Windy hills

One of the most popular long distance cycle routes in the UK is the C2C (read "sea to sea" geddit) which runs over the Lake District and the Pennines from the Irish Sea in the west to the North Sea in the east. Having crossed the Lake District the route climbs up the Hartside Pass from Penrith. The pass was built in 1824 by the famous road engineer John MacAdam and at the top is the Hartside Cafe (1904ft)  which looks over the Solway Firth to Scotland. It's a long climb.

Unlike being carried in a car, when you're riding a bike you develop a direct physical relationship with the landscape. Your feelings about it are modulated by the steepness and length of the hills and the strength and direction of the winds. But these two factors affect you in very different ways. To put it simply, hills are predictable but the wind is not.  You can set yourself against a hill but you have to take the wind as it comes.

If you ask people why they don't cycle then one of the common responses is that where they live it's too hilly. It might be surprising therefore, to find out that lots of regular cyclists really love hills and enjoy going up them almost as much as coming down. There's something about the effort that makes the view more rewarding.  Compared to riding on the flat, riding in the hills gives a much bigger view to effort ratio. On the few occasions that I've been skiing the view from the top of a hill that you've been carried or dragged up doesn't feel as substantial as one you've climbed yourself.

My local rides take me out into the North York Moors or onto the Yorkshire Wolds. Looking out over the landscape I can see the places that I've been, the hills that I know, and just seeing them is enough to evoke the sensations involved. Whilst the thrill of the descent is perhaps obvious the pleasure of the climb is less so. My own hypothesis is that it's about synchronising rhythms. Once, climbing up on off road track up Staxton Brow and could hear my own pulse I looked down at my watch and noted that I was taking 40 breaths per minute, pedalling at 80 revolutions per minute and had a heart rate of 160 beats per minute. In musical terms they were all playing the same note just in different octaves.

When you're climbing a hill, either by bike or on foot, you can often find yourself in dialogue with the terrain. Rather than feel disheartened by false summits I learned early on to treat them as failed attempts to tease. "If you'd wanted to put me off you shouldn't have given me something to aim for before the top" Though more often, all that happens is that you find yourself thinking about something else and then, mysteriously, arrive at the top.

The wind, however, is a pain. Unlike a slope you can't simply get in the right gear and then set yourself against it. When you're climbing a hill there's a simple relationship between the effort you put in and your rate of climb. Twice as much effort means you climb twice as fast. But because wind resistance varies with the square of the speed it takes 4 times the effort to go twice as fast. There's a law of diminishing returns and trying to maintain a steady pace against a gusting wind is almost impossible because the effort varies so rapidly.

In the days when I took students out for bike rides on a Wednesday afternoon the first thing we'd note was the wind direction. Head off with the wind and you could easily find yourself with a long struggle against the wind coming back. The simple rule was to head off into the wind and then you knew it wouldn't be too much trouble to get back. But, living on the east coast, this made it tricky if, like in the last few weeks, you were faced by strong easterlies.

Back to Hartside Pass. The C2C route picks up the main road about a third of the way up the pass. Up until that point it's on steep but quiet roads and the odd changes of gradient aren't too much trouble. The pass itself, however, has an astonishingly steady gradient and, once you've settled into a pace, isn't actually that hard to climb. It turns out that the horses pulling carts also prefer a steady gradient and that's why John Macadam built it that way. 

Thanks John.

The big prize

Just as you can't choose your parents you don't have much choice about the culture you're brought up in. My mother's side of the family were obsessed by motors.  So, even though I'm clearly an environmentalist, I know a lot more about cars and motor racing than you might expect. 

My grandad once applied for a racing licence at Brooklands, passed all the practical tests but was turned down when they discovered that he only had sight in one eye. (As a young boy living in the Lee Valley he'd picked up a piece of scrap metal, taken it home and hit it with a  hammer only for it to blow up in his face. It turned out to be a bit of shrapnel, probably from the Lee Enfield arms factory nearby).  When either he or his brother acquired a new car the first thing they'd do was  take it to bits and then put it back together again "properly". The first time they realised they needn't have bothered was when he got his first modern BMW in the early 1960's.

As a boy I got two regular publications. The first was Animals,  the official journal of the Panda Club, itself the junior wing of the then World Wildlife Fund, the other was Autocar. I studied both of these as studiously as only an 8 year old can. My first published letter was in Animals, asking whether it was feeding cheese to my mice that made them smell, and, from Autocar, I knew the prices, horse powers, even the gear ratios of just about all the contemporary cars. From memory an Austin 1800 cost about £900, developed about 70hp and had a top gear ratio of 1:1. At about the same time you could get an E type Jaguar for just under £2000.  

Once my grandad called me and my brother to one side. He'd got something important he wanted to tell us. Our first thought was that we really didn't want him telling us the facts of life. But no, he sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and announced, "Now boys, this is how a four stroke engine works". Shortly to be followed by "and this is how a two stroke engine works".

Just after my brother had learned to drive my grandad, then in his 60's, offered to teach him how to do four wheel drifts; apparently these were useful "if you were in a hurry". Later he gave me the most sensible bit of motoring advice I've ever been given "If you don't know what you'd do if you met yourself coming the other way then don't do it"

The upshot of this is that yesterday I was busy avoiding the news so that I could watch a recording of the Malaysian Grand Prix without it being spoiled by knowing the outcome. I suspect a good number of relatives were doing something similar.

What do I like about it? Certainly not the sheer waste of energy, but I do admire the skill, the technology and the sheer physicality of withstanding enormous, and rapidly changing, g forces whilst at the same time keeping everything just about under control. When ordinary people have accidents they often describe it as though something just happened. When a good racing driver  crashes they can spend 2 or 3 minutes describing a series of events that actually lasted only 2 or 3 seconds.

I also can't help thinking about the physics. For example, a Formula 1 engine produces about 800hp. At about 750W per hp that translates to about 600kW. Now this is the power delivered to the wheels and, since the engine is about 35% efficient, this means it's producing heat at about 1200kW. Now a typical central heating boiler is rated at about 20kW so a single Formula 1 car at max power is producing heat equivalent to 60 domestic boilers. Enough to heat an entire street. No wonder they overheat if a crisp packet gets stuck in the radiator and that when visibility is low the following driver can judge their distance from the car in front by the wave of heat that's being given off.

But, even though I may have passed my driving test within a month of turning 17, I must also have been one of the first people to give up driving for environmental reasons. For a three month period as a 19 year old the only vehicle I drove was a dumper truck on a building site. In the full spirit of hypocrisy I got a mate to give me lifts.

Postscript: I was out at a gallery opening in the afternoon and came through the kitchen on my way to watch the race just as a Radio 6  bulletin gave the game away and told me who'd won the big prize. Never mind...

Market failure

Lets start off by saying that I'm not an economist and so if I use economic concepts they will have been ones I've re- invented for myselr. 

For example, when I was trying to set myself up as an energy advisor, I wrote a spreadsheet that worked out an expected rate of return on the investment in a piece of energy saving technology. It treated the extra you might have spent as an investment and the money saved as though it were the interest. At the end of the product's expected lifetime it assumed that you got back the original sum along with the interest and calculated what rate of bank interest would have given the same overall return. It even took into account the money you would have forgone by not being able to put the original investment in the bank. I had no idea that what I was working out was called an Internal Rate of Return and has its own Excel function " =irr ".

I though this was marvelous, give people the tools to make sensible decisions and that's what they'll do. Trouble was, that whilst I was into education, giving people the skills and a little bit of technology to make decisions for themselves, the very same people were being bombarded by schemes that promised to do it all for them, albeit at a cost.  My slightly feeble efforts were drowned in a sea of cynicism. 

Despite this, I found it useful. Some investments turned out to be complete, as they say, no brainers. For example here's a screen shot for replacing a 35p 100W filament bulb by a £2.99 20W Compact Fluorescent Lamp

Original/Replacement	100W filament/20W CFL
Original power (W)	100
Replacement power (W)	20
Power saving (kW)	0.080
Original cost (£)	£0.35
Replacement cost (£)	£2.99
Extra cost over use life (£)	£3.07
Orig. lifetime (hrs)	1,000
Replacement lifetime (hrs)	10,000
Cost per kWh (p)	9.00
Deposit rate (%)	4.50
Use per day (hrs)	8
Net lifetime saving (£)	£72.43
Use life (yrs)	3.42
Extra rate of return (%)	154%
Payback time (yrs)	0.13
Saving per year (£)	£21.16

The calculated quantities are the ones between the solid lines. It's assumed that you could have put the £2.99 in the bank at 4.5% interest for 3.42 years and that's why the extra cost isn't £2.64 (£2.99 - 35p) but £3.07 and why there's an extra rate of return which is the return above and beyond leaving the money in the bank. At 154% it was a very good deal.

A few years later a local hotel received a grant from the local Energy Advice Centre (part of the Energy Saving Trust) of £5000 in order to install energy saving light bulbs. Why???

The only effect of this grant was to tell other businesses that it was only worthwhile investing in energy efficient bulbs if you were given extra money to do it. It was giving out precisely the wrong message.

After the first Rio Earth Summit back the American Govenment put an enormous price on improving energy efficiency. They argued that if it was cost effective it would already have happened. The market would have delivered.

When Amory Lovins, from the Rocky Mountain Institute, challenged this by asking what would happen if the participants in the market didn't have perfect information (i.e. didn't realise what opportunities there were to save money through energy efficiency) the answer he got was 

"Well then it would be different"

Markets seem to be alright when you're comparing two essentially similar products A and B but it has trouble if you then throw in something a bit different, such as C. For equipment which uses energy, too many decision makers simply see the cost up front and, for something like a light bulb or a fridge, that just doesn't work. 

Postscript; Having looked again at the spreadsheet I have, of course, found a mistake. To save the suspense, I underestimated the savings because I compared the original cost of the CFL with just one filament bulb and not the 10 that it would actually replace.

Thwack, thwack, thwack it's a jet ski

Most sporting activities produce a carbon footprint. For motor racing or hot air ballooning it's obvious. For many events, including a Grand Prix or major football match, I suspect the biggest impact comes from the crowd as they travel to the venue. For playing golf in an arid country, it will come from pumping water to keep the greens green.

For most sports it's possible to suggest ways in which the environmental impact could be minimised. For power boating and jet-skiing I think the only thing to do is to give it up.

Here's my 21st way to stuff the planet

Twenty one Thwack, Thwack, Thwack it’s a jet-ski

Should you happen to live near water, you can do your bit for global warming and piss off loads of people trying to enjoy a quiet day out.  All you need is a jet-ski.

What’s the damage?

A Yamaha jet-ski, at full throttle, burns 58.6 litres of petrol an hour. At 2.31kg per litre this means 135kg of CO₂ an hour.

At £1.30 a litre this’ll cost you £76.18 giving a cost of 56p/kg of CO₂.

This is about twice the cost of leaving a light bulb on, but at least twice the fun.

Unfortunately, jet-skis don’t come cheap. You’d be lucky to rent one for less than £25 an hour, so this would shove up the total cost to about £75 which works out at over 75p/kg of CO₂

Can I be arsed?

As well as the dosh you’d also need to wear a wet suit. This might be embarrassing if you're the lardier side of manly.

Wind-up-ability

Jet skis not only make a lot of noise but they make it in places where boring old farts go to seek peace and quiet.

A soggy minded American researcher even went so far as to interview people on the shore and ask them how much they’d be prepared to pay for the jet-skis to go away. At a popular ocean beach this went as high as $538 per hour. He estimated the total noise cost to beachgoers in the USA as $908million per year. Go for it dudes.

As a footnote, one intrepid soul did cross the Atlantic on a jet-ski. He didn't like the noise either and managed to make a quiet one. 

Quiet apart from the thwack, thwack, thwack that is.

Personal politics

I have a problem. I want to try to find out why people behave in the way that they do but I can't find a way of asking that will get a straight answer.

Last summer, for Olympic purposes,  Scarborough was linked with with the London Borough of Hackney. The idea was to develop sporting links between the two places with a particular emphasis on young people. Not a bad idea but not a lot came of it, but that's a story for someone else to tell.

Now at the time I had an odd personal interest in both places. I had a son born in Hackney who was living in Scarborough and another born in Scarborough who was living in Hackney. For the purposes of this post all this means is that my 25 year memories of Hackney had had a recent update and so I would happily go around telling people what they had in common.

Firstly, Scarborough is not quite the middle class place that outsiders imagine. Three of the Council's ward's are among the 10% most deprived in the country with transient populations, high teenage pregnancy rates, self harming drug use and lots of other problems that you'd normally associate with an inner city area. Not like the rest of North Yorkshire at all and therefore sometimes a bit of a mystery to the County Council.

Another thing that  Hackney and Scarborough have in common is that they both have thriving artistic communities. This is because they are both relatively cheap places to live but also because they both possess interesting local environments. In Scarborough its the sea and the moors, in Hackney, to keep it simple, the colourful multi ethnic mix. 

But, one thing about the artists in Hackney is that at some point in the last 25 years they have embraced the bicycle. You can spot a gallery opening by the bikes dangling off every available railing. Cycling has become cool.

This hasn't happened in Scarborough, yet. There's a handful of us that are likely to turn up on a bike and that's it; we really can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Now,  because of the nation's recent cycling successes, I tried sounding out some Scarborough artists to see if we could make something of this and begin getting a few more of them on bikes.

But, whenever I tried to talk about it the discussion immediately turned personal and I found it impossible to get past a list of excuses and on to a general discussion of the phenomenon, "But I live too far out of town", "But I've got heavy sculptures to transport", "But we live at the top of a hill", "But my bike cost a lot of money so I wouldn't dream of leaving it on the street"...

My old friend Mike, who has kept up a beautifully written blog, Idiotic Hat, for over 5 years, noticed this blog and last week wrote a post  that directed people here. In this he mentions how annoying moralisers can be and, whilst I undoubtedly do moralise, he suggested that at least I try to support my observations with facts and good science.

So, to restate the problem, either your attemptedly neutral efforts to find out what's going on get turned into a personal challenge or else your arguments are challenged, not on the basis of there being some flaw in the argument, but because you in some way don't personally live up to the implied consequences. Neither Al Gore nor The Prince of Wales help themselves by living obvious lives of luxury whilst suggesting that the world would be better if we didn't, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. 

If you're a member of the Greedy Selfish Party then no one expects you to be anything other than greedy and selfish, but if you're into the politics of the environment then the first attack is invariably one of hypocrisy. 

The challenge is to work out how to shift the debate from one particular person's personal behaviour, either the proselytiser or the proselytisee, and on to the systemic reasons why we behave in particular ways. For example, if we build our towns and cities around the needs of motorists than it shouldn't be too surprised that lots of people choose to drive.

Power speaks to power

In my previous post, A redacted abuse of power, I spoke of my attempts to draw the behaviour of a fraudulent CEO to the attention of the UN, which accredits his company, and that I expected a decision to be made at this month's meeting of the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism.

The report of this meeting has now been published and, with this sentence, followed by a list of companies including the one concerned, they simply state "The Board took note of the notifications by the CDM-AP on the positive outcome of the regular on-site surveillances of the following entities:" 

Quite how there could have been a positive outcome when a proven fraud is in charge of the day to day running of the company is only a mystery if you fail, like me, to realise that power speaks to power. I suspect that two factors played a major role in their decision.

Firstly, there is a strong political need to have a company based in that particular continent and I can quite easily imagine that, just like the bankers who threaten to up sticks whenever anyone threatens their bonuses, the CEO simply threatened to close the company down if action was taken against him.

Secondly, there was an element of culpability in that they had previously approved changes in management structure that left one individual as majority shareholder, CEO, Chairman and, at the time, the sole director.  Whilst the risks involved in this are obvious, and have manifest themselves, so too would be the embarrassment of admitting that this mistake had been made.

However, this raises two further questions. If the UN is there to serve all of the world's people on an equitable basis then it shouldn't kowtow to the powerful simply because they have power. There's enough of that going on already.

Secondly, in the absence of any procedure for whistleblowers, such abuses are likely to continue.

The CDM is a heavily rule based system and, to do its job, it needs to be. But unless the rules are seen to be applied fairly, and to all parties, the entire system runs the risk of going into disrepute.

When I pointed out to the leader of the Accreditation Team that the CEO's qualifications were fakes his first response was "if that's true then we can't trust anything and we might as well go home now". In retrospect I wish that I hadn't then sought to reassure him that this was just a management issue and that I trusted the work being done by the company's actual assessors. I did not want the decent, but vulnerable, people in the company to lose their jobs.

Sitting on the job

You wouldn't buy a car because of its mileage if you barely intended to use it. And here we are, one of the best ratings of the lot, right up there with the caribou, and we spend all day sitting around.  Evolution doesn't normally select for redundant qualities, that's why fish in caves tend to be blind, so maybe this is a big hint ...


From ScienceDirect.com

Getting off our bottoms is one of the major public health problems of our time. 

The challenge is to bring this up the political agenda, an agenda that has lots of conflicting interests. One of the problems is that debate about physical activity is bound up in that about obesity and, because it is complex with many players and many different interests, has led to what Professor Tim Lang calls a policy cacophony. 

Of course, there is a connection between the two, but its not as simple as be more active and you'll lose weight. The very efficiency with which we move about means we can go an awful long way on remarkably little. If you're on a bike, the most efficient means of ground transport that there has ever been, then this just gets worse, or better, as you will. Many years ago friends and I were cycling in the Black Mountains in Wales and, during a break, were discussing not only the different ways of dismantling a Mars Bar but also its energy content. Suffice to say we reckoned that one Mars Bar was good for at least 50 miles.

It now seems that the most likely causal relationship is that being overweight discourages you from taking physical exercise. Indeed from what I remember from the book "The body has a mind of its own" (so good that I've lent out my own copy but it's reviewed here) it appears that the mental map of an obese person's body can become reduced to the extent that some motions no longer even seem to be possible. 

Up until recently physical activity has often been seen to be synonymous with sport. This takes the heat off special interest groups such as the motor industry which want to keep us dependent on our cars and sees the solution, not in choosing to walk or cycle, but in driving to the gym or out into the countryside with an accessory mountain bike strapped to the back.

But sport is never going to be a lifetime answer for very many people and physical education, which is primarily about giving young people awareness of their own bodies, is at least as likely to be about Indian Dance or whatever as it is being in the football team; no matter how willfully stupid David Cameron might be on the issue.

The most likely way in which we're going to get people moving under their own steam is to make our towns and cities good places to walk or cycle, plan our communities so that most of the things we need can be got to without using a car and make it clear that one of the best things a parent can do with their young children is to walk places with them. 

This is not likely to happen as long as we remain in thrall to the great car economy but, with  fewer young adults learning to drive, the signs are that we just might be beginning to get over it

Breaking even on the HS2

In  Time Travel I suggested that going faster doesn't necessarily save time. 

Here  are some sums.

The proposed HS2 from London to Birmingham should save about 35 minutes

The estimated cost of Phase 1 is  £16.3bn at 2011 prices

The average rate of pay in the UK in 2012 was about £12 per hour

 In the summer of 2012 there were 29.59 million people in employment

Therefore the total hourly earnings were about £355 million (29.59 million x £12)

To earn £16.3bn we'd all have to work for 46 hours (16.3 billion / 355 million)

That's the saving from about 79 single trips each (46 hours/35 mins) but at no extra cost 

Because earning even more money would take even more time.

By 2043 it's estimated that the route would carry 136000 passengers per day.

To get our time back we'd have to make a total of about 2.3 billion journeys (29.59 million x 79)

It would take 16900 days for us to take these journeys (2.3 billion/136000)

Or just over 46 years (16900/365)

So we're unlikely to get the time back but we might see it whizz by.

Time travel

In Ivan Illich's extended essay "Energy and Equity"  he made the point that a transportation system exists to save people time but that the total time spent should include the time spent earning the money to pay for it. 

But, and here’s a bit of physics, whilst the time saved goes with the speed the cost tends to go with its square. i.e. going twice as fast may save half the time but it’ll cost 4 times as much. So, if you travel more quickly the time you have to spend paying for the trip eventually exceeds the time you save by going faster. 

 He also argued, and here’s the equity bit, that the rich, who can afford to travel quickly, can only do so at the indirect expense of the poor, who can’t. For example, build an expressway through a favela and whilst the rich people in their cars save time its at the expense of the poor people whose community has been divided. The example which sprang to my mind was Concorde. At the time there was a public subsidy of about £5 per head towards its development. This was when the average wage was about 50p an hour. Hence, each of us gave about 10 hours of our time to the project. Time which the vast majority of us were never likely to get back. 

This argument struck me as immensely powerful. The only problem is that most of us can't choose to forgo the expense and take the time instead. For the cleaners who are busy being cleaned out of central London the extra hour's commute will not only use up an hour of their time but probably, to pay for it, the first few hours of each working day.

When the costs and benefits of transport schemes are evaluated, rich people's time is given a higher value than that of the poor. For example, in the UK the time of a typical taxi passenger is judged to be worth £45 an hour whereas that of a person on a bike is only £15. Given that the regularly riding a bike tends to increase your life expectancy, this is a counter example to the ironic fact that the value given to our time seems to be in inverse proportion to our life expectancy.

I used to take students out on bike rides into the North York Moors on a Wednesday afternoon and still can't really believe it was work. During one of these rides a student was talking about the car he was going to buy. We discussed the cost of the car, how much he was likely to use it and the time he'd spend at his part time job in order to pay for it. Once we'd divided the likely distance he'd travel by the time he he'd spend earning the money it came out at about 5mph. I then simply noted that we were already bumbling along at about 12mph so what was the point. As far as I know he never did buy the car.

The next post applies some of these principles to the HS2 Breaking even on the HS2

And a later one the transformational potential of insulation and bicycles