Scandinavia always makes me wistful. The Finns are quick to point out that they are Nordic, not Scandinavian. But the same beautiful melancholia unites the whole peninsula. At Helsinki airport, despite the late Autumn warmth, the bus transfer proudly displays pictures of Finnish ski-jumping champions. I board my quiet electric train and am soon gliding through tall, pristine pine forest. This gives way to city buildings, malls and university campuses, a blur of whites and greys, like a rapid flick through a 1990s Ikea catalogue. I take my Egg out of my cabin bag and turn it on. When I had last used it on my early-morning train to the airport in England, it had registered in the 30s for PM2.5 mg/m3. Now it is 1mg/m3. At one point, in a tunnel, it excitedly climbs to 7mg/m3, before getting giddy and falling back to 5mg/m3.
I’ve come to Helsinki because it has a strong claim to be the cleanest-air capital city in the world. But also, amazingly, it isn’t resting on its laurels – in fact it is doing more than most cities to clean up what little air pollution it has left. And number one on its ‘to do’ list is to make the private car a relic of the past.
I message Sonja Heikkilä when I’m on the train. Sonja found herself the accidental poster girl of the clean mobility movement when her college thesis went viral – at least among international transport community types – in 2014. It coined a new term, ‘Mobility as a Service’, or ‘MaaS’, as a concept of ownership-free, multi-vehicle transport that could replace the dominance of the private car; today there are entire international conferences dedicated to ‘MaaS’, all thanks to Sonja’s college thesis. The central premise is this: why own a car, or a moped, or a bicycle, or even buy a train ticket, if you could instead access whatever you need via a single swipe card or app? Why attempt to make an entire journey from A to B using just one form of transport, and then have to return from B to A using exactly the same one? Why needlessly pollute, just because you own something?
Outside Helsinki train station, electric trams mix with cars and bicycles. It looks busy, so I get my Egg out again: astonishingly, it’s still only 1mg/m3. Sonja arrives at the pick-up point in front of the station tentatively driving a pristine white electric BMW i3. The company she now works for, the insurance firm OP, has embraced the MaaS idea and brought the car club DriveNow to Helsinki. Car club members have access to a fleet of cars dotted around the city, rather than needing to own one. Sonja is keen to meet me in one of its flagship EVs, though she admits she hasn’t driven it many times before. ‘Is it on?’ she asks, as she tries to reverse. ‘It’s hard to tell. No, it isn’t on.’ She presses another button and there is a beep in lieu of an engine sound. ‘The i3 is probably the most popular car in the external fleet,’ she tells me as we set off. ‘I can never find an i3.’ There is a simple blue line on the dashboard display showing it has 160km of charge left. ‘I think it’s quite limiting if you need to either choose to live without a car and then are restricted to where you can go, or you choose to buy a car but are restricted to those costs that come with driving and car ownership,’ she tells me, as we drive quietly through Finland’s quiet capital. ‘Even when you’re not driving it you need to pay for the insurance, everything. You are not free … I wanted to create this concept where you don’t need to be dependent on anything, you can choose to use what you want at that moment … I am not dependent on the car or bike that I took with me from home or work – I can change my plans during the day.’
OK, so ‘MaaS’ sounds like – and is – corporate jargon. But its central premise is one that all cities with clean air aspirations will need to embrace: we need to quit our car habit. This is part of the clean air blueprint. Electric cars are great, but fewer cars are even better. Remove the traffic, and the pollution goes too. In Newcastle, UK, when city centre roads were closed to traffic for the HSBC UK City Ride bicycle race in 2016, levels of NOx fell by 75 per cent.
Sonja’s thesis adviser in 2014, Sampo Hietanen, has since set up his own company, MaaS Global. Its ‘Whim’ app allows subscribers to use many different forms of transport within Helsinki (and increasingly other cities, including Birmingham, UK) simply via an app. I decide to use Whim during my stay in the city, to experience it in practice. When Sonja drops me off at a Metro station, I’m a bundle of bags, papers and Dictaphone, with no idea where I actually am, so I look to Whim to tell me what to do. Top of its list of suggestions is a five-minute walk around the block to catch a tram. As I am standing directly outside the Metro stop, I don’t want to do that, so I scroll down the list to find the Metro option and touch ‘start journey’. There is no ticket, only the promise that the ‘ticket will be automatically generated at the start of the journey’. When I get onto the train I’m slightly worried that it hasn’t worked. Before I even have time to check, I’m met by a ticket inspector. ‘Er, I’m using Whim? I say apologetically, and proffer my phone screen, hoping he’ll know what to do. ‘Whim?’ he replies, expressionless, as if he’d never heard of it. This is not a good start. We both stare blankly at my phone. I weakly prod at the ticket button again. This time a green symbol appears saying ‘HSL Seutu, valid for 60 min’. ‘Yes, OK,’ says the inspector, and moves on. I relax. I also have no idea how much that just cost me. But compared to struggling with a ticket machine, it was quick and easy.
I emerge in the city centre by the waterside. My Egg now wavers between 12 and 19mg/m3, but never once breaks the WHO’s 20mg/m3 health advisory limit (except if I pass someone smoking, in which cases it can easily shoot up to triple figures). Walking down Kalevankatu Street, the six-storey brick buildings and cafés remind me of Manhattan. It then opens out into a boulevard that is more like Paris, except for the trams going up and down. There are cars too, but they are outnumbered, in passenger terms, by bikes and buses. The Egg reads just 9mg/m3. Then 8mg/m3.
MaaS Global’s new penthouse office is literally being unwrapped when I arrive. The metal buzzer still has protective plastic that’s yet to be peeled off and the elevator is internally lined with cardboard, like a parcel waiting to be opened. When I arrive the CEO, Sampo Hietanen, is regaling some staff members with a story from a recent trip to Japan – he seamlessly changes into English to include me. ‘The toilet’, he says, ‘had a washbasin above it – you wash your hands, and then that “grey water” is used to flush the loo. Perfect closed-loop sustainability!’ He offers me a coffee and ushers me in to a glass-walled meeting room. ‘There is a problem of more and more dense cities. The normal curve has been as GDP rises, the ratio of people owning cars rises as well. Cities are jammed, they cannot move,’ says Sampo. He, by contrast, is so full of energy and enthusiasm that he continues to move even when sitting down. ‘So, we have two ways of trying to solve this issue: one is looking at the map and start banning things. But in a free democratic world, and even in other places, that’s pretty hard – I’m not a big believer in what Oslo or Barcelona are trying to do. It is easy to say politically “by 2030 we are going to ban cars” – they are not going to do that. Unless – and this is the other solution – unless there is something better out there. If you want to focus on the issue of emissions … you need to look at the individuals and ask, why did they buy that car … if the paradigm of how we plan our mobility changes from owning a vehicle to owning our own operator or service provider, that changes the whole system.’
Car ownership and driving licence applications are already going down among young people across Europe and the US. Sampo believes this is not just because insurance costs are going up, but that ownership is ‘seen as a drag’. In mid-2017 the regional public transit agency for Austin, Texas, piloted the Pickup app, allowing users to request a ride via public transport to anywhere within its service zone from their phones – in effect, an on-demand bus service. Similar services have started popping up around the world, such as the Citymapper Smartbus in London. In Milton Keynes, Brian Matthews is already thinking about a driverless minibus system that gets you to where you want in a very similar time to a car, and the same quality that you experience in a car, so you get your personal space, so you’re not crammed into a very small space … it’s the experience that will make it work and challenge the car.’
Another alternative is to get people to share their cars. This is an essential part of the MaaS idea, such as Sonja’s latest car club scheme in Helsinki. At the London Assembly, Leonie Cooper is a big fan: ‘It’s about trying to get people to switch to electric car clubs, and sharing their cars and being more efficient with car use … I think joining a car club is the way forward. Although they haven’t got their own car, they have access to a car – so on that occasion that they need to take rubbish to the dump, or go and visit their aunt in Suffolk … if they are a member of a car club, for some people it would be a lot cheaper. Owning a car is not cheap. I think we need to start presenting people with the evidence about the calculation between if you don’t have a car – not paying road tax, no insurance … And if you join a club with access to all kinds of vehicles, not just one.’
At the LCV Show, car-sharing was high on the car industry’s agenda too. According to Konstanze Scharring, director of policy, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), ‘exponential growth’ of car-sharing is ‘expected in a very short time-frame … We expect membership of shared services to increase [in the UK] by 2.3 million by 2025.’ Car-sharing operators – including Zipcar, DriveNow and Enterprise CarShare – currently have more than 200,000 members across the UK. If the 2.3 million forecast is correct this would remove an estimated 160,000 private cars from UK roads over the next eight to ten years. According to industry analysts Frost & Sullivan, app-based taxi services such as Uber and Lyft could potentially remove about 10.41 million vehicles from the road worldwide by 2025. This, said Scharring, heralds ‘a significant change in the future of mobility’.
Whilst at LCV, I ask Andy Eastlake about the elephant in the room. If the end goal of car-sharing is fewer emissions and fewer cars on the road, that is surely the opposite of what every car company at this show actually wants? ‘That is one of the end goals, I would absolutely agree,’ he says. ‘We have a number of key evolutions that we’ve got to go through. So, we’ve got to get the cars to be as efficient as possible, to use as little energy as possible. Whatever engine they are using has got to be zero carbon and zero emissions at the tailpipe – at the moment the clear leader is electric vehicles. So OK, we’ve got zero emissions mobility. What we aren’t solving with that is congestion and space. If by 2050, rather than having 35 million petrol and diesel cars on the road we have 40 million electric vehicles on the road, we will have failed … we will be gridlocked. So, what we’ve got to do is change the whole model of mobility and ownership. Rather than having a vehicle that costs you £25,000 and sits static and idle 95 per cent of the time, maybe we want a vehicle that costs £35,000, but is sweated as an asset and used 65 per cent of the time. We could deliver the same number of miles with half the vehicles.’ But the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) want to sell more cars, surely? ‘You’re selling better cars, at a slightly higher price, and the services that go with them – the cost of the mobility,’ says Eastlake. ‘And given that they are used more frequently, they will be replaced more frequently too.’
To reduce emissions in our cities, the private car in the driveway can no longer be the automatic go-to option. People often use the car because it is there, it is easy and they are already paying for it. Car clubs put cars on an equal footing to other mobility options, and ask the question: what is your best way of getting from A to B today? They are also one of the quickest ways of electrifying road transport. Not everyone can afford an electric car, but everyone who can afford to buy an old car, can buy a car club membership instead. The Paris AutoLib was the biggest electric car club in the world before its plug was pulled in 2018, but its spirit lives on in the many cities around the world that have since copied it* . Wrocław, Poland, has 200 Nissan Leaf electric cars available through its Vozilla car-sharing club. The ‘e-share mobi’ in Japan is available on a membership-free, pay-per-use basis – the cars are also available with the new ProPILOT autonomous technology, making this a clever way to familiarise people with both EV and autonomous driving. The original company behind Autolib in Paris, Bolloré Group, has also gone on to run similar schemes around the world including Indianapolis (BlueIndy), Los Angeles (BlueLA), London (Bluecity) and Singapore (BlueSG).
But while electric car clubs are part of the clean air blueprint, weaning people off cars altogether is even better. This is not about removing all cars from the streets, but simply reducing the number of them, cutting into their dominance. Mark Watt, the executive director of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, wrote in his blog in 2017, ‘Ultimately, private cars will never be the best climate and clean air solution … While electrifying our vehicles is an important step in tackling air pollution and climate change, citizens will ultimately need to move beyond private cars and shift to mass transit – buses, trains, car share – and good old-fashioned walking and cycling … [making] our streets safer, quieter and more pleasant places to be.’
‘What will the MaaS city of the future look like?’ Sampo asks himself, as he talks, ostensibly to me. ‘The tube [London underground] is the backbone of London, for example. But then spanning out of that you would have hubs of multiple services – from the tube station you plug in your Segway share or your car or ride hailing [such as Uber] or CAV or your drone, which connects you to other hubs. What do you currently see when you come out of the tube? A roundabout. So, if we want a new kind of future you have to build the infrastructure.’
There’s a line in a WHO report that nicely sums it up, saying, ‘Poor urban planning, which leads to sprawl and overdependence on private vehicle transport, is a major factor in urban emissions.’ Sampo too, who started his career in urban planning, says, ‘The sooner we start building on that future the sooner it will come.’ Some cities are starting to do just that. Madrid’s mayor, Manuela Carmena, plans to kick private cars out of her city centre. On Spanish radio she announced that the city’s main avenue, the Gran Vía, will only allow access to bikes, buses and taxis by the time she leaves office in May 2019. This was in addition to a previous announcement that all diesel cars will be barred from entering Madrid by 2025, while 24 of the city’s busiest streets are already being redesigned for walking rather than driving. Not wanting to be outdone by its regional rival, in September 2017, Barcelona created its first car-free ‘superblock’, covering 15,000 square metres (160,000 square feet) of Barcelona’s El Poblenou neighbourhood, with six more superblocks, each housing around 5,000 to 6,000 people, to follow in 2018: the plan is estimated to lower pollution levels nearly threefold, simply by giving pedestrians and cyclists priority over cars. Roadside parking within the superblocks will go, making space for street games, sport and even an outdoor cinema.
Professor Chris Griffiths at St Barts Hospital is co-founder of the campaign group Doctors Against Diesel. He tells me, ‘It’s important to remove diesel from the road, but … it’s not just about diesel, it’s about reducing traffic, making city centres an environment where kids can walk to school or cycle to school instead of going in cars, they can play more, get more exercise, be less obese. Living in a city can be much more pleasant than it is now … no diesel, no internal combustion engines, less traffic, better transport systems. That means that the quality of life of people in cities is much improved.’ In south London, Greenwich Councillor Dan Thorpe gives me a great example of this, called the ‘walking school bus’. Just like a traditional school bus, it stops at regular points along the route to school, picking up kids at each stop – but unlike a traditional bus, there is no vehicle, only children in high-vis jackets walking hand in hand, with two designated adults – typically teachers and-or pre-allocated parents – at either end. ‘Some schools have them on a daily basis,’ he tells me. ‘They have posters and slogans to spread the message. In the winter it gets a bit more tricky. But that kind of mass action is one way to make progress … We have an annual festival where we close off the streets for two days, it’s amazing the sense of freedom it gives everyone.’
While public transport is crucial – and far better than individual electric cars – it is the transport that we can do with our own two feet (also known as ‘active transport’) which makes for the cleanest air. According to research by Delft University of Technology, a 3.5-metre-wide (11ft) road lane can transport only 2,000 people an hour in cars, compared to 14,000 cyclists or 19,000 pedestrians, before you even take into account the space saved on parking.
But the battle for that road space is very real, and very bloody. As the number of cyclists increases in major cities such as London and New York, so does the resentment between road users. Lives and limbs have been lost. In New York City in 2011 there were 754 crashes between motor vehicles and bicycles, killing three cyclists and injuring 755 people (of whom just 10 were vehicle occupants). By 2016, the numbers had greatly increased: 4,592 people were injured in 4,574 collisions with motor vehicles, in which 18 cyclists were killed (no motor vehicle occupants were killed). Most are genuine accidents, but not all. Headlines such as ‘Pro cyclist knocked out by punch from road rage driver’ (28 March 2018, road.cc ), and black cab drivers ‘wage all-out war on cycling’ (22 March 2018, London Evening Standard), show the genuine hatred felt. While less shocking, a post on Twitter in April 2018 by the artist – and cyclist – Grayson Perry sums up the everyday, brewing antagonism: ‘If you are the woman driving the black Citroen C3 who rammed me onto the pavement on Barnsbury Road this morning, fuck you.’ There are Twitter accounts dedicated to posting such interactions daily, from both sides of the divide.
During Paris’s car-free day, the same simmering resentment threatened to boil over. Traffic was only down by 52 per cent that day, with many cars and vans simply flouting the ‘ban’. Police and volunteer organisers stopped some, but they were overwhelmed. The exemption for taxis and Uber drivers – which can easily look like private cars – also made it hard to distinguish genuine exemptions from laissez-faire locals. Mariella Eripret, one of the community organisers, told me that, ‘Some of them, especially taxi drivers, were very aggressive … It often happens like this … they are angry when hundreds of cyclists take a big part of the road, which forces them to drive slower, or to wait longer at the traffic lights or the crossroads … other drivers drove very fast, taking advantage of having less traffic … There were still too many cars, and drivers did not respect the limit of 30 kilometres per hour.’ Speaking to the Guardian, Christophe Najdovski, the deputy mayor in charge of transport, admitted: ‘We have to change people’s attitudes and behaviour.’
But there is an answer to all this, and one hinted at in earlier chapters: separate the cyclists from the vehicles, by building segregated bike lanes, and close off more roads to cars permanently. London has an average of 1.1 deaths per 10,000 cyclist commuters, which is better than New York’s 3.8.† But this isn’t about the number of cyclists each city has. Copenhagen and Amsterdam, two of the highest cycling-density cities in the world with around half of all commutes taken by bike, have just 0.3 and 0.4 deaths per 10,000 cyclist commuters, respectively. Both London and New York have a higher percentage of cycle helmet-wearers, too. The difference is that bikes are given their own dedicated lanes and roads away from trucks and cars. In Copenhagen, Denmark, over 50 per cent of all trips within the city are now taken by bicycle and 30 per cent by public transport, with just 25 per cent taken by car.
Helsinki is now trying to copy Copenhagen’s success. Using the Whim app I step onto a bus that takes me to the Environment Centre, the Helsinki council department responsible for parks, recycling and air quality. It’s on the outskirts of town and I have barely left enough time to make it for 5.30 p.m. as arranged. Everyone flashes a card as they board, except me clutching my phone. It strikes me how much quicker a cashless journey is than the not-so-very-old days of everyone tipping coins out of their pockets. Soon, there won’t even be a card to flash. The bus departs and arrives exactly as Whim says it would, at 5.38 p.m. I apologise to Esa Nikunen, director general of the Environment Centre, and apologise again when I realise he is the only person left in the building. Finnish working hours typically end at 4 p.m. ‘In Helsinki we are promoting the use of bicycles and walking and public transport quite a lot,’ he tells me. ‘The traffic planning is taking this quite seriously, they are building quite a lot of new bicycle lanes every year to Helsinki city, they are closing some streets from private cars in the city centre.’ He tells me that the main road I took the bus on will soon be closed entirely to private cars, although the buses will still run. ‘Many people are not very happy about it,’ he says. A new €150 million (£130 million) bridge connecting the centre to one of Helsinki’s many island suburbs is also to be built, ‘and it’s not going to be open to private cars at all, so it’s just for public transport … tram, bicycles and walking … you have to drive about ten kilometres [but] the bridge is less than two kilometres long.’ So, is the idea is to make non-car transportation the easier, more attractive option? ‘Yes, that’s right, that’s the main tactic … they’re building more houses there, and then of course it’s more attractive if you have a fast connection to the city centre from that new area.’ I later learn that three such bridges are planned – known as the three Crown Bridges – connecting to residential islands, all of which will be free of private cars.‡
‘The difference between Copenhagen and … others is the service promise from an infrastructure point of view,’ Sampo also tells me. ‘When I biked in Copenhagen the best part of it was that when I turned left, I knew that the bike lane would still continue. Anywhere else it can stop any time and no one cares. It would never happen to a car.’ Sami Sahala, chief innovation advisor at Helsinki city council, tells me that Helsinki has only recently embraced cycling. The city bike hire scheme has only been running a couple of years. ‘But it’s been hugely popular. This summer even though the weather wasn’t that good, on the best days every 1,400 bicycles (there was 1,500 but we gave 100 to the neighbouring city) were used on average for 11 trips per day. That really is at the top end for cycling schemes. So now we seem to have become a cycling city as well … at the same time we have been building cycling highways called “Baana”. There used to be a rail line going through the city centre that has been disused for many years, and then somebody had the idea about eight years ago to turn that into a bicycle lane, and that was a big hit. There weren’t huge numbers at first, but in time people starting realising the amount of time they could save when they needed to cross the city centre.’
I spend that afternoon trying out the Helsinki city bikes. Keen to get onto the nearest Baana, I pre-register online (it wasn’t yet available on Whim) and walk to find the nearest bike docking station. The official map I download of Baana routes from hel.fi however is simply a pdf, and it’s hard to work out exactly where I am, so I decide to just ride on the nearest path and see where it takes me. I quickly reach an industrial area, riding by a busy three-lane carriageway of cars. This isn’t quite the lush, green picture of Helsinki I had in mind. But soon I am on a bridge, cycling towards a marina full of little boats moored on the right bank; on the horizon, a yellow glow as the sun breaks through the clouds out at sea, and an ancient-looking sailing boat is silhouetted. As I cycle along a now blissfully easy, segregated bicycle lane, I almost want to wave and shout ‘isn’t this great?’ as I pass other cyclists. Unlike in the UK, cyclists and pedestrians and cars seem to co-exist without animosity. Each accepts the other. When I cycle back towards the central station, I discover the original Baana: the old railway track cutting through the city centre, under numerous bridges, now a two-way cycle route and footpath. There are even digital information signs, similar to motorways, although I have no idea what they are telling me. Up on either side, above the railway-cut cliffs, the city roads are stuffed with slow-moving cars.
There is a definite ‘if you build it they will come’ aspect to cycling infrastructure. In the Netherlands, an entire country criss-crossed by segregated cycle lanes, 50 per cent of children cycle to school every day; in Greater Manchester, UK, it is less than 2 per cent. When London began building its cycle-superhighway scheme in 2010, it was pilloried for just being ‘blue paint’, easily flouted by drivers, and disliked by cyclists due to the lack of protection (i.e. they continued to die). In 2015, however, based an International Cycling Infrastructure Best Practice Study, the approach changed and London began physically separating the ‘blue’ cycle lanes from cars with concrete kerbs, narrowing the road lanes in order to make space. Right-wing newspapers published photos of empty cycle lanes next to gridlocked traffic, such as the Daily Mail front page headline on 5 October 2016: ‘Cycle lane lunacy! The new blight paralysing Britain’ (yes, that was a real national front page). But people previously too scared to cycle in London – due to the very real risk of death – could now cycle in confidence, and the lanes soon filled up. By early 2018, the Mail’s photographers would have to be up very early indeed to find an empty cycle superhighway: in the morning rush hour, between 7 and 10 a.m., cyclists account for 70 per cent of all traffic going over Blackfriars Bridge into central London.
Laura Parry at Islington Council is trying to get commercial businesses out of vans and onto bikes, too: specifically ‘cargo bikes’, with fitted boxes on the front to transport goods. It sounds lovely in theory, but are businesses really tempted? ‘We’ve so far converted 13 businesses onto cargo bikes,’ she tells me, only weeks into the trial. ‘The way a lot of businesses are currently doing deliveries just doesn’t make sense – I met a wholesale and retail business recently in Islington who had one shop near Angel and one near Oxford Street [around 2.5 miles apart]. Whenever they needed to deliver to a customer they would have to get their Oxford Street van to drive up to Angel and then deliver to customers just two streets away. So, we are helping them to switch to a cargo bike now because it was just not a good use of their time, resources, or money … they have five members of staff and they are all keen to take turns [on the cargo bike]. They are really excited. It is good for their customer relationships when they turn up on a bike … it’s definitely good for advertising.’ The food delivery company Deliveroo, for example, uses predominantly cyclists rather than motorbikes. Deliveroo works with over 15,000 self-employed bicycle delivery riders across the UK and 30,000 globally.
Given the dangers of exposure to road pollution, though, is it fair to encourage more people to cycle or walk on the roads? A large multi-country study led by the University of Cambridge in 2016 found that at PM2.5 levels of 22mg/m3, the benefits of physical activity ‘by far outweigh risks from air pollution even under the most extreme levels of active travel’. In 99 per cent of polluted cities the health benefits of cycling outweigh the negative effects, said the study. Even at PM2.5 levels above 100mg/m3, which would be considered high almost anywhere (except Delhi), ‘harms would exceed benefits after 1 hour 30 minutes of cycling per day or more than 10 hours of walking per day’. A Danish study in 2001 followed drivers and cyclists on the same routes and found that the drivers were exposed to 2–4 times the amount of PM and BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene) compared to the cyclists, who benefited from open airflow rather than stewing in stagnant air inside a car. It also found that children travelling on the back of a bicycle inhale significantly lower concentrations of pollution than those in the backseat of a car. A study in Montreal found that separated cycling lanes had a significant impact on personal exposures with a 12 per cent decrease observed for black carbon, compared to cycling within traffic. Cyclists and joggers are typically fighting the same air pollution from a much higher base line of general fitness; inactive people are asking their bodies to withstand those pollution levels with immune systems far less equipped to do so. The conclusion of the Cambridge study was that the benefits of walking and cycling, even in polluted cities, by far outweigh risks from air pollution, even under the most extreme levels of active travel: where walking or cycling replace a car journey, the benefits increase even more.
While in Delhi, I asked Dr Sharma what might be a sacrilegious question within the walls of the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) – is part of the solution to the city’s pollution problem to have fewer roads, and more cycle lanes and pavements? ‘If I understand you properly you are talking about the non-motorised transport, pedestrians and cycling? In Delhi it is quite difficult because of the lack of facilities … it’s too dangerous.’ Delhi Metro stations disgorge a flood of passengers out onto broken pavements and busy highways, meaning they still need to catch a taxi to get where they need to go. ‘You call it last mile connectivity. Teek hey. Theoretically it is a good idea. But it means infrastructure, infrastructure means investment, and Delhi Metro last mile connectivity has to be made … but [the issue] is always land acquisition. Everybody whose land is being taken and people are compensated. In India, people will die for their land. If it is compensation, they want hugely disproportionate compensation, they will go to court – I tell you we are too democratic – and in court it will take one or two years.’ The Delhi Metro is ‘the pride of India’, says Dr Sharma, and without it pollution would certainly have been worse. But public transport here – as in many parts of the US, too – has an image problem. When I ask Dr Sharma if he takes public transport himself, he laughs. ‘You will be surprised – I have done at least 20 projects [for the] Delhi Metro related to the environment as a consultant, as an advisor. But in my whole life I have not [travelled] by Metro more than two or three times.’ I tell him I’m very surprised. ‘Yes. The reason is last mile connectivity. Second, it’s too overcrowded.’ He prefers ‘the comfort level’ of his car, he says.
When I meet the Delhi-based author Rana Dasgupta later that week, he tells me, ‘the use of public transport is directly connected to means. If you have the money to run cars for all the members of your household, there is no way your household will travel on Metro or buses – least of all buses.’ He tells me about an attempt during the Delhi Commonwealth Games (2010) to re-engineer some of the major roads with bus-only lanes and dedicated cycle lanes. ‘Of course this city is obsessed with position and hierarchy, the idea that poor people could be occupying these car-free areas of the road while everyone was queuing up, it didn’t appeal at all,’ he recalls. ‘They all started driving in the bus lanes, and the buses got caught up in the traffic. So [the city authorities] employed people full-time to stand at the road divide, trying to divide the traffic, holding “buses only” signs up to the cars. Meanwhile the cycle lanes were separated from the roads by flimsy bollards – those bollards were knocked down in no time, and the cars started driving down the cycle lanes, which is what you see now … they have just completely given up [on the idea].’ The car, he says, remains fundamental to Delhi, and how Delhi-ites see themselves. ‘You quite often see marriage ads [in the newspapers] where it will say “Groom, 25, drives Honda City XLS …” because it is an extremely good gauge of where somebody sits in the social hierarchy … It also signals your power on the road … people shoot each other, literally, over car parking spaces. There is no neighbourhood fight so big as over car parking space.’ As he speaks there is a loud parping of a car horn outside.
Walking and cycling are actually very common means of transport in Delhi, ‘but it is confined to the poorer 50 per cent of the city’, says Rana. ‘I had a friend who decided that she was going to sell her car and cycle everywhere … But people actually stop and stare at wealthy people on bikes, because it is such an unusual sight. They are used to bikes designating a certain class.’ Vandana, my B&B host, strongly advises me not to ‘get on anything with two wheels. It’s like a death sentence. I have so many foreign guests, young people … telling me “we are going to cycle” – but really? You will be killed.’ Yet she recalls a happier time when ‘we all cycled when we were kids, we all had bikes … I don’t even cycle from my house to the Defence Colony market now [less than 1km or 1,100 yards away]. I sold my bike.’ Shubhani Talwar, a clean air campaigner, also laments the loss of cycling: ‘What we need back for our city is that culture of cycling.’ But, she says, it is a ‘chicken or the egg’ situation: ‘Should we cycle when there is no cycling track?’
Carla Stephan, a medical doctor from Lebanon, now works in London for the public health charity, Medact. She tells me that Lebanon’s pollution is similarly caused by having ‘a lot of cars. For example, my family is five people and each of us has a car, so we have five cars – this is normal within Lebanon. Even poorer households will have a car for every person that’s working, because there’s no other way that you can go to work. There’s no real public transport … We used to have trains and we used to have buses, but the car lobby won over many developing countries … we have so much congestion.’ But some developing and middle-income countries have cracked the code. Bus Rapid Transit, for example, is distinct from normal bus systems in that they have their own dedicated roadways which no other vehicles are allowed on. It works like a metro system but on the surface, or a tram system without the tracks, and is therefore a far cheaper alternative to both. It was pioneered in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1974, and soon spread around the world including in Colombia, Turkey and Iran. Mexico City’s Bus Rapid Transit system Metrobús, launched in 2005, is the longest such system in Latin America, serving 800,000 passengers per day and around 180 million passengers annually. But crucially it replaces the need for a car for many people. It has been estimated to have caused a 15 per cent shift from cars to public transport, or 122,000 fewer daily trips in private vehicles. Metrobús alone has been estimated to reduce annual NOx in the city by 690 tonnes.
As well as showing the world how to run Bus Rapid Transit, Mexico City has also led the ‘greening cities’ movement. This comes next on my clean air city blueprint: pollution-busting cities need lots of green space and vegetation. Trees, plants and grasses eat up carbon dioxide and filter out particulate matter. In Mexico City in 1986 there were only two square metres (2.4 square yards) of green space per inhabitant. By 2016, there were over 16 square metres (20 square yards) per inhabitant.§ As well as increasing park space and tree planting, as of 2015 the city had over 35,000 square metres (42,000 square yards) of green roofs (rooftops planted with a dense covering of low-maintenance, hardy meadow plants and succulents), mostly on public buildings, with the plan to add an extra 10,000 square metres (12,000 square yards) in 2018. In 2016 the environment minister Rafael Pacchiano announced they would be planting an extra 18 million trees in Mexico City in what he called a ‘historic reforestation’ to reinforce the ‘green belt in the megalopolis’.
While it makes intuitive sense that living near greenery means breathing better air, there is plenty of science to back it up too. A study by the University of Lancaster published in 2012 found that effective planting of vegetation in cities can reduce street-level concentrations of NO2 by 40 per cent and PM10 by 60 per cent. Trees, as we have seen, are big emitters of VOCs, but their uptake of 03 and NO2 and ability to filter our PM pollution, more than make up for it. The Lancaster researchers concluded that the ‘judicious use of vegetation can create an efficient urban pollutant filter, yielding rapid and sustained improvements in street-level air quality in dense urban areas.’ PM is removed by plants through a process known as ‘dry deposition’, whereby particles get stuck to the leaf wax and are later washed away by rain. Another University of Lancaster study in 2009 found that a single tree could lower PM10 concentrations around it by 15 per cent. The gases, meanwhile – predominantly CO2, but also NO2, O3 and sulphur dioxide – are sucked into the leaf stomata, the tiny openings or pores that plants use to breathe.
Simply planting more trees, plants and ivy are easy starting points for cities wanting to clear their air. But some are already thinking on a far more ambitious scale. Stefano Boeri is a Milan-based architect internationally known for his ‘vertical forest’ designs. It’s an idea that has long been talked of in sustainability circles, but few have actually gone ahead and done it. Stefano has. The Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a pair of 27-floor residential towers in the Porta Nuova district of Milan. Officially opened in October 2014, the exteriors are planted with over 700 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 15,000 perennials and climbing plants; the buildings take up just 1,500m2 of ground space, yet provide the neighbourhood with the equivalent of 20,000m2 of forest and undergrowth. This is not just a few extra pots on balconies – the planting and irrigation have been integrated into the infrastructure and design of the building. Trees and shrubs – the largest single one when planted was 9 metres (30ft) high, weighing 820kg (1,800lb), including soil – are irrigated with groundwater pulled up by a solar-powered pump system. In the hot Italian summer, heat inside the building is reduced by up to 30 degrees centigrade purely due to the vegetation, eliminating the need for air conditioning, while many species of birds have nested on the trees including martins, redstarts and pale swifts.
‘The vertical forest concept was an idea that came to me in 2006,’ Stefano tells me, still overflowing with enthusiasm for the project. ‘I was pitching a project in Dubai, with more than 200 apartments in a building, and it was all covered in glass. I remember at that moment saying “this is crazy – in a desert!” I probably came up then with this idea of trees or forests and in that very moment … I suggested totally covering this project with trees or biological architecture.’ The client turned it down, but his idea only grew. Stefano’s mother, the designer Cini Boeri, was best known for designing a small house in the forest in the north of Milan – ‘so I was always destined to work with trees in some way!’ he laughs. When work finally began on the Milan towers, ‘We studied many things that an architect never really gets to do, like how a tree can live at more than 100 metres, in terms of humidity, in terms of sunlight exposure, wind exposure, which kind of soil, how we can fix the roots to the base,‖ how to design the structure [to cope with] the weight of the soil, how we can propose the best maintenance system for the future of the building … so we work a lot on that … I came back to the client, Mr Heinz, who said OK, let’s start.’ The architectural design, says Stefano, started with the trees and plants: ‘We designed the building according to the proportion and dimension of the trees … We had a nursery first, of maybe 1,000 trees. We had to teach the roots how to grow [into the spaces].’ The growing process began in 2010, and ‘we started to move the trees one by one from the end of 2012. The trees have been there now five years … I consider it an open experiment. And what we are now doing all over the world, it’s always referring to what we have done in Milan.’ I ask what they have discovered five years on, which plants didn’t do so well? ‘All our plants are still there,’ he says, ‘which is amazing, we thought that maybe 10 per cent of the plants would die or suffer. But we had 21,000 plants when we started … I think we had trouble with eight plants. That’s it … CO2 is an amazing fertiliser! It is true. We are seeing this in China. When you plant trees in such harmful air pollution conditions, you see trees growing so well, so fast. It was something we were not expecting, but is also something you should consider as an opportunity, no?’
His firm, Stefano Boeri Architetti, has since built vertical forests in Toronto, New York, Nanjing, Utrecht and Mexico City. But his grandest project to date is the Liuzhou Forest City, in southern China. Commissioned by the Liuzhou Municipality Urban Planning Bureau, it will be an entire forest city of 30,000 people, 40,000 trees and almost 1 million plants. With every wall and roof planted, it hopes to absorb almost 10,000 tonnes of CO2 and 57 tonnes of pollutants including NO2 and PM per year and produce approximately 900 tonnes of oxygen. ‘In China we are looking at a totally different selection of trees to Italy,’ says Stefano. ‘In every place the architecture is a consequence of the selection of the trees … First, we have to increase the numbers of parks and gardens, we have to work on reforestation, to surround cities with forests.’
The greening of buildings and architecture is a significant part of the answer to urban air pollution. ‘We know that 75 per cent of CO2 present in the atmosphere is pollution [caused] by cities,’ says Stefano. ‘And we know that 30 per cent of CO2 is absorbed by forests all over the world. So, the idea to move forest inside the cities, in a way is to fight the enemy within … it is not expensive … I think it is a very, very easy way to fight [air pollution].’ Given that a one-hectare forest typically has around 350 trees, Liuzhou Forest City will be equivalent to a 114-acre forest, despite taking up far less ground space than that. No one yet knows, because it isn’t yet built, but there is a very real possibility that – if combined with electric and active transport, and renewable energy – this could be the first carbon-positive city, that gives back more to the environment than it takes.
Plants and trees are an easy retro-fit option for older cities too. In France, a new law since March 2015 has required all new buildings in the country’s commercial zones – shops, offices and restaurants – to have either solar panels or green roofs. This will provide habitats for birds, absorb PM and NO2, retain rainwater, and provide insulation both in winter and summer. In Toronto, a similar law has required all commercial and large residential buildings built since 2009 to have at least 20 per cent green-roof coverage. In Zurich and Copenhagen all new flat roofs, both private and public, must be green roofs. And since 2001 in Tokyo, all new buildings larger than about 3,300m2 (11,000ft2) are required to have at least 20 per cent usable green-roof space.
Singapore, a city-state with one of the highest population densities in the world – around 5.6 million people crammed into 680 square kilometres (260 square miles) – is trying to cut its annual PM2.5 by 12mg/m3 by 2020. Part of its plan to do so, despite obvious space limitations, is to provide 0.8 hectares of green space per 1,000 people by 2030. According to the Singapore Center for Liveable Cities, the green cover in Singapore was around 36 per cent in the 1980s; by 2016 it was up to 47 per cent, despite the population on the island having more than doubled in the meantime. All new structures in the city must include green roofs or green walls. A few hundred kilometres of cycling and walking trails now weave through the island, connecting a network of green spaces and waterways together, with the hope of spawning a cycling culture in the once car-dominated city. The ultimate goal is 640km (400 miles) of walking and cycling paths. But it’s the ‘supertrees’ at the 250-acre Gardens by the Bay, looking like a utopian other world from Star Trek, that really catch the eye – and the imagination. The artificial tree structures ranging from 24 to 48 metres (80 to 160 feet) collect enough solar energy to light up at night, their ‘trunks’ providing vertical gardens, with more than 150,000 plants weaving in and out of the wire branch-like frames.
There is something personally empowering about the greening of cities, too. If a single tree can lower PM10 by 15 per cent, then planting trees in front of your house would reduce the PM and NO2 levels in your garden and in your home. If your local children’s school or nursery is near a busy road – which is highly likely, given that most were originally built for easy access to cars and buses – then planting green walls with ivy or tall, dense evergreen shrubs can be instantly beneficial for the health of the kids who play in the playground. Their lungs, stunted if exposed to high levels of traffic-derived NO2, PM and nanoparticles, will be protected by this additional green barrier between them and the pollution source. Recent research carried out by King’s College London monitored NO2 concentrations either side of an ivy screen installed at Bowes Primary School in north London, close to the busy North Circular road. A 12-metre (40-foot) screen of ivy was installed at the primary school, with air quality measurements taken during the months before the green wall went up and the months immediately afterwards. The ivy wall reduced exposure to NO2 by nearly a quarter (22 per cent).
To highlight an air pollution problem, however, whether it’s by a school or on your street, you first need to measure it. And most streets and schools aren’t lucky enough to have a municipal air quality station on the doorstep. Kamila Knapp, co-organiser of Krakow-based Smogathon, tells me in 2017 that in Poland, ‘there are only 126 of the huge official measuring stations, in the whole of the country – that’s one for every 125 square kilometres [50 square miles].’¶ Smogathon runs a competition each year to offer seed-funding to smog-busting start-up ideas, and helped previous winners Airly.eu set up cheap sensors – about 150 sensors in Krakow alone – to give residents readings that are more relevant to their street and their commute. ‘Now we see exactly where the air is bad and what needs to be done’, adds Kamila’s co-organiser, Maciej. ‘If you go to Airly.eu … you can see exactly where the air is bad, and that’s pretty cool, because you can fight it. They [the public authorities] were denying it for a while, because the problem is they did not officially [measure] it … the accuracy of Airly is over 95 per cent and they cost 200 quid – and the station costs 200,000 quid … So, the idea is that if you have a dense network, even if you have some anomalies and some sensors that don’t exactly work, you can still average to a close accuracy … No one looks at the official station [readings in Krakow] now, they use Airly!’
And, of course, there’s consumer monitors like my Egg. In Beijing, I take the subway to Beixinqiao on the pink line, to treat my Egg to a homecoming. I’m on my way to Kaiterra, the makers of the Laser Egg 2. When I get off in Beixinqiao, I realise this is quite a different area to the Central Business District. Suddenly buildings are only one or two storeys high, the telephone cables and power lines hang low and loose, and narrow streets look more like back alleys. I take a street that is barely a few shoulder-widths apart. Red lanterns hang invitingly from restaurants. The Kaiterra HQ is almost indistinguishable from the other single-storey buildings that line this street, each one painted gunship grey, with curved roof tiles populated by moss and fallen leaves. A pagoda-like red arch leads to a small central courtyard. I only know I’m in the right place when I see that the yard is full of Kaiterra-branded boxes and products ready to package and ship. The windows around the courtyard are lit up in the late afternoon gloom by 20 or so people working at their laptops. A door opens and Liam Bates, the tall, athletic, young CEO, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, walks out with a long, loping gait and greets me. In the little meeting room where we chat and drink green tea, bookshelves loom with titles by Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and entrepreneurial self-help books with titles like Getting Things Done and Radical Candour.
Liam started out as an entrepreneur when he was just 12 years old. While his friends were earning money babysitting, he was designing websites – ‘when you’re 12 you can’t get any real work, but over the internet no one knows.’ He had to use his parents’ credit card, but rather than taking money off it he added money (‘they were very supportive’). He first came to China aged just 16 and founded a website helping foreigners come to study martial arts; he employed five people when still in his teens. Stints at university and TV presenting followed, until the Airpocalypse hit. ‘I was completely oblivious to the problem of air pollution until the Airpocalypse – the sky went almost black during the day,’ he tells me. ‘My fiancée had a hard time breathing. When she was young she had asthma, but we thought it had disappeared long ago … She was like, we need to buy an air purifier. Then, I had this crazy idea – wouldn’t it be fun to try and make one?’ His first product, an air purifier called the OxyBox, came out in 2014. ‘But then we realised that if you don’t measure your air, purifying it properly is virtually impossible, and thus monitors are incredibly important … Before the Laser Egg, there weren’t really any other low-cost air quality monitors available.’
I take my now bashed and bruised Egg out of my bag and reintroduce it to its maker. ‘Ha, that’s funny!’ he laughs – he’s previously only ever shipped them out, making this one the first to return home. I ask him to talk me through how it works, starting with the soft hum as it sucks air through the front? ‘It is actually taking it from the back. It is pulled down a tube on the inside and a PCB [printed circuit] electrical board which has the convenient advantage of warming the air up slightly, which decreases the humidity level, which makes the readings more accurate … Particles cross the laser beam – hence the name “laser” egg – that causes the light to diffract, and underneath there is a sensor which picks up on the intensity of the light. So technically this device could and should be called a particle counter. What it is doing is counting every single particle which crosses that laser beam. And as it crosses it, it sizes it. Particles of different sizes cause the light to diffract differently … and it comes up with this number [PM2.5mg/m3].’ Laser Eggs have also been designed to communicate with each other, constantly receiving new calibrations according to their location. In major cities such as Beijing and Delhi, Kaiterra have set up fixed outdoor Eggs for this purpose. Hundreds of them. ‘We are about to ship a couple of hundred [more] monitors to install across Delhi,’ he tells me. ‘So we will probably have ten times more data on Delhi than the Indian government. Which is ridiculous!’ He types at an implausibly fast speed on his laptop and a graph emerges which resembles a foreground of softly undulating light-blue hills set against huge purple mountain peaks. ‘So, this is insane,’ he says, genuinely taken aback by what he is looking at. ‘The light blue is Beijing’s air quality, and the purple is Delhi, for the last two months [November and December 2017]. There were maybe two days when Beijing had worse air than Delhi … Actually no, that’s just two hours.’ It shows Delhi’s November peak, when the official PM2.5 sensors couldn’t go past their three-figure settings of 999mg/m3 – here we can see that a Laser Egg located beside the US Embassy in Delhi actually reached 1,486mg/m3.
Where consumer particle counters such as the Egg fall short, however, is their inability to register nanoparticles. It can only register particles down to 300 nanometres, or PM0.3. After that, the particles are too small for the laser to pick up. I get the sense that Liam’s faith in PM2.5 creates a blind spot for ultrafines. He tells me that he believes the pollution in Beijing ‘is industrial – steel production is a huge part of it – and power generation, which is coming from coal,’ meaning that, ‘banning cars in Beijing will have negligible effects.’ To back up the point, he tells me, ‘If you take the Laser Egg on the street in Beijing and stand in the centre of the third ring road, with cars everywhere, there is no change in the [PM2.5mg/m3] readings, because they are so far beneath the background [level of PM2.5]. Even if you go to a car’s tailpipe, the air coming out is actually no worse than the air in the city! In fact I have actually seen the reverse happen, where you put it at a car’s tailpipe and the numbers go down, because they have a good filtration system.’ Transboundary industrial pollution is the cause of most of Beijing’s PM2.5 woes if your cut-off point is PM0.3 or 300mm. But given that studies of ultrafine particle emissions from road vehicles have found that 90–99 per cent of PM2.5 (by number, not by mass) are smaller than 300nm, that’s a pretty big blind spot. And given that the Edinburgh gold study found that you have to go right down to 30nm before you find the deadliest particles that can enter the bloodstream, those are the ones we should care about the most.
What the Egg does very well is to give an indication of personal exposure in someone’s home, street or commute, far better than a single fixed monitor ever could – even the precise nanoparticle readings of government monitoring stations are only helpful if you are standing right next to one. But while the Egg is cute and portable, it couldn’t claim to be wearable technology, like a Wefit or Apple Watch. In Paris, I meet a low-cost sensor entrepreneur who is trying to produce the world’s first small, wearable device that can clip onto a belt or bag and measure real-time concentrations of NO2, VOC, PM2.5 and PM10. In the offices of his company, Plume, Romain Lacombe talks at a breathless, caffeine-fuelled pace. The pre-orders for ‘Flow’ – his stylish wearable air pollution monitor the size of a cigarette lighter, in charcoal grey, set into a mock-leather holster – have just opened, and orders are coming in fast from across the globe. Everything about the Plume offices screams ‘modern tech start-up’. Casual clothing, coffee machines, technicians working shoulder-to-shoulder behind unnecessarily large monitors. There is even the obligatory table tennis room.** For the past three years, Plume’s main business has been in air pollution forecasts – specifically the ‘Plume Air Report’ app, which offers a two-day pollution forecast, including minute-by-minute levels. It started in a handful of major world cities, simply using publicly available monitoring data; then 60 cities, then 430. In late 2017 it began to use satellite data and atmospheric modelling to fill in the gaps, and now even covers small towns like my own in Oxfordshire. ‘The Air Report app was a way for us to start building a user base and explore how we could show that people could actually change their habits,’ he explains. His plans for Flow, meanwhile, are more ambitious: ‘Even with very precise on-site monitoring, personal exposure actually varies quite a bit based on where people live, the type of activities they do, how much you ventilate or not. So, if you go running in an area with high pollution and you are hyperventilating, of course you are going to breathe more pollution than someone else … The reason why environmental agencies invest so much in having [fixed] monitoring infrastructure is in order to determine when action should be taken. But what’s not measured is what people actually breathe in their day-to-day lives, when they go to work taking the subway or bus or driving or biking behind a truck, when they are at home … what we’re trying to do is focus on that personal exposure.’
When I ask how Flow compares to official city fixed monitors in terms of accuracy, Tyler Knowlton, Plume’s Canadian director of communications, steps in: ‘these aren’t designed to replace those [fixed monitors] – you kind of need both … These don’t test up to EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) fixed point standards, that’s not the point. But it’s like the canary in the coal mine. This can trigger action. If you can start to see that your exposure is too high, then you can investigate that further … I have a friend at the EPA who works on the massive, millions-of-dollars monitors – it’s like comparing a home telescope to NASA. But I feel like the way we [as a society] are approaching this is totally busted – because those fixed points, [even] if you are lucky, there’s only a dozen of them in your city. If you live in a small town in Michigan, there’s zero, and even if there is one there’s little capacity to collect and understand the data. Pollution doesn’t just sit and hang around politely near the fixed-point station, and then replicate itself out uniformly across a city. It moves and changes and shifts, it is up and down and all over the place. You need both – the big things to take an average, but also a system that is always in flux, like the air you are trying to measure.’
Even the much-maligned (by me and Jim Mills, in Chapter 2) plastic diffusion tube, which is only able to give an average NO2 level, is becoming popular among concerned citizens. The environmental charity Friends of the Earth began a campaign in 2016 for the public to buy a ‘Clean Air Kit’ from its website for as little as £10 ($12), which included a diffusion tube, instructions on how to install it, and a Jiffy bag to send it back for free analysis. To date thousands of Clean Air Kits have been sent out, with the results pinned to an online map of the UK. And despite being an appallingly blunt tool to measure NO2 with, in terms of evidential quality to take to a local authority, it is actually far better than the live reading offered by the likes of Flow and the Laser Egg. Jim Mills tells me, ‘if you went to your local authority now and said … I’ve used a Chinese particle monitor and got this reading, I’m sure they would be very kind and they’d listen. But then probably after the phone call then they’d say “there’s another guy buying a [cheap] device and telling us that our monitors are all wrong”.’ But surely a diffusion tube is far less accurate, I ask? ‘Yes. But if you buy a ten-quid diffusion tube and stick it up for a month and you send it off to the lab and it comes back over [the statutory limit] then you have every reason to insist that they do something about it, because that information, even though it’s just as uncertain [as an electronic device], is credible because we know what the uncertainty is and there’s evidence over decades.’
I decided to put some of the theories in this chapter to the test. My daughter’s nursery stands next to a roundabout on busy road. During rush hour, four queues of traffic trudge slowly forward, with the nursery building at the epicentre. Immediately behind some flimsy wooden gates is my daughter’s playground. I contacted the nursery to ask if they’d let me put up some diffusion tubes to test for exposure levels, and potentially erect a green wall to replace the flimsy fence between the playground and the road. I wasn’t sure how open they would be about discussing this issue – most schools in the UK are government-run, but most pre-school nurseries for working parents are for-profit, private enterprises. Negative associations such as high air pollution would be bad for business. My request would cost time and money, both of which are in short supply within the childcare sector. Fortunately, the director of the nursery was keen to meet me.
I arrive for the meeting armed with reports on air pollution, council air quality readings, and brochures on the benefits of green walls. The director, Tom, is an English eccentric, sporting an out-of-season Father Christmas look with a bushy white beard and a woolly green waistcoat. He quickly says yes to my idea of putting up some diffusion tubes and says he will immediately look into building a green wall. I order a Clean Air Kit from Friends of the Earth and put two diffusion tubes up in the roadside playground for two weeks. The results come back a couple of months later showing the playground had an average NO2 reading of 20.4mg/m3, while one I placed on the building furthest away from the road recorded just 1.3mg/m3. Despite being well below the EU average limit of 40mg/m3 (the point at which, Jim Mills suggests, I could have demanded some action from the council), the roadside reading is still a concern – if the average is that high, including at night when there’s no traffic, then peak rush-hour readings must be much higher. I suggest going ahead with a green wall, and, from the research literature, recommend a thick tall barrier of evergreens such as conifer. The pollution literally sticks to the leaves, making deciduous trees useful for only half the year, I tell Tom. ‘Yes, yes, good – simple, that’s how I like it. Whatever’s best for the children and for your daughter,’ he says. I leave wondering why I worried. A school or nursery should always have the children’s interests at heart.
Weeks later, the planters arrive, along with 11 young conifer trees, already 2m (6ft) tall. Their immediate impact will be limited, but within a year or so they will grow taller and denser, and my daughter’s playground will have lower concentrations of pollutants than it had before, making it safer for her and her friends to play outside. I feel happier, relieved, maybe even a little proud. But I still find myself glaring at the daily queues of cars pumping out their fumes every morning when I take her in, and every afternoon when I pick her up. Without them, there would be no NO2 problem to solve.
Notes
* Not least in Paris itself. In summer 2018, its electric car share market was opened up to multiple competitors, with Renault launching its own ‘dockless’ scheme, Moov’in, in September 2018. The fleet of Cityscoot e-scooters also grew to 6,000 by 2018 and 10,000 by 2019 – far bigger than Autolib ever was.
† Which is scarily similar to the death rate among serving UK army personnel in 2014 of 4.3 deaths per 10,000 soldiers.
‡ This isn’t only happening in Scandinavia (sorry, ‘the Nordic countries’). The largest car-free bridge in the United States, Tilikum Crossing Bridge in Portland, or opened in September 2015, with dedicated light rail, streetcar (tram) and bus lanes, plus paths for cyclists and pedestrians.
§ Compared to 3m2 in Tokyo or 6.4m2 in Istanbul. The WHO actually recommends a minimum of 9m2 per inhabitant, while the lucky citizens of Vienna, Austria, luxuriate in their 120m2 each.
‖ All the trees have elastic bands that connect the root ball to a steel mesh embedded in the soil; all the medium and large trees also have a safety cable to prevent the tree from falling in case the trunk breaks; while the largest trees in locations most exposed to wind have a safety steel cage that restrains the root ball and prevents it from overturning in major windstorms.
¶ Which is better coverage than in the UK, by the way.
** Note for all business historians of the future – all ‘tech start-ups’ in the early 2000s had to have a ‘fussball table’; in the 2010s, it was replaced by table tennis.