13. What are your top 5 actions for making York a
healthy clean air city?
Editor's Notes
I’ll just spend a few minutes going over the main benefits of walking and cycling and how important they are to the health, quality of life and sustainable development of the city.
This is my favourite picture of all time – Bike Belles ride meets prostate cancer charity ride.
As you all know, regular walking and cycling has amazing health benefits – it can help to prevent more than 20 chronic health conditions. A recent study held that regular cycling reduces cancer and heart disease by over 40%. And there’s also the mental health and general wellbeing benefits, including a sense of freedom, alertness, achievement and happiness.
An under-valued benefit of walking and cycling is how it brings people together, and connects them with each other and the world around them – both the natural world and the buzz and vitality of city life.
Moving on to the economic benefits of walking and cycling…
In the last financial year, transport was the largest single category of household expenditure. There is a well-researched concept called “transport poverty” where some people just can’t afford to get around by car or public transport. Walking and cycling are by far the most affordable ways of getting around.
Walking and cycling has many economic benefits for workplaces.
Actively travelling to work leads better retention of staff, reduced absenteeism and improved productivity. It’s simple - healthier, happier employees want to stay and do better work!
This is one of the wonderful Fossgate traffic free festivals.
It’s an oddly persistent myth that removing car parking has a negative impact on retail. In fact, providing pedestrian areas, bike lanes and bike parking has been shown to stimulate local spending by up to 60%.
More walking and cycling, alongside reduced traffic and dedicated infrastructure, could be the key to unlocking city movement in York.
Cycle delivery vehicles have proved particularly successful in getting cities moving world-wide. York has the brilliant Green Link couriers, perfectly suited to York’s narrow streets. This is Pete, enjoying Fossgate, recently liberated from traffic.
Air pollution has been called the greatest public health issue of our time.
In the UK, outdoor health pollution is linked to 50, 000 premature deaths each year. And road transport remains the primary source of nitrogen dioxide emissions. Paris is now regularly holding car free days, which have cut levels of pollution by 40%.
Last October’s sun of doom – it’s the furthest east a category 3 hurricane has reached since records began.
Cities are a major driver of climate change. And studies repeatedly show that active transport that replaces traffic, especially cycling, plays a significant role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions in cities.
Routes and places friendly to walking and cycling dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone in that area.
These neighbourhoods are often safer, more accessible for people of all ages and abilities, and they create, social connectivity, a sense of belonging and of community. The area around the Millennium Bridge is one of York’s best walkable and cyclable spaces. York’s needs more of these.
York could be the best walking and cycling city in the UK.
But we are not there yet. There remain multiple challenges, including far too much traffic, severe congestion, road safety issues, insufficient and unequal walking and cycling infrastructure and cultural predisposition to car-dependency and hypermobilisation.
Enter the new Walk Cycle Forum … The Forum started in October 2017 and brings together walking and cycling stakeholders in York across diverse sectors of the city with the aim to increase walking and cycling in York.
The Forum works together to share knowledge, improve relationships and communication, develop joint initiatives, adopt a solutions approach to overcome challenges and, in a nutshell, lead progress towards a strong walking and cycling culture in the city.
So far, we have identified key challenges and solutions, helped progress an initiative to increase cycle parking in the city centre, discussed shared space challenges and identified initial solutions and – most excitingly - put together a new collective Walk Cycle Vision and emerging City Action Plan for York.
We have collectively developed a York Vision for walking and cycling – here are the 10 principles. We are now looking at how we can deliver these principles with a list of actions.
Today, I’d like us all to work on is the 5th principle – and investigate how we can make York a healthy, clean air vehicle lite city.
By the end of the workshop, it’s be great to come up with your top 5 actions to add to the Vision and Action Plan!
