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Welcome to the new walkit.com! Please let us know what you think.
We're very pleased to unveil the new-look walkit.com!
See below for some of the things we've changed. And, at long last, we're delighted to also launch the service in both Manchester (city council area) and Wigan Borough.
There will no doubt be niggles and glitches you come across, and some things you like, some you're less sure about.
Please post a message on this blog or contact us to let us know what you think – the good, the bad and the ugly.
It is, of course, still work in progress – so while a new structure for the site has now been established, we'll continue to work on the fixtures, fittings and furniture.
And now we've got an extra hour of light in the evenings, all the more reason for you and your colleagues, friends and family to get out and about on foot.
Happy walking
The walkit.com teamA 1 minute guide to the new walkit.com
New logo: Evolution, not revolution. We hope you like it.Better city search: The new search box lets you easily get walking directions in different cities from any page of the site. So, for example, it’s now simpler to find your route to the train station in one city, and then from the station in another.
More vias: You can now add up to 4 locations to walk via – simply click the add via ‘+’ button, and to remove via locations click the ‘-’ button next to the location you want to remove.
Step count: We’ve added a step count to the route data, so you can see how close you are to reaching your 10,000 a day.
Set my home city: If you ‘explore our cities’ you’ll see there’s a ‘Set as my home city’ button beside the city title. Select this, and whenever you click the logo, ‘Home’, or revisit the site, your home city will load by default.
Map & directions side by side: You can now see your route’s written turn-by-turn directions right next to the map.
More city content: We’ve improved the weather icons, added some suggested walks, and made the books more visual for each city. We aim to add to this city-specific content over time.
Content themes: On the left of each page we’ve added links to content about walking for health, walking to work and school, and going green. Again, we’ll add to this over time.
'Walk to work week' just a month away
Walk to Work Week 2009 is coming!
Walk to Work Week is a national awareness event run by the charity Living Streets. The Week aims to encourage employees to walk more as part of their commute and working day, and to help organisations and businesses encourage and promote walking amongst their workforce.
When is it?
27 April – 1 May 2009.
Individuals, businesses and organisations should register to take part between 9 March and 24 April. When you register, you will receive follow up emails from Living Streets about how to take part. Everyone who registers can take advantage of their specially designed online tool which will be launched nearer the event. Individual employees and organisations will be able to track their progress throughout the week, find out how they compare against other areas and how the nation is progressing as a whole. Not to mention the fantastic prizes to be won!
The theme is ‘how do you do it? Living Streets are asking employees “How do you do it?” to encourage them to consider how much walking they currently do, and the charity will be challenging participants to fit more walking into their daily working life by setting a series of challenges to be done during the week itself:
1. Burn off your cornflakes and walk all or part of your way to work.
2. Unleash your creativity! Take a “walking meeting” and let the ideas flow.
3. Ditch your desk: get out and enjoy your local area during your lunch hour.
4. Take a walk with a friend: the perfect way to catch up and unwind.
5. Escape the rush hour and walk all or part of your journey home.
What resources are available?
Posters, leaflets, banners, umbrellas, frisbees, bags and pedometers are available to buy from www.walkingworks.org.uk until 30 March 2009. Free downloadable
materials will be available in April for businesses and organisations, detailing how to encourage and run each of the five challenges within a workplace.
How do I find out more?
Visit: www.walkingworks.org.uk/walk-to-work-week-2009
Email: catherine.aston@livingstreets.org.uk
Tel: 020 7377 4906
go london, go
go london (no capitals for the capital) was launched today at a big event in Central Hall, Westminster.
It is a new health legacy programme from NHS London to improve Londoners' health through increasing participation in physical activity in the run up to the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.
And Think Feet First is a new walking campaign from go london to help Londoners get more active. The first stage of the campaign is encouraging people to consider walking first for short journeys.
It's bang on what we've been banging on about for years now.
They've linked to us from their home page – walkit.com wedged between 3 multi-billion pound organisations: TfL, London 2012 and NHS London!
The event was fascinating – a huge array of health professionals all committed to health promotion through physical activity (rather than disease management through drugs), and trying to work out how you get that thinking, and practice, running through the whole NHS.
The day ended with Steven Norris (Tory ex Transport Minister), who made a pretty impassioned speech about how cycling and walking must reach the sorts of levels that many continental European cities take for granted, and how it would have so many benefits in terms of health, the environment, the economy and people's general quality of life.
However, how he squares this vision with (fellow TfL Board member) Boris Johnson's 'everyone's a winner' rephasing of traffic signals, remains distinctly unclear.
£928 million spent on school transport every year
Maybe not the most exciting-looking report to ever come off the printing presses.
But if you look at today's press notice, and take a shufti at the report itself, there are some quite arresting details, e.g:- Car use on the journey to and from school has doubled in the past 20 years
- Public sector funding on school transport in England in 2008-2009 is budgeted at £938 million
- The Government to make a clear commitment to promoting walking and cycling as the preferred transport options where this is practicable.
- The percentage of funding allocated to initiatives to support walking and cycling to be increased.
But while the report is good at willing the ends, it's got much less to say on the means.
One thing we'd like to do is work on a pilot with a school to 'batch process' all the kids' home postcodes so that we could produce dedicated walking route maps to school for each pupil. They could be handed out in class and emailed to parents, including all sorts of related info about the cost, health, congestion, time and environmental benefits. We could even involve the kids (and parents) in helping identify missing cut-throughs or routes that avoid dangerous junctions.
OK, it might not transform behaviours overnight, but we reckon it would be a pretty cost-effective way of spending part of that £938 million.
Drop us a line if you think your school might be interested in such a pilot.
£2k to scrap your old car and promise not to buy a new one?
George Monbiot makes the point in today's Guardian that you really can't dress up the mooted car scrappage scheme in even the skimpiest green clothing.
Giving people £2k to trade in an old car for a new one with slightly better fuel ecomony ain't the best way of getting a carbon reduction bang for your buck.
What about giving people £2k to scrap their old car and promise not to buy a new one? Might that work? OK you wouldn't get the benefits of keeping car workers in a job, but then again, you'd be injecting money into the economy for people to spend on other things.
Or maybe you could trade your car for £2k of public transport vouchers?
Or the government could give extra money to local authorities to spend on sustainable transport schemes.
You'd then not only be getting a carbon and economic return (yes, sustainable transport initiatives employ thousands of people too), but also a health benefit. Sustrans have calculated benefit:cost ratios for walking and cycling schemes of between 15:1 and 33:1 (much better than the average 3:1 of typical road and rail schemes), and much of this is because you're keeping people fit and saving the health service money.
But no, it looks as though a whole load of cash could be going towards propping up the car industry. We need cars, but we need efficient ones. Companies like Jaguar Land Rover have woefully miscalculated: by making expensive and fuel inefficient cars they've completely failed to hedge against a downturn in people's spending power, against higher fuel prices, and against climate change constraints.
Surely any government subsidies in this area must favour initiatives that help the environment, help the economy and help keep people healthy.
Now, where have I seen one of them….?
Wake up and smell the nitrogen dioxide
The Sunday Times is today reporting that Britain suffers from the most widespread levels of dangerous traffic fumes in Europe.
The Campaign for Clean Air in London (CCAL) says that in 2008 over 100 UK cities breached the pollution limit for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) that will become the legal standard next year under European law.
Apparently London has the worst annual average level of NO2 of any capital city in Europe. For example, in Brompton Road and Marylebone Road, current levels of NO2 are over twice the World Health Organisation backed legal standard.
- London – 698 miles of roads
- Greater Manchester – 129 miles
- West Midlands – 116 miles
- West Yorkshire – 48 miles
And in a sign of what's bound to become an increasingly common economy:environment trade-off (with the latter the loser), in London, Boris has suspended phase 3 of the Low Emission Zone, affecting vans and minibuses, as a 'reprieve' for small recession-hit businesses.
But according to Simon Birkett at the CCAL:“London needs urgently one or more additional inner low emission zones and other measures, including incentives, to tackle harmful emissions at their source. Premature death and irreversible climate change are even worse fates than economic depression. Why can’t our political leaders wake up and tackle two problems at the same time?”
walkit.com is playing its own small part in this debate by offering users 'pollution aware' routes in London and Cambridge. So if you need to walk from Euston Station to Marylebone Station we can show you a route that avoids the filthy Marylebone Road.
Of course this is a bit of an 'end-of-(exhaust)-pipe' solution – we'd much prefer it if you could walk down any road in Britain safe in the knowledge that you weren't exposing yourself to dangerous levels of a toxic gas.
But for the time being, that, (to labour the gag), seems to be a bit of a pipe dream.
