Denial Of Service

The Christmas break is now a distant memory and I'm back on the weekly treadmill, looking forward to some warmer weather and some visits to look at new walking & cycling infrastructure.

The last job of the holidays was to get shot of the Christmas tree and fortunately, my local authority laid on a pop-up treecycling drop off point within cycling distance, so I hooked up my trailer and took our tree for a little trip before its final journey to be composted. As I was heading home in the freezing rain, I got thinking about what I would have done without this temporary facility and what the wider implications are.

I could have cut the tree up and home-composted it, but Christmas trees take a lot of time to rot down. I could have let it dry and burnt it, but it would take ages to dry (and yes, smoke pollution). I could have cut the tree up and popped it in a neighbour's green waste bin or I could have taken it to my borough's tip (reuse and recycling centre).

Sticking the tree in the neighbour's bin would have been fine with him, but I got the exercise doing my errand. The tip would have been a much longer ride, but given it would have been on 40mph+ country lanes for the last part of the journey, it wouldn't have been safe. 

As with many places, the green bin service has to be paid for (notwithstanding I had a free opportunity) and the tip is only really accessible by car (and there is only one in the borough). As a citizen, you either pay an additional fee or you have access to a car. This goes for bulky waste such as mattresses, refrigerators and furniture. OK, you probably wouldn't be able to take every bulky thing by cycle, but that's not even an option where I live. 

I have in the past done work at home which has generated timber and rubble which either couldn't be reused or was surplus (I do tend to keep potentially useful materials). This kind of stuff isn't collected by the council, even for a fee and so back in the day, having a car was handy to get rid of this stuff and to be fair to the local waste authority, this type of material does enter the recycling stream. The alternative would be to pay a private contractor.

In other words, beyond what is collected for free with the weekly collection, waste services in my area favour those who have access to a car and indeed, this is a driving subsidy. You can of course discuss how and what should be collected, but the service is not equitable. When you start thinking more widely, you can see just how much more of life operates with driving being either subsidised or a prerequisite for participating in society. This is beyond a simple infrastructure problem, it is rooted in how services are planned and designed. It is rooted in the very spatial planning system which governs us; and of course, it is political decision-making at all levels.

I can think about other services where I live. Luckily plenty are within walking and cycling distance (dentist, convenience store, primary school). Walking is generally easy, but cycling isn't helped by hostile local streets. Other services can still be walked to, but if you're time poor, then cycling should be the natural quicker choice, but again, the streets don't enable it. Perversely, it's safer for me to cycle to a big box supermarket on shared paths than it is to my closer local shops.

Then consider the nature of development. In my personal "15-minute city", I can get to a fast food outlet by cycle, but the local streets are a barrier. Given it's a drive through, there's car parking and no cycle parking, I'm not really their customer. My main town centre is a 20-minute ride, although there's a ring road to cross. My nearest hospital is a half-hour cycle ride, but it's edge of town and again, there's some awful roads to traverse to get there. Beyond that, I need to swap from personal power to a train, bus or car (expect we don't have one any more).

This hasn't overnight. Out of town shopping centres and retail parks were fashionable in the 80s and 90s. Planning from the 50s started to separate living places from working places which created the need to travel and in the 2010s, building conversion planning rules were relaxed so much, that my town centre lost most of its office space. Throw in new hospitals built on the edge of town (with prime town centre sites redeveloped) and the addition of car-centric housing on the edges, then no wonder things have got as they have.

We can also add signalised junctions which have no pedestrian crossings, crossings which take ages to get a green man and layouts which prioritise shifting motors over people and all of the other features deployed to try and manage driving created by the parasitic symbiosis with the planning system.

I advocate for infrastructural changes of course, but I think it is important to stop from time to time and consider the planning system which we are trying to mitigate against, because it feels like a losing battle sometimes. As well as redesigning how streets and places operate, we need planning authorities to step up and change how development and redevelopment operates in their areas, prioritising that which supports local trips made actively. This is quite daunting where national policy is so warped (England especially), but change is needed.

Then there's the politics. The last decades have seen services pushed out to the community and then centralised again with the changing domga of the ruling party and indeed where investment is made and cut. Some years back, we had sure start centres across our area which was great for having a service in walking distance. The modest building constructed for our local one has now been a private nursery for many years and the early years support has gone. We had 13 centres and now we have 7 which means people have to travel much further.

One thing I have more recently been exposed to through my structured continuing professional development is how walkable and cyclable places can strengthen community cohesion and as well as being able to physically easily get around, this includes have essentially services close by. Lots of smaller supermarkets which don't have car parking, vs a few large sheds with massive car parks. Local GP and clinic services rather than everything under a larger regional medical roof. Smaller local schools, rather than super-sized campuses which are hard to reach. Local independent retailers rather than chain stores in town centre shopping malls which outcompete the rest of the town centre. Being able to live locally is a highly resilient thing and doesn't rely on big centralised services operating.

This is a complex and interrelated subject, but my experience of getting rid of a Christmas tree is actually a fantastic example of what I am talking about.