Why people advocating personal solutions to social problems annoys me

This post was triggered, as are many posts, by a Twitter exchange. This started because the City of London Twitter account announced:

We've teamed up with #taxis & .@CleanAirLondon to help #Londoners avoid air pollution bit.ly/1E7lxJZ .@TheLTDA pic.twitter.com/Mx4ATzvjOV

They were promoting an app where you can "choose from the user groups below to receive advice tailored for you on polluted days". So the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association was advising us on us how we can attempt to avoid the pollution that they are in large part responsible for. Great. A bit like Henry VIII advising his wives to steer clear of men with axes.

In reply to this, Schrödinger's Cat tweeted:

.@cityoflondon Is that advice simply "Leave London"? @CleanAirLondon @TheLTDA

Now the story gets more curious, because Clean Air London is a respected pressure group campaigning for air pollution to be cleaned up in London. They replied to my re-tweet of Schrödinger's tweet,

@VoleOSpeed You can reduce exposure without leaving London. @HealthyAirUK video

They linked to this video, from Healthy Air, another anti-pollution campaign:

This over-long video presents essentially two contentious ideas. The first is that those cycling and walking receive less pollution than those in cars. This is contentious because, although the concentrations of some pollutants have been measured to be higher in cars than around the heads of those walking and cycling on the same roads, it does not take into account the rate of absorption due to exercise and respiration, nor the time spent exposed to the pollution. Now, there's nothing wrong with advising people to cycle or walk (except that such advice is likely to be ineffective until the environment is changed to make that behaviour easier), but let's not advance scientifically-shaky arguments for it.

The second contentious idea is that those walking and cycling can reduce their pollution exposure by chosing 'quieter routes'. This is problematic in many ways. For one thing, there's nothing in general to stop motorists from very sensibly heeding the same advice, and chosing the quieter routes to drive on themselves, so making those routes anything but quiet and tending to level-up air pollution everywhere (a process that the sat-nav devices are expediting). For another, the advice is impractical, whether we talk about walkers or cyclists. They need to go to where the things are that they need to get to, which tend to be on main roads. Also, the main roads usually are the direct, shorter routes, the socially safer ones, and the easiest routes to find and navigate without spending a lot of time in research.

An actual example: yesterday, I nededed to wheel my partner, who is in a wheelchair, from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London WC1, to King's Cross Station. We had decided to create less pollution by walking and taking the tube than by taking a cab. We could have walked between those points on a slightly quieter and ldess polluted route than the one I chose, which was via Russell square, Tavistock Place and Euston Road, some of the most polluted roads in London, but in fact we needed to go via shopping streets as we needed also a bank, and we desired an eating-place as well. She, being low down in the chair, would have received the worst of the pollution.

In general if you try to navigate in any town avoiding the main roads, you soon find that you are taking much longer routes, you are taking complex, time-consuming detours (which might lead to you even absorbing more pollution as you are in lower levels for longer), you are probably going up and down more hills (which also may lead to more absorbtion), as main routes tend to be the flattest ones in hilly areas, and you require more planning to take in the facilities you actually need to get to.

The truth is that everybody has a limited amount of time. Main roads are the main roads because they go through. Minor roads don't, you get lots of kinks in your route trying to use them, or you find yourself trying to navigate obscure paths, through housing estates or other obstructions, and in places where the space is tight and infrastructure poor. Many back streets have narrow pavements in a bad state of repair or with strange gradients or changes of surface, or are full of street furniture obstructions that make them impossible to get a wheelchair along. I have tried to use, for example, Stephenson Way NW1, as an alternative to a section of Euston Road, and found it is quite impossible with a wheelchair, for these reasons. You can only have a reasonable level of confidence that you are going to encounter reasonable, pedestrain and disabled-friendly infrastructure, with good junctions, pedestrian signals, smooth surfaces, proper dropped kerbs, and enough space, by sticking to big roads, where the pollution is.

But what I really object to is not being told all this nonsense about 'quiet routes' in itself. I can put up with it if I am told it by institutionally hypocritical governmental organisations, or people who are part of the problem, like the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association. What I really object to is being told it by organisations that claim to be there to campaign for better conditions: for actual solutions to the problem of pollution. Because, I don't understand why they are doing this. It's like they are undermining their own work. They are causing a distraction from the big, real social problem, that they are supposedly there to address, and its real, collective, structural, permanent solutions, by towing, or in any way supporting or publicising, this 'personal solution' line. It's just very convenient for the organisations on the 'other side', like the chronically conservative, anti-democratic mediaeval excrescence that is the Corporation of the City of London, or the polluters themselves, the taxis, that campaigners collaborate with this kind of thing.

It's parallel to the cycling case where, for so long, cycle campaigners have got wrapped up in the idea, and the systems, of trying to train people to cycle in motor-dominated conditions, as a personal solution to the big social problem, that, basically, cycling can't flourish unless it is given workable motor traffic-free space. This is a similar distraction, playing along with the 'solution' advocated by those who want to keep the environmental, infrastructural status quo. It absorbs so much energy that should be spent campaigning for the actual change in conditions that is needed.

In another area in which I am interested, the quality of the night sky and the issue of light pollution, it is like campaigners for darker skies telling people they should get dark skies by driving to dark places (producing more pollution on the way, of course), rather than by getting better, more appropriate lighting solutions in their communities, in the places, and at the times, at which they are genuinely required, and not elsewhere.

It's also like rape justice campaigners saying a part of the solution is for women to be more careful and not get drunk, or put themselves in risky situations, or wear the 'wrong' clothes.

I am irritated by these people promoting personal solutions to social problems because they are wasting time and energy on these things, they are letting 'the authorities' and those otherwise in powerful positions 'off the hook', and in general, they are giving out patronising, unhelpful, poorly-thought-through advice to boot.

It's not a practical solution to try to avoid air pollution by cycling or walking on quiet routes. It's not a route to mass cycling to try to train everyone to ride on roads full of motor vehicles. It's not a solution to light pollution to tell anybody who wants to see the stars to drive to a place many miles away. It's not a solution to rape to advise women to avoid risky situations – which will – hey! lead to them avoiding quiet streets, which is where they are supposed to go to avoid the pollution, and not cycle, which seems to be regarded as an act of sexual provocation by many men, and avoid the places where they might be able to silently contemplate the stars.

For these personal 'solutions' to social problems just lead to a mass of patronising, contradictory advice and nonsense. They are not short-term solutions to 'tide us over' until the policies can be sorted out, they are part of the problem themselves; they form a part of the environment of ideas in which the real solutions are just put off. My take-home message: if something is wrong, campaign for the policies to fix it. Don't tell individuals to change their behaviour. Don't even start.

A damp but colourful Spring Clean, and pavement parking in Brent

I am sure Climate Rush's Spring Clean protest against London's filthy air quality, and against Boris Johnson's policy of trying to conceal the problem by gluing the pollution particles to the roads by treating them with calcium magnesium acetate powder near monitoring stations, would have attracted a much larger crowd, had not London been deluged with heavy rain for most of the day on Thursday. As it was, a small but spirited and colourful crowd marched from DEFRA in Smith Square to Parliament Square waving feather dusters and banners, to make the point that obeying the UK's legally-binding international treaty obligations on clean air should not be regarded as optional by the government and the Mayor of London. The lives of those who die because of our polluted air (estimates range from between 19,000 and 29,000 per year for the UK) should not be treated so lightly.

Spring Cleaners at DEFRA in Smith Square

Feather dusters to the fore at Pasrliament Square. The police would not allow an occupation of a lane of Westmister Bridge, so a picnic was held in the square instead.

Another group who seem to think that obeying the law is optional are some of Brent Council's drivers. Here I witnessed not one, but two of Brent's vehicles parked on the pavement in Stag Lane NW9. The more distant one is clearly making the footway impassable.

Brent Council minibuses on Stag Lane

Perhaps the drivers of these vehicles have become confused about the function of the footways because of the way in which Brent, along with many other authorities, is now designating parts of them, in many places, for parking, as here, not far away, in Church Lane, Kingsbury NW9.

Church Lane NW9

I have looked up Brent's criteria for deciding where the designation of footway parking is appropriate.
It says here:

Brent Council has the power to exempt certain streets from the regulations to enable drivers to park either partially or fully on the footway to maintain the safe flow of traffic. At the same time, the conditions must be right to protect pedestrians, so where exemptions are granted, there is sufficient access for pedestrians without being forced into the road. There are certain criteria which have to be met before a street is granted exemption and they have been approved by Brent Council's Highway Committee.

So it's to do with maintaining "the safe flow of traffic". But here is a wider view of the street in question.

This pavement parking exemption is clearly just here to allow parking outside this small parade of shops to be doubled up, both sides of the service road, and still allow space for a car or van to get through. There is in fact pavement parking allowed on both sides of the service road.This has nothing to do with maintaining a "safe flow of traffic". The flow of traffic on the road is unconnected with this, being maintained by the presence of double yellow lines. And note how the word "traffic" is here being used implicitly to mean "motor vehicles", not pedestrians or cyclists. And note, again, the enormous total width available on this road, as so often in suburban north Brent, but that clearly there is not seen to be the space available for any sort of cycle facilities. Well, there are "cycle facilities", if you include cycle parking stands with that phrase. The part of the pavement that remains after the chunk taken out of it by the car parking has also been used for these curious, newly-installed stands by the "Biking Borough".

But that's not what I mean by "cycle facilities". For Church Lane is a difficult and intimidating street to cycle along, being a rat run, with high speeds, intermittent blocks of parking and stopping buses which a cyclist needs to pull out around into the 30+ mph traffic stream, wide lanes in both directions encouraging these high speeds, with occasional pinch points at the pedestrian islands where drivers tend to try to overtake cyclists dangerously, and prevalent poor driving standards, the norm in north Brent. By "cycle facilities" I mean space in which to cycle with a measure of subjective safety, which would mean cycle lanes or cycle tracks. The space is clearly there, but the street would need some rearranging to accommodate them. At present, it is arranged to allow lots of parking, and excess space on the road, which leads to speeding. Note how none of the several cycle stands are in use, in the middle of a working day. This is a measure of how little cycling there is here, itself a measure of the bad environment.

But to go back to Brent's pavement parking "exception criteria", we read:

• Exemption to be granted only where parking of vehicles wholly within the carriageway reduces the carriageway width to less than 3 metres.
• A minimum footway width of 1.2 metres be available for pedestrians.
• Roads in shopping and other busy pedestrian areas not to be considered.

There are more criteria, you can read them if you wish. But note that the first three have all been disregarded here. The parking of vehicles wholly in the carriageway would not reduce the width of the carriageway to less than 3 metres, even if it were allowed on both sides, because the carriageway is the main road, not the service road. And even if you interpret carriageway as the service road, which I think is technically wrong, you could still have more than 3 metres width, with parking, if you put double-yellow lines on one side. There is no law, national or local, which says you need parking on both sides of a narrow service road.

The second criteria is also broken: there is not 1.2 metres available for pedestrians on the outer pavement. Look at the placing of the tree in the first picture of the row of parked cars. And, clearly, this is a shopping area, so the third criterion is violated.

I would like to know why Brent's traffic planners are ignoring the council's own criteria for allowing pavement parking. Of course, I know why. It is due to political pressure. There is a recession on. There are lots of small local shops going out of business. There is a prevailing public feeling here, in the outer suburbs, that trade for small shops is inextricably linked to the availability of car parking, and that parking restrictions, and even parking charges, are a contributory factor in businesses going under. There is a feeling that these shops cannot compete with supermarkets, with shopping centres like Brent Cross and Westfield, and with the retail sheds, for the want of the practically unlimited free parking that these provide. I have encountered this view at the Brent Council local Consultative Forum for this area. The alternative view, that of course I have tried to put, that most shoppers, even in these car-dependent suburbs, do not actually arrive by car, and that dedicating the streets to cars in this way produces an uninviting shopping environment for those using bus, foot, and bike, gets very little shrift.

The truth is that shops are having a hard time irrespective of parking regimes, and they would be having a hard time if there was not a recession. People don't have to go to shops now. I rarely do so. There is the on-line alternative, for everything. The more unpleasant the streets are made, to try to pack in more parked cars, the less shopping I will do in small local shops like these. I suspect I am not alone in this. To compete with the internet and the shopping malls, the small parades of suburban shops need to be able to provide something better than this inconvenient shabbiness on the fringes of a dangerous rat-run. And that's down to local authorities having a bit more backbone, and planning vision, than this.

Brent scoops the pollution prize in time for the Climate Rush "Spring Clean"

Brent has the most polluted location in London, it is revealed by the Brent & Kilburn Times:

According to the London Air Quality Network (LAQN), Neasden Lane reached the maximum of 36 Bad Air Days per year on Tuesday (11).

This means any further days could be breaking legal requirements on pollution levels.
....

It is claimed that the poor quality of air is due to waste transfer activities at Neasden Goods Yard and the proximity of the North Circular Road.

Last year the maximum amount of pollution allowed was exceeded 77 times, more than double the acceptable level.
.... 

Simon Birkett, founder and director of campaigning group Clean Air in London, who work closely with LAQN in their attempts to combat pollution said levels were ‘dangerously high’. 

He said: “This is not dust these are invisible and dangerous airborne particles including some which are toxic or carcinogenic. 

“The Neasden Lane breach is the latest evidence that there has been a failure to address the biggest public health crisis for decades.” 

Brent council confirmed that a monitoring station which had been set up on site showed that standards for air quality were ‘repeatedly breached’.

So, as we are only one quarter of the way through 2012, and Neasden Lane has already had more days over the "safe" limit than are "allowed" for a whole year (I am not sure why any days over the limit are "allowed" at all, but there you are), it appears that pollution in Neasden Lane (which I often cycle on) is twice what it was last year.

As I have discussed before, this is one district of London where cycling for practical journeys is to all intents and purposes impossible, because of the severing of the whole area by infrastructure that is almost impossible for cyclists to negotiate: the North Circular Road barrier (creating much of the pollution), the appalling huge gyratory junctions around Neasden, which force cyclists to take extremely circuitous and inconvenient ways round (and walk), or else take on motorway-style slip roads and the terrifying "Death Valley" underpass, plus the barriers of the railway corridors: the Chiltern Line, with no bridges between the North Circular and Wembley Hill Road, a distance of 1.5 miles, and the Metropolitan and Jubilee Lines, with no bridges between the North Circular and Bridge Road, Wembley, again a distance of 1.5 miles, plus the nasty lorry-filled one-way roads of the Wembley Park industrial estate, should one manage to get across the North Circular, and into that impassible triangle of land between the diverging railway lines that separates Neasden and Willesden from Wembley (only possible via the North Circular itself, and Great Central Way).

The situation of Neasden Lane, courtesy of Google maps

"Death Valley" for cyclists, at Neasden (A4088 underpass beneath North Circular)

North-south journeys through Neasden are restricted to Neasden Lane (the B453) or Dudden Hill Lane (the A4088) because of the North London freight line. Both these roads take you inexorably to the Neasden gyratory mess, unless you use the pedestrian footbridges illegally. Neasden lane itself is a very unpleasant road to cycle on, being quite wide in parts (but always one lane) and narrow in others, particularly by the tube station, and where the road passes under the North London freight line. Here, cyclists are squeezed between the constricting kerbs of the pavements, aggressive "Titan" kerbing which has been used for central traffic-calming islands, and cars and lorries roaring up from behind.

Here's the view I got when I called up Neasden Lane on Google Earth. The Google camera got it spot on: typical conditions: narrow lanes dominated by heavy industrial vehicles, with no space for cycling.

The part of Neasden north of the North Circular, totally divorced from the southern part, is sandwiched between the vast Underground railway depot, the River Brent (a tiny stream, but one with strangely few crossing points), and the Brent Reservoir. It would be lovely if there were a connection for pedestrians and cyclists from the north to the south side of the reservoir in Neasden, other than the deeply unpleasant race-track of Neasden Lane North, and I discussed the possibility that such might be created with Brent Council and British Waterways (who own the reservoir and land around it) years ago, but British Waterways kiboshed the idea because they thought it would be a "security risk" to have pedestrians and cyclists near the dam, and nobody at Brent Council was prepared to push the idea. (Why it would be a security risk uniquely here, when pedestrians and cyclists use dams for access all across the rest of the UK and Europe, I have not a clue).

The end result is that Neasden and Wembley are the most cycle-impermeable suburbs you are likely to find anywhere in Britain, and travel on foot here is also awkward, inconvenient and unpleasant. It is not in the least bit surprising that, for almost everybody, the only practical means of transport here are the car, bus, and train. It is not in the least bit surprising that Neasden Lane is the most polluted place in London. The record has no doubt been worsened by the low rainfall we have had this year. Some of the pollution is due to the waste transfer station adjacent to the road. Some may be due to the Chiltern Line, which has some diesel units, though I expect not much. Mostly it will be the traffic, particularly the diesel lorries. Neasden Lane is actually in a slight valley, into which the pollution from the North Circular will sink.

And all this is little more than a mile from Wembley Stadium, the national sports stadium, the biggest of the six stadiums hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. Wembley however only will host two Olympic events: men's and women's football. That's probably just as well. We don't want too many of the athletes of the world to be given asthma at the London "greenest Olympic Games in history". As to our own teams that play there regularly, well, they are British, they must be used to it by now: lungs of steel, and all that.

If you are seeing the Olympic football, or any other match, or any other event at the stadium or concert arena, my advice is not to try to get to Wembley by bike. Unless you live in the part of London to the north of Wembley, which you probably do not, it would be a major challenge. There was a plan, about five years ago, to create "greenway" cycle and walking routes to Wembley Stadium from all directions, in time for the Olympics. Sustrans was involved. It was called, cleverly, the Wembley GOAL project, standing for Greenways for the Olympics And London. Of course, as usual for these things in this country, there was no funding for it, beyond the initial studies, and nothing ever happened, save for employing consultants for a few weeks, and wasting a few days of LCC volunteers' time. Pretty coloured maps were produced, residential streets and parks were cycled around, "stakeholders" were consulted, and the project then vaporised. I could write a whole long post just on this scandal – it is a story that has not yet been told – but I will not do so today. Little enough has been done for cycling and walking access to the main Olympic Park in East London, as many other bloggers have mentioned, but at least something happened there. At least a new platform was constructed to allow the route along the Lea canal to be continuous, even though it looks like that route, crazily, will be closed for the Olympics themselves because of, again, the absurd "security" obsession. But precisely nothing happened in Wembley, or in Brent.

The fantasy "greenways" conceived for the Sustrans Wembley GOAL study of 2007, never built

Here is a newer version. Sustrans still propose (or was still proposing in 2009) this contorted Greenway "network" for Brent. Apart from the fact that it has made practically no progress, in my view, this entire concept is wrong, of attempting to push cyclists onto obscure, un-useful byways. Large-scale popular cycling will only ever be achieved by giving people on bikes direct, convenient, safely segregated routes on main roads, as they have done in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.


So pollution in Boris Johnson's London continues to spiral out of control, killing 2,200 people per year, according to the latest research reported by the BBC. This is about ten times the number of people killed in road crashes in London. And of course everybody's health must be affected, not just that of those who die as a result of the pollution. Johnson's "solution" is to put pollution suppressants in front of air quality monitors, so reducing the number of occasions on which the PM10 value is reported to be breached and reducing the number of smog alerts, both preventing the public from being warned of the dangerous conditions, and attempting to circumvent the discovery of legal breaches, and application of fines. This is what the Campaign for Clear Air in London, a non party-political organisation, condemns as "public health fraud on an industrial scale". And as the MP for Brent North, Barry Gardiner, said in a Tweet yesterday: "Boris's pollution suppressors near air quality monitors is like putting breathing apparatus on the canary in the mines!"

Those living or working on or near main roads like Neasden Lane and the North Circular Road are the ones at the sharpest end, the ones who will pay the heaviest price for this truly criminal public health fraud. But its all connected, and we all suffer, from the failure to control motor traffic in London, the failure to provide decent routes for walking and cycling, the failure to live up to the spin of "the greenest Olympics ever", the failure to arrest the degradation of the environment.

If you can, support the Climate Rush Spring Clean walk and cycle march, rally and direct action, today, Thursday 19 April, at 6:00pm outside DEFRA, 17 Smith Square, London SW1. And of course, come on the LCC Big Ride, calling for "streets as safe and inviting for cycling as they are in Holland", on 28 April. Most importantly, do vote in the London mayoral election on 3 May for a candidate who does not think the best way to combat pollution is to try to glue it to the road.