RosieBell

Brightness falls into the air

The most famous verse about plague is Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence. 

Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die –
Lord, have mercy on us!

Metaphorically, darkness has fallen in a time of anxiety. Literally, the air has never looked brighter and clearer. In a fine Spring the colours of flowers and young foliage are intense and the air is clean. In the highly polluted parts of the world eg Delhi they have seen blue skies; in China the smog has cleared from their mega-cities and they can see the stars.

It’s as if the world has been newly washed.

The pandemic’s impact on the environment has been staggering. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are heading for a record 5.5-5.7% annual drop. From mid-January to mid-February, China’s carbon emissions fell by around 25%. In Delhi, a city with often the worst air quality in the world, pollution caused by PM2.5s reduced by roughly 75% as traffic congestion dropped by 59%. A 70% reduction in toxic nitrogen oxides was reported in Paris, while satellite imagery showed nitrogen dioxide levels in Milan fell by about 40%. In the UK, road travel has decreased by as much as 73% and in London, toxic emissions at major roads and junctions fell by almost 50%.

In my city the air pollution has fallen by 50%.

You can see it; you can smell it. The car-farting that was part of the background of getting round the city suddenly becomes noticeable from one individual vehicle.

There is plenty of evidence that polluted air exacerbates the chance of dying of Covid-19.

researchers in the US are building a case that suggests air pollution has significantly worsened the Covid-19 outbreak and led to more deaths than if pollution-free skies were the norm. As well as predisposing the people who have lived with polluted air for decades, scientists have also suggested that air pollution particles may be acting as vehicles for viral transmission.

I like to imagine that citizens will demand clean air as being essential as clean water and clean disposal of sewage – that is, that an aberration will only be tolerated if it is temporary.

What else has changed is the use of urban space. A pretty, cherry-tree lined street near me which was once a challenge to cross now has joggers running down the centre white line. On other streets children play. On the arterial route where we have had a long, exhausting campaign to get a mile of cycle lane, there are now children cycling and the Council is considering emergency measures to build a far longer cycle lane instead of the convoluted compromise that we had battled for (see an account of this here). 

The shared walking and cycling paths have been crammed; people are therefore using the streets as they should be used. They are looking at the masses of tarmac that had been taken over by single-occupancy cars and wondering why they couldn’t walk or cycle safely. And so the demand has come for more space, instead of pedestrians and cyclists being jammed at the edges for the convenience of the motor vehicles.

The bike shops have been selling out, my bike repair guy was working until 11pm to fix the bikes that had been rusting in garages, and the docking stations for hire bikes have become empty.

To accommodate streets now busier with bikes, as well as facilitate social distancing, some places have installed temporary cycle lanes or closed streets to cars. Pop-up bike lanes have appeared in cities including Berlin, Budapest, Mexico City, New York, Dublin and Bogotá. Governments from New Zealand to Scotland have made funding available for temporary cycle lanes and walkways amid the pandemic. In Brussels, the entire city core will become a priority zone for cyclists and pedestrians from early May for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, temporary street closures to cars have taken place in Brighton, Bogotá, Cologne, Vancouver and Sydney as well as multiple US cities including Boston, Denver and Oakland. In England, restrictions have been lifted to enable and encourage councils to more quickly close streets to cars.

Large areas of London are to be made car free. The Council in my city has been closing off some streets for use on foot and cycle and are in the process of repurposing more. Emergency powers are being employed to take measures which used to grind through the laborious planning process. The UK government is pushing councils to produce pop up lanes and urging commuters to commute by cycle.

Active travel campaigners are dazed. The dream we have been chasing for decades suddenly materialises at the bidding of unlikely politicians - the wider pavements; filtered residential areas; cycle lanes on arterial routes; slow car speeds - anything that removes the domination of the car and making exercise as part of getting about instead of something done in gyms. If you want to see a crowd of slimmish, healthy people, go to a cycle demonstration. (Obesity is another condition that makes you more vulnerable to Covid-19.) This is our big break that has arrived after years of toil. But we may of course lose this opportunity as we return to some kind of normality and people hop back into their cars again, in fear of public transport.

Chris Boardman, the former Olympic champion and Greater Manchester’s first Cycling and Walking Commissioner, says that the 1950s level of traffic has made a nice environment, but that can only be continued by a change of transport policy.

we are at a crossroads and we could go either way, and I don’t know which way it is. For the first time we genuinely have a real choice, we could change our transport culture, the way we use our streets.

The pandemic has upended our society, as a war would, and after a war revolutions come. 1945 brought in a Labour government and the welfare state, which had been proposed for decades and demonstrated in other countries eg Michael Savage’s New Zealand of the late 30s. 

Of course we all hope for a future that resembles our desires. Socialists point to the rise in estimation of obviously useful jobs like nurses, cleaners, carers and bin collectors along with the general co-operation as proof of the desire for a better, more sharing society. A libertarian Facebook friend extols the local delivery of various goods like meat and vegetables instead of the supply chain, with a whiff of caveat emptor for hygiene control. A Conservative predicts the end of the expansion of universities and media and gender studies degrees. George Monbiot suggests changing to an eco-education.  And John Gray, ever the happy pessimist, looks forward to a time like Russia’s civil war with cannibalism on the table (so to speak).

I have modest visions. I have to say I would quite like to get back to my normality which includes my workplace village of office gossip, a coffee machine and two big screens instead of a poxy little laptop for working from home. With the addition – that commutes will be short; workplaces scattered; shopping more local; streets far more free of cars and every damned front garden space paved over for car storage dug up and used what it was intended for – flowers and vegetables.

Strange days of taboo and ritual

It’s so strange, so weird, so unprecedented. That’s what we say to each other, as we stay at home except for the walk in the streets where hardly a car moves, and then when one comes along it sounds extraordinarily loud. You step off the pavement and walk on the carriageway when you see someone approaching. In my neighbourhood it’s as if we were all having feuds, or had been scabs/strikers during the miners’ strike, or were members of an unpopular ethnic minority. (In the high bourgeois Edinburgh where I take my airings social distancing comes more naturally than to most.)

The air is much cleaner; here in Edinburgh we’re just coming to an end of weeks of bright spring days with a chilly east wind. With blossoms and bulbs and the trees with fresh leaves, it is the most spectacular time of year. I am enjoying the lovely quiet streets then catch a glimpse of something familiar - what is that golden palace – oh one of the private schools - I've not seen it from that angle before. In these days of disorientation they seem fragile, as if they may become ruins soon. Charles Jencks’ installation in the grounds of the Modern Art Gallery looks like a fortification from an archaeological dig in a thousand years’ time.

A school at an unexpected angle

What is strangest to me – and I hope anthropologists are studying this – is how quickly taboos have been established. I eye with shock someone in the supermarket riffling through packets of apples or courgettes before deciding on one. Don’t they know you don’t touch anything unless you are going to buy it? Also, when in the narrow little fish shop, after I’d waited to go in when it was empty of customers, the shop assistant brushed past me to get to the back of the shop. I reacted like a high-caste Brahmin being slapped by an untouchable.

Charles Jencks installation

As you can get up riots and murders in Pakistan by saying the someone is a blasphemer, I await denunciations of those who have had friends around for a visit, or have tripled their daily exercise quota, with crowds turning up shouting, a pitchfork distance between each member. That ancient gentleman walking very slowly up a steep hill in Edinburgh’s Newtown – he is well past eighty, let alone seventy. He should be at home! I admire the old gent’s spirit – this might be his last glimpse of sunshine.

On a holiday in Bulgaria once we were at a street market and were gob-smacked to see a stall selling Nazi memorabilia. My companion picked up a hip flask and found she had touched a swastika stamped on it. She immediately wiped her hands with a tissue, so taboo is that symbol in our culture. She also wiped the hip flask so her fingerprints would leave no trace.

Superstition – well that is from fear. In times of insecurity you look for omens; see patterns which are unrelated to anything that could possibly happen to you or your community. If you’re an Aztec, you make human sacrifices to placate the gods; if a Roman examine the entrails; if you’re a Christian you cross yourself. Life for most human beings as been a fairly insecure thing, and superstition and ritual are one way of coping with it.

So I follow that video that a load of people posted about how to unpack your shopping, quarantining non perishables for three days in the shed; taking the courgettes and apples from their plastic bags packaging (which might have been touched by that vile blasphemer with unclean hands in the supermarket) and pouring the contents (untouched by dangerous human hands) into the chill bin or bowls. I have a special part of my work surface, soaked in disinfectant, where the unpacking and sorting is done. There are several washing of hands episodes during this whole process. Another rule is to leave all the doors in the flat open so that when I return from the dangerous outside world, I can walk straight to the bathroom and do the hand-washing without touching any door handles.

This may be a woefully wrong way of protecting myself from the virus, however it’s a ritual, so if I leave it undone I become very uneasy. I used to be fairly careless about hygiene, now I’m a neurotic.

The result is that the outside world, the one with other human beings, is a zone of danger, and home the only safe place.

We are under orders, both from the government and our employers, and there is nothing much else we can do. Our culture exalts the maverick, the policeman who takes short cuts and gets results, obstructed by his superior who goes by the book; the free spirit; - that is the individual that advertising panders to. Now we have gone collective and people are highly judgmental about neighbours not following the rules. We’re as far from the sixties let it all hang out spirit that upended our culture as we can be. We are all dutiful now. 

But this is the phony war of course. We don’t know how long it will last; whether it will affect the supplies of food, let alone the luxuries. The bizarreness is of how the World War II spirit is evoked when many of us are complaining about how to get that particular type of coffee or sourdough that that little shop (now closed) provided, with the rider that we know we shouldn’t complain, plenty have it worse.

I have a right because I have

 I’d been having thoughts about the “right” to own a car and a place to park it. Two things I’d observed:-

1. A friend who loves to do up classic cars– ahh if the only car owners were those who really did love automobiles.
2. Loki the Scottish rapper, winner of the Orwell prize for his book, Poverty Safari. He tweets sense normally and engages civilly with Unionists. This has made the madder Nats accuse of him of being a sell out with subsequent abuse, which he meets robustly.  However, when he started to complain about the lack of parking in his area, he stopped tweeting on the subject– he didn’t know he’d get such a furious response from the sustainable transport gang. He, who had seen his childhood poverty in a larger social context, could not see his car in the same way. 

I was slowly formulating, “Cars as luxuries for hobbyists or the rich would be like Lear jets or private helicopters. You may object about how they are obtained by unequal wealth but the damage they do is limited. It was when cars became necessities for mass transport that they turned into the barbarian hordes of city destroyers that they have become.”  Health, education, sewerage systems, electricity, postal delivery, even broadband, they should be distributed and available and affordable, when they are not free, to all.  Cars, and the infrastructure they require – no.

Yesterday I posted on Facebook a link to an article about the conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians in shared space.  I got this comment:-

SC:- - More cyclists wanting every stretch of tar to themselves.

Cyclists asking for the kind of safe, connected space that motorists and pedestrians take pretty much for granted get furious reactions. It is the Bounderby fury that workers petitioning for a half day off on Saturday and a work day of 12 instead of 14 hours are sybarites, calling insolently for a life of leisure. It is the anger of the unthinkingly privileged being challenged. 

The comment thread then followed the path familiar to cycling activists, with the mythical road tax being evoked.  SC’s last comment is:-

“Yes local taxes pay towards the roads but the car drivers tops it up massively with the extra tax imposed on them compared to a cyclist. And not every car in a city only transports one person. It's a human right to have a choice to drive cycle walk or run and should be bullied out of driving because of higher and higher taxes and insurance only drivers pay . As for space a car uses its the same as a cyclist because the highway code is give a cyclist the space of a car.”

He has been asked to consider the space taken by 10 cycles parking vs 10 cars, 10 cycles pulled up at the lights vs 10 cars and has not yet responded.  The “human right to have a choice to drive” phrase is a marvel, equating car ownership with the right not to be tortured or subject to arbitrary arrest. It is a wonderful demonstration of a privilege being perceived as a right – which is why debates between drivers vs sustainable transport types are so bitter and angry.  Drivers aren’t just put out that they may not have it all their way in the future – they view themselves as victims of a gross injustice, like women denied the franchise.  

This essay by Andre Gorz eloquently said it all back in 1973.

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one.…

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one...

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it’s up to the “government” to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots.

Andre Gorz goes on to make a variety of points that are now commonplaces among sustainable transport campaigners:- 

• car ownership has turned cities into sprawls with increasing distances between shopping, work and schools, which reinforces the reliance on the car;
• mass ownership of cars jams up cities so that the car goes no faster than the bicycle at rush hours (observable any commuting day);
• that cities made hellish by cars have to be escaped from by cars;
• highways have been developed at the expense of public transport;
• oil magnates have seized much power in producing car dependency;
• there is a paradox in that while cars give a sense of independence their owners are far more dependent on third parties like garages and mechanics than with earlier means of transport, and the workings of car are a mystery to most. (That last point I think specious – you were dependent on wheelwrights and blacksmiths in horse-owning days, and in my youth every young bloke tinkered with an engine.) 

His solution is the green Utopian one of local neighbourhoods growing their own food that are so fully integrated and agreeable that no-one wants to leave them –a radical and unlikely reshaping of our cities, which have always had districts – whether tanning and copper beating in other times, or these days, finance and the “old town” i.e. the tourist area.  Variety and specialisation within a city are a city’s strength.  As so often, someone who can forcefully express a problem, may sound weak when expressing a solution.

But that’s a cavil – Gorz wrote this in 1973 when city centres were still getting knocked down for ring roads. His point is that you cannot talk about transport in isolation – that when considering transport you have to consider what kind of city people should inhabit, and how they should relate to each other.

And better a green Utopia than the Divine Right of the status quo.  

DISTINGUISH carefully between the two,
This thing is yours, the other thing is mine.
You have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe
And half a coat. I am the Lord benign
Of fifty hundred acres of fat land
To which I have a right. You understand?

I have a right because I have, because,
Because I have—because I have a right.
Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,
Remember your low station, do not fight
Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks
Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks.

I do not envy you your hat, or shoe.
Why should you envy me my small estate?
It’s fearfully illogical in you
To fight with economic force and fate.
Moreover, I have got the upper hand,
And mean to keep it. Do you understand?

The Justice of the Peace
Hilaire Belloc: in “Sonnets and Verse.”

Not the Netherlands

When cycling activists suggest making a city friendlier to cyclists, we are told, "this is not the Netherlands." That's true in Edinburgh, and every other city.  I stopped at a ceramics shop in Sofia to buy one of their mugs. I asked the shop owner about cycling in Sofia.  I'd seen painted outlines of paths ending and dumping you into traffic.  "We would like it to be better, but we are told this is not the Netherlands." "But Sofia is almost flat," I said. (There's a small gentle hill in the centre.)  "But it's not the Netherlands."

 

Sofia, Bulgaria

Sofia, Bulgaria. Not as charming as Plovdiv, but still pretty nice, in its centre anyway. Again, a variety of architecture. What impressed me most was the underpass under the Boulevard Kniaz Aleksandar Dondukov. There is the Roman street of big slabs – seems you can’t strike a spade in the Balkans without digging up something that the Romans built – but also the underpass is an agreeable space with shops, totally unvandalized and very clean. As well as the Roman bricks there are portions of a painted interior of an orthodox church with a few offerings on the little altar – can you imagine how long that would last here?

Also a view of a hefty, rebarbative building of the communist period from the underpass.

Byzantine. Under Communism churches were often concealed by other buildings. Lenin’s statue has been replaced by Saint Sophia, as in Tbilisi he’s been replaced by Saint George.

Bulgaria makes a lot of products from rose petals. These are popular with tourists, and they waft rose scent in the streets and underpasses.

City gardens. Civilisation is a public space, where even the beggars can beg unmolested, the buskers busk, the limping and swollen old sit in the sun, the eccentrics flaunt their off-beatedness, and friends take a selfie of themselves with the bride at her modest wedding.

Bric-a-brac market in Sofia, Bulgaria, near Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. I sneaked these photos of one stall. Most stalls had Nazi stuff - postcards and busts of Hitler and swastikas on drinks flasks. Very unsettling seeing casual heaps of images which are taboo in our culture. My sister picked up an army shoe cleaning kit in excellent condition. Leather case with swastika stamp and shoe horn and brushes inside. She shuddered and wiped her prints off the case.

 

The 365 tour of Sofia was excellent, the guide an actor with colloquial English and an actor’s instinct of audience. I asked him about the Nazi stuff at the bric-a-brac stalls and he said that it was mostly repro. Talked about Bulgaria’s involvement WWII – either allying with Germany or be invaded by them as a route to Greece; stalled the transport of the Jews eastwards to death. Some bombing by the Allies of the city centre.

Bathhouse from 1900s, now museum

He also spoke with pleased anticipation that Ryanair and other cheap carriers were flying to Sofia. I shuddered at that of course. The beer here is cheap.

Sitting in Sofia airport on the way home I could hear a chorus of flat voices, “It’s coming home, it’s coming home.” It was Friday and I wondered if the first stag parties were on their way.

Sofia, Plovdiv, Kavala – waiting for the tourist euro – economic salvation meaning the spoiling of their cities.

Kavala

You know the walk across hot tarmac, the wave of heat that hits you that shows the Brits they are on holiday? I had that at Glasgow airport in our astonishing summer. When I arrived in Thessaloniki it was pelting with rain. It was after 10 at night and I had pre-ordered a taxi for my late arrival. The bloke who picked me up was a guide, who wanted to point out the beauties of Thessaloniki in the rain and darkness. Then he pulled up a screen on the dashboard and showed me pictures instead, taking both hands off the wheel to gesture his points. He was an agreeable fellow – most Greeks are – so I concealed my fear and asked interested questions.

It rained all night – too wet to walk around the streets near the hotel and find dinner – taxi to the bus station the next morning and bus to Kavala, a couple of hours away through a pleasant landscape of small holdings, olives and coast.

I was meeting my travel companion, TC, who was attending a tourism conference (she’s an academic). We had a little apartment for a few nights, up a steep hill. In the evening she went to the opening reception for the conference, and I to the waterfront for a meal. Thunder, lightning, the waiters running about drying to find dry seats and pulling the restaurant umbrellas around to give us shelter. It was so wet I took a taxi back to the apartment.

TC had meanwhile been addressed at the conference by the mayor, a woman who had made a very good speech – the municipality wants to encourage tourism in Kavala. Then they had an hour’s guided walk. In what would have been a ridiculed plot point in a comedy, the guided tour was pelted on with rain, everyone poking each other with umbrellas and the noise of the water from the sky and rushing in rivers down the streets so loud you couldn’t hear the guide.

I can see why the mayor sees It has possibilities. It has a population of around 50,000, is nicely situated on hills and by the sea, and has an interesting Ottoman old town including an eighteenth century merchant's house you can visit, with a beautiful panelled interior, and the sense of a life lived turned towards inside – women’s quarters set up so they never see the men. It was the house of Mehmet Ali, the founder of a dynasty that ruled Egypt up to Farouk.

 

 

Byzantine Castle

Imaret

 

 

View from castle

There are only a few souvenir shops, some selling attractive ceramics and olive wood spoons and bowls. We bought some sponges and the woman we bought them from pre-haggled – i.e. offered us bargains before she needed to. I assumed she had been on a haggling course and was keen to practice.

Ottoman houses

Kavala Museum suited me. It’s air-conditioned, on one floor, small, choice collection including some coloured busts of women, a style of artefact which I’ve never seen before. Only two visitors when I was there.

The finest structure is an aqueduct built under Suleyman the Magnificent. It is very grand.

You can have an outing to Thassos, an island nearby, with a history of pirates kidnapping the citizens and a monastery beautifully tended by grumpy nuns. 

Archangel Michael Monastery

The most felt history is a memory of a 400 year occupation by the Turks.

Of course we were congratulating ourselves for staying somewhere not full of tourists, or at least not foreign ones, as the cafes were full of holidaying Greeks watching a noisy air show, and like all tourists we hoped that the place would not become too touristy. Greeks need the money though and if their resource is history, buildings, cheap drink and their people's agreeable manner, so be it.

Main square, Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki, where we stayed one night before heading to Bulgaria, was jam-packed and very hot. It has a brilliant Byzantine museum and a waterfront lined with busy cafes. Quite expensive compared to Kavala.

Plovdiv Pedestrianised - Bulgaria

Underpasses – yes I groan how a busy road bisects the old town. The cars get the right of way. And we the pedestrians are forced in the underpass. An underpass conjures up urban menace of urine stench and graffiti and dodgy characters.

Busy road through Old Town

The underpass under the road that cuts up the old town at Plovdiv is beautiful.

 

Attractive façade, ramps so you can push a cycle or buggy or wheelchair, and then shops, Roman paving of large slabs that they discovered when digging the subway, and a fine little museum of Roman mosaics and glass.

Roman slabs in underpass

Then onto the longest pedestrianized area in Europe, longer than Copenhagen. A busy, lively place, where you can stroll and shop and eat at cafes. Also nicely designed with ramps as well as steps.

A Roman stadium was dug up from an earlier level of the city.  It is in excellent nick, being covered so long and pleasantly incorporated into the street, with a cafe on a mezzanine level and views from above.

Plovdiv is Europe’s City of Culture in 2019. It’s a lovely little city, with a mixture of architectural styles, highly walkable and a lively creative quarter. Keep the cars out, make the city live.

The National Revival style of architecture is very attractive.  It was a bourgeois style of national self-assertion against the dominant Ottoman empire (400 years of Turkish occupation).

I'd never heard of Plovdiv until going for a few days to Bulgaria, chosen because the border is close to Thessaloniki. The delightful family hotel we stayed in showed two deeds of ownership - one from 1878 in Turkish script, the other a few years later in Cyrillic, after the liberation.  The Turkish occupation weighs here, like Britain in Ireland. 

 

Civic Cycling

I had a few days in Ljubjana, a charming city, the capital of a hilly and wooded country the size of Wales.

We were staying in an apartment about 2 km from the centre in the university district. From the balcony I could watch a busy cycling crossing and outside the apartment the cycling traffic flowed – all ages, and in ordinary clothes. I barely saw a helmet.

 

I didn't get on a cycle myself but observed the cycling infrastructure of demarcated pavements in the city, and it was well-used. The historic centre is pedestrianised and was full of tourists on guided walks, the cyclists go about at a sedate pace and it all looked very civilised. There was also a bike hiring scheme, lines of recyclng bins and small electric mini-buses for public transport. A mural by the river showed a pageant of cyclists.

Ljubljana was building cycle provision in the 1960s. “37 percent walk, 12 percent ride a bicycle, 13 percent use public transportation, and 38 percent drive a car. There are 45 miles (73 kilometers) of cycle tracks and 83 miles (133 kilometers) of bicycle lanes.“

We went on a guided walk. The guide was a young, hip looking guy of about 30, and he took us to the Town Hall, where he extolled a former mayor of the city, Ivan Hribar, who was mayor between 1896 and 1910 and who oversaw the rebuilding and modernising of Ljubljana after it had suffered a destructive earthquake. The guide proudly pointed out the awards for the European Green City of 2016. When he took us to Congress Square as well as telling us about the history (it was named after the 1821 Congress of the Holy Alliance) he talked of how it had once been covered with cars, which seemed a bad misuse of a fine public space in the centre of the city.

This kind of thing evidently interested him more than the baroque architecture though he was also an enthusiast for Joze Plecnik, the local architect of an idiosyncratic style who designed a good deal of the modern city.

Knowing all too well how much push back you'll get from the motorised citizenry, I asked the landlord of our airbnb apartment about pedestrianisation and whether it had been met with much opposition. He, said no, people had been walking over these areas anyway. So they had evidently built around desire lines. Like the guide, he, a young guy in his mid 20s, was proud of his agreeable city.

It's a pleasure being in a city where citizens show green civic pride. Councillors who go to Copenhangen or Amsterdam fact-finding on cycle provision could try Ljubljana, which has good inexpensive food and drink as well.

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

I'd like to be magisterial and say The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley is the definitive work, or as comprehensive a book as you can find on the history of Britain's railways. I'd like even more to be the happy pedant, pointing out lacunae in the description of how Britain adopted the standard gaurge against Brunel's broad gauge. But I know almost nothing of railways, though I love travelling by train, so have to come to this book as the general reader of a well-written, entertaining piece of social history that cites novelists and poets as well as engineers. Simon Bradley quotes the book-making Victorians – Dickens, Trollope and Surtees as well as films like Brief Encounter, The Railway Children and the opening scene of a Hard Day's Night, where the Beatles dodge their screaming fans “behind poster hoardings and into telephone boxes and photo booths” in the cluttered concourse of the 1960s.

 

Bradley's book tells a big story – the technical development of the railways and their social impact, and embroiders it with fascinating details eg the contents of the luncheon baskets and the placing of toilets, the slight ring underfoot on the Southern Railway's preferred concrete over timber platforms. He devotes a whole chapter to signals, which doesn't stoke my boiler, however, his writing flows and he never loses sight of the human beings – in this case, the solitary signal-man on duty in his box. He explains the sensible height of British platforms (set at 915mm i.e. 3 feet) with a step or two to the train compared to the steep climb on the Continent. He gives the reason why Cambridge station is such a trek from the town centre because the dons feared loss of control of undergraduates and pulled strings to ensure that the station was built well over a mile away from the town.

Former platform on National Cycle Network 1

The railways created their own kingdom “a physically separate domain, in thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws.”

Cyclist on National Cycle Network 1

Simon Bradley was a young train-spotter – not just of the locomotives but of those working on them. “Driver and ganger alike belonged nonetheless to the world of proper work, visible and practical and comprehensible – a world away from the office-bound lives of most of our own fathers.” He conveys the excitement of the Victorians as this great force entered into their lives, as transforming as computers and the internet in ours. The landscape was altered with embankments and tunnels and viaducts.

Detail of former railway bridge, now carrying cyclists and pedestrians

He points out that bridges were a relatively rare sight before the railways came. Oldest bridges were almost all bespoke structures. Only when canals arrived were bridges multiplied to standard engineers' design. Now their striding arches are one of the splendours of the British landscape. (For cantilevered iron, the Forth Bridge beats the preening Eiffel Tower any day of the week, and how much finer the Glenfinnan Viaduct is than pompous static showoffery like the Arc de Triomphe.)

Viaduct on the National Cycle Network 1

“Part of the fascination of the railways is their permeation with memories and traces of obsolete working routes, and the human lives and destinies they shaped. The physical record is often patchy, because different aspects of the system have changed and developed at wildly varying speeds. The modernised freight network envisaged by Dr Beeching is already utterly lost; the diffuse small-scale system which he knocked for six is more remote still. Yet the bridges, tunnels and earthworks that carry the twenty-first century traveller are still predominantly those the Victorians witnessed take shape.”

Bradley moves beyond the Victorians and their share-owned competing railway companies through to British Rail and to today's mess of ownership – state subsidy of dividends to share-holders:-

“The old British Rail system was subsidised between 1 billion and 1.5 billion. Subsidies since this time have reached as high as 6.3 billion….Much of this money comes nowhere near the operating side of the railway, but is sucked straight out again in dividends, administrative and legal costs ,inflated salaried and bonuses. Nor is the system cheap for its users. [Grossly expensive, and Byzantinely complex in fact.] All of these features are intrinsic, not accidental, parts of the business model under which the railways were privatised – a process that,… was meant to address the supposed scandal of a public opened system which required high subsidies in order to operate. It has proved an extremely expensive way of saving money.”

Though Bradley does follow to the modern age via the marshalling yards and the change to diesel, it is the Victorians and Edwardians who dominate from when the technology was innovative and exciting.

The new words such as stoke, shunt, siding, running out of steam, on the right lines. Time, once set by the “guildhall and town hall and church steeple” was set by the “power of capital”. The landowners were challenged and there would be battles between the surveyors and navvies and estate workers where theodolites would be smashed. (In Middlemarch there's just such a scene – not quoted by Bradley.)

As the railways developed they were felt at the time to be as unstoppable and transforming as our own digital revolution. So in Trollope's Rachel Ray set in Devon, which was late to be connected, the timid matron Mrs Ray says of her journey to Exeter:- '“I thought the train never would have got to the Baslehurst station. It stopped at all the little stations, and really I think I could have walked as fast." A dozen years had not as yet gone by since the velocity of these trains had been so terrible to Mrs. Ray that she had hardly dared to get into one of them!' ' There are obvious comparisons with the elderly of today who once wondered at the young's sci-fi interweb thing now complaining of the speed of their Skype.

The railways have been with us for long enough to have created their own archaeology. I live across the road from the busy Edinburgh to Glasgow line, which I walk or cycle under every day. My commute goes past an embankment which was once a line and is now the National Cycle Network 1 cycleway. On the route are ghosts of platforms and you are riding unaware over a viaduct which is visible from the street a hundred feet below. There was a railway yard, now a place for billboards (advertising was a huge feature of Victorian stations). Another part of it is scrubland which the Council is planning to turn into a further cycleway, restoring a bridge or two.

Once a railway line, now scrubland, future cycleway

The living railway, Glasgow to Edinburgh line

When I see the great nineteenth railway structures – the viaducts, the Forth Bridge, the grander railway stations, I feel that we are lesser beings living in the half ruin of a mightier civilisation. We don't build such grandeur any more but conserve with our heritage industries, our endless touristing.

Bradley's last chapter is about the volunteers running old lines. He describes a “steam-hauled express arrives from a visitant from the another world, a sort of industrial unicorn or dragon.” Crowds gather to view this icon of another age, as beautiful and obsolete as a full-rigged man of war.

“Made vivid again, here is something that transcends Nature, an amazing work of man; what H.G Wells, writing in 1901, proposed as the best symbol for the century that had just passed, 'a steam engine running upon a railway.”

The Flying Scotsman

Pedal on Parliament IV

Pedal on Parliament, 25 April 2015 12:00 Middle Meadow Walk Edinburgh

This Saturday I'll be among the thousands pedalling from The Meadows down Edinburgh's Royal Mile to Holyrood for the fourth year of Pedal on Parliament (POP).  The motorised traffic will stop and for once we can enjoy Edinburgh's beautiful centre without the fumes, noise and fear that are the usual experience of cycling among the internally combusting.

This is Pedal on Parliament's fourth year.

Transport is a devolved power in Scotland. According to Sally Hinchcliffe, one of the organisers of POP:-

Since we started in 2012, Pedal on Parliament (PoP) has become a national force for cycling in Scotland. As soon as we saw the first-year turnout – the biggest demonstration ever outside the new Scottish Parliament building, apparently – we realised we were going to have to continue.

At the time, although the SNP government had made bold promises about having 10% of journeys made by bike by 2020, on closer examination its plans proved to be no more than the usual UK-style handwaving: training a few schoolchildren, encouraging people to get on their bikes (ignoring the fact that most of them would love to if it wasn’t for the traffic), and asking everyone to be nice to each other on the road.

Funding for the one measure proven to be effective at getting people cycling – building safe, direct and attractive cycle routes – was being cut. Instead, money was being poured into roads: a new Forth crossing, extending Glasgow’s motorway network, and dual carriageways between every city in Scotland.

Sally though does point out the accessibility of Scottish politicians, some who will be at POP including the Minister for Transport. Some of the MSPs are members of Spokes, Edinburgh's cycling pressure group.  The First Minister obviously thinks appearing on a bicycle does her no harm.

If the First Minister likes to be seen riding a bicycle, perhaps we can hold her pedals to the fire to do more for cycling in Scotland than photo opportunities.

Cycling activism moves slowly and incrementally and the news that a kerb will be dropped will cause you a frisson of achievement. However there is the bigger picture, and who better to talk about cycling than a Dutchman Henri de Ruiter:-

As I grew up in the Netherlands, cycling is so entirely normal for me that it still feels strange to advocate for it. As a teenager, I cycled to football training from one end of the city to the other end. It did not matter whether it was dark, light, raining, or sunny; we just cycled. The only thing my mother worried about was how dirty the laundry would be when I returned, not whether I would return at all. We cycled to school, to music lessons, to football training, to friends – just everywhere. No parents or their cars needed. Here in Aberdeen, I would never let my child cycle from one side of the city to the other. One small mistake could kill here.

So cycling is an enabler, especially for children. Though most cycling advocates stress the health and environmental benefits of cycling, for me cycling is about liveable, enabling cities – places where everybody wants to live and where children can play on the streets. Even in the US, arguably the car-loving country in the world, people want to keep cycle lanes once they are put in, because the vast majority agrees that their “neighbourhoods became more desirable to live in”. So why wouldn’t that be the case in Scotland?
..
70% of our world’s population will live in cities in 2050, and people will be increasingly geographically mobile. As a result, cities compete for talent and businesses in a global marketplace. If Aberdeen, Edinburgh or Scotland wants to thrive, it needs to be able to attract people; hence an attractive cityscape will be vital.
More densely populated cities are needed, because “Generation Y” is different (more singles / fewer kids / more focused on experiences) and has other demands, such as work close to home and smaller apartments. The Atlantic recently reported that car makers are worried about these “Millenials” because they don’t seem to care about owning a car. So why build an infrastructure based on current preferences without talkin’ ‘bout my generation?

Densely populated cities are also needed because suburban sprawl is becoming too expensive for an ageing population (more maintenance of roads/sewers/landlines ). However, in order to function properly, densely populated cities need a different transport hierarchy: pedestrians first, cyclists second, public transport third and the private car last.

So the new urban types, the harbingers of the two-wheeled future, are going to Pedal on Parliament. There are feeder rides and also a feeder walk.