The Miracle Pill

by Peter Walker

  As with Jan Gehl’s approach, such very practical engineering measures must be combined with a more generally different way of looking at things. The official Dutch government road design manual, something of a 388-page secular bible for those who push for active travel,23 is based around a holistic concept called duurzaam veilig, or sustainable safety. One of its principles is the idea that humans are flawed, and make mistakes, and that the infrastructure surrounding them should be suitably forgiving. When you are trying to tempt out unprotected humans amid a world of speeding, two-tonne metal boxes, this is arguably as important an idea as any.

  When stated this way, it all seems completely obvious, and fairly easy to implement. And yet many governments still seem incapable of doing it. To take one example, many continental European cities achieve David Sim’s prescription of allowing pedestrians uninterrupted flow across side streets through the basic intervention of painting zebra crossings on every such junction. Chris Boardman wants to do this in Manchester, but at the time I spoke to him, he was battling against central government scepticism, as this has never previously been done on UK roads – although, as Boardman points out, it already does exist in the country, in virtually every supermarket car park.

  A war on cars

  There is generally a point during any discussion about promoting active travel when someone will pipe up to say, ‘Ah, but what about my granny – is she meant to walk and cycle everywhere?’ A slightly trite response might be to point out that if said granny lived in the Netherlands she might well do that anyway, given the sheer number of older Dutch people who get about by bike, with almost a fifth of those aged sixty-five and over still cycling every day.24

  But to reiterate the earlier point, no one is arguing for an absolute ban on cars, just ways to make them less of a default choice for shorter trips, which make up the great majority in the UK. A fifth of all journeys of any sort are less than a mile long, a distance very easily managed on foot and the matter of around five minutes of cycling. And yet 20 per cent of these happen in a car. Almost 40 per cent of trips of two miles or less take place by motor vehicle.25

  All this illustrates the scope for extra activity when it comes to everyday travel. To take another example, census data tells us that almost half the commutes in England and Wales are less than three miles each way, about 20 million trips a day.26 Imagine if just 10 per cent of these could be made on foot or by bike – that would be 2 million people reaching their 150-minutes-a-week threshold and well beyond. The gains for health and happiness would be astonishing. In one of the papers from the previously mentioned 2012 edition of The Lancet on inactivity, the authors analysed data from earlier Danish research to calculate that even in this bike-friendly nation, if all current non-cyclists started to cycle, this would prevent 12,000 early deaths a year through less ill-health, as balanced against around thirty extra deaths on the roads.27

  Another possibility for our hypothetical grandmother would be that she invested in an electric-assist bicycle, or e-bike, a relatively new innovation which has a formidable potential to change the way people travel, especially those facing slightly longer or hillier trips, or for people who don’t feel up to using a traditional bike. These are hugely popular in some countries, accounting for about 40 per cent of all new bike sales in the Netherlands,28 where they are popular with older riders. Various studies have also shown that e-bikes are particularly appealing to people who would not see themselves, traditionally, as a cyclist. They can also be beneficial for those with impairments or disabilities, sometimes in the form of e-trikes, or handcycles with electric assist.

  In the UK there remains a slight, residual idea that e-bikes are almost a form of cheating. And it is an inescapable truth that if you are on an e-bike this is not entirely human-powered motion. Even with the fairly weedy 250-watt power limit on the motor, which under British law must cut out above 15mph, e-bikes do offer particular help with the more strenuous parts of cycling, like riding up hills or getting going when a traffic light turns green. That is why they can be so practical in tempting people out of cars. It is much more possible to commute in everyday clothes on an e-bike, without arriving a panting, sweaty mess. But they are not electric mopeds – you still need to pedal. Additionally, e-bikes generally allow the rider to adjust how much electric oomph is provided, which can be reduced as people become more fit.

  A series of studies have shown that e-bikes do thus still deliver a significant amount of physical effort. One 2019 research paper which studied 10,000 participants across seven European cities found that those who rode traditional bikes and e-bikes amassed roughly similar tallies of MET minutes of activity per week, with the lesser exertion of those with electric assist seemingly cancelled out by the fact that they tended to ride almost twice as long on average per day. It did find that people who switched from a non-electric bike to an e-bike lost some MET minutes overall, but this was around a quarter of what was gained if people moved to an e-bike from a car or public transport. ‘This data suggests that e-bike use leads to substantial increases in physical activity,’ the cross-Europe research team concluded.29

  Ashley Cooper, who is a professor of physical activity and public health at Bristol University, and has spent several decades investigating ways to get people moving in their everyday lives, says e-bikes are ‘probably the best physical activity intervention I’ve done’. Having tried out an e-bike on holiday, Cooper was so enthused he set up a project in which a group of people with type 2 diabetes were lent e-bikes to see if they could help them become more active. The results were hugely encouraging, he explains: ‘We found the majority used them a reasonable amount, and fourteen of the eighteen people actually bought the bikes at the end of the study. It seems to be something which people really take to. We measured people’s heart rates and it showed that riding an e-bike in terms of heart rate response is actually more energetic than walking. It’s obviously not as energetic as conventional cycling, but it’s not a no-exercise option. It’s a really great way of getting moderate-intensity activity.’30

  Electric assistance is also helping to bring more activity back to the workplace. One of the fastest-changing areas of e-bikes is cargo bikes, where even a fairly small motor can help a rider carry loads into the hundreds of kilos. Such bikes are increasingly being used in some cities to replace vans for the so-called last mile of urban deliveries, from a city distribution point to people’s addresses.

  But these innovations are, again, often dependent on having sufficiently safe streets. It can be depressing to consider how far behind countries like the UK are lagging in terms of this. It is not just a matter of densely packed big cities. A few years ago I visited Odense, which while being Denmark’s third-biggest city is a largely suburban place. Its generally spread-out population of about 200,000 people live mostly in houses, often with a garage, and generally with a car. But decades of work to build, at last count, around 350 miles of bike lanes and more than 120 cyclist-only bridges makes Odense a hugely welcoming place to cycle round. When I was there, city officials told me proudly that more than 80 per cent of children cycled to school, and – this was the statistic that most amazed me – the streets were now considered so safe that the official advice was that children should be perfectly able to cycle to school from the age of six. On their own.31

  We in the UK can but dream of such movement-friendly urban landscapes, even if things might be about to shift at least slightly. One of the many things happening amid the coronavirus lockdown while I write this book is new government planning on how people can return to work but travel in socially distanced ways. With estimates that capacity on public transport could be cut by 90 per cent, and worries about gridlock if everyone drives, ministers have given local authorities new powers to carve out instant, temporary bike lanes using cones, and to widen pavements. The instruction has come: if you can walk or cycle to work, do so.

  Could this spark a new active travel boom? Only time will tell, but the UK record
on such matters is not a hopeful one. During our chat, Jan Gehl is politely pitying about my homeland, pointing out that not one UK city ever makes the various magazine lists of the world’s most liveable places. ‘I always say that Queen Elizabeth must have a traffic engineer’s education to rule over such a country,’ he jokes.

  Just before I leave following our much-longer-than-scheduled talk, Gehl rummages in a folder and hands me a piece of paper. It is a street plan for a small housing development in the Danish town of Hobro, on the Jutland peninsula, for which his colleagues have been offering advice. Gehl shows me the many ways in which residents will be gently nudged towards activity. While there are roads circling the estate, and a couple within it, the houses are crisscrossed with a network of smaller, walking and cycling paths, making such rapid connections easy. Gehl then points out something not obvious from the plan: all the car parking for the development has been placed at one side, with public transport at another. The estate is on a hill, and if people want to reach their cars, they will have to climb up it. In contrast, the public transport is downhill. In their many efforts to invite people to be more active, Gehl’s colleagues have even enlisted the assistance of gravity.

  The hidden staircase

  This crisis of designed inactivity is not, however, just about Gehl’s life between buildings. It is also what we do inside them, particularly public ones like offices, shops and hotels. Among the most telling examples of a built environment biased against human movement is, as briefly mentioned in the opening chapter, the conspiracy of the hidden staircase.

  I am a stair user by preference, in part because of a mild dislike of lifts. Sadly, this preference comes at a cost. Like most such people I could recount numerous examples of hunting vainly down hotel or office corridors for the telltale ‘Fire exit’ sign, not to mention the times I have accidentally triggered an alarm or found the stairwell doors only open from the outside, leaving me trapped in a windowless, fluorescent-lit concrete purgatory. When I first visited the London offices of the publishers of this book to discuss the idea, the route to the fire stairs in the 1970s office building was so complex that Fritha, who was to become my editor, had to not only guide me on the way up but lead me down again afterwards. It goes without saying that a set of gleaming lifts was immediately obvious when you first walked in.

  The architecture of staircase use is a subject which might not immediately win you an audience at parties but is considerably more interesting than it might seem. I sought out experts to explain why stairwells are so often cramped, interior, unappealing and hard-to-find places. The obvious answer is that they are primarily also fire stairs, which to an extent dictates the design. It is possible to construct buildings with both fire stairs and another, more welcoming set of steps, but that adds to the costs.

  Leon Rost, a New York–based partner at the Danish architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), points out another reason, particularly relevant for offices: such buildings tend to be designed so each floor can be rented out individually if required, and a spacious, obvious, front-of-house staircase on each level makes them less flexible, and thus potentially less lucrative.

  Rost is fortunate enough to rarely have to worry about such things, given that his company specialises in bespoke, high-end buildings, often for the tech sector. He is leading the architectural team for the vast, still-under-construction new Google headquarters in California. Part of the brief for the futuristically named Googleplex in Mountain View, which will comprise about 200,000 square metres of office space, was to encourage as much physical movement by staff as possible.

  As well as pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, the design emphasises the need for, in Rost’s words, ‘a natural way to entice people to move from building to building’. Trees and shade are a significant part of this, based on the idea known as biophilia, meaning that humans will instinctively seek contact with nature. With the new headquarters, Rost says, Google ‘basically inherited a parking lot or suburban landscape, which is very un-enticing to go from building to building. If we can de-emphasise the space given over to vehicles and give more to nature, that alone gets people to move.’

  The architects also hit on a slightly less subtle ruse to make sure Google’s employees exert themselves at least a bit. The office has two storeys, with the work space almost all on the upper floor. On the ground level, connected by appealing, very obvious courtyard-style staircases, are meeting rooms and cafés – as well as every single toilet, apart from accessible ones. If you need the loo, you use the stairs.

  ‘Sundar loved that,’ says Rost, referring to Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. ‘He was like, “We need to get these guys off their butts and moving around. Put everything on the ground floor except for water.” Of course, if the stairs were locked inside of a concrete core, or if you had to find an elevator, that would be a drag, but we make those courtyards the best experience of the building.’32

  Such design is important. When people become acclimatised over time to not using their body in the built environment, even when a flight of steps is very obviously there, it can go effectively unseen. One fascinating study tried to shift the physical decisions made by people by using nothing more than a reminder. A team of Glasgow University researchers put up signs saying, ‘Stay Healthy, Save Time, Use the Stairs’ at an underground rail station in the city centre, where passengers had the choice of an escalator or, right next to it, a thirty-step flight of stairs.

  Observing passengers during the morning rush hour over a period of weeks, and excluding those with luggage or pushchairs, they found that a pre-sign stair usage of 8 per cent rose to more than 15 per cent during the three weeks that the signs were up. Even twelve weeks after the signs had been removed, stair use was significantly higher than the original figure, although on a gradual downward trend.33

  It goes without saying that habitual stair use brings health benefits, and equally inevitably these have been proved via long-term mass studies. A 2019 paper using some of the decades of data from the Harvard Alumni Health Study, first developed by Ralph Paffenbarger, found that even after factoring out all other activity, habitual stair climbers (those who ascended thirty-five or more flights a week) had just 85 per cent of the mortality risk over the course of the study than those whose weekly average was ten or fewer.34

  The big vision

  Ideas about incorporating physical movement into architecture and planning have begun to move beyond staircases, occasionally in fairly startling ways. Amager Bakke, just east of central Copenhagen, is a huge waste-burning energy plant, designed as well by BIG. Also known as Copenhill, it is constructed with a huge sloping roof, on top of which is a dry skiing course as well as publicly open walking and hiking paths. When I travelled to visit Jan Gehl it had just opened and so I took one of Copenhagen’s many public hire bikes and pedalled towards what, from a distance, looked like a hugely high-tech, angled, shiny shed, with a smoking chimney on top. I walked up the steep, rocky walking path to its 125-metre peak, from which padded skiers launched themselves down the angled, unnaturally green surface. Even with what are, by skiing standards, relatively cheap prices – an hour on the slope with all equipment is about £20 – no one would particularly mistake this for everyday activity. But as a statement as to what is possible it is quite something.

  The most ambitious project in which Rost and BIG are involved, albeit so far only at the design stage, has been commissioned by Toyota, whose near-ninety years of producing reliable, affordable cars have played a fairly significant role in helping to create our inactive world.

  The Japanese automaker has commissioned BIG to help design not just a human-friendly building, but an entire mini-metropolis. Toyota Woven City, to give the project its formal, slightly awkward name, is a planned 175-acre community to be built near Mount Fuji in Japan, which will not only be a home for its 2,000 or so residents but a test-bed for solutions to urban problems, including a move away from persona
l car use so residents can move around in different, often more active ways.

  Only one in every three streets will be used by cars, with another third reserved for bikes and other types of, in the current buzzword, ‘micro mobility’, for example electric scooters, with the remainder of streets for pedestrian use only. The more human-oriented the street, the more nature will be included, as a way to tempt people out. Mundane logistics such as rubbish disposal and moving goods will be banished underground, an urban solution pioneered in Disneyland, with an emphasis on AI and robotics to do the work. All the cars, it should be mentioned, will be autonomous, testing out a form of transport on which several car makers, not only Toyota, are effectively betting the mortgage, but which has been found to be hugely difficult to integrate into real streets packed with smaller and sometimes arbitrarily moving objects such as people and bicycles.

  Rost talks me through the plans with enthusiasm and a genuine passion for the ways they could make the urban realm more welcoming and inclusive. I am impressed, if not completely convinced. History might prove me wrong, but if towns and cities have a future in which physical activity becomes the norm, I’m not sure that technology, robotics and automation will be the primary reasons why.

  A few years ago I had a long chat with a senior executive from Sidewalk Labs, a Google spinoff company which seeks to use tech to reimagine how cities could work in the future. We discussed how driverless cars – which at the time, as now, were confidently billed as being just around the corner from ubiquity – could affect active travel. While stressing that predictions were essentially guesswork, he conjured up one scenario in which autonomous cars sped people from distant suburbs to city centres, but with the last half mile or so, where people lived and worked, reserved for modes like cycling and walking. Again, I wasn’t so sure. There is definitely an urban transport revolution coming, perhaps more quickly than most people realise, but it could go in several different ways.