joshuaheald.com

Picardy Place

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Picardy Place is a major junction in Edinburgh, currently the subject of a big redesign, and it’s not going well. The Council has been very quickly pushing through a gyratory which does everything it can to keep Picardy Place a car-dominated non-place. It goes directly against their own stated transport strategy of reducing car modal share in favour of active travel, which I can only assume this is down to a bad deal with the developers of the nearby St. James’ Centre replacement, soon to be famous for the giant gold poop that is going right in the middle of the new shopping centre.

The finished plans were quietly unveiled a couple of months ago, to the dismay of the few people who saw them, who then managed to kick up enough of a fuss to get a formal consultation going. That’s running now, basically on the same plans as before, with a few more colours and arrows drawn on them.

I’ve been meaning to submit my thoughts on it for that consultation for a while now, and it closes in just two days, on the 15th of December, so I spent some time writing them tonight. What I’ve written is below, but for a bit of context if you’re interested, it’s worth having a quick skim over the newly formed Picardy Campaign Group’s manifesto.

Even the Scottish Government aren’t too impressed.

Here’s what I wrote:

The current layout is clearly poor, a relic from the 1960’s. We’ll not redo this junction again for at least another 50 years, so please, please, take a step back and plan it for people, and as a place for them to gather and to enjoy our city, not for cars. I live in North Edinburgh, and use this junction very frequently in many of the modes of transport which share it, as a driver, cyclist, pedestrian, and bus passenger at different times, and I am very worried about the proposal under consultation currently.

Fundamentally, the plans are flawed by the gyratory design which everything else revolves around. It takes up a huge amount of space both with the lanes of traffic, and the central area which it cuts off from the surrounding area. People will not find it easy or compelling to use this space, even if it is not sold off as a development opportunity and kept as common good land.

The wide roads of the gyratory in the current proposal make it difficult for anyone not in a car to get around, even along major desire lines. Many, many more people travel through this junction on foot or by bike than in a car, so please prioritise them in the design - good, quick pedestrian crossings and proper, physically segregated bike lanes which have priority over the roads they cross are critical for this.

The current design does not have good crossings. For example, to get between the shops, bars and restaurants on the East side of Broughton Street, and the centre via Leith Street requires four separate crossings of 2 or 3 lanes each, with associated waiting on traffic islands. For those with buggies, small children, or mobility needs, these are even more awkward.

The council has stated its goal of reducing car modal share from 42% to 29% between 2014 and 2019. I don’t know the current progress on this, but the modal share can only be reduced by making other modes, public transport, walking, and cycling significantly more attractive. I don’t see their prioritisation over cars in the use of space, or the layout of traffic controls. For example, the tram lines are likely to be regularly blocked by cars at the east side of the gyratory, when cars drive through the two sets of lights nearest them, without regard to what’s in front of them. Reducing the number of lanes over time, as noted in the consultation documents, is not the way to achieve this. It has been clearly demonstrated that building wider roads induces demand, so the number of lanes should be built at a reduced level initially, in order to avoid this increase in car traffic, and encourage a decrease. Where there are likely to be delays for public transport, prioritise those modes over cars using bus lanes, bus gates, and tram and bus priority at traffic lights, rather than trying to get all the cars through so that public transport isn’t delayed.

The current public space could be much higher quality, but the current proposal makes them worse. The plans reduce the overall amount of space, breaks it upmoves the Paolozzi sculptures to the edges of roads, rather than placing them in a pleasant space for people to enjoy them - whether that’s sitting inside or outside at a local cafe, children playing around them, or people gathering in a good quality public space.

With the TRO which is currently in force showing that there really is no need for car access along Leith Street, I urge you to please take these plans back to the fundamentals, away from a gyratory and to a much smaller junction allowing for better public space, for example the T-junction proposal by Zone architects, and the Y-junction proposal by Sustrans. Removing car access from Leith street to replace it with a bus gate, wide footpaths, and segregated cycleways would be a great start to improve the priority of modes other than the car.

If you are also concerned about these plans, please do fill in the consultation. There are only two questions, you don’t have to write nearly as much as I did, and the more people who write in about it, the better.

I like to ride my bicycle...

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Yesterday, Gideon and I spent an hour in Inverleith Park together, while Jennie and Angus were at the supermarket. We took his bike and had a few sessions riding it interspersed with time on the swings.

That was only the second time we’ve been for a ride since his birthday when he got the bike; he was very keen to go, and talking all about riding his bike on the way there. When we got there though, he was a bit nervous about riding, and wanted to get straight off, saying “I think I’m a bit too tired now” after just a few seconds.

After a little gentle bargaining, we agreed on trying to ride to the huge puddle covering the whole path further along, then to have ten minutes on the swings before another ride. He was still nervous but I could tell he did really want to do it - he was straight back on the saddle and grinning the whole way.

I was trying to show him about pedalling forwards as he had been doing a half turn, then back-pedalling and going again. I hold him under his arms, so tapping on his side on the side of the foot he needed to pedal with worked well and he started to get the rhythm of it.

We tried again on the other path after the allocated ten minutes in the playground, and he was a little more confident; his pedalling was smoother, so I stopped pushing (but still held him) to help him understand that the pedalling was what made him go, and that he’s less stable when he’s going slowly. On the way back from the central crossing path to the park, I was able to hold him more loosely, and let go a little so that he was balancing himself for a few seconds at a time. He was definitely balancing by himself.

We went over again this afternoon, and he was straight on it - he rode most of the way there, and most of the time we were at the park as well. Pretty much from the start I was just running along side him and not holding him at all, just recovering the odd swerve and reminding him to look where he’s going. The problem is, he’s so fast now! It was more than a jog to keep up with him, so I was quite thankful for the little incline on the way back - that slowed him down at least!

Here he is showboating, from this afternoon…

I like to ride my bicycle… from Josh Heald on Vimeo.

It was loads of fun, and now I’m all in planning mode for cycling adventures on the paths around where we live and on holiday in Islay…

An X in which box?

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve had seven weeks to think about it, and don’t know who to vote for tomorrow. This post is probably a little bit of a stream of consiousness, and I’d love to discuss it with any of you who will talk to me about it. As much as anything, I’m trying to decide.

In the last decade, I’ve gone from Labour member, intern, and occasional activist, to Labour voter, to No-supporting onlooker from England at IndyRef, to Scottish resident supporting independence and voting Green. I’ve not voted for the SNP before, but I’ve been impressed, like many others up here, with the job they’re doing of running the country. There’s a reason that they won 56 seats despite losing the referendum the year before.

Some of my friends may be surprised by my support for Scottish independence, particularly those in England, but then three-years-ago me would be surprised too. I’ve seen several people make jokey comments about how much the Nationalists might talk about IndyRef2, yet up here the real difficulty is finding out what other parties would do in Scotland, other than oppose an independence referendum which has been democratically approved by the Scottish parliament, and should already have been rubber stamped by the UK government to go ahead.

IndyRef2 has, by shear bloody mindedness, been made a key issue up here in this election, so here are my feelings on it. Independence isn’t about being against our neighbours, friends, and family in England, it’s about being able to choose a government with the full ability to represent and work for her own people. It’s about the opportunity to live in a country who’s people broadly share views about how things should be done, differing markedly from the consensus in England, where those views are reflected in policy and society. That can only happen when those people are able to choose a government who represent them, speak for them, and are not prevented from acting on their behalf.

It’s easy to buy into a strange sense of guilt/responsibility for Scotland to bring a liberal balance to the UK, but that isn’t what has happened in the past. Elections go the way that they go in England, almost exclusively. 5m people can not and should not be able to overturn the votes of 55m, but why shouldn’t they be able to choose what’s right for them.

As I said though, this is a Westminster election and the question of IndyRef2 should already be settled as it has been democratically called by our FM with a clear mandate, and it is an outrage that it’s even on the table. Our votes should be for the best people to represent us in Westminster, and more importantly the right people to form our government. That is clearly not the Tories, and the SNP can’t govern the UK alone. My choice should be simple, but for the Labour party. Corbyn has really, really grown on me as the campaign has gone on, since I’ve heard from him directly, in spite of the BBC’s best efforts. My worry is that he’s still one of the oddballs of the party, and that there aren’t enough people like him to form a government. Labour didn’t have time to change candidates so even their newly elected MPs are likely to be more of the ‘New Labour’ variety, than people who agree with Corbyn. How will he form a government of people as principled as he is?

I want Corbyn as PM on Friday morning, not May (or heaven forbid, Johnson), but I’m finding it very difficult to vote for the Labour candidate, because he, and other Scottish Labour candidates, seem to spend more time baiting the SNP about independence than holding the Tories to account for their record in government. This is a Westminster election: despite the Tory government’s dreadful record, and the weird Tory/Ruth Davidson resurgence up here, Scottish Labour aren’t fighting them, not really.

Despite the SNP’s strange position in Westminster, they’ve done good work there. I was sad not to see them form a coalition in 2015, that could have been a fantastic start to the implementation of the Smith Commission findings, but it was not to be. If we wake up to them in coalition on Friday, I think that would be a good thing, however I’ve always been a believer in voting for the party you want to win in a general election. I’m in a marginal which Labour could just about win, but they seem to be making great efforts to convince me not to vote for them.

It’s a new feeling for me, going to the polling station without knowing who I want to support. Are you having as difficult a time choosing, or have you been decided from the start?

Cynical Tory Voter ID

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0100

I’m furious. I’d heard that people were being asked for National Insurance numbers when registering to vote a while ago, and been mildly irritated at the time. I then heard about it again around the EU referendum, so by now I thought people would know, as I did, that it wasn’t actually required but might delay your registration a bit if you didn’t provide it.

I wasn’t thinking and challenging what’s going on in our democracy, even though it gets more and more fixed and gerrymandered every year. Even in a world where Scotland speaks with one voice and elects 95% of its MPs from a single party, she can still be completely ignored by the parliamentry system and UK government, so I really should have been paying more attention. I’ve been worn down by all the nonsense over these last few years, and that’s something I need to change, but it’s not what I’m furious about.

Today, I was begging for some babysitting from my little brother when he gets back from Uni for the summer. He mentioned he would be getting back between the 6th and 8th of June, which rang some alarm bells…

Little roadblocks like this are enough to stop people registering, even intelligent capable people like Felix. Some people will be tempted to start victim blaming and say things like “well a simple web search could have told him the answer”, but you don’t expect to have to check an online form from your council actually requires all the things it asks for. You do what he did, and go and try to get what it’s asking for, and end up not being able to register in time.

These little things are abuses of power, many little cuts to our already pretty poor democracy in the name of cynically keeping power. An actual, bring-your-passport-to-the-polling place trial of voter ID is already scheduled for 2018. We need to stand up against this stuff, and remember ahead of time to get people to jump through these stupid hoops so that they aren’t disenfranchised. I’m just upset that I didn’t think to do that for my brother, and that it’s now too late.

One

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a little while since Angus turned one now, and I’ve had this 90% finished, sitting on my computer, waiting for me to give it the time it deserves…

One

We might not have so many pictures of Angus as we do of Gideon, but we do have this, so he’s not entirely a poor second child! His birthday was 7 months ago, and he’s much bigger, cheekier, and more mischevious nowadays, but remains just as cute as ever.

😍

Our New Home

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Two weeks ago, Jennie, Angus, Gideon and I got the keys to our first flat, a first floor Victorian Edinburgh tenement, with loads of potential, and buckets of work to do. We thought we’d start as we mean to go on, so promptly went on holiday for a week.

Right, Islay was really great, but we’re back again. I had Sunday to have a go at starting off work on our empty flat while Jennie took the boys to see Grandma down in England, so I got provisions from B&Q, and steeled myself for the messy, painstaking, unpleasant work of stripping Anaglypta wallpaper from our living room walls.

Turns out, we hit the jackpot. There was a single layer of it with sound plaster underneath, and I could peel it off in rolls leaving the walls more or less clean! I got the living room done by lunchtime, then started on the fireplace.

The seller had shown us that there were some original tiles in behind the strange board of bathroom tiles which someone had overlaid, but we weren’t expecting much of it. How wrong we were! With some gentle smashing, levering, and the removal of six bags of rubble and ash, I revealed a beautiful cast iron fireplace with pretty tile surround and hearth, only a couple of which were cracked. All this will take is a good clean and a careful hunt for a matching front.

Next up, the laminate had to go. What will we find underneath?

Really nice, close fit tongue and groove pine floorboards, that’s what! They’ve only been disturbed a little, to fit the three sockets around the room, but no one’s been cutting them with circular saws or anything like that, so they should come up really nicely. I’m particularly pleased that they’ve not had the black paint treatment around the edge of the room, just a bit of a stain in the past.

On the recommendation of Simply the Nest I’m going to pick up a decent hand held belt sander and tackle the floor methodically bit by bit, rather than trying to go for it in a single weekend with a hired drum sander like I have in the past. I’m hoping that doing it bit by bit with a smaller tool will help get a better result, fit in with family life, and even be cheaper over a few floors.

So, I’d done plenty on the living room. That was all I was going to touch. “We’ll take it one room at a time”, we said, over and over. But that Anagylpta did come off so easily and it’s all over the bedroom. I made a call, and with Jennie’s blessing went for it…

It was the right call. Thirty neat rolls of old paper later, we had two rooms with bare plaster, though the bedroom needs more patching than the living room, it’s still better than the cat scratched Anaglypta and we can live with it for a while.

So, a big opening day. I’m sure it won’t all be so easy, and we’ll have days the complete opposite of this one, but with the fireplace find and the barely touched floorboards, it feels like we’ve got the right sort of project on our hands. Next time I’ll even try to remember to take before shots that aren’t from the schedule!

Something that matters

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve been working on Room for Refugees for the last month or so, donating my time to a Glasgow based charity, Positive Action in Housing. I’ve helped them automate processes around their decade-old refugee hosting scheme, and in the month we’ve seen growth from under one hundred registered hosts, to (as of this morning) two thousand. When you donate your time to something you care about, and something that matters, you can make amazing things happen.

As I wrote in my last post, I wanted to help the people offering to host refugees in their own home to have a chance to do that, safely. It seemed like there was a great, but fleeting, opportunity while people were talking about the crisis to do something meaningful. To get something up quickly, I put up a simple Google Form and embedded it in the PAIH website, and we spread the word in a few groups on Facebook, and via the charity’s mailing list.

My form went up in the early hours of Friday morning, and we started to watch some incredibly generous people pledge to share their home with refugees in dire need of help. Ten before ten o'clock, fifty by lunchtime, every few minutes another person was filling in our detailed form. By the end of the day, 260 people had registered, and I felt bowled over. Each morning, it started again with registrations coming in every five minutes on average, until late in the evening. I found it difficult to tear my eyes away from the results as they rolled in; a spreadsheet has never been so fascinating!

We had some issues, like the number of hits taking the website over the charity’s bandwidth limit, and some issues with users finding the Google Form interface confusing, but overall it felt very successful. I learnt a lot (that I already ‘knew’ in a theoretical sense) about the amount you can achieve when working on both something that matters, and something which people want.

I really recommend doing this kind of thing for a cause you’re interested in - I’d not even written a line of code, yet I felt like what I’d done had been more meaningful than any of my best professional work to date.

Donate your skills

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0100

The photograph of Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, looking as though he was sleeping in the surf, was a tipping point in the public perception of the Syrian refugee crisis. Before the explosion of attention that image precicipated, there had been low level coverage for months, and I had certainly been peripherally aware of the issues. I’d done what many people do, signed a few petitons, donated a little money, and grumbled a little about the news and our selfish Tory government’s inhumane approach to the problem. Seeing Alan made me want to do much, much more.

You don’t need to have children to be deeply affected by an image of a drowned toddler, but I’m certain that three or four years ago, before I was a dad, I wouldn’t have been so deeply upset as I was when I saw that picture. It challenged me to use my privilege, skills, and my lucky birth to help the millions he represents. I’m not alone in feeling that - the messages I saw from family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances were predominantly asking what we can do, how we can help, why Britain isn’t doing more, why we have a PM and Government who seem to see people as insects.

What I particularly noticed was the number of people offering to take someone in to their own home - a fantastically practical, yet very obvious temporary reprieve for the problem. Why have people living in dreadful conditions in refugee camps, when generous, open-hearted people will give them a warm, safe space in their homes? The first hurdle was a big one though: where and how could an individual or family arrange this?

A sign up and a database would be fairly easy to make, and with inspiration from the Refugees Welcome sharing site based in Germany, I decided that I wanted to make this possible for people, and to help capture this generosity in the face of the crisis unfolding on our screens. A web app alone does not solve anything though, and I know nothing about helping refugees integrate with a new society or have a successful stay in someone else’s home. I did some research and found a number of smaller, local charities had been doing this for years, including one in Glasgow. I got in touch with Positive Action in Housing and outlined how I thought I could help and the opportunity presented by the number of people expressing an interest in hosting refugees, and we decided to take it from there.

PAIH have been running a hosting scheme successfully since 2004, but the manual registration which had worked for so long would not cope with the influx of interest brought by the increase of public attention on the crisis. By donating my time, I was able to automate that system and help them build a growing database of over 1800 volunteers across the UK, Europe, and further afield, who want to host a refugee in their home. A number of people have already been given a home to get started, and as more partner charities start to make referrals, more will be. I’ve found it really exciting to see what’s been precipitated by donating my skills, compared to my usual response of donationg some money or signing a petition.

I’ll be writing a few posts about what exactly I’ve done, and continue to do, but I really encourage you to think about what you can use your skills for, and what you can make happen.

Made it

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0100

I made it! 78.0kg, 24.9 BMI, one week to spare before I turn thirty.

I’ve been losing weight for six months, with the goal of getting from the obese band to the normal band of BMI beform my thirtieth birthday. I set that as a goal to test myself, but I wasn’t going to get too worried about it if I found it exceptionally difficult; everyone seems to say that BMI’s very flawed after all, I’ve said that myself in the past.

When I set it, it represented losing 0.9kg each week for six months, which is pretty unrelenting given dietary advice is not to lose more than 1kg a week. I lost weight smoothly, and perhaps a little too quickly, up until July, but once holidays kicked in I fluctuated a lot more. The final 2kg took six weeks to lose. It really felt like I’d hit a wall and wouldn’t make it to my goal, which actually would have been disappointing having gotten so close to it. I’m really glad I worked through that.

Lots of people have asked how I’ve lost the weight, but I don’t think my approach would work for most people - it’s very analytical and if you get emotional about the number on the scales each morning, it’s probably a bit frustrating. To see what I’ve done (and continue to do) to get here, take a look at my healthy for thirty post series.

I don’t plan to immediately stop dieting and gain back into the overweight band, so the new goal is to get to 70kg by Christmas. That’s much slower weight loss, only about 0.5kg each week, so I hope it will set me up with good habits for maintaining that weight when I get there…

The Wrong Motivation

Sat, 08 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0100

Last week, we had our fantastic annual group holiday; Jennie, Gideon, Angus and I squeezed in to our little hatchback for the drive down to the Lake District to spend the week with school and university friends. We had loads of fun, and as ever there was loads of food, drink, and merriment. I wasn’t so foolish to think that I’d want, or be able, to keep up my 1600 calories/day diet, but I did want to keep on tracking what I ate.

I’d tracked my food and drink every day since March, as I find that even when I cheat for a day, tracking it and seeing the calories stops me going off the rails completely. The app I use, MyFitnessPal, keeps a tally of how many days you’ve logged in and entered food or exercise information, and my streak was 108 days at the start of the holiday - I was proud of that, particularly when I hit my hundredth day.

So I dutifully added everything I ate and drank to the app, ticking over 3000 calories each day (which is ‘not going off the rails completely’ on one of our holidays!) It wasn’t easy, not least because using the app was really slow due to our extremely flakey internet connection (love a rural broadband connection over weak WiFi boosters in a thick-walled old house with 14 nerds trying to get their fix on 2-3 devices each!)

On the fourth day of the holiday, I tracked my food, and got the same old ‘data stored locally’ messages I had been all week. But on the fifth, I’d lost my streak of 111 days. It didn’t sync what I entered until after midnight, so despite the fact I’d been entering as I ate through the day, I was back down to a single day. It shouldn’t mean anything - I knew I’d kept track, so what difference does it make?

Well, it made enough of a difference that I stopped tracking. What was the point, I had no streak to maintain, and I wasn’t going to hit 1600 calories anyway, so why bother? It turns out, my motivation to track was wrong, I should have been focusing on not going off the rails, not what my login streak was.

As a result, I’m sure that I ate more, and have more work to do in the next five weeks to get down to my goal weight. It’s very much in sight, but if I’d had the right motivation, or if the app took in to account the time food was tracked not just when it was synced, I’d be in a better position now.