Sheer genius

Submitted by jamiewallace on May 8, 2006 - 21:00.

I've never seen so many smiling policemen.

I think it's difficult to overestimate the impact of The Sultan's Elephant.  For me, it was easily the most uplifting event I've ever witnessed in London.  It was a privilege to be part of a spectacle that had so many people entranced.

It unified Londoners.  I can't think of any other event that has ever brought together such a range of ages, classes, races and nationalities.  To wander through central London, surrounded by waves of emotionally-charged people, enthralled by the sight of this extra-ordinary visitor, was truly memorable.

The policeman were smiling, the kids were gasping, the 'suits' were bunking off work, the tourists were happily mystified, and everyone was reminded of a child-like wonder that is so absent from our adult lives.

It was also a subtley subversive event.  There was no advertising.  There was no sale of TV rights.  There was no Coca Cola sponsorship.  There was no strict start or end time.  There were no ticket sales.  There was no merchandising.  There were no executive boxes.  There were no courtesy cars.  It broke nearly every rule of modern 'event management'.

It was wonderfully anti-consumerist.  In the context of the current lively debate about economic growth failing to deliver increased happiness, the Sultan's Elephant stunningly demonstrated the systemic failure of our conventional measures of 'development'.

I imagine London's GDP took a bit of a hit at the weekend.  Bus revenues down, taxi fares down, John Lewis' tills not ringing quite so loudly.  But the utterly immeasurable wonder, awe, anticipation, excitement and joy of the elephant's millions of spectators was boosted in a way that no 'metric of success' will ever capture.

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Chief execs are getting younger

Submitted by jamiewallace on March 19, 2006 - 15:40.

We (that is myself and Terry and Martin - the technical supremos behind walkit.com) met up with the Department for Transport, the Ordnance Survey and our first client, 4Holborn, on Thursday. And all the meetings went suspiciously well.

4Holborn, the Business Improvement District (BID) that camps out in Holborn police station, have really bought into the idea and we had a great chat about all the creative opportunities for ‘marketing' walking/walkit.com through their upcoming transport portal. Their CEO (and in case this conjures up a mental image of a 50 or 60-something bloke, no, I think she was in her twenties...) had some great ideas and will hopefully help us make links to the other BIDs in London.

So we're now moving from the largely conceptual development phase, to delivering ‘products/services' to ‘clients'. This is a bit of a leap - but a welcome one. I now need to get my head round things like contracts and licensing agreements.

We had a good meeting with the OS too. They're a funny old outfit the OS. They certainly charge out their data in a very commercial manner, but they also behave partially like a statutory body. There's a huge amount of debate amongst mapping experts about them: on the one hand recognising that they produce some of the best data in the world, but on the other complaining that their charging model stifles innovation (wholly in contrast to the US where much of the equivalent data is free). The guy we met has been there only 6 months and certainly seemed to have a ‘can do' attitude. I suspect ‘can do' will morph into ‘can't help'. But I'm happy to suspend disbelief for a while longer.

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DfT endorses walkit.com...

Submitted by jamiewallace on March 9, 2006 - 15:30.

Well, sort of.

I use the 'Google Alert' service to tell me when new instances of the phrase 'walkit.com' appear in the global ether. It crops up in some unusual places.

I was particularly surprised the other day when Google informed me that 'walkit.com' had been detected on the Department for Transport website. Curious I thought. I've been in protracted talks with the DfT for over a year now, but I've never been bowled over by their enthusiasm for the concept.

So I click through and low and behold the DfT has placed a walkit link on the 'How to find us' section of their website. Nestling at the bottom, below all the 'By bus', 'By train', 'By car' etc. information is the following: "On foot - For central London walking routes, see walkit.com".

It's a rather nice endorsement (of sorts) to receive. But it's slightly puzzling, not least since the site is very much a 'beta' (or pilot) version, and hence still pretty unreliable.

But I suppose in relation to their own Transport Direct (TD) journey planner, we've done rather well at the walkit.com HQ.

TD is a hugely ambitious project that allows you to enter any two postcodes for anywhere in the country and it will give you practically every possible journey option (by public or private transport) between them.

But it's being delivered at a price - some £35 million, and counting. And what have we spent? About £3.5k. Yup, we've spent a TEN THOUSANDTH of their budget. Probably less than the cost of refreshments factored into the budgets of the vast global consulting firms who are meant to be delivering TD. read more | 1 comment

walkit.com helps avert looming threat from floating elephants

Submitted by jamiewallace on March 2, 2006 - 17:09.

The London Borough of Sutton website helpfully provides visitors with the following statistics:

"The average car (based on a 4 seater family car) emits 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year. In December 2004, there were 31 million cars on the roads in Britain. That means 31 million cars emitting 124 millions tonnes of CO2.

Hard to imagine such high numbers?

To help, imagine an African elephant. An adult male weighs about 4 tonnes. That's the equivalent of the CO2 emissions of one car.

Now imagine 31 million African Elephants floating over our heads."

I struggle to imagine 1 floating elephant, let alone 31 million. I've never quite understood the whole 'tonnes of gas' thing. To me it's as incomprehensible as 'yards of water' or 'pints of wood'.

I think I got a C in O level physics.

But if walkit.com is needed for the impending floating elephant threat, we're ready to help. 1 comment | global warming | climate change | carbon dioxide

Cops and bloggers

Submitted by jamiewallace on February 9, 2006 - 15:59.

I've just come back from Holborn Police Station.

Out of the blue the other day I got an email from Simon Hughes (no, not that one). He works for the 4Holborn Business Improvement District (BID). We got talking and set up a meeting to see how walkit could provide them with a customised walking route planner for their part of London.

"We're based in the police station" he says, "so call me on your mobile when you get to us." Bit odd I thought. I arrive in the police reception, call him up, down he comes to get me, and within seconds I'm in the Kafka-esque behind-the-scenes world of modern-day British policing.

It turns out that 4Holborn are housed in the police station because a lot of what they do is about keeping streets safe and crime down. So there I am, doing my walkit spiel in a police canteen, surrounded by coppers. It all feels like a bit of strange Channel 4 drama-cum-comedy mongrel.

Anyway, it turns out the BID is keen to promote sustainable transport and so I'm going to pull together a little proposal for them.

One of the stranger incidents in the history of walkit.com. But nice to think that people are now starting to approach me, rather than me constantly having to knock on doors.

As ever, TfL are involved with 4Holborn. But I think I'd better just bite my tongue when it comes to TfL. Probably more politic to save that story for another day.

 

 

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Walking congestion

Submitted by jamiewallace on February 5, 2006 - 14:51.

One of the narrowest parts of the Thames walkway - one of the busiest pedestrian routes in London - and nearly half of it is cordoned off. Private, dead, useless space.

Madness.

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£50,000 to ride a bike?

Submitted by jamiewallace on January 26, 2006 - 11:52.

Crazy thought.

There's a lot of talk about incentivising or rewarding people for leading more sustainable lives.  Instead of a rather unappealing nanny state in which we're penalised for 'not doing the right thing', how about patting us on the back when we do?

Here's the idea.

One day every month a random cyclist somewhere in the congestion charge zone would receive a very nice surprise.  Lorraine Kelly would pop up from behind a pillar box and swoop on an unsuspecting cyclist, camera crew in tow, brandishing a huge out-size charity check.  Yes, that cyclist will have just won £50,000!

Totally bonkers?  Let's work through it a little:

A ridiculous sum of money?  It is a lot, but over a year that would amount to £600,000.  In terms of TfL's budget, it's chicken feed.  Even in terms of cycling budgets it's not that huge.

Who would pay?  Perhaps you could get a sponsor for each month.  One month it could be Evans Cycles, the next Trek bikes.  TfL might sponsor another, and even someone like Pret a Manger or Innocent drinks could probably be persuaded. 

Would it work?  I don't know, but I think it might.  There is a whole cohort of potential cyclists out there who are just waiting for that trigger point which snaps them out of their longstanding state of inaction.  They want to start cycling, know they have friends very like them who cycle, but haven't quite motivated themselves to take the plunge.

A load of amateur cyclists would invade central London? This is a risk, and you'd need all sorts of supporting advice on safe cycling.  Perhaps on prize days Ken could also impose a 20mph speed limit?

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When Lives Collide

Submitted by jamiewallace on January 22, 2006 - 18:45.

This is the name of an extremely moving exhibition at the Oxo Gallery (until January 29).

It recounts the stories of those who have either lost friends and family to road 'accidents', or have been victims themselves.  Each story is accompanied by a large portrait photo.

It nearly left me in tears by throwing into sharp relief the misery that surrounds the daily carnage on our roads.  It says so much more than the bald statistics we've grown so used to, but I still think they're worth repeating here:

In London

• 300 lives lost every year
• 2 in 5 road deaths is a pedestrian
• 1 child killed every 2 weeks

In the UK

• On average, 10 people killed every day
• You have a 1 in 200 chance of dying in a road crash
• Pedestrians and cyclists account for 1 in 3 road deaths

In Europe

• 40,000 road deaths each year
• Road crashes are the leading cause of death and hospital admission for those under the age of 45

Across the world

• Over 1 million road deaths each year

RoadPeace (the source of these statistics) also estimate that a 20mph speed limit in residential areas would reduce child road deaths and serious injuries by 67%.

There is a campaign to introduce a 20mph speed limit in urban areas - why the the powers that be resist this is beyond me.  Allowing metal boxes to hurtle around at 30mph (and a lot of the time a lot faster as enforcement is so poor) just inches from pedestrians is lunacy.

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Euston please, and go easy on the ultrafine particles

Submitted by jamiewallace on January 15, 2006 - 18:24.

So that's official: jump in a cab and you're exposing yourself to high levels of pollution.

The BBC has reported that a team at Imperial College London have found that taxi travel results in more exposure to pollutants than travelling by car or bus, riding a bike, or walking.

Examine the figures a bit more closely, however, and you find out it's a little more complex than this.

On average, individuals were exposed to the following ultrafine particles counts per cubic centimetre:

Taxi - over 100,000
Bus - just under 100,000
Car - 40,000
Cycling - around 80,000
Walking - just under 50,000

So what do we make of this? You're twice as safe driving than biking? You're twice as safe walking than cabbing it? Come again?

There's a risk that these sorts of studies leave us even more confused than before. Not least when you consider that another Imperial study found that if you were walking along Marylebone Road you should walk on the inside (and not the edge) of the pavement to minimise exposure to PM10s, and that one side of the road was worse than the other, but when it came to carbon monoxide, it didn't really matter where you walked.

I hope that's clear.

Surely what we all crave at the end of the day is to be told that if we're going about our business by car, taxi, bike, bus, on foot or by bloody pogo stick, we're not being exposed to dangerous pollutants. read more | add new comment