If Delhi can do it…

When you step out into the chaos of a central Delhi street – with its dilapidated looking buses, battered taxis and auto-rickshaws fighting for space,  it is hard to believe that Delhi has carried out one of the largest experiments in the greening of urban transport anywhere in the World.

But since 2002 all buses (10,000 of them), auto rickshaws and taxis have been converted to Compressed Natural Gas.

The moves to convert to CNG were brought in alongside other measures – including a reduction in the most polluting industries, the cleaning up of power stations, and a reduction in the sulfer content for diesel vehicles.

The measures were forced through by the Indian Supreme Court rather than the politicians – and were designed to deal with Delhi’s chronic air pollution (among the worst in the World) rather than carbon.

Although these changes were about air pollution rather than carbon, it struck me that if Delhi can take such dramatic environmental steps, with all the chronic social challenges it faces, then there’s no reason why the challenge of carbon reduction should result in the levels of fatalism that it seems to do in the UK.

As you sit in a pub in Britain (usually with the heat leaking out of the ill-fitting windows) the usual take on climate change seems to be a deep sense of hopelessness over the scale of the task. China’s power stations, the feeling that policy change in this country never happens quick enough, both combine into a sense that we are not going to go down fighting on this one.

I don’t get it. Why the assumption that nothing will change when things change anyway? There’s plenty of evidence that technologies turn over quickly and dramatically once they reach a critical mass. You can see it time and time again from modes of transport to energy sources. The rapidity of the turnover that can occur from economic factors alone can be extremely rapid:  canals to railways, steam to diesel, rail to road.

The other reason not to be fatalistic is that I sense the carbon debate is moving on. Its moving on from an argument about whether climate change exists or not, and from high level rhetorical commitments  and the odd gesture here and there. It’s now about a practical challenge. If we need to reduce carbon by a set amount then what’s the most timely and most cost effective way to do this within the time available? In other words its not about polar bears and culture wars anymore it’s a practical, behavioural and technical challenge.

Having said that from a public transport perspective (which is where Ive been involved) it’s a very tricky challenge however.

The first challenge is how you measure carbon emissions and allot them to particular modes and journeys. The carbon output of a bus journey for example depends on vehicle type, the condition of the vehicle, the number of passengers, and the way its driven. Telling people what the carbon footprint of the journeys they make by public transport therefore has to be based on assumptions and aggregations piled on assumptions and aggregations.

The second challenge is that if you make public transport greener and reduce its carbon impact the chances are that you’ve also made it more attractive (eg you’ve provided new vehicles) and thus people adapt accordingly (by for example making more or longer journeys).

The third challenge for public transport is that a) the vehicles that provide it are large and heavy and thus harder to convert to low carbon technologies than light weight vehicles like cars b) the car market is far larger than the public transport vehicle market and thus the likely focus for investment for low carbon technologies is the car market.

Given the complexities and relatively small share of overall carbon outputs attributable to public transport the major influences of UK carbon policy (such as the Climate Change Committee and Lord Stern) tend to prioritise more straightforward targets for carbon reductions – such as power generation and the carbon efficiency of the built environment. And when they get to transport they tend to go for what looks to be the easiest hit – which is decarbonising the car fleet.

To a certain extent there is a justification in focussing on non-transport sectors as priority sectors. However, given the scale of the carbon reduction needed – and the relatively short timescale – transport needs to play its part.

A report by MTRU for Campaign for Better Transport also makes the argument against too much focus on a ‘tech-fix’ for carbon reduction from transport. There’s no doubt that we need to reduce carbon from vehicles themselves but we also need to reduce the need to travel – and to shift people onto the modes that are lowest carbon of all walking and cycling, and to a lesser extent public transport.

This probably leads to the conclusion that a carbon policy on transport comes in two waves. The first wave is based on ’smarter choices’ which focuses on reducing the need to travel (through planning and taxation policies) and on encouraging people to use lower carbon modes – in particular walking and cycling (through better information on modal choice, pricing policies, road-space re-allocation, better provision for walking and cycling and planning policies). This is the first wave because much of this can be done relatively quickly as it doesn’t require emerging technologies. Much of the capital investment required is also relatively modest – the main focus is on current expenditure.

The second wave is vehicle technology – as this requires a longer timescale. For example much of it follows on from a shift in the energy generation mix. So plug-in cars or hydrogen cell buses only really become low carbon when the national grid upon which they rely has been de-carbonised.

It’s a practical challenge then. And if the fatalists are right and we’re all doomed anyway – then at least we gave it our best shot.

Ken for PM

Except (as he says) his views make him unelectable outside London…

Highly quotable interview in current Total Politics magazine…

‘He (Boris) wrote a load of racist, reactionary, negative, neo-con piffle. The only thing Boris had never taken a right wing position on was immigration. How were we to know he was just writing for his audience? I believed he genuinely believed all this. It’s only after the last ten months as I have watched him desperately trying to govern from near the centre that I realised Boris doesn’t believe in anything at all, except that Boris should rule the world.’

‘No one in Germany would think you can play with the national government until you have demonstratedyou can run one of the smaller bits. Only here do we think that posing against your opponents in Parliament is a preparation for government.’

‘The civil service is a malignant conspiracy against the national interest…When I took over we removed 27 of the top 30 people in London Transport. A government minister can’t do that. It’s tragic. The civil service is filled with crap. I met a government minister every week for eight years. There were a handful who were in charge.’

‘My biggest failure was not finding a way of forcing the Standard out of business.’

Indian Metal Music

Added to my fotopic site is a ‘photo essay’ of some hours in the life of Sanchi station in Madhya Pradesh in India.

Ginnel culture

Some tourist cities can keep their dignity and their secrets and not vanish into backdrops for mandatory photocalls – or become imperfect versions of the made in china replicas on sale at the the gew gaw shops.  Having as much history as possible helps in order to disrupt and overwhelm.  Rome’s good at that - Paris not so good. York hovers just about on the right side of the divide.

Or maybe its me and the rising sense of panic that being surrounded by the slack jawed tripper induces.

One way to deliberately disorientate, to intermittently shake-off the set menus of shopping streets and tourist channels,  is to follow Mark W Jone’s Snickelways of York. Three and a half miles with numerous loops and doublebacks – all with a quarter of a mile of the Shambles. Tuning in and out but never re-tracing your steps in a walk that connects 47 ginnels (the Yorkshire word I’m familiar with) or snickelways (as the author prefers). Both being narrow pedestrian passageways. 

Beats the tourist boat trips everytime.

More meanderings in the ginnels of York’s history can be found here

Iconic site

Iconic site installation in Mancheter

Next stop Leeds…?

Enlaka

 

August

 

In the village of Enlaka in Hungarian-speaking Romania you feel you should whisper it’s so quiet. Feeling like a benign alien, unable to communicate.Like an advance scout for the tourist massive. Not many English visitors get this far. Most are Hungarians wallowing in the loss of their historic homeland. The deep rustic Hungary they no longer have at home. Or Unitarians from America making connections with this Unitarian enclave – where you can see pre-echoes of the American west. The horse-drawn carts, the hats, the white churches. 

 

Ceausescu’s combine harvesters and heavy agricultural machinery lie rusting in their depot. The field patterns remain medieval as do many of the tools that till them. The thick wildwood remains in hefty clumps all around the rim of hills. There are satellite dishes on the houses as there are wells in the gardens.

 

Hungarian hospitality presses on you – wine, meat, bottle of Palinka (local brandy). Our host,the priest’s son, full of entrepreneurial zeal and local pride. Holding the balance of power in the uneasy settlement between the centuries.

 

Suddenly everything speeds up and we invited on a tractor trailer delivering wood to a homestead in the back of beyond. Stopping every twenty minutes for more wine.

 

We land up at the homestead of some refugees from Budapest who have bought some fields and set up a garden and a new life – in deep in Hungarian mysticism, sheltering in the lee of a hill. Beasts are a fact – bears, wolves and wild boar. Animals you can’t see but can harm you. Shepherd’s dogs that you can see – and will attack you. Translyvania is like that – comfortable, cosy – but always the feeling you could slip off the edge into something wilder. Something on the edge of town, just out of vision.

 

Next day we return for a walk up the hill with one of the Budapest visitors to the homestead. We learn that the spirits can harm you too – or help you – or tease you. The faerie castle and garden on the hill are still inhabited by the faeries – and if you sit and contemplate them long enough they might tug at your shoulder. Or so our guide says – walking and taking – mesmeric. Stopping to examine fresh bear droppings. The wood has a presence. Too much presence eventually for a christian retreatant who is  now in an asylum. He built a hut in the dark wood by the castle wall. His bed and table still there and the walls still daubed with crosses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T Dan Smith

A while back I saw a film by Amber Films called ‘A funny thing happened on the way to Utopia’ about T Dan Smith – the Newcastle City Council leader in the Sixties who was later jailed for corruption. The film itself was in some ways a rather clumsy Eighties Channel Four effort that blended a dialogue between film makers about a documentary they were making about T Dan Smith (with interviews with the man himself) and a drama about a character based on T Dan Smith. At the same time the format was a strangely effective way of examining a complex tale and a complex man, from a number of differing angles and viewpoints.

T Dan Smith himself was a mesmeric interviewee. Although the evidence against him on corruption was hard to refute he could have convinced you of just about anything. If you want to see him in action the Amber Film is not too easy to find (I can’t find any extracts on the web) – however there is some good archive footage on real player on this BBC site.

When he set out his wider political analysis and strategy it was striking and compelling. In essence his view was that if you have a small number of driven, intelligent and like-minded people who have a clear strategy and understanding – but who are flexible on tactics – you can capture institutions and you can change the world.

However, having said that – forget about changing the UK from the centre. The London and national establishment is too entrenched. They will absorb you and you will fail – every time. By comparison establishing a strong powerbase in the regions is child’s play. You can then change the country by building up strong regions which creates pressure on the centre to devolve. If you achieve that you can bypass the national establishment and create a new Britain made up of powerful and confident regions.

He nearly succeeded as well.

He first put some brio and ambition into North East politics and governance by setting his sights on turning Newcastle into the Milan of the North. In his mind there was no reason why the North East couldn’t emulate Milan – a European industrial power house that embraced modernism, industry, the future and an appetite for life. A city that was quasi-independent from the deadening and opaque institutions, the establishment webs, of the nation-state.

The motorways, tower blocks and concrete plazas followed as Newcastle tried to bulldoze and system-build its way into the future.

Having become Mr Newcastle – the mouth of the Tyne – in 1966 T Dan Smith got himself onto a national commission for local Government re-organisation (the Redcliffe-Maud report) and pushed the case for regional government. He was making good progress too. If the report had been fully implemented the country would have been divided up into eight provincal councils (what we would probably now call regional councils). Below the regional councils there would be 58 large, single-tier councils. The exception being the largest urban areas where there would be three super Metropolitan authorities (West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Merseyside). The super Metropolitan authorities would have had lower tier councils below them. This was exactly the kind of structure that T Dan Smith would have taken full advantage of to create powerful regional Government.

But at the same time Smith had also set up his own public relations company. Among his clients was a boorish, bullying and all round identikit Yorkshire Bore by the name of John Poulson. Poulson was a talentless architect  who bribed his way through nationalised industries and local authorities to get commissions for various grim and ugly concrete eyesores some of which still disfigure British cities today. T Dan Smith’s PR work included extending Poulson’s largesse to councillors and officials who were happy to sell out their city’s futures for relatively pathetic amounts of cash (you can read a workmanlike journalistic account of the story in ‘Nothing to Declare’ if you can pick it up second hand).

But such was Poulsons greed and vanity that in his dash for expansion his company became a pyramid sales operation – he was so over-exposed that he could only keep the company afloat by winning more and more commissions which cost him more and more in bribes. Eventually the failure to land some big contracts in Malta caused the company to go under.

The crash brought into the spotlight that T Dan Smith wasn’t the only one on Poulson’s payroll. Conservative Home Secretary Reggie Maudling was also pitching for business for Poulson (all part of Britain’s export drive don’t you know). In fact Maudling was partly selling the Poulson brand because he needed cash to pour into the money pit that was his wife’s vanity project – a ballet theatre in East Grinstead.

However when the Poulson empire fell apart it was T Dan Smith who was among the prosecuted – not Reginald Maudling.

What the film (or T Dan Smith) never made clear was why – when he had such determination, allied to a clear politically strategy (a strategy that might have paid off) – he got involved in greasing the wheels for the Poulson machine. Maybe he liked the high life, maybe he saw the Poulson operation as a small part of a bigger strategy for the modernisation of the North – and the ends justified the means. I don’t know.

One of the fascinations of the T Dan Smith story is why such a disciplined and idealistic plan for the re-making of the North as self-confident, creative, dynamic and prosperous cities descended into shoddy deals over shoddy buildings. And why working class councillors brought up in the neighbourhoods they represented sold out their neighbours’ futures in return for petty bribes to approve trashy housing schemes.

Indeed in many ways this is the original sin that propels the decades long narrative of the TV series Our Friends in the North – a disillusionment that leads to the dissolution of communities and relationships, the loss of ideals and the rise of Thatcherism.

But then of course T Dan Smith would say its not as straight forward as that. At the time tenants weren’t complaining about the new high rises – they wanted to know why they weren’t going up faster. When they would get their flat? And he argues in the film that whatever the faults in the new housing projects they were a massive improvement on the slums they replaced.

What is clear though is that there’s no-one much around in the city regions that is providing anywhere near the strategic leadership that T Dan Smith showed. The last of that was perhaps in the Eighties before Thatcher finally rolled over the left wing leadership in South Yorkshire and Merseyside. Now England outside London (perhaps with the exception of Manchester City Council) is a sleeping giant. There’s few MPs or Councillors that city residents would identify as the voice of their cities. These days political heavyweights seem to prefer the empty glamour of Westminster and London. When they finally get some ‘power’ as Ministers they invariably tow the line and when they are eventually turfed out of their Whitehall Deparment – and if they are heavyweights – then they seem to prefer wasting their time with inconsequential nonsense in the London media industry than doing something of consequence for the cities of the North.

Meanwhile in London and in Edinburgh people like Ken Livingstone and Alex Salmond have showed that like T Dan Smith you can have far more impact and have far more influence if you grab the opportunities that come from regional leadership than you can from being an MP or a Minister in Westminster.

And one day the North will rise again…

Transylvania to London by Train

1,800 kilometres of rail travel from Transylvania to London by train. Enter a trance state – addicitve – as Europe roles by. From crumbling platforms and clapped out second hand trains in Romania the trains progressively speed up and the economy solidifies into prosperity. The edge disappears. The golden fields unspool into the mountains and then back down into the endless Central European plain – baking in 90 to 100 degree heat.

‘The Bihor’ from Sighisoara to Oradea. A mamoth overnight holiday train from the Romanian coast sans buffet car, sans air con. Hand me down french railway carriages.

Oradeo to Budapest on some Slovakian carriages with a compartment to ourselves then a couple of hours at Budapest Keleti

Budapest to Vienna – five hour break

Overnight on the ‘Orient Express’ from Wien to Koln (which now operates Milano/Wien – Amsterdam). Thieves try to raid the carriage at Karlesrhue but one of our companions wakes up and sees them off. Breakfast as the train winds its way up the Rhine valley

Worst train of the voyage – boring Thalys to Brussels – a couple of hours break

First class on Eurostar to St Pancras

Cost a heck a lot of more than flying budget from Stansted to Cluj but preferable in every other way.

Inside the Bunker – the jungle

In World War Two the Nazis took to building massively re-inforced ‘Flakturm’ vertical bunkers in the sky as anti-aircraft citadals to protect their premier cities – including Vienna. With walls feet thick it would have taken a series of direct hits to dent them. Wien got four of them. They are imposing brutalist sheer concrete cliffs with balconied walkways close to the summit for anti-aircraft batteries.

Now an imaginative reversal has turned one of them into a zoo and aquarium - complete with hanging jungle gardens with monkeys roaming around. It’s a private enterprise and not perfectly achieved but nevertheless it’s still a feat to have sharks and huge turtles swimming around massive tanks encased in a bunker in the sky.

if it had been a school trip I would have said that my favourite creatures were:

- the seahorses- because of their heartstopping delicacy and transparency in the way they do everything – the way they breathe, the way they move, the way they eat, even the way they excrete. And because they pairbond for life. They meet first thing in the morning to reinforce their pair bonding with an elaborate courtship display. The female meets the male in his territory and as they approach each other they change colour. The male circles around the female the pair often spiral around an object. This display can last for up to an hour. Once over, the female goes back to her territory

- the red ants – because they were escaping from one of the plastic tubes that ran around one of the galleries to exhibit their complicated, intricate world. That’s the way it starts with the ants escaping…

- the turtles – because they are stoic little dinosaurs that still exist

- and the jellyfish – because they look like an animation 

Picture of the bunker during WWII

Thickness of the walls

View from the balcony

The jungle

Borsec part two: places to stay – or not

Don’t think the Nostalgia villa was taking guests but I would recommend the Anna Villa. One of the most traditional wooden Villas still standing and open to guests. Very friendly and welcoming host.

The dis-used Hotel Transylvania is not taking guests anymore. Though you could wander around it. Creepy like The Shining. I heard a door slam upstairs and fled.