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Just a quick note to point out an excellent new resource for those interested in making Cardiff even better than it already is.
Share Cardiff is a network of grassroots community groups and projects in and around Cardiff that aim to make Cardiff a better, healthier, more connected and more social place to live.
We have created an online directory of Cardiff based grassroots groups, neighbourhood projects, local community groups, co-ops, social enterprises and other initiatives that are achieving social good and that share the values of the sharing movement.
The site has everything from swap groups and repair cafes to Credit Unions, open source projects and spare room networks. There’s also a healthy number of cycling groups on there too, including our friends at Cardiff Cycle City.
Check it out and, if you are involved in a project that you think should be on there, be sure to let them know.
What a brilliant, brilliant thing. There’s so much good happening in our fair city already, it just needed something to help pull it all together and give it a platform. Now we have one. Thank you, Share Cardiff.
I sit here, feeling as though I missed a great party. Having only discovered the magazine fairly recently it feels like those moments when you’ve binge-watched a TV show only to discover it has been cancelled; or you’ve exhausted a late author’s back catalogue.
In a sea of cycling magazines focused on selling expensive bikes adorned with the latest incremental tweak, to people who already have bikes, Boneshaker was a breath of fresh air.
Pete Adeney, also known as Mr Money Mustache retired at 30, mostly through a combination of living frugally and by saving money where he could.
Unsurprisingly, one of Adeney's main money-saving mechanisms was riding a bicycle instead of a car.
Cars suck more cash than most people imagine. On an average income half of a working week is spent paying for the costs associated with running an automobile, calculated philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1974 book Energy and Equity. (“The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car,” wrote Illich. “He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.”)
via Money Guru's #1 Tip For Health, Wealth & Happiness: Drive Less
Adeney isn't alone. We've seen this time and time again, in books by Michelle McGah and Tammy Strobel, but I know as well as most how much money cars can consume.
Forget the societal costs for the time being. How much could you save by not having a car? How many of us are having to travel further because we've built our cities around cars?
Something to think about.
Public Health Wales has published a response to the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act.
Creating healthier places and spaces for our present and future generations talks about the importance of activity-friendly neighbourhoods and the importance of green spaces.
The common wisdom when faced with traffic congestion seems to be that just adding more lanes will sort everything. It won't.
Whilst it may initially relieve some pressure, it won't be long before more traffic arrives to fill the space.
Just as with the Katy Freeway expansion, adding new roadway capacity also creates new demand for those lanes or roads, maintaining a similar rate of congestion, if not worsening it. Economists call this phenomenon induced demand: When you provide more of something, or provide it for a cheaper price, people are more likely to use it. Rather than thinking of traffic as a liquid, which requires a certain volume of space to pass through at a given rate, induced demand demonstrates that traffic is more like a gas, expanding to fill up all the space it is allowed.
Before thinking that more roads; bigger roads; wider roads; faster roads is the answer to our problems, we should look to America. The land of the 22-lane motorways. The i10 in Florida for example, has an average of 22 lanes, occasionally increasing to 26 in places, yet it still gets clogged up at rush hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAezAGogWOI
If you make motoring easier, more people will choose motoring. As they put it:
Initially, faster travel times (or the perception of faster travel times) encourage behavioral changes among drivers. An individual may choose to take the new highway to a more distant grocery store that has cheaper prices. Trips that may have been accomplished by bike or public transportation might now be more attractive by car.
Sadly, the cost of building more roads is rarely just financial. It's in the habitats and communities that are bulldozed to make way where the long-term effects are felt.
Fortunately, this phenomena isn't confined solely to car traffic. By installing cycle lanes in London, Manhattan and numerous other places around the world, people started to cycle. Combined with the congestion charge, London's traffic has shifted.
He added: “The new protected cycle lanes that opened last year in London can move five times as many people per hour as a main carriageway lane in the most congested parts of our city. At peak times, the new cycling infrastructure moves an average of 46% of people along the route despite occupying only 30% of the equivalent road space.
“Just two weeks after opening, the east-west and north-south cycle superhighway roads were moving 5% more people per hour than they could without cycle lanes – and that number is increasing as more cyclists are attracted to the routes.
Cities need to decide what sort of traffic they want, then plan and build for it. Prioritising more efficient modes of travel to the detriment of more inefficient modes can change a city for the better.
