on the passenger seat when driving past school gates disgorging pupils into the gloaming? None of these things. It's the usual deck-the-soft-targets-in-reflectives solution. Rather than urging car users to volunteer the utmost care and attention to those they otherwise imperil, children – we all - must wrest attention from them with fluorescent clothing: our communities as construction sites. 

My untutored layman's understanding suggests one principle enshrined in Child Protection legislation is that the adult in any given interaction has responsibility for the child. Put the adult in a car and the polarity shifts, the responsibility is now the child's to militate the threat posed to her by the behaviour of the adult. Something's wrong here.

Bio-engineering may be the way forward. It's been done with puppies. Splicing genetic material from bio-luminescent marine creatures into the DNA of future generations will see glowing people co-existing safely with motorised traffic. There'd be an additional benefit to this genetic tweaking: when the lights go out with the impending end of the century-long cheap oil orgy, people will still be able to read after dark by the light of their own fluorescence.

This has depressed me. Let's finish with an up-beat song.