The British Medical Journal has published a study of the health impact of the bike hire scheme in London. (BMJ 2014;348:g425 Woodcock et al.)

Our very own Doctor in the House, Dr Gill Corble, has written this Precis.

Introduction.  Physical inactivity is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and the creation of opportunities for safe, active mobility has been identified as one central feature of a “healthy city.”  Promoting a shift away from motorised vehicle travel towards walking and cycling would also be expected to yield additional health, economic, and environmental benefits, including reducing traffic congestion, noise, and the emission of greenhouse gases. One way in which cities can seek to realise these benefits is by implementing bicycle sharing systems to facilitate short term bicycle rental in urban areas. London is just one of those cities, with the so-called “Boris” Bike Scheme.

Study and Results.  In this study in London, over the year examined, users made 7.4 million cycle hire trips (estimated 71% of cycling time by men). These trips would mostly otherwise have been made on foot (31%) or by public transport. Using observed injury rates and a computer-modelling system for health benefits, it was found that the population benefits from the cycle hire scheme substantially outweighed harms among men using cycle hire. There was no evidence of a benefit among women, this sex difference largely reflecting higher road collision fatality rates for female cyclists. At older ages the modelled benefits of cycling were much larger than the harms.

Conclusion.  London’s bicycle sharing system has positive health impacts overall, but these benefits are clearer for men than for women and for older users than for younger users.

See the original article for all details and references.

Wave 1: We’ve finally waved bye bye to the two sets of hoop-shaped inhibitors have finally been removed on the Great Stour Way. However, if there is any resulting problem with unwanted motorbikes on the path, replacement inhibitors will be installed.

Wave 2: The flooding is very bad on the Great Stour Way.
Mother Nature has reclaimed the Hambrook Marshes.

And finally, Wave 3: Farewell to two further surplus cattle grids that have been ‘re-moo-ved’ between Tonford and Chartham.

Happy pedalling and paddling!

Sheila Webb

As we come to the end of the first month of 2014, we look back at some of the carnage caused by the stormy start of the year.

A tree down on the Crab & Winkle Line – Large sections of the Crab & Winkle Line were covered in woodland debris as well as the odd fallen tree.[Image: Matthew Banbury]

In deep water on the Crab & Winkle Line – As well as enormous amounts of woodland debris on the Crab & Winkle, there was quite a lot of water too. [Image: Matthew Banbury]

Those mileposts are amazingly strong! A milepost on the Crab & Winkle Line holds up a fallen tree. [Image: Matthew Banbury]

A tree has fallen onto the bike polo court. Canterbury City Cycle Polo play at the Riverside Youth Centre at Kingsmead but the tree means a temporary relocation. [Image: Kristian Gill]

The Great Stour Way flooded [Image: Sheila Webb]

The river takes over the Riverside route in Canterbury [Image: Sheila Webb]

Another tree blocks the route [Image: Sheila Webb]

The January edition of The Mudguard has been dropping on to members’ doormats this week.
Here’s the online version for your perusal.

newsletter72-v10-2

The Middle Ages, starting with the Normans, produced a crop of Romanesque and Gothic Master Builders. They built cathedrals, parish churches, city walls, gates and castles in a property boom not seen in Europe since the Romans. Their names are little known today and don’t tend to trip off the tongue like those of Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones or Hawksmore, but their designs achieve landmark status. Often these buildings are admired. Sometimes sadly they are not, even by those closest to them who cannot recognise what they see when they step out of their own front door.

One of the greatest of these Master Builders was paid wages on a par with a Premier League footballer today. He was Master James of St George 1230-1309, brought to England from Savoy by Edward I in a move to defeat the Welsh. A castle builder of genius, he was supported by a cast of thousands, comprising diggers from the Fens, master carpenters and stone masons. Not only did the castles have to be built, these men had to be housed, fed, paid and protected. All in the middle of a bitter guerrilla war.

Harlech Castle was completed in six years, Rhuddlan Castle within four. Beaumaris Castle was his last. In all he built ten castles in Wales. Often he oversaw the construction of a string of castles, all at the same time. Modern contractors would be hard put to rival this feat today on even one of them.

Canterbury too, boasted Master Builders to rival him. Henry Yevele 1320-1400 and John Wastell 1460-1515 came to work on Canterbury Cathedral. Wastell, the inventor of fan vaulting and the architect of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge, designed and built Bell Harry Tower. When it was half way up the Pope made Archbishop Morton, of Morton’s Fork fame, a Cardinal. To celebrate this Wastell was instructed to double the height. It’s difficult to know what the planners would have made of this today or any modern contractor faced with such a task.

Yevele, fresh from his triumph at Westminster Abbey, where he redesigned the nave and cloister, came to Canterbury a century earlier, to redesign the nave of the cathedral in a completely new Perpendicular style, inventing Gothic Architecture as he did so.  He also designed the south cloister. Archbishop Sudbury commissioned Yevele to build a new fortified gate, completed in 1378, to control the entrance into the city. Sudbury, a powerful man, had introduced the Poll Tax. That made him extremely unpopular. In the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381, which it provoked, he was seized by rebels in the Tower of London, as Watt Tyler negotiated with the young King Richard II. His head was cut off and stuck on a pike over London Bridge.

After Sudbury’s death, Canterbury was enclosed by Yevele’s city walls in 1385. They were dangerous times. Today 636 years after it was built, Westgate Towers is marooned by traffic, like Eros was once in Piccadilly Circus.  When a scheme was first floated for pedestrianizing the road in front of the National Gallery there was an outcry from taxi drivers that they would have nowhere to stop and would be driven out of business. Once there were equally loud and successful cries for the demolition of Hardwick’s magnificent Euston Arch. Today, as even louder cries come for more traffic to pour through the opening in Henry Yevele’s masterpiece, one of the greatest city gates in Europe although you would be hard put to recognise that in the columns of the Kentish Gazette, we should perhaps pause and question. What irreversible damage is that traffic doing to the stone work?  Why does no one question whether this is a fit and proper way to treat a Gothic masterpiece by a Master Builder?

Sam Webb

January 11^th 2014

On 23 November 2013 the WWF, Oxfam, ActionAid, the International Trade Union Confederation, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace walked out of COP19,  the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Warsaw.

Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said: “Governments must…come back in 2014 ready for meaningful discussions on how they will deliver their share of the emissions reductions which scientists say are needed, and their share of the money needed to help the poorest and most vulnerable countries adapt.” 

All six issued a statement: “The Warsaw climate conference, which should have been an important step in the just transition to a sustainable future, is on track to deliver virtually nothing.”

Among actions which drove them to leave was Tony Abbott’s. The Australian PM backed by the UK Government, wants to avoid any recognition and payment to poorer countries for loss and damage payments for damage caused by Global Warming. Abbott did not attend. He was spearheading a move to repeal the Australian Carbon Tax telling the Washington Post: The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment.

Scientists began sampling atmospheric carbon or CO2 in 1958 when it was 315PPM in the days of President Eisenhower. At this point when they knew from glacier sampling that before the Industrial Revolution the figure wavered between 180 and 280PPM. They issued the first warnings about CO2’s warming effect on the atmosphere and its ability to cause climate change.

Under Eisenhower the USA had just commenced a huge Interstate Highway System – the greatest civil engineering project in world history. Ike had such good intentions in starting this when President after his experience as an army Major observer on the US Army Transcontinental Convoy of 1919. That took over two months to reach the West Coast from the White House Lawn. Once the convoy left Omaha there were no roads until they crossed the Rockies and reached Sacramento.

Europe followed Ike’s lead. In Britain plans were laid for the M1 and a similar national road plan. Dr Beeching of ICI drew up his rail closure plan and planning inspector Colin Buchanan prepared a report called Traffic in Towns. Multi-national companies like Chevron Texaco, Exxon/Mobil, BP and Ford jumped on the world bandwagon. Few had counted the consequences though the profits were enormous.

Twenty years later when a concerned Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof, the level had risen to 337PPM. In 1979 President Reagan, a former second rate actor who was good at reading other people’s lines had the panels put in a skip. Meanwhile the index rose to 339 PPM. By the time Reagan left office the CO2 index had reached 352 PPM. At that point NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen issued a warning to the US Senate that such levels, if not reduced, would introduce catastrophic climate change.

The major problem with building roads is, as fast as they are built they fill up with traffic pumping out CO2. We’ve seen that here with the M25 which at times represents an enormous parking lot and cars line all lanes nose to tail across the QE Bridge.

By March 1997 as the CO2 count reached 363PPM the United Nations convened the first Council of the Parties (COP) on Climate Action in Germany. So bad was the situation that COP met again in Kyoto as the count reached 365PPM. Apart from Andorra and South Sudan the only other countries not to sign up to reduce levels at Kyoto to below 1997 levels were Canada and the USA.

In 2008 James Hansen of NASA renewed his warnings. Today the count hovers just under the 400PPM level. In 50 years since Ike left office when CO2 emissions were 40PPM above pre-industrial highs, they are now 200PPM higher. They have tripled since the first concerns were raised and have gone up 50% since the first COP climate summit.  However the scientific warnings may at last be changing political minds as huge gales lash the coast of Britain and rivers burst their banks and every State in the USA shivers in unbelievably low temperatures.

On the 8^th January 2014 David Cameron told the House of Commons that he suspects the dramatic weather that we and the rest of the world are experiencing, is caused by climate change. His own party is split on the matter. Owen Patterson MP, Minister of the Environment, has expressed views sympathetic to leading climate skeptics like Nigel Lawson.

Meanwhile the major producers of CO2 continue to pump funds into the climate change denier’s camp. Let’s hope the penny drops before the sky finally falls in. Otherwise we are heading for insanity by, as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sam Webb

See what the KCC councillor candidates think on a number of cycling-related questions:
http://www.spokeseastkent.org.uk/election/may-2013

Dr. Gillian Corble, a Spokes member and local GP, has prepared a precis of the NICE guidance PH41 to promote walking and cycling that was issued in November 2012.