Litter Picking

Roughly once a month I spend an hour or so picking litter from my woodland, mostly from the 300m verge next to the A24.  Initially, when I was dealing with the backlog from many years of neglect,  I would stop after I had filled 2 large bags, usually having reached about half way along the verge.  I always litter pick south to north, so that I am facing the oncoming traffic.  Although I am not actually on the road, I'm near enough to worry about people failing to stay on the road.   Indeed, early on I have had to remove large parts of cars that were clearly the remnants of crash damage.  Trees are a lot tougher than they look!
I've used different methods, my current kit is a high quality litter picker, waterproof gloves, and a litter picking hoop to hold the collection bag open.

Most of the litter is chucked out of passing cars.   I don't really understand why they can't take it home, it feels like it's more effort to wind down the window and just chuck it out.  And it's mostly food and drink - sandwich wrappers, cans, bottles etc.

 But there are also more unusual items.  The pic below shows a silencer box, found this month, It's about 500mm long, so not a trivial item to throw from a passing car, more likely something that fell off and got pushed to the side.

I've found a pair of trainers, an old boot (always useful when fishing) carrier bags full of I don't know what (didn't look) and a bookcase.  The last is probably fly tipping, rather than littering, but it's all of a piece with people who somehow imagine that the world is full of magic tidy-uppers.  

I'd really like to charge the fast food vendors for the mess they facilitate in my wood. 

Downslink bus - park and ride?

Bob Bayley (Surrey Ad : letters 18/Mar/16) offers us a pretty vision of a guided busway on the Downslink.  It’s good that he (or Balfour Beatty) has come up with some ideas about how this might be funded, and the suggested £25 million cost.  

This looks low; the nearest similar scheme I could find was the Cambridgeshire guided busway between St Ives & Cambridge, at 15 miles and outturn cost of £180 million.  This is double tracked, so a rough cost per mile of £6 million per mile for single track would give a cost of £48 million for the 8 miles from Cranleigh to a junction point on the A3100.  This is still lower than a tramway, which would likely cost £104 million. 

However, all is not lost - although it might be for the suppliers of guided bus track components.  The big advantage of a bus on this route would be its ability to use conventional roads at each end.  Single track tarmac, suitable width for one way working with passing places at Bramley station would cost around £10 million, and this is well proven technology.

He does not mention what route he proposes to get from the Downslink to Guildford station.  My preference would be to connect to the A3100 south of the railway bridge, using traffic lights to phase the bus into the road traffic there.  Also traffic lights would be needed at the crossings at Station Rd in Bramley and on the A281.    Rising bollards would be needed at the junctions and at start and end of the Downslink section  to prevent other traffic attempting to use the route.  At the Cranleigh end one would need to consider whether there would be enough demand from Dunsfold itself to justify the bus starting from there, or whether it would be better to have a park and ride start point where the Downslink crosses the B2130.  Or possibly both. 

These schemes tend to fall down on the demand side: people are reluctant to abandon their cars for buses, however pretty, they would often rather sit in traffic jams.  However, a park and ride scheme to Guildford rail station, with pick up points south of Bramley and near Shalford station, including a peak hours congestion charge between Shalford & Guildford, would be feasible.  Two 300 place car parks would cost around £6 million to build, ( costs from the South Tay P&R project 2010) and would not involve fencing the Downslink or major civil engineering works in people’s back gardens. The existing park and ride schemes into Guildford are popular and well used: let’s build on that success.

This is not the first time Bob Bayley has proposed such a scheme.  See http://www.cranleighsociety.org/2015/05/17/the-future-of-the-downslink/ , and I quote from there “The reopening of the [rail] line was looked at again ... in 2013, as part of Surrey County Council’s rail strategy and was still not considered to be viable.”  

Firewood and the toast rack

I store my potential firewood in 2m by 3m woodpiles, using stakes at 1m intervals round the boundary to hold the wood together.  I'll post more about that another time.  I keep the wood largely in two forms:   small diameter (up to 10-15 cm) as cordwood (long pieces) and larger diameter as roundwood (up to the size I can move; bigger than that gets split before going into the pile.  See below.    The advantage of this is that if anyone decides to take some of my wood, they need to do the work to make it a suitable size to burn rather than me, which is less irritating for me, and makes it less likely to happen.

When converting cordwood into firewood lengths (about 20 cm) I start off when working a new woodpile by setting up a "toast rack"

Empty toast rack

The posts are about 1.5m, sharpened, and bonked in with my post bonker so that they are firmly embedded in the ground.  They're about 20cm apart in each row, and maybe 50cm between the rows.  The distance between the rows depends on your chainsaw, mine has a 16" bar.  Then at the bottom I put a some timber that I don't mind just sawing into, so that I can easily saw right through the wood I'm working on.

Full toast rack

Then I stack the cordwood between the two rows

Firewood

And saw down.  I start at the far ends of the pile, working inwards from both ends to keep it balanced, then sawing between the posts.   One thing  to watch out for is that as the lengths of wood being sawed get shorter, they may decide to spin rather than be cut, which can be a bit disconcerting, and sometimes pieces of wood fly out, so it's important to stand so that they won't hit you (and of course personal protective equipment).    And there it is.  In 10-15 minutes with the chainsaw, all that wood is now ready to burn.

Decaying Hornbeams?

In summer last year we had a lot of bark stripping, particularly on our hornbeam trees, from squirrels.

Hornbeam has quite thin bark, and it seems that squirrels like to strip bark as some sort of competition.  I've already felled half a dozen which had been almost completely stripped, and I'm hoping that they will regrow as coppice.  If not, they weren't going to survive anyway,  I recently noticed this group of hornbeams, which I think have had their bark stripped and then some sort of decay.   I've seen recommendations that anything like this should be removed more or less immediately, but also it's good to provide standing deadwood for the creatures.  My current plan is that, as we are getting into bird nesting time, I'm going to leave them till about October this year, and then fell them.  

Electric Cars – a solution to Climate Change?

TL;DR: No.  A 4 kWp photovoltaic installation   saves much more CO2 for the difference in lifetime cost with a conventional car.

Electric cars have been talked up as a potential solution, or part of a solution, to climate change and dependency on fossil fuel.  At first sight, they have many good characteristics:  Zero emissions in use, running on electricity which can be made from renewable sources.  So can they solve at least part of the climate change/ renewable energy challenge?

Fuel economy.  A typical electric car will travel 5 miles per kilowatt hour, whereas a comparable internal combustion engine (ICE) car might do 66 mpg.  I picked a Fiesta 1.0T Ecoboost http://tinyurl.com/p9vrkpb .

It’s difficult to compare 66 mpg with 5 miles per kWh, so we need to get to using the same units for energy.  Also, we need to take account of the raw energy needed to produce 1 kWh of electricity.

There are 4.5 Litres in a gallon and one  litre of petrol produces about 10kWh (http://www.withouthotair.com/c3/page_29.shtml ), so 1 gallon of petrol produces 4.5*10 = 45 kWh.

 So the equivalent calculation for the ICE car is 66/45 miles per kWh, 1.5 miles per kWh.  This looks like the electric car travels over 3 times as far for the same energy.

 However, in order to compare like with like, we must take into account that we don’t actually have sufficient renewable energy in the UK to power our normal usage, let alone additional for electric cars, so the marginal kWh for the electric car will at best  come from a gas fired CCGT power station, which will typically burn 2 kWh of gas to produce the 1 kWh required for charging the vehicle.  So for each  kWh of raw energy, the electric car will only  do 2.5 miles.  It’s still significantly more thanthe 1.5 for an economical ICE vehicle, 66% more, so it’s worth having.

   Or to be more precise, it’s worth having if that benefit doesn’t cost too much.  The Fiesta selected above costs £15k, while a typical electric car costs £25k, with a £5k government subsidy.  Even without the government subsidy, that £10k difference in price would buy a lot of fuel.  At 14.5 miles to the litre, and around £1.40 per litre, it would buy 100,000 miles at 10p/ mile.  That’s a lifetime supply of fuel – in fact at the RAC’s estimate of an average of 8.2 k annual miles per car, it would last for 12 years.  

Energy saved

 The total electrical energy used by the electric car  over 100k miles would be 20 megawatt hours (MWh), or 40 MWh of raw energy.(methane gas).  By comparison, the ICE car would use 67 MWh of raw energy ( petrol)

So the energy saved is (67-40) MWh or 27 MWh.  Assuming a 12 year life for the 100k milies that equates to 2.4 MWh per year of raw energy.. 

Range

Electric cars have a typical range of 100miles and a long refuelling time:  8 hours on a normal domestic power circuit,4 hours on a fast charge point,  down to 30 minutes on a “rapid” DC charging point.  At present, the charging infrastructure is fairly sparse, although with good planning and a willingness to wait for at least half an hour while charging, reasonably long journeys are possible in the UK.  But for most people, the certainty of fuel availability, and a range of over 300 miles, would mean that their main car, the one used for long journeys, will be ICE.  So an electric car, if bought, will be a second car, and used for relatively short trips, typically 40 miles out and back as a maximum, and mostly for even shorter runs.   Electric cars score here, as ICE vehicles are particularly inefficient for the first few miles when the engine is cold, while it makes little difference to electric cars.  However, this restricts the market largely to households that can afford to run 2 cars, and also of course reduces the likely annual mileage.  Each car in a 2 car household will typically do fewer miles each year than a single car, while a designated short range car would do less again.  If the average annual mileage for an electric car is less than the 8,200 miles per year used for the calculations above, then the annual energy saving would be less.

Financial savings

We calculated above that the cost of fuel for the ICE car over 100k miles would be £10k.  By comparison, the electric car would use 20 MWh of electricity at the plug for the same distance.  Domestic electricity costs about 12p/ kWh, so the cost of the fuel for the electric car for 100k miles would be 20,000 * 12p, which works out to £2,400.

Costs in £k	ICE	Electric
Customer price	15.0	25.0
Subsidy	0	5.0
Lifetime fuel cost	10.0	2.4
Total cost	25.0	32.4

So financially the Electric car costs £7.4k than the ICE car, or £2.4k if we deduct the subsidy.

Who will buy?

We’ve already determined that the most likely purchasers will be for a second car, not the first.  There is also a problem for some people with overnight charging.  While many people park their cars in a garage, or on a drive near to their house, some 37% have to park their cars on the street. (UK government National travel survey 2010 http://tinyurl.com/noekobw ).  And it’s not reasonable to trail power cables out into the street, nor to trail them out of windows for flat-dwellers, so these people would not be able to charge an electric vehicle overnight.   We come down to some fraction of the 63% who would want an electric vehicle for a second car, and are willing to pay a sizeable premium for a perceived aura of green-ness.   One might suspect that there wouldn’t be all that many people in this category; in 2013 1,100, out of the 2.2 million new cars were sold in the UK.  That’s less than 0.05% of the market.

Alternatives

The electric car seems like an attempt by the car makers to hang on to a dying market.  There have been a number of articles on “Peak Car”:  the idea that car miles per person per year is starting to decline, rather than increase.  For example http://tinyurl.com/6hbtvdr.  The alternatives, public transport and cycling, are considerable more economical than cars (in the case of buses and trains, when reasonably fully loaded). 

Transport type	Energy for 100 passenger kilometres
Normal speed train	6
Bus	19
Car (1.6 passengers)	26
Bicycle	1

Note that as a bicycle engine is a human,  the fuel for is food, which is a bit more expensive to produce than fuel.

A problem with both buses and cycling is the competition for road space with cars.  Relatively inefficient cars use up the road space, delaying buses and intimidating cyclists so that neither form of transport can effectively use the road space.   Groningen in Holland has a cycling modal share of around 50% http://tinyurl.com/nb9zkfk;  if this could be replicated in the UK it would produce a very much larger fossil fuel and CO2 output saving than a few electric cars. 

In order to save energy/ CO2, arguably a better option would be to spend the £7,500 additional cost of the electric car (including subsidy) on PV installations. For about £7k(between £5.5k and £9k) you could install a 4 kWp photovoltaic system, which would produce about 3.5 MWh per yea rhttp://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Generating-energy/Choosing-a-renewable-technology/Solar-panels-PV#3 ,  The 2.4 MWh/ year of energy saving by the electric car is raw energy, so to compare like with like we need to double the electricity generated by the PV system to find the raw energy saved    So we are comparing 7MWh/ year raw energy saved by the PV system with 2.4MWh /year for the electric car; 4.6 MWh/year.

Policies

The £5,000 / car subsidy is roughly £5 million pounds/ year for the UK, but it is not producing a worthwhile effect in numbers of cars, nor in CO2 output reduction.

One alternative would be to spend that money directly on PV installations or house insulation.  £5 million is enough for at least 500 4kWp PV installations, which would generate 2 GWh/ year, which is 0.8 GWh per year more than is saved by 1,000 electric cars.

Another possibility would be to spend £50/head per year on cycling infrastructure.  This is double what is spent in the Netherlands, so would enable catch up to their quality of infrastructure over time.  £5million per year would only cover 100,000 people at that rate, so a demonstration town of about that size would be needed.  Perhaps a competition where cities and towns  could bid for the funds for a period of ten years, as political will is important as well as money?

To reducie overall car fuel consumption, apart from reducing the mileage travelled by better planning of the urban landscape, it would be sensible to adjust VED rates to further encourage new car buyers to buy more economical vehicles, and to increase fuel duty which would tend to both reduce mileage and encourage more economical vehicles.

Tram, Bus Or Cycleway from Cranleigh to Guildford?

There have been several suggestions that a tramway along the old cranleigh to guildford railway would be a good thing, in particular cutting congestion on the A281.   I think there are some unconsidered difficulties with the idea, and suggest two alternatives.

                Trams are relatively slow, and as I understand it the point of a light rail system from Cranleigh to Guildford is that the trams could join the national rail network at Artington, continuing to Guildford Rail Station.  However, including a relatively slow tram path into the timetabling for that section, including the fast and slow London – Portsmouth trains and the North Downs link, may be a problem.  A further problem would be the platform height at Guildford; maybe an additonal low platform (and track?) would be needed somewhere. The tracks would cost around £13 million a mile; £104 million for the 8 miles from Cranleigh to the rail junction.

                Alternatively the route could be converted to a dedicated busway.  Using bendy buses for higher capacity, the capacity would be somewhat less than a tramway, although demand would probably be the constraint on capacity in either system.  Clearly a bus cannot join the national rail network, so the buses would link the dedicated route to the A3100 just south of the railway bridge near the a248/a3100 junction.  The new junction would need traffic light control to greenlight the buses onto the road from the busway.  From there, drive on the road to Guildford station.  Cost per mile of such a busway would be around a tenth of the tramway cost, at £1.3 million per mile, total £10 million(Both figures based on single track working, possibly with passing places)

                Both of these ideas ruin the track as a leisure facility.  Cycling, walking, horse riding while being passed by buses or trams at high speed is not an enjoyable experience.

                A second option would be to make the route into a cycle way that actually goes somewhere.  By extending the route from where it meets the national railway by just over 2 miles, round the very old trackbed back to the River Wey, and providing a well surfaced track along the towpath to join with the towpath at Millmead, cycles could easily travel from Cranleigh and Bramley to the centre of Guildford completely off road.  Cost of this (based on TfL construction costs estimates) would be about £0.3 million/ mile, for a total of well under £1 million. It would be good to also have a toucan crossing where the High St. crosses Millmead near Debenhams, cycle parking in the Riverside Market carpark, access through the pedestrianised shopping street to the Bus Station, and safe access from the towpath to Guildford station – with cycle parking there too.   The towpath to station access might be difficult to create, but with the millions saved from  even the cheaper busway option, something could surely be done.

Comments on the Surrey County Council Cycling Strategy

For the original see http://tinyurl.com/q9f83cb

It would be a surprise if it wasn’t a disappointment, so many cycling strategies and plans have come and gone, whether national or more local, and very little happens.   Where it does, as the TfL Cycling “superhighways”, there seems to be more hype than delivery.

The foreword is encouraging, talking about every child in Surrey being able to ride a bike and cycle safely to school, as well as increasing cycling for transport purposes.  If that objective were to be achieved, it would be a huge change in cycling infrastructure provision and would necessarily facilitate a much higher modal share for cycling in Surrey.  But once we get into the detail it goes downhill.

International comparisons and UK experience shows that the only way to change cycling modal share significantly is high quality infrastructure, as in the Netherlands.  Training and promotion of cycling may give a brief short term effect, but soon those encouraged into cycling find the road environment too hostile and frightening, and the new (or refurbished) bike is left to rust in shed or garage.  And no sane parent will let their children mix it with high speed motorised traffic when they have a car to take them safely to school, even if they would far rather let them go on their own if it were safe.

Almost immediately we are told that money is scarce and there are no actual funds for this proposed transformation.  Much is made of bidding for funding from various sources, but without serious funding, high quality infrastructure and changes to Surrey’s Highways network  

Very few numbers are put forward.  It would be good to have an objective for modal share and the current modal share for cycling.  This would enable a series of targets for modal share to be set over the 15 years of the strategy.  For example, if the modal share now were 1%, which is less than the national average of 2%, a target of 16% modal share by 2026 would entail a 1% increase for each year of the strategy, and it would be clear whether this was being achieved. 

If the target were a modal share of 16%, it would not be unreasonable to allocate 16% of the SCC Highways budget to cycling schemes each year, rather than assuming it is all to be spent on motorised transport.

There is no definition of a “busy road”.  The London Cycling Campaign (LCC) defines  a busy road as one with more than 2,000 PCUs (Passenger Car Units, with multipliers for large vans, buses, and HGVs)  per day and an 85 percentile observed speed of below 20mph.  For busy roads, separated cycling infrastructure is required, or some treatment to make it not busy. http://tinyurl.com/orrdzng

The strategy has:

• Two political/ organisational points – which boil down to the strategy being conditioned by local conditions and consultation and that SCC will work with other stakeholders.  I assume that “Local” in this context means the district/borough council area local transport committees, which typically consist of 2 or 3 county councillors with officer support and consultation from relevant borough and parish councils. 
• A commitment to provide cycle training.
• A commitment to promote cycling with maps, adverts, and so on.
• A commitment to promote safety – by training and awareness, and enforcement of highway law.
• 2 points about managing and encouraging sport cycling
• A rather meaningless point about “capturing economic benefits”
• And one commitment to infrastructure – but only subject to funding, feasibility, and lack of local objections.

When we get into the detail of the infrastructure to be provided,  there are several good points and if a significant amount of infrastructure is built according to section 6.1 of the strategy, that will be a major improvement.

However, I can’t help feeling that nothing will change.  Training, promotion, encouraging motorists to be nice to cyclists, is all relatively politically easy.  But if it would change anything, we would already have a high modal share for cycling.  it only needs a few distracted, impatient motorists to overtake too close, left hook a cyclist or otherwise use their heavy vehicle to intimidate and bully a vulnerable bike rider – for another cyclist to decide that actually, it’s not safe enough – or to end up in hospital or dead.   Infrastructure, high quality cycle track provision,  is the only thing that will make a long term difference; the rest is politically easy, but useless.

It’s no more than a way of spending any funds that are found, as well as an excuse for pointless meetings and reports.  If the funds, however small, were actually spent on cycling, something might be achieved.