CO-CAFÉ
  • Home
  • Study
    • Aim and Objectives
    • Cycle BOOM outputs
  • Flo' Park
  • Resources
    • Community Groups
  • Blog
  • Team
    • Tim Jones
    • Ben Spencer
    • Tom Shopland
  • Contact

Co-CAFE Blog

FOCUS ON fLO'

4/15/2019

0 Comments

 
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.
​
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.  
Picture
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.
0 Comments

Electric bikes can boost older people's mental performance and their wellbeing

4/15/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
​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.
​

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.
Picture
Having a bike can open up new places of adventure. Shutterstock

​This research, to some extent, provides support for many bike-related motivation quotes, including the following from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking."
​

It seems then that e-bikes have the potential to re-engage older adults with cycling and provide a great opportunity to increase physical activity and engagement with the outdoor environment. So given that more than three million older people in the UK live alone, of whom more than two million are older than 75, it might just be that the use of an electric bicycle could help to improve older people’s lives by increasing independence and mobility – all of which can have a significant impact on their well-being.

This article was originally published in The Conversation 9 April 2019.

0 Comments

CO-CAFE @ the london bike show, March 2019

4/2/2019

0 Comments

 
Ben Spencer and Tom Shopland attended the London Bike Show 2019 at London ExCel on Friday 29th March. Ben made a presentation on the main stage on 'Older Riding & E-Bikes'.
Picture
Ben highlighted how cycling in the UK is relatively rare among the older population due to fears over safety and increasing difficulties with the ageing body, unsupportive built environment and technology ill adapted to their needs. He explained how the award-winning cycle BOOM study (www.cycleboom.org) there is the potential to engage a significant number of older people in cycling and how this could support improved mobility, health and wellbeing. This is especially true given the growth in the availability of e-bikes. These were found to provide health and wellbeing benefits on a par or better than pedal cycles - and to be the perfect tool for local microadventures.' 

Who We Met

We talked to many interested people at the show including Cherry Allen, a researcher and policy writer at Cycling UK. Cherry was familiar with the cycle BOOM study and had used the information as part of her role as policy adviser. 

We also spoke to a company that rented portable pump tracks. Pump tracks are a circuit containing features such as banks and banked turns that are designed to be ridden by riders using up and down body movements to maintain momentum instead of pedalling or pushing aka "pumping". The temporary tracks seem a great way to engage local communities in experiencing potential use of space for recreation prior to the development of a more permanent pump track of landscaped aggregate. We think pump tracks should be included as part of age friendly environments as they could help nurture inter-generational contact through play. Co-CAFE will be investigating the potential to bring more pump tracks in Oxford.
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Highlights from Andrew Gilligan's report on investing in cycling in Cambridge, Milton Keynes and oxford

3/20/2019

0 Comments

 
The report by former London cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan in July 2018 highlights the need for £200m worth of improved cycling infrastructure in Cambridge, Oxford and Milton Keynes.
Picture
We have presented some interesting facts taken from the report:
​
  • 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
0 Comments

Co-CAFE visit 'mini holland' in waltham forest, london

2/10/2019

1 Comment

 

Introduction

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.

Main approach to creating a mini Holland

  • Stepped cycle lanes. Pedestrians had a dedicated zone, then step down to 1.5m cycle lane, then step down to road. All roads had been narrowed to accommodate, where there wasn’t enough space, the walk way had become slightly narrower as the cars and bikes had a minimum fixed width. Continuous protection for all. All pavements had dropped curbs for cycle lanes. Bikes had dedicated traffic lights that all went green together before cars.
    ​
  • Cut out through traffic on neighbourhood roads. This was done by creating physical barriers half way along the road, meaning the roads were only being used by the people who lived there and reducing 90% of traffic. Cyclists / walkers could still use them as through roads. Created new ‘community islands’ for new green spaces / bike storage / play areas. Can be done very cheaply and have a huge impact on neighbourhood.​​
  • Intuitive understanding for motorists that they are entering neighbourhood zones. Entrances to neighbourhood roads had been squeezed from two lanes to one using trees and bollards. This meant that a car had a tight angle to enter the road and would have to drive slowly. Also full width speed bumps on neighbourhood roads.
    ​
  • Pedestrian priority road crossings. Known as Copenhagen crossings. The design of the pavements indicated that it was the right of way to pedestrians to continue their walk and cars would have to wait.
    ​
  • The high street was closed off to vehicles. Had the longest street market in Europe with all the reclaimed space. Full high street occupancy - all shop premises were rented, which was not the case before the mini Holland project took place. Did have certain access times for loading vehicles. 
  • Branding as active travel / healthy streets / better streets / ‘walk cycle enjoy’. Dropped mini Holland branding and also anything too cycling specific. Early engagement with natural community groups such as schools and park users. Held events in local parks with visuals of what it could look like, asked community to imagine what they would like their streets to look like, how they would improve them, what are the issues, how they used the streets when they were younger. Took answers in a perception survey after the engagement events. A lot of people didn’t even think they could change the traffic on their roads. Engagement worked particularly well when partnered with trusted / established groups such as Neighbourhood Watch.
    ​
  • More trees and flower beds for natural draining. The reclaiming of the streets had created more space for flowers and trees to be planted. The local residents were taking care of the flowers and vegetables, not the council.
  • Complementary Cycle Programmes. Including cycle training (on and off road), cycle road shows, bike maintenance courses. Offered to schools, businesses and members of the public through bike training partners / local newspaper / social media. 

  • £17m spent on 4km cycle highway. I didn’t have the chance to see it as part of this visit​.

  • Bike storage schemes. Locked / waterproof / breathable spaces for bikes. Pay 30 pounds a year for access to cycle hangers. Over-subscribed by 2000 bike owners. Locked walk in bike sheds at train stations with cctv.

Challenges

  • Emergency service access. One of the main points people were concerned about. Designed the plan for physical barriers with the police / fire / ambulance and were able to assure locals no service delays would occur. London first responders use motorbikes and could still by pass physical barriers by using cycle lanes.

  • Damage to high street footfall. Businesses thought that 60% of their customers had driven to them. A survey on the high street found out only 20% had driven, 80% had used public transport or active travel. Now have the longest street market in Europe in the extra reclaimed space. First time the high street had been oversubscribed for shop space. Businesses would not want to share the impact on their revenue / footfall – too many other affecting factors for high street businesses.

  • Can’t park at house. Not true. Residents could still drive to their doors and park outside their homes.
    ​
  • Taxi drivers
    ​

Outcomes

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.'
​

What about Oxford?

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.
​

1 Comment
Forward>>

    Authors

    Co-CAFE is led by Tim Jones (Reader in Urban Mobility) with Ben Spencer (Research Fellow) and Tom Shopland (Co-CAFE project administrator) based in the School of the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University.

    Archives

    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Picture
Picture
Picture
Project Administrator
Tom Shopland
​tshopland@brookes.ac.uk

Oxford Brookes University
School of the Built Environment​
​​+44 1865 48 4061
Funded by the Lifelong Health and Wellbeing cross-Council programme. Grant No. EP/KO37242/1
  • Home
  • Study
    • Aim and Objectives
    • Cycle BOOM outputs
  • Flo' Park
  • Resources
    • Community Groups
  • Blog
  • Team
    • Tim Jones
    • Ben Spencer
    • Tom Shopland
  • Contact