We recently met with Oxfordshire County Council to introduce the Co-CAFE project and to look at possible ways of investigating the appetite for developing a bottom-up, community-led approach to age-friendly neighbourhoods in Oxford.

Our discussion led to Florence Park in South East Oxford being identified as a possible area of focus. This is due its location between the busy Iffley Road and Cowley Road, leading to traffic management issues such as 'rat running' and speeding. The area seems ripe as a test-bed for developing something similar to the 'mini Holland' we visited at Waltham Forest in London. 

To begin our community-led approach we contacted local Florence Park community activist, Scott Urban (Oxfordshire Liveable Streets), who invited members of local community groups to get together to discuss the potential for such a project.
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Co-CAFE facilitated a discussion with community members at Flo’s Cafe on the 9th of April. The discussion was centered around the Co-CAFE concept and the appetite and potential to translate this into concrete action.  

We were pleased when Florence Park Community members expressed that they were keen to pursue the concept, particularly around 'better streets', and to begin to engage the wider community. The meeting seemed timely as the group reported that a cyclist had recently been knocked off their bicycle by a car at a junction which had already been highlighted by local residents as unsafe.

The plan is to meet again on 7 May at 7.30pm [venue tbc] to take the conversation further - the idea is that members of the community can pitch their thoughts and ideas. 

Scott Urban has agreed to act as ‘nerve centre’ for local communications. We also agreed that the Co-CAFE team will provide support by investigating:

• Costs of various infrastructure interventions e.g. raised tables.
• Legislation around making experimental/temporary traffic orders i.e. to actually test out traffic management ideas over an extended period. 
• The potential to develop a resource hub of online information readily accessible to the community.

 
Co-CAFE is also pleased to have been invited to the Flo-Fest community event on the 21st of June. We hope to bring a fleet of e-bikes for the local community to try out and to gauge ideas on making Florence Park neighbourhood age friendly.

​Getting on your bicycle can give you an enormous sense of freedom and enjoyment. It can increase your independence and knowledge of the local area, and improve your access to the natural (or urban) environment. It can also be highly nostalgic – reminding you of your childhood cycle rides and the joy of being young.

But beyond the feel-good factor, can cycling actually make any difference to mental abilities and well-being? This was something our new study aimed to investigate – specifically looking at cycling among older adults.

While most studies incorporate exercise in a gym situation, our study wanted to examine the impact of cycling in the real world – outside a controlled environment. So older adults, aged 50 and above, were asked to cycle for at least an hour and a half each week for an eight-week period.
Participants either cycled on a conventional pedal bike, on an electrically assisted “e-bike” or were instructed to maintain their regular non-cycling exercise routine as a comparison group. Mental abilities, mental health and well-being were measured before and after the eight-week cycling period.

​Mental boost
Exercise is thought to improve mental functioning through increased blood flow to the brain – as well as encouraging regrowth of cells, specifically in the hippocampus. This is known to be an area associated with memory. So it was expected that the greater physical exertion required for pedal cycling, compared to cycling an e-bike with a motor, would result in greater benefits to mental functioning.

One of the tasks we used to measure mental ability is the “Stroop test”. The task involves participants being shown the name of a colour printed on a card in a different colour script – imagine the word “blue” printed in red ink. Participants are asked to saying the colour of the ink that the word is printed in, rather than reading the name of the colour. The Stroop test measures how accurately someone is able to minimise distraction from the written word when reporting the ink colour.

We found that after eight weeks of cycling, both pedal and e-bike cycling groups were better at ignoring the written word, indicating that their mental function had improved. This was not the case for non-cycling control participants.

Pedal power
Aside from the benefits found to some mental abilities, we also saw a trend for mental health improving for the e-bike cyclists, but pedal cyclists did not change on this measure. This could be because e-bikes may be more enjoyable and easier to ride than normal pedal bikes – helping to improve mental well-being.
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We also found e-bike cyclists spent more time cycling on average each week than the pedal cyclists. Many of the participants commented that they felt they could go further on the e-bike as they could rely on the motor to get them home if they could not manage it by themselves.

We have presented some interesting facts taken from the report:
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• Cambridge, Milton Keynes and Oxford all need an effective, cheap and – given the special nature of the historic cities’ centres – low-impact way of increasing transport capacity and catering for growth. Cycling is all three.
• Cycling is something which already epitomises both cities; which, in Cambridge, already has a greater share of journeys than any other mode, and in Oxford not much less. Yet even in Oxford and Cambridge, policymakers treat bikes as essentially marginal – so imagine what cycling could do with the attention it deserves.
• Cycling is a serious mode in both places. It has a 43% share of work journeys entirely within Cambridge (car is 25%) and a 29% share of all work journeys by Cambridge residents. Cycling has a 25% share of home to work journeys entirely within Oxford (car is 27%) and a 17% share of all commuting by Oxford residents. 
• In fact about 75 per cent of work journeys within Oxford and Cambridge are not made by car. The number of people cycling to work in Oxford is six times the UK average.
• The Government is spending about ten times more on one road project in Cambridgeshire, the dualling of a few miles of the A428, than it spends in its dedicated annual budgets for cycling across the whole of England.
• The Government should fund cycling in these places in a way which reflects how people actually do and could travel. In particular, recognise Oxford and Cambridge as the special cases which they are now, and as the trailblazers for others which they could become.
• It is recommended that £150m of the proposed £200m should be spent in and around Oxford.
• London’s new superhighway schemes included segregated tracks, completely protected from traffic, on Blackfriars Bridge and the Victoria Embankment. By November 2016, six months after they opened, the number of cyclists using these roads had risen by 55 and 54 per cent, respectively, over pre-construction levels. During the rush hour the Blackfriars Bridge track, which takes up about 20 per cent of the roadspace, carries 70 per cent of all traffic on the bridge.
• Opposition to reallocating roadspace from motoring to cycling is often based on the belief that motor traffic is like water. If you narrow the pipe, runs this argument, it will flood. If you make one route harder to drive down, the same volume of traffic will simply flow to the next easiest route. But in London, this did not happen in practice. Traffic is not a force of nature. It is the product of human choices. If we want more people to choose cycling, we need to make it more attractive.
• In Oxford, traffic on the Botley Road, the main entry from the west, went up by 10 per cent in 2016 alone and at The Plain roundabout, the main entry from the east, by 5.9 per cent. Disappointingly, as motor vehicle numbers have risen, these approaches have also seen noticeable falls in cycling

In 2013, Waltham Forest was one of three boroughs (along with Kingston and Enfield) in outer London selected to share the total £100m pot from the Mayor of London’s Mini-Hollands fund. The funding was used to upgrade streets and road networks to help tackle safety for walking and cycling, air quality and public health. Waltham Forests's allocated £27m was boosted to a £40m total pot by accessing money from local developments under Section 106.

Co-CAFE project administrator Tom Shopland joined a guided tour of Waltham forest given by Paul Gasson, of Waltham Forest Cycling Campaign, who talked us through the changes to the road infrastructure in the neighbourhoods and the journey of engaging the local community with the project. The trip was organised by the Coalition for Healthy Streets and Active Travel in Oxford, which is made up of the following community groups: Cyclox, Oxford FoE, Oxfordshire Liveable Streets, Pedal and Post, Rose Hill and Iffley Low Carbon, Oxford Pedestrians Association. The following is taken from Tom's observations from the visit.

A report in September 2018 by King's College London shows:

• More than 51,000 households in Waltham Forest are no longer living in areas with dangerously high levels of air pollution compared to a decade ago
• Gains in life expectancy from residents walking and cycling more
• Changes in local streets and neighbourhoods support more active lifestyles for adults and children

​The research found that after one year, people living in parts of such boroughs were, on average, walking and cycling for 41 minutes a week more than those living in comparable areas. Among the most notable elements of the study, led by Dr Rachel Aldred of Westminster University, is that while the schemes were primarily billed as seeking to boost cycling, the bigger increase in active travel came on foot – an extra 32 minutes weekly on average, with nine more minutes by bike.'

Westminster University expected the research to yield few results in the first two years of the study. The three year longitudinal study from Westminster University will be released in June 2019. 

​Tom Shopland said of the visit to Waltham Forest, 'I was so inspired by what I saw, especially the increased trees, small green spaces, space for community engagement, quiet neighborhood roads, increased protection of cyclists and walkers with dedicated spaces. I am beyond keen to make this happen for the people of Oxford.'
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Our visiting group were very impressed with what we saw in Waltham Forest and concluded that a pilot project in Oxford was needed, focused on one area or road and include all the community groups to create the standard street design for rolling out to a wider plan across Oxford city.
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