Where does all the council tax money go?

Submitted by jamiewallace on December 20, 2005 - 17:07.

I had a meeting with a walking officer from Southwark Council the other day. Based in great buildings (Chumleigh Gardens) in Burgess Park off the Walworth Road, she told me about the difficulties she faces to keep hold of her job, let alone expand the reach of her work.

Reliant to a large degree on volunteer helpers, she struggles to even reward them with food and drink for their efforts. Forget about providing them with suitable clothing.

It gave me quite an insight into the financial challenges faced by local government - while our council tax may seem high, it certainly isn't filtering down to her.

So no chance of a sub off her then for walkit.com! But more contacts made, and more offers of help to spread the word. add new comment

Levelling the playing field

Submitted by jamiewallace on December 19, 2005 - 11:20.

According to Friends of the Earth, the Toyota Landcruiser Amazon 4x4 emits a staggering 3.5 times the amount of carbon dioxide of the Toyota Prius. Visit the Vehicle Certification Agency's database and you'll also find the cost of driving those two cars for 12,000 miles. The former clocks up a respectable £664, while the latter comes in at £2,523.

I suppose if you have the money to buy the Landcruiser, the fact that it will cost nearly £2k more to do a year's driving is neither here nor there. But imagine if the VED differential between those two cars was also £2k. We now have a total of £4k. Even a die-hard Clarkson fan might start to think differently.

I think the greatest opportunity lies in car advertising. If the government's rhetoric on climate change is to mean anything, surely it has to start forcing car manufacturers to prominently display the new fuel economy label in all car adverts. And there's a precedent - no different really from the warnings they used to have in cigarette advertising.

So what's this got to do with walkit.com? Well, it's just one of the many things that could help us all to gradually rebalance our attitude to mobility, narrowing the gap between common sense and sustainable transport. 2 comments

Bringing down the OS

Submitted by jamiewallace on December 8, 2005 - 15:28.

You certainly find yourself in interesting company pursuing a project like walkit.com.

In the past weeks I've attended the monthly meeting of the Living Streets Southwark local group. Up a back staircase in a great local boozer somewhere behind Borough High Street. Committed people doing the hard graft of auditing local streets for 'liveability', and then feeding that back to the Council through its myriad consultation processes - people engaging with tortuous democratic procedures and gradually helping to shift the balance back in favour of a more pedestrian-focused urban environment.

I've met a guy - Steve Coast - who's mission is to 'bring down the OS' (Ordnance Survey - the national mapping people to you and me). He's systematically trying to build up an 'open source' map not just of the UK, but the whole world. And he's just a motivated, intelligent and skilled individual using the internet to connect literally thousands of people up around the globe, all intent on democratising the way we map the world around us. Pretty inspiring stuff.

But of course a lot of 'social entrepreneurship' is actually very prosaic. Chasing people who fail to deliver what they promised. Filling in funding application forms - forms that have an uncanny knack of wanting largely the same information, but invariably sliced in such a way that it requires you to practically start from scratch each time. And, of course, there are the disappointments. People who fail (wilfully, you sometimes ask yourself) to understand what you're trying to do. People who are sitting on stacks of cash, just a tiny fraction of which would allow you to make a step change in the development of your project, but which they prefer to throw at every conceivable initiative but your own.

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What's all this blog nonsense?

Submitted by jamiewallace on December 7, 2005 - 07:28.

To blog or not to blog. I dunno. Who wants to read the meandering thoughts of a wannabe social entrepreneur? We're such a diverse bunch of people (hence the 10s of definitions of the term social entrepreneur) that it's difficult to believe anyone can really have much to learn from someone obsessed with producing, of all things, an online walking route planner.

But that's what I'm doing, that's what's got under my skin these past few years. And I can't shake it off.

I seriously question my sanity sometimes. The 1000s of hours I've put into this project, which ultimately is just a series of bits and bytes and digital pulses, which with a bit of cajoling, produce information that I hope people will find useful. It's incredibly intangible. At least if I'd spent those hours planting a forest or teaching kids how to ride a bike I'd have something to show for it. But with the web, it's all so bloody insubstantial.

So why am I still at it? Because it's a complete no-brainer. We have online journey planners for cars, for trains, for buses, for planes…but who is looking out for the humble walker? Yes there are some half-hearted attempts from Transport for London and there's your trusty copy of the A-Z, but there's so much potential to use the web to bring alive the benefits of walking – giving you personalised, motivating, and engaging info about why walking is really quite a clever way to get around town.

And ultimately getting this idea off the ground requires such a piddling amount of money. But I almost think it would be easier getting £500m out of the DfT for a bypass than it would be getting a few tens of k for walkit.com.

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