Podcasts about edinburgh council

In today's fast-paced world, the ability to negotiate effectively is more crucial than ever. Whether you're in the public sector, private industry, or simply trying to strike a deal at home, the principles of negotiation remain the same. In our latest podcast episode, we have the privilege of hosting Andy Archibald, a senior consultant at Scotwork, who sheds light on the art and science of negotiation.Andy brings a wealth of experience, having worked across the energy and utility sectors, as well as at the City of Edinburgh Council. His insights into negotiation are not only practical but also transformative. One of the key highlights of our discussion is Scotwork's eight-step negotiation process, a tried-and-tested framework that can be applied across various negotiation contexts.Preparation, as Andy points out, is the cornerstone of effective negotiation. Without thorough preparation, negotiators risk entering discussions without a clear strategy, leading to unsatisfactory outcomes. Andy shares a compelling story of a group that focused too heavily on numbers during preparation, neglecting other crucial aspects of negotiation. His advice? Move beyond spreadsheets and consider all elements that could impact the negotiation process.As we look ahead to the implementation of the Procurement Act 2023, Andy highlights the significant changes it will bring to public sector negotiations. With increased flexibility and freedom, public sector negotiators must be equipped with the right skills and knowledge to maximise value in their deals. Andy's experience in the public sector and with public sector clients underscores the importance of investing in negotiation training to navigate these changes effectively.Throughout the episode, Andy provides invaluable tips on avoiding common pitfalls in negotiation, such as getting stuck in circular debates or making non-specific proposals. By focusing on constructive dialogue and clear, specific proposals, negotiators can steer discussions towards successful outcomes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daily Record Deputy Political Editor Chris McCall is joined by Sunday Mail Political Editor John Ferguson and Scottish Express Editor Ben Borland on the Planet Holyrood podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are thrilled to announce the 10th episode of The Local Government Stories Podcast, featuring a special guest, Andrew Kerr, CEO of Edinburgh Council. Andrew began his career in Leisure Services and has since built an impressive 42-year journey in local government, serving as Chief Executive across four major local councils in North Tyneside, Wiltshire, Cornwall, and currently in Edinburgh. In addition to his professional accomplishments, Andrew is a medal-winning 400m runner who has represented Team GB and Scotland at the international level. He was honoured with an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2021 for his contributions to public services. Throughout his career, Andrew has held various local and national roles. His move to Wiltshire as Chief Executive drew significant media attention as he navigated some challenging political waters with redundancy after only 18 months into the position. He then moved to the Chief Executive role in Cornwall where he faced some unprecedented challenges during politically difficult times. Andrew later took the opportunity as the Chief Executive of diverse Edinburgh, leading through the challenging pandemic period. He has overseen significant events, including the arrangements for the Queen of England's funeral. Today he leads on developing positive relationships with the city's four universities, engaging with a breadth of partners that make the city a global attraction. Don't miss this insightful episode where Andrew shares his vast experience and unique stories from his distinguished career in local government. Solace website: solace.org.uk  Dedicated podcast site: ⁠⁠⁠https://solace.org.uk/blog/local-government-stories-podcast/⁠⁠⁠ Share on our Socials: @Solace_UK  LinkedIn #LocalGovernmentStories

Dr Grace Vickers, Chief Executive at Midlothian Council, is a dynamic leader in local government. She has improved school performance and played key roles in addressing pandemic-related schooling issues as co-chair of the Scottish Government's National Children and Families Collective Leadership Group. In 2023, she chaired Solace Scotland, highlighting her extensive leadership experience.  Grace's leadership journey from Head Teacher to Chief Executive at Midlothian Council is rooted in her strong academic foundation, including a postgraduate certificate in secondary education, a PhD from the University of Edinburgh Business School, SQH, and a B.Mus (Hons).  Dr Vickers gained invaluable insights into impactful policy decisions during her time as a secondary Head Teacher at a diverse Catholic school, where she witnessed firsthand the difference such decisions can make on the ground. This experience propelled her into the role of Quality Improvement Manager at the City of Edinburgh Council, marking the beginning of her distinguished career in local government.  Grace's leadership roles at Midlothian Council, a rapidly growing local authority specializing in life sciences, have been pivotal. She served as Education and Chief Education Officer, overseeing significant initiatives that drove positive change in education across the region. Her subsequent role as Head of Education at Midlothian Council allowed her to spearhead the implementation of a new curriculum across Edinburgh, further cementing her impact on educational development.  Throughout her career, from pioneering educational initiatives to her current position as Chief Executive, Grace remains dedicated to delivering improved outcomes for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds within her community. Tune in to Episode 7 as we explore Grace Vickers' transformative journey and her unwavering commitment to educational excellence.  Solace website solace.org.uk Dedicated podcast site: ⁠⁠https://solace.org.uk/blog/local-government-stories-podcast/⁠⁠ Socials: @Solace_UK #LocalGovernmentStories

Rob discusses the current situation in the Scottish housing market where Scottish councils are proposing to raise rents by as much as 8.4% to cover their costs, while private landlords are constrained by rent caps. Rob highlights the unfairness of this situation, as landlords face high mortgage rates and are unable to take advantage of the rent cap loophole. The episode explores the consequences of these policies, including landlords selling their properties and decreasing the supply of rental housing.  KEY TAKEAWAYS Scottish councils are proposing to raise rents by as much as 8.4% to cover their costs, while private landlords are constrained by rent caps. Private landlords in Scotland face rent controls of just 3% until March 2024, potentially 2025, while councils are looking to increase rents by up to 8.4%. Edinburgh Council has declared a housing emergency due to a lack of housing stock, as landlords are selling their properties and not being replaced by other landlords. The council justifies the rent increases by claiming they need to upgrade existing homes to high energy efficient standards, but private landlords are not able to increase rents to cover similar costs. The mismatch between rent controls for private landlords and rent increases for councils is causing issues in the Scottish housing market. BEST MOMENTS "Rent controls or price controls of any sort do not work."  "There's not enough housing stock because landlords are being pretty much pushed out of the market."  "It's just insanity. Insanity from the point of view of what they're trying to achieve and how they want people to get there."  "A lot of faeces close to hitting the fan up in Scotland on the housing sector." "I just wish for a lot of things, but a bit more joined up thinking from people would be fantastic."  VALUABLE RESOURCES Please sign this petition to make financial education compulsory in all schools from primary age: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/648514 GET YOUR DEVELOPMENT FINANCE HERE: https://propertyfundingplatform.com/WharfFinancial#!/borrowerinitialregistration SOVEREIGN MAN PREMIUM INTELLIGENCE MEMBERSHIP https://dash.sovereignman.com/a/smc12m995/tpnpodcast SOVEREIGN MAN 4th PILLAR https://dash.sovereignman.com/a/4pmain/tpnpodcast WEALTH BUILDERS https://www.wealthbuilders.co.uk/propertynomad ABOUT THE HOST Rob Smallbone is the author of the Amazon best-seller Buy-To-Let: How To Get Started as well as 101 Top Property Tips and Property FAQ's. BOOKS  Property FAQs = https://amzn.to/3MWfcL4   Buy To Let: How To Get Started = https://amzn.to/3genjle   101 Top Property Tips = https://amzn.to/2NxuAQL   WHERE TO FIND US https://linktr.ee/thepropertynomadspodcastuk property, Investment, Property, Rent, Buy to let, Investing for beginners, Money, Tax, Renting, Landlords, strategies, invest, housing, properties, portfolio, estate agents, lettings, letting, business: https://patreon.com/tpnpodcast

The City of Edinburgh Council will be working with a brand new accessibility commission to help improve movement around the city for people with a range of disabilities. RNIB Connect Radio's Allan Russell spoke to Kirstie Henderson, RNIB Scotland, and Zara Todd, Chair of the Commission, to find out who will be involved in the decision making and it's hopes for the future. #RNIBConnect Image shows Edinburgh Castle 

Here we speak to the Housing Convener Jane Meagher to find out what it means and also to Cllr Iain Whyte the leader of the Conservative group who voted differently from the remainder of the council. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edinburgh-reporter/message

In the last few days, the City of Edinburgh Council has launched a consultation about how to turn Portobello into a 20 minute neighbourhood. Over the next six week, local people will have the chance to express their views on how to make local services – shops, cafes, the local surgery - more accessible by foot, cycle, wheelchair or public transport. It hopes this will help people share their ideas about how to make the town centre and local area better for everyone. David Calder spoke to local councillor Jane Meagher about how it would work.To complete the consultation, follow this link: https://tinyurl.com/bdhtdayf

Episode 63 features Business Development Director, Louis Daillencourt discussing Novoville's Shared Repairs App, which the City of Edinburgh Council introduced to help owners of housing blocks deal with shared repairs. Described as a ‘game changer', the app integrates all aspects of the repairs process benefiting owners and property professionals too.

The music played at mass can often become a lightning rod for disagreements. What instruments are most appropriate? Are hymns necessary? How do we navigate conflict? Archbishop Richard Smith is joined again by Roderick Bryce in tackling these practical questions on Sacred Music!Roderick Bryce is the Music Director at St. Joseph Basilica. Hailing from Edinburgh, Scotland, Roderick relocated to Stettler, Alberta with his family in July 2013. In Scotland he was in great demand as a baritone, teacher, vocal coach and choral director. As a singer, he is broadcast often on BBC Radio 4 and regularly sang with Cappella Nova, recording music by James Macmillan on Linn Records. Also on Linn Records, he has recorded Bach's Matthäus-Passion and sung across Scotland, Northern Ireland and France with the Dunedin Consort. He has appeared with Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan at the Edinburgh International Festival. Roderick was director of the Scottish Chamber Choir; founder and director of Sospiro Baroque and former choirmaster of St Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral, Edinburgh. In addition to a busy private teaching practice, he also taught singing for City of Edinburgh Council, Loretto School and Fettes College.The Graduale Simplex:https://media.musicasacra.com/books/graduale_simplex.pdfSubmit your question for the Archbishop at the link below using the SpeakPipe widget:www.caedm.ca/upfrontUpfront with the Archbishop is a weekly podcast seeking to bridge the gap between the hierarchy and the faithful by discussing the beauty, truth, and challenges of our Catholic faith. The podcast features our host Jenny Connelly, as well as Archbishop Richard Smith, of the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton Alberta.Produced by Matthew Bodnarek

What music is appropriate for mass? Is there a right and a wrong to what songs and styles get played? Roderick Bryce joins us so that we can dive deep into what the Church teaches us about sacred music, and what makes it so sacred any way. In this part 1 of our discussion we get into the official teaching and principals, and it part 2 (to be released in a couple weeks) we go in to the practical questions.Roderick Bryce is the Music Director at St. Joseph Basilica. Hailing from Edinburgh, Scotland, Roderick relocated to Stettler, Alberta with his family in July 2013. In Scotland he was in great demand as a baritone, teacher, vocal coach and choral director. As a singer, he is broadcast often on BBC Radio 4 and regularly sang with Cappella Nova, recording music by James Macmillan on Linn Records. Also on Linn Records, he has recorded Bach's Matthäus-Passion and sung across Scotland, Northern Ireland and France with the Dunedin Consort. He has appeared with Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan at the Edinburgh International Festival. Roderick was director of the Scottish Chamber Choir; founder and director of Sospiro Baroque and former choirmaster of St Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral, Edinburgh. In addition to a busy private teaching practice, he also taught singing for City of Edinburgh Council, Loretto School and Fettes College.Submit your question for the Archbishop at the link below using the SpeakPipe widget:www.caedm.ca/upfrontUpfront with the Archbishop is a weekly podcast seeking to bridge the gap between the hierarchy and the faithful by discussing the beauty, truth, and challenges of our Catholic faith. The podcast features our host Jenny Connelly, as well as Archbishop Richard Smith, of the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton Alberta.Produced by Matthew Bodnarek

Cllr Cammy Day became leader of The City of Edinburgh Council just one week before this chat with him to find out how the week has progressed. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/edinburgh-reporter/message

finally it is time to release this beautifully constructed tapestry of audio pleasure of guest mix from Christian Steinburg based in Germany this mix is just simply gorgeous featuring cuts from DJ G, Chaos in the cbd, Fred p, anerah yasole, Seven Davis Jr, Lootbeg, Tom Vernon, zito mowa, Black Loops, gavinco, Edinburgh Council, amtrac, Ricardo Miranda, River yarra, isaac Reuben, flexulant, Leo pol, DJ houseplants, boobjazz, dream House, needs, loz goddard

Welcome to a dive into the Sharing things archive and a selection of 5 episodes that revolve around the themes of belonging, fitting in and finding your place. These are conversations about growth and about identity. In our second episode we revisit the conversation between Daisy Narayanan and Dalia Al-Dujaili and listen to them as they talk about childhood excitement, happy folders and love over hate. This episode is hosted by Richenda Rae, who joined us in the summer of 2020. After her summer with us she returned to her final year of medical school. Daisy is Director of Urbanism at Sustrans, a charity making it easier for people to walk and cycle. While on secondment to the City of Edinburgh Council between 2018 and 2019, Daisy led the Edinburgh City Centre Transformation project.Dalia is a final year English Literature student who has recently started a platform and newsletter showcasing emerging creatives called MISFiT. She was formerly editor-in-chief at Mxogyny, an online platform for marginalised creatives to share poetry, art and writing related to prevalent social issues.Each episode of Sharing things is a conversation between two members of our university community. It could be a student, a member of staff or a graduate, the only thing they have in common at the beginning is Edinburgh. We start with an object. A special, treasured or significant item that we have asked each guest to bring to the conversation. What happens next is sometimes funny, sometimes moving and always unexpected.Find out more at www.ed.ac.uk/sharing-things-podcastThis episode of Sharing things was recorded during the Covid thing. We were finding our feet with online recording.Images designed by Chris Behr. They are part of his Nice Things icon set.

This final episode in the current series is all about kinship care.  This is when caring responsibilities for a child are taken on by extended family or friends because parents are unable to play that role any longer. There are many reasons why children end up in such arrangements, it could be as a result of a bereavement or ill health, or because parents are having problems with drugs or alcohol. There are estimated to be around 180,000 children in these arrangements in the UK, but the rights and responsibilities of kinship carers is a complex area, and sometimes there is very little support available. It is often grandparents that take on the role, and they may be on low incomes and struggling themselves. The children will have had some difficult experiences in their lives, and this can add to a very challenging situation for their new carers. Nevertheless,  the outcomes for children in these arrangements are reported as better than for those in statutory care. So, it is a vital way for children to be cared for at a critical time, and those that take on the role deserve recognition for what they do. Joining TV presenter and journalist Richard Arnold to explore this important but underreported area further are Alec Robertson from the Kinship Support Team at Edinburgh Council and John Hamilton, Grants Development Officer for Buttle UK. 

Portobello Town Hall is now OUR Town Hall. On Thursday afternoon, the City of Edinburgh Council accepted the proposal put forward by Porty Central, the action group that’s been working hard to ensure that we got to this position. So now, the hard work really begins. In the Council’s own estimate, the building will need £1m over the next three years for it to be fully refurbished. But the team believe this is achievable and that there is a viable business to be created here in the future. In this episode, let’s find out more about their plans.

When children are really vulnerable to harm social workers have to work even harder to create partnership with families where risk is present. For infants, babies, and very young children, as well as older children who are nonverbal or require constant care as they grow up, ways need to be found to work with risk that does not necessarily involve family separations. Family Group Conferencing is one way of holding risk with the older children and adults in a family and agreeing how that risk will be addressed. Parents and expectant parents need an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do, with the sustained relationship-based support of professionals. In this episode, Dr Mary Mitchell, Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh, and social workers Heather Rush and Nicky Hunter from the City of Edinburgh Council, speak about the practice of Family Group Conferencing and how it can make a difference to families. This forms part of a child protection and welfare project titled Recognition Matters, which bring together knowledge from different pieces of research to strengthen practice and improve the experiences of families. Transcript of episode. Resources Azaria's story - a film of one woman's experience of family group conferencing.  All Recognition Matters films on YouTube. Critchely A and Mitchell M (2020) Can knowledge exchange forge a collaborative pathway to policymaking? A case study example of the Recognition Matters project. The British Journal of Social Work.  Mitchell M (2020) The value of recognition theory to family group conferencing and child-care and protection. The British Journal of Social Work. Mitchell M and Ali S (2020) Adaptive family group conferencing practice: keeping families at the heart of decision making during COVID-19. Social Work 20-21 magazine. Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes.

Ahead of the Scottish Parliaments elections on 06 May, Anni talks to Andrew Kerr, Chief Executive of The City of Edinburgh Council.This episode is packed with discussions as Andrew talks openly about everything from leading through a pandemic to the importance of family, community and working as a team. He also reveals his career inspirations and how an ex-miner from Ayrshire helped him to become the proud senior leader he is today, working in his dream job. Despite his prominent position in the council, Andrew was not always in the public sector. Following school, he worked as a professional athlete, representing Scotland and the UK in the 400m races. However, he knew athletics was a career with a limited time span and stepped into his first public service role as Manager at Grangemouth Stadium, Falkirk “In lots of ways it was opportunistic, but I realised early on that I enjoy the community part of being a public servant. And I've been there ever since,” he confirms.With a passion for contributing in the community, Andrew has gone on to nurture a 35 year (and counting) career as a public servant. He has worked in positions across England, Wales and now in the City of Edinburgh Council where he was named Chief Executive in 2015. Listen to this Leaders in Conversation Podcast to discover: Andrew's early influencers and inspirations including the benefit of growing up in a supportive family that encouraged his passions like poetry writing, the flute and athleticsHow his running coach was a role model throughout life, providing a huge source of inspiration and shaping his approach to both personal development and senior leadershipWhy conquering his nerves in the stadium was an invaluable lesson in how to be a confident leader and to stay focused on the task in hand How staying active and learning to practice  mindfulness became a useful tool in prioritising what's important in order to stay focused, achieve more and deliver moreThe importance of teams both professionally and personally and supporting one another at all timeThe process behind shaping and defining values and putting them into practice  Andrew also talks about leading through a pandemic and how it allowed him to deliver on his core value of helping the community. He honours those whose lives have been lost and pays tribute to the civil servants like teachers, janitors and bin collectors who have kept the UK going “without demand for extra overtime or extra anything, because they knew that we're doing good things for the community”. Finally, Andrew reveals his vision and ambitions for Edinburgh and Scotland and why “community wellness” is at the heart of The City of Edinburgh Council's business plan. He talks about what the roadmap looks like, from collaboration with local partners to setting carbon targets and more.Discover moreTo find out more about The City of Edinburgh Councils including the strategy and plans visit edinburgh.gov.uk

It’s Wednesday the tenth of February. Welcome to today’s bulletin from Porty News. And thanks to several people who’ve drawn attention to the news that we will soon have a cycle path (albeit temporary) from Portobello all the way to Musselburgh. The City of Edinburgh Council had taken soundings from local people who liked the idea – but it would have to stop at the East Lothian border as all of that local authority’s funding had already been committed. But the Council there accepted that a cycle path that stopped at the county boundary just didn’t make sense – so they made an application for additional funds to Sustrans which was successful. There seems to be growing interest in organisations changing their status. We’ve heard about Porty Central changing from a limited company to a body with charitable status - a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation. Now, it seems, the Jack Kane Centre across in Craigmillar is doing something similar. At the moment, it’s an unincorporated charity but it wants to get the protection of being a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO). Its officers have already held meetings with the Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations Council to find out the implications. Their next step is to work out a timetable for how to make progress with hopefully a result within weeks. I keep hearing about the way the lockdown – and in particular the closed schools – have placed considerable emotional stresses on families, sometimes to breaking point. There is help available through what are known as Family Connection Centres. They’re safe friendly places that help children and young people as well as parents and other family members learn how to cope with new family circumstances. The chief executive of the umbrella organisation, Ruth Campbell, is a member of Grow Porty and recently asked the help of other members to donate indoor plants to brighten up the charity's parent room and playroom. Now that’s something that’s worth supporting. Finally, the beast from the east has turned even the beach white – and people have taken to doing fun things in the snow. There’s been sledging at Joppa Quarry, building snowmen at various places and, our favourite, a snow circle on the beach by the inimitable Paul McPail - and thanks to Gyselle Dye and Rich Howells for the excellent pictures. And people have also been taking photographs and videos of the snow-covered golf courses and parks and expressing the hope that the the snowy conditions remain for a few days longer. Take care in the snow. More tomorrow (all going well)

It’s Wednesday the 3rd of February and this is the fourth bulletin from Porty News First, a couple of pieces of information from the City of Edinburgh Council! The first has to do with the brown bins we use for garden waste. As you know, households have to buy a permit costing £25 to benefit from this service and registration to join is open from now until 2pm on 16 February – and that’s the last opportunity to get the permit for this current year which, it seems, runs until the 7th of November. Apparently, garden waste collected last year was turned into over 20,000 tonnes of compost, which is used on farms, greenspaces and gardens – assuming you can get your hands on it during lockdown! tinyurl.com/105znx88 There’s also a reminder that we go to the polls in May for the Scottish Parliamentary elections. The Council is keen to stress that, if you want to vote in person, polling places will be safe – but they also wanted to remind us all that there are other ways to vote. So you can apply to vote by post or you can get someone else to vote on your behalf, otherwise known as a proxy vote. You can apply for one or t’other on the Lothian Valuation Joint Board website. https://www.lothian-vjb.gov.uk/ You may have seen that Porty Central is looking for a lawyer. It’s all to do with their hoped for change of status. They’re starting work on becoming a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation or SCIO to run the Town Hall when, in Geoff Pearson’s words “the Council agrees it should be managed by and for the community.” Portobello Central Ltd is as the name suggests currently a company, but the plan is to wind this up. Apparently the powers that be in the charities world provide a lot of guidance but the team think it might be helpful to have a lawyer, able to cast an eye over their work from time to time. And finally, the Portobello Bookshop has reminded us that it’s LGBTQ+ History Month! It will be stocking a selection of some of their favourite books from the genre, from the history of Stonewall to contemporary novels, poetry and essays. The bookshop will also be hosting, as part of the event, an online session with the novelist Niven Govinden to mark the publication of his latest book ‘Diary of a Film’. It will take place on the 23rd of this month where the author will be in conversation with Roland Gulliver, Director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Tickets cost £14.99 and the price includes a signed bookplate edition of the novel, which will be posted out following the event. https://theportobellobookshop.com/events/

Hello and welcome to Porty News, which at the moment is an experiment as part of the Porty Podcast. Our aim – and perhaps that of anyone who wants to help out occasionally – is to bring you brief snippets of news from Portobello, Joppa and the surrounding areas as well as useful information from organisations like City of Edinburgh Council, the police and other such bodies. Let’s start with news of a scam – and quite a nasty one at that. Several local people have received very credible looking emails claiming to be from the NHS and giving them details of their supposed appointment for a Co-Vid 19 jag. As I say, it looks pretty legit – until you’re asked for your credit card details right at the end. That should immediately ring alarm bells! Indeed, the very fact you got this invite as an email and not a letter should have been the give-away. According to the NHS, they will only contact you by post. Now, you remember, there were far too many people out on the Prom and Beach last weekend. I don’t know about you but I didn’t want to mingle and stayed at home. But it was enough for Police Scotland to warn that they’ll be stepping up patrols here this coming weekend, along with places like the Pentlands and Cramond. The rules, which are supposed to apply to all of us, say we’re are only allowed to leave our homes to go to work, to take some exercise to go shopping. There’s been a lot of online comment here, whenever the weather’s good which actually doesn’t look like being the case over the next few days, about roads leading to the beach being clogged by 4-by-4s, filled with maw, pa and the weans, folk who’ve come down from other parts of the city for a wee dauner along Porty sands. That’s not following the rules boys and girls. Finally, tomorrow’s episode of the podcast in its usual form will be an interview with Justin Kendrick looking forward to a future when life returns to some form of normality, whatever that turns out to be – asking how we can build on the community spirit that’s been helping us through the pandemic – and asking what sort of community we want Portobello and Joppa to be and how we get that community involved in thinking about how to achieve all of that.That will be posted wherever you find your podcasts, as well as assorted pages on Facebook and Twitter first thing tomorrow morning.

Road safety - the safety of cyclists in particular - was once again headline news this past week. The tragic death of a cyclist, killed by a lorry, brought into focus yet again just how vulnerable you are on two wheels. That complex junction at the end of Portobello High Street has seen more than its fair share of such tragedies over the years. And as David Calder reports for this week's episode, it's in danger of throwing the Scottish Government and Edinburgh Council's active travel policies into disarray.

In this episode, guests Daisy Narayanan and Dalia Al-Dujaili talk about childhood excitement, happy folders, love over hate and more.Daisy is Director of Urbanism at Sustrans, a charity making it easier for people to walk and cycle. While on secondment to the City of Edinburgh Council between 2018 and 2019, Daisy led the Edinburgh City Centre Transformation project. Dalia is a final year English Literature student who has recently started a platform and newsletter showcasing emerging creatives called MISFiT. She was formerly editor-in-chief at Mxogyny, an online platform for marginalised creatives to share poetry, art and writing related to prevalent social issues. Each episode of Sharing things is a conversation between two members of our university community. It could be a student, a member of staff or a graduate, the only thing they have in common at the beginning is Edinburgh. We start with an object. A special, treasured or significant item that we have asked each guest to bring to the conversation. What happens next is sometimes funny, sometimes moving and always unexpected. Find out more at www.ed.ac.uk/sharing-things-podcast

Sustrans' and Arup's new report, Cycling for Everyone, was published at a time when both the Black Lives Matter movement and the active travel movement are at the forefront of public discussion. Susan Claris is one of the report's authors, and Global Active Travel Leader at Arup, and Daisy Narayanan is Sustrans' Director of Urbanism.Coincidentally launched the day Boris Johnson's government announced its Gear Change document, setting out a path to cycling growth in England, Cycling for Everyone identifies through interviews, data and analysis who is cycling, but also crucially, who isn't, why, and how greater diversity in cycling can be achieved.Cycling in the UK is predominantly white and male: 85% of people aged over 65, as well as around three quarters of disabled people, women, people at risk of deprivation and people from ethnic minority groups, never cycle. Quantitative data can only tell us so much, however, and although different people face different barriers, many of the issues stopping us cycling more are similar, from safety fears, to access and affordability, to perceptions of competence.As Susan Claris puts it, inclusion is more than making things step-free – it's about looking at the impact of infrastructure from the broadest possible perspective. This means where we design our cycling infrastructure, how, and with who in mind - and the report acknowledges we need to do better in our public spaces, and offers some pointers as to how we can do that.Cycling for Everyone provides not only a call to action to level the field for more people to cycle, but a platform to achieve greater diversity in cycling at a time when we could be on the cusp of great leaps in active travel participation and, if we heed the report's lessons, far greater diversity, too.As Daisy Narayanan writes in her forward to the report: "Only by ensuring that voices of underrepresented groups are integrated in policy, planning, design and implementation, can we ensure that we create places that meet the needs of the diversity of people who want to use them."You can read the Cycling for Everyone report here: https://www.sustrans.org.uk/media/7377/cycling_for_everyone-sustrans-arup.pdfTranscript Laura Laker 0:00 Hi and welcome to the Active Travel podcast. Brought to you by the Active Travel Academy, which is part of the University of Westminster in London. I'm Laura Laker, an active travel journalist. Now we know cycling has benefits for physical and mental health as a low cost transport, for independent access to services, work and education, but there are people across society who can't access cycling. The most recent National Travel Attitudes Survey found two thirds of adults feel it's too dangerous to cycle and cycling is still predominantly something done by a small proportion of the population. In other words, it's not very diverse. According to a new report by Sustrans and Arup, Cycling for Everyone. 85% of people over 65, and around three quarters of disabled people, women, people at risk of deprivation and people from ethnic minority groups, never cycle. This report is what we're talking about today, what it tells us about why certain people don't cycle and what can be done to change that. So with me today, is one of the report's authors, Susan Claris, who is the global active travel leader at Arup. Hi, Susan. Susan Claris 1:07 Hello,Laura Laker 1:08 and Daisy Narayanan, who is Sustrans' director of urbanismDaisy Narayanan 1:13 Hi Laura. Laura Laker 1:14 Hi. So, yeah, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's great to have you both on; can you just tell our listeners a little bit about how the report came about, and who it's aimed at.Susan Claris 1:26 It's actually got quite an interesting story because I had to remind myself of this one it was it was actually from the Arup side, it was a colleague who joined us as a graduate back in 2015, and he'd done his dissertation on cycling, and older people. And shortly after joining us he sort of said, you know, there's not much guidance out there, wouldn't it be good if we could actually do something to look into this subject. And it took a bit of while to get it, get it all going but from that we had discussions with Sustrans. And the idea came about drawing on the Sustrans Bike Life data to actually produce his guide that would actually show how cycling can be made more inclusive and really can be made for everyone so that that was the background of it from the Arup side I don't know whether Daisy wants to talk about it from the Sustrans perspective.Daisy Narayanan 2:12 Yeah, I mean, just adding to what he said Susan from a Sustrans perspective, all Sustrans strategic priorities have 'for everyone' at its very heart. So, the whole concept of inclusive design has been something that me and Sustrans are really wanting to focus on, so it is so timely, this conversation with Arup, what bike life was saying to us as well. For the past year, you know, talking about diversity and inclusion and all set within the wider context of climate change, and the whole conversation around black lives matter and inclusion I think this is such a timely report, and you know it's been wonderful working with colleagues at Arup to bring this together.Laura Laker 2:53 It's really exciting isn't it because, as you say, inclusivity has become so much more prominent in public discussion as has the need for cycling infrastructure and active travel infrastructure in general, it feels like these agendas have really, risen just at the time that this report has come out. I know that you're working on it since 2019 and there's been a bunch of stages, including a literature review there was the bike life data, you've had focus groups where you've talked to people about why they don't cycle or why they do, and working out what you can do about that, you've had workshops with decision makers in the transport sector. And there's a database now of case studies of successful projects. And one of the things that Sustrans has found out through its Bike Life surveys, it's not that people don't want to cycle. 55% of people from ethnic minority groups, 38% of people at risk of deprivation 36% of women and 31% of disabled people who don't cycle would like to start. So that's a that's a huge amount. Susan Claris 3:54 I think if those surveys were actually redone now those numbers would be even higher. So if you think those those surveys were pre COVID pre lockdown and we've seen what a huge upsurge there's been an interest in cycling, as I said those numbers I think would be so much higher now.Daisy Narayanan 4:09 Absolutely I couldn't agree more. You know, we've seen that in our own areas and over lockdown we've seen this massive increase in in cycling and all kinds of people cycling, not just the usual people that you expect to see on our road cycling and I think that's been, you know, it's not you can have surveys and reports and all of that out there and statistics, but for me what has been really really powerful about this process is getting stories from people you know just understanding, getting right into the depths of why what the barriers are. And I think that's been really powerful in the report but more than that, you know, as Susan was saying, during lockdown. That's being so visible now, all of us can see how that change is required and people want that change to happen. And that, to me forms, quite a strong foundation for for going forward into policymaking going forward.Laura Laker 5:10 And the report, sort of touches on issues affecting different groups of people as statistics from earlier older people as women as people from ethnic minorities, people with disabilities. And although there are different needs across different groups there is a commonality isn't there there are sort of common themes that come up, and you have to, you know, obviously the roads have been quieter and so a lot of people have been cycling so road safety is going to be one of them. Can you say a bit more about other sort of common themes that we saw across different groups in terms of what's stopping them from cycling what would help them to do so.Susan Claris 5:46 Yeah, I mean in terms of the report we've sort of grouped the actions into into three main areas, so better places is certainly one of those three themes which is about safety, road safety, but it's also about sort of personal safety and harassment. That sadly has come through quite strongly. It is about the importance of cycling infrastructure being fully inclusive. So there's a very strong focus on the places but that it that that's not enough so that's why we focus on the other two key areas which is to be more inclusive in terms of governance and planning and decision making. And then also this welcome and support for for people to cycle. It sort of, it's not just I think we've moved from, you know, a few years ago. Cycling was not much thought about at all then we will onto the wall stick in a cycle lane and tick the box and we've done that. We've moved to well let's count how many people use it. And now we're moving on to saying well actually, you know, who are those people and who aren't those people and I think it's understanding, broadening the understanding of what inclusion is all about. So I think, you know, for TfL, Transport for London, for a long time inclusion has been about making things step-free. Make it step-free, that's inclusion. I think many people who think about it in terms of gender, but actually it's actually looking at it from the broadest possible perspective to make sure it's fully inclusive for everyone, and that's that's a real shift and that's going to take a lot more than, than purely infrastructure, it goes much wider than that.Daisy Narayanan 7:21 And adding to what is missing as well you know there's something about the language we use, and making sure that the imagery that we have, you know, that that talks to cycling is not just you know what you see generally, it has to be truly inclusive, it has to reflect our communities, our places. And again, you know, for me, if you step back and take a look at what what inclusive places means and there is, there is a danger in my mind about the word inclusive becoming, you know, becoming use so much you know it becomes a word like sustainable, or resilient, it becomes one of those words that are used quite often without quite going into the depth of what that means. And again you know what Susan was saying, a place has to be inclusive, it has to be welcoming for everybody regardless of age or race or faith and ability or income, all of that has to be part of it. And cycling that fits into that walking and cycling into that placemaking. And that shift in the narrative has been has been accelerated over the past two to three years. You know the conversations that I'm having here in Scotland, and across the UK I'm sure as well, is reflecting that kind of shift in attitude. And that comes from the report, I think, you know, quite clearly across the themes. Again, going back to what I was saying, there's quite a strong platform for that, you know, for the call to action you know what is our call to action, what are we asking, what are we asking policymakers to do. And I think this kind of shift in narrative is has been so critical and so crucial to that.Laura Laker 9:08 And as a delivery body Sustrans is obviously involved with a lot of local councils and local authorities, and in creating infrastructure for cycling and walking and I wonder what kind of impact this information is going to have what what you mean when you talk about inclusive spaces and how that will translate to physical space.Daisy Narayanan 9:29 It is already making a huge difference, you know it helps policymakers, it helps councillors, local councillors to say look people want this. This is what surveys are saying this is what they are telling us to do they want us to make spaces better for walking and cycling, but it also helps officials who are actually going out and building this, it helps engineers who are designing this this infrastructure that goes into a place or the design of a place. And finally, it helps, I think it helps, people to come together, it helps a community engagement process, where you can truly get people together to shape what the place looks like and to me that is so crucial. And that's something that we haven't got right and you know we've talked about this before we have to acknowledge where we, we need to do better. And I think what this report does is acknowledge that. and see, here's how we can go, we can do better.Laura Laker 10:34 And, yeah, like you say it's it's about having communities, having a say in what's happening and not just a small percentage of people.Daisy Narayanan 10:44 It has to reflect, the communities, absolutely, it has to reflect the people who live there and work there you know whatever the context of the place that we're talking about whether it's city or town or neighbourhood, the people who shape that place, so when you look at what needs to go in. It has to reflect the aspirations, and has to reflect the vision of what what people see their places to be, and cycling is such a big part of that,Laura Laker 11:10 you said in your foreword to the report about a lack of diversity in transport planning and how you're not only often the only woman you're the only person from an ethnic minority in the room.Daisy Narayanan 11:23 Absolutely, yes, you know, I remember going to meetings, and I joined Sustrans in 2012. So, you know, this is, eight years ago almost, and almost every meeting I was the lone woman or the lone person of colour, sat there and I remember going to a meeting once and someone asked if I was here to take notes. And I said, no I'm here to chair the meeting. So there's a perception around transport, that is, you know, macho and it's transport and I think what to me is so encouraging and so incredible. And Susan I'm sure you you've seen this in your experience as well you know the change in more women coming forward, you know, change and more of us having that having the strength to come forward and say this isn't right. And we need to we need to do better.Laura Laker 12:18 Yeah, and Susan you've talked about how we count cycling, and the report talks about this as well about how it's been about increasing numbers in the past and how that hasn't really served in terms of improving diversity perhaps you could tell us a bit more about that and what needs to change.Susan Claris 12:35 Yeah, So, I think you know just just counting the number of cycles using a facility. It's good to see those numbers go up, but actually it's important to look behind those numbers and see. I said, who it is cycling and but also as importantly, who isn't cycling and who could benefit from that so it isn't purely a numbers game and you know having counters on cycleways and seeing the amount of usage is great, but it's that's only part of the picture and I think what the report shows is this big unmet demand for cycling, which I think will be even higher now following following covid and lockdown. And it's how we actually make cycling more accessible for people both physically and culturally how they can how people can see it as something that they that they can do themselves you know so often the image is you know, and I ban colleagues from using the word bicycle you know try and talk about cycles to be more inclusive and, you know, the imagery and this was true when the obesity strategy came out and the GPs to prescribe cycling. Virtually all the news articles that accompanied that were of a, you know, a man on a bike, white of a certain age, you know, a lot of people they'd look at that and I think well if that's if that cycling that's not for me. And so I think it's it's it's just making it accessible and achievable and realistic for people, I think, is getting people to start either either people who haven't cycled for a long time maybe they cycled as children but haven't carried on in adults, or if someone's never cycled, you know it's like where do you start, it's immensely difficult because you're not gonna go out and spend, potentially hundreds of pounds on a bike. And you know, so it's that what is your entry point into cycling and I think that's where hire schemes or lessons and things can really help because for some people, they may not like it, it may not be for them so actually, a way of way of trying it and seeing how people get on with it in a supportive environment with supportive people, because, you know, a colleague of mine actually, in lockdown, I guess she's early 30s. She just recently learned to cycle, you know, and I think that's quite a big thing for an adult to learn to cycle, most of us do it when you kids and you fall off and you grade yourself and you know that's part of growing up but to actually, you know, do that as an adult, is, is a big step and I think it's brilliant she took a week off and you know she wasn't going anywhere. She couldn't travel so she was like, Well what can I do happen to coincide with a bike being on her streets, with a sign saying free to a good home. And it was like well this is a sign I need to learn to cycle, but it's it's a really, it's a really difficult. I think you know, don't underestimate that by any means.Daisy Narayanan 15:19 Absolutely. I think these stories are so powerful. When we run. One of the workshops we ran in Glasgow, as part of the reporting. There was a councilllor from Edinburgh Council, Councillor McInnes who spoke at that. And she talked about you know how she's in her late 50s, and she's very vocal about how she had cycled for over 30 years, and she was quite nervous about getting back on a bike, but then she's you know she had she felt the pressure as she put it to be seen on a bike. So she then she. The next step was to buy a buy, and then she says it's quite intimidating going into a shop, when you don't know anything about where you begin as. Where do you begin? So all of those steps were little barriers and she had to push through those and then finally she now commutes over 10 miles, well pre-lockdown, to the city chambers and back and she says it's completely changed her. How, how she looks at how she looks at her place actually because suddenly you see the batteries for yourself and as a Transport Convener how powerful is that? You can do that so I think it's, there's something so good about having these stories out there. And, you know, being able to talk about this. This is about people, isn't it, at the end of the day it's about people and cycling is, is the framework, on which we're talking about people's lives, and this.Laura Laker 16:47 And I guess I guess the temptation is that if you're if you've got a certain amount of money for cycling that you will do a linear route, as you've seen in the past from a wealthy area to city centre area, and you know it's like the low hanging fruit of cycling you know for a certain amount of money you'll get X number of people cycling they probably already got bikes they're already confident enough on the road to link up missing bits and that's what we've seen in a lot of cities around the UK. But I guess it's, it's so much harder to sort of look at, like, all of the different barriers that people face the argument that the report makes is that the people who have the greatest barriers should be the kind of focus is there potential people that can benefit the most.Susan Claris 17:26 Yeah, and I think looking at neighbourhood areas I mean as you say that the temptation is always to go for the radial routes and the commuting routes and I think that's the whole 'we design in our own image' and this is set out really powerfully in the book Invisible Women, you know, but actually, the more important things I think are the you know, are the local areas or neighbourhood areas half of all our trips are for leisure and shopping. So we should be focusing on those, only 15% of trips are for commuting. So I think actually sort of focusing on the commuting route is not the wrong thing to do but it's not the only thing we should be doing, and actually looking at making neighbourhoods better for cycling, you know, having cycle parking whether it's at shops or in people's homes, you know, particularly in areas, I mean, for me, one of the worst aspects of street design are cul de sacs, you know, looking at how you can work on housing estates designed around cul de sacs to make better routes for cycling so you don't have to follow the wiggly routes that cars follow so it's it's looking at some of those areas and then people might be encouraged to start cycling from their home. Maybe to begin with, they go to the local shops and then they find that quite useful, they go a little bit further and they go a bit further and it builds people's confidence, rather than actually sort of taking a, you know, a radial route into a town or city centre and focusing on that. Laura Laker 18:41 Yeah, and when you start to understand people different people's trips, so women as the report notes, women do a lot of trip chaining so it's you going one place you're doing something you're moving on to the next place, perfect for cycling and in the Netherlands more women cycle than men, Susan Claris 18:54 And older womenLaura Laker 18:54 And just doing these yeah and just by just doing these, these linear routes, you're basically designing everyone else out you're excluding everyone else and then people say that Cycling is white and male and middle class and it's because those are the kind of cyclists that we're designing for. And so in terms of measurement, we've, we've talked about how quantitative measurements are obviously not helping diversity. I know that the Leeds-Bradford cycle route was specifically built in an area that is low income households and poor transport links, and they've done a lot of qualitative work but I think they're in the minority there. What would good look like in this sense?Daisy Narayanan 19:37 One of the examples I can give you from, from up here in Scotland in Scotland Sustrans works with Scottish government and we deliver funding in partnership with local authorities to build walking and cycling infrastructure. And over the past couple of years as the programme has grown, it's called Places for Everyone, the focus has been on more deprived areas and the research and monitoring unit that work alongside the project delivery team, you know, are very very conscious that the for everyone piece is very much part of the monitoring. So to me that's quite, again, it's an example of how, you know, process can help. If you get your right processes in place to make sure that you're measuring the right thing, then that can then encourage everyone to do better. It depends on the context, which is different places will have different ways of measurement and different ways of what you see good looking likeLaura Laker 20:34 potentially the people with the greatest barriers and just thinking about investment and return on investment, which is something we're kind of obsessed with, In a way, certain groups or excluded groups are excluded because the. The benefits are external to transport so transport is almost a siloed thing that needs to make its own money in a way which doesn't make any sense because it's such a public good isn't it is especially when we talk about active transport it's, it's the physical activity benefits and often it's the people with greatest barriers, people who aren't getting exercise people with poor transport links, poor access to work and education, for whom the benefits will be greatest. So it's kind of harder to do but if you're looking in the round. There's just so much more benefit for society potentially.Susan Claris 21:17 And I think that's where it brings in the walking and cycling angle as well because cycling was featured quite heavily in the obesity strategy but i think you know recognising that telling someone who doesn't currently ride a bike to go and ride a bike is a very difficult ask and if there's someone who is overweight or obese then that's probably an even harder ask but I think if it can be in terms of increasing physical activity, walking and cycling the two go together really well, you know, and it always interests me that Sustrans' National Cycle Network is usable by people walking them by cycling so I think it's having active travel routes and promoting both walking and cycling, just as ways of being active and you know it isn't it isn't badging someone as a cyclist it's looking at people as people and those people walk sometimes it may cycle sometimes they might drive a car they might get on a bus, you know, people do all of those different things. But the key message is actually about, you know, promoting the active, the active side of it because of all the benefits it brings physical health and mental health.Daisy Narayanan 22:19 Absolutely and again, to your point Laura about the wellbeing aspect not being captured and when you measure the impact the project has; in Edinburgh in a project called the city centre transformation when I was in secondment to the council here for 18 months, and we were very clear from the beginning that we were not going to use the traditional methods of stag or the transport appraisal survey, you have to be under the umbrella of quality of life and quality of place. And that was quite an interesting process to see how you can put value to green space and to active places. And I think there's something quite exciting about how the work is starting to take shape, where, you know, yes you do the transport appraisals but then over that you layer in your wellbeing and your, you know, physical and mental health and your green spaces. And yeah, I guess the next step that we all need to take forward.Susan Claris 23:12 I think it's interesting in a way it can come from from other projects as well. So one of my favourite projects in our Arup is one we've got called Greener Grangetown which was down in Cardiff. And that actually started off as a drainage study. And then the idea was to put in greenery to help with drainage and that's what actually if we're putting in greenery, maybe we put in some, you know, walking and cycling as well and that the benefits just cascade in that way so is walking and cycling projects can come from unusual areas sometimes.Daisy Narayanan 23:39 I love that project, it's gorgeous.Laura Laker 23:42 We have one near me in Stratford actually that has an a lot of drainage with plants in and it's really nice to cycle pastSusan Claris 23:49 Rain gardensLaura Laker 23:49 That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it's really lovely actuallyDaisy Narayanan 23:57 We have that a lot during consultation for most projects. That's something that comes back so strongly. You want greener spaces you want to be able to access within five minutes, your local park or you want to have greenery and colour and wildflowers and all of that speaks to us as humans.Laura Laker 24:17 Yeah, there's a lot of temporary changes happening and in terms of temporary cycling infrastructure and presumably a lot of that is going to become permanent and there's a real opportunity isn't there to make our cities more resilient in terms of climate change and creating shade which is so important in creating better drainage, because water runoff is a massive problem with extreme weather. And, yeah, just that reallocation of road space from motor vehicles.There's been a lot of announcements from government, as we know, we've had Gear Change which is the government's vision for cycling we've had proposed highway code changes. And we have had new design guidance and obviously there's a lot happening with COVID, in terms of an emergency response for transport; I'm wondering how all of this kind of feeds in to this agenda of making cycling more diverse,Susan Claris 25:11 I think, i mean i think it's really timely I mean the fact that our report came out on the same day as Gear Change is a complete fluke because I think we chose the publication date back in March or something so it's just one of those really happy coincidences that it came out on the same day so I mean I really welcome all the policy announcements that are being made and you know it is it is a great sort of step forward compared to where, where we've been over the last few years. I think the big thing is what happens next because we've had all this good stuff in terms of Gear Change but then we have the planning reforms and the potential relaxation of planning. So it's like one part of government is saying all the good stuff about active transport but if there is then a relaxation, how do we actually make sure that when developments are planned that they are planned with walking and cycling in from the outset, and we don't end up with some of the housing developments that we've got now that are totally inaccessible by public transport or by active modes so I think that's there's a lot of welcome but there's a degree of caution there as well.Daisy Narayanan 26:12 I agree with that, and I think what for me is, is very encouraging about the Gear Change report is the language around it, it's quite directive, which I don't think we've had so far which I think is quite good. I'm also encouraged by the fact that it's not just the UK government that has announced increased investment for walking and cycling you can see Scottish Government, Wales, Northern Ireland, for the first time I think across the across devolved nations and the UK government. There's a real sense of we need to invest more in walking and cycling. And, you know, when you look at the whole picture. It's really important as Susan said to get the right to get the next stage right, make sure that the words that are put into policy are translated on the ground because the delivery on the ground is going to be for the local authorities, for boroughs, and we have to make sure that that disconnect is as small as possible, because you see that a lot, you know, the right words are being used, but then you see something on the ground and you just go that's not what it's meant to be. So I think that there's a piece of work there about that about local authorities being empowered to do what national policy is telling them to do.Laura Laker 27:25 Yeah, there's a lot of that isn't this these wonderful statements about putting pedestrians and people cyling first, and it just doesn't happen in the real world and one of the things in your report one of the three elements for targeted changes are governance planning and decision making. So I guess I guess that's, that's going to be there isn't it it's going to be about putting that into practice which is which is perhaps the hardest part it's easy to say something is harder to do itDaisy Narayanan 27:56 That's why you need the grassroots community. The community to feel empowered to to ask for that change because then then change happens at that local level. And when that then marries up with the national policy, then you can generally make magic happen.Susan Claris 28:15 I think that thing about think about support is really important because you know we've seen that it's always the people who are against schemes who shout the loudest, there was the recent YouGov poll that was showing that you know for every person against there's six and a half people supporting these schemes, but you don't tend to hear that voice. We know with some low traffic neighbourhoods that are going in, they're being badged as road closures, there are some quite vociferous lobbies typically from people outside of the area who come in to oppose, and you know it's very easy for a politician to hear the negative voice and not to hear that support and if the support is maybe coming from older people maybe they're not so engaged in the process. So I think we need a better mechanism for all people's voices to be heard, whether they're for or against rather than the vocal minority in either way, being dominant.Daisy Narayanan 29:04 I completely agree, and I mean I think more and more you're seeing that seeing the backlash against some of the temporary schemes you mentioned Laura, because, you know, things have been put in quite quickly and you know they're not the most beautiful, you know they're cones or wands, and that that doesn't provide the vision of what that street could look like when it's done well with thought and care. So there is, there needs to be that communication of what this specific temporary measure is about and how that then leads to the wider vision that everyone has to feed into and what it could be. So yeah absolutely the process of as Susan was saying there needs to be a better mechanism because we've got that quite right. Laura Laker 29:45 Yeah, because if what's happening now is being called out undemocratic in places in terms of temporary infrastructure going in before consultation takes place or the temporary infrastructure being there during the consultation, it gives everyone a chance to see it on the ground, and we know that having a car dominatedstreet is not an equitable place but at the same time having these consultations, which perhaps only highlight the voices of the vocal minority isn't necessarily democratic representation of who's for and against something it is quite a difficult one really isn't it because of the fundamental change and changes to our physical streets, it's never going to be easy is itDaisy Narayanan 30:24 Absolutely, I've got scars on my back and inbox to show thatSusan Claris 30:29 for people who aren't currently cycling which we know is a large part of the population, they're not going to be out there probably giving support for something to benefit cycling because they don't see themselves as a cyclist so they don't necessarily see that as of relevance to them alone benefiting them. So it is, it is very hard to actually get that support for something that you're not currently doing and you don't see as relevant to youDaisy Narayanan 30:57 know if you, if you are frail and if you have a physical or sensory impairment of any kind change is scary. Change is scary anyway but for someone who iss already feeling their lives are not what it should be, this kind of change is scary so I think there is something about the empathy that we need to have when we talk about projects like this it's not, it's not just this needs to be done because x y z. It's like let's do this together. And it sounds very motherhood and apple pie but I think if we get that right if we get that conversation right at the beginning, then we can save ourselves a huge amount of angst later on in the process.Laura Laker 31:38 The third element to these three recommendations is welcoming and supporting all people to cycle and I guess, perhaps you're arguing that this has to be from the beginning, Daisy Narayanan 31:48 yesSusan Claris 31:49 yeah I think it's I mean it's talking about the language and the imagery that we've already talked about, but I think also it's the cost and the barriers to getting getting a cycle So, you know, cycles generally are not cheap and so there can be an issue around cost and availability. But I think it's also in the report draws on the whole purchasing experience, and a very brief story if I may, my, my background is partly in anthropology. And one of the best studies I saw about the value of urban anthropology, it was it was conducted by Shimano and it was a quite a few years ago, and they were looking at, this was in America, why certain groups of people don't cycle, and the view was that they were too lazy, too fat, too whatever, didn't care. When, the anthropoologists went out and spoke to these people they said they've all had really positive associations with with cycling when they were children, but then they didn't see it as something that were relevant when they were older and they said if they went into cycle shops they found a very hostile environment. So they then talked to people in the cycle shops and they went, oh no no it's not hostile we welcome everybody you know, everybody is welcome here. So then what they did is they gave the people working in cycle shops $100 or something and told them they had to go to a department store and buy certain types of cosmetics. And when they walked into that department store they absolutely felt the discomfort that other people felt walking, and that's how they really got it that actually their place wasn't as welcoming as they thought it was so it's always trying to see something from the insider's viewpoint and I said, you know, cycle shops are not always a happy place or comfortable place to be if you're not part of that, that sort of type of people already, you know, so it's like it's a big step for someone who doesn't cycle and cycling now is quite technical and it's complex and you know what you've lost a lot of is basic bikes, a lot of people they don't want 21 gears, they don't know what to do with them. So they certainly don't want to start with 21 gears you know what, where, where is the basic bike gone that can give people that entry into cycling so I think that's, that's really important so people can actually get a cycle and then have some training on how to use it.Daisy Narayanan 33:55 Absolutely. And I think we also talked so much about safety and you know, we talk about cycling within transport terms quite a lot. I think we don't talk enough about the joy and delight. That cycling brings to you, And, you know, I got an ebike a year, a year and a bit ago and I love it. There is that sense of joy that comes with it, and I think the more we can talk about you know, this makes you feel good is, is as relevant to saying it makes you feel safe, it's good for your health and well being and the climate and all of that. Yeah, I don't think we should forget the joy.Laura Laker 34:34 Yeah, I remember being in Edinburgh. Last year, actually, I was going on a little biking trip and I borrowed an electric mountain bike, and I was whizzing through town it had nice fat tires so I didn't have to worry about the tram tracks, you know, Edinburgh is just full of trams. And then there was a guy next to me at the lights on this hill, up hill, and I just looked across at him and I was like, e-mountain bike best thing ever and he was like Yeah. And we both just whizzed off.Daisy Narayanan 35:07 Edinburgh is a city of seven hills and an ebike flattens the hills in Edinburgh i can ride around and not feel like I'm about to die.Laura Laker 35:17 Yeah, I love absolutely love I've got an ebike as well and I absolutely love it. And it really does make it more accessible to so many more people for many so many reasons. Maybe I can ask you what you want the report to achieve. Maybe a big question or an obvious question. Susan Claris 35:34 I think, from my perspective I would like it to help decision makers politicians transport planners all the sort of people that are likely to read it actually realise that Cycling is for everyone. And I said to get rid of the conventional image of a person typically a man on a bike, and realise that actually cycling embraces all these different types of people and should embrace all these different types of people well you know from the five to 105 not even eight to 80 sort of thing so it is a viable form of transport for the majority of the population. And we just need to actually help that become real. And as Daisy said I think bringing the joy back into cycling as well so yes it's a great mode of transport from A to B, but it's so much more than that. But it yeah it is that cycling should be and is for everybody.Daisy Narayanan 36:30 Yeah, and just to add to this from my perspective there's also. I'm hoping that this report can accelerate change that needs to happen because I think we've demonstrated that change needs to happen, and people want change. So what this should do is now get that in motion get that really fast and from a personal perspective I hope that it also allows people to reflect on you know on attitudes, on how we how we perceive cycling. What do we think about when we talk about inclusive cycling, and even within Sustrans to challenge ourselves to be better and to make sure that the For Everyone, that we want to be at the heart of everything we do. It's truly at the heart of what we do. And so yeah so external and internal, I think there is some reflection and then there is a lot of acceleration.Laura Laker 37:22 Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that stuck out from me in the report was you know just admitting that we've got things wrong and you know looking around at the people cycling generally speaking it's It is, it is a very narrow portion of the of society who feels brave enough is what it boils down to, to cycle on the roads and so obviously something has gone wrong, and I think is a chance for reflection and to move forward. So, yeah, super important report and really nice to talk to you both. I wonder if there's anything else that you wanted to say that you feel that we've missed out.Daisy Narayanan 38:07 I think from my perspective nothing much more to add, except that I love the fact that we have three women here talking about cycling. Yeah, which I think is is brilliant. And, you know, that this is even on the agenda and the cycling is so different when I joined Sustrans in 2012, as an architect slightly naive thinking I'm going to go to the world of walking and cycling, it's going to be amazing, no one can be angry in this world. It has been quite a learning process over the past eight years, but I think we're at the cusp of something quite incredible. And, yeah, the more we can collaborate and make that happen, I'm really excited for the future.Susan Claris 38:54 I think for me it's it's broadening the scope of cycling because so often it's associated with a sport and it's seen as a sporty activity. And I think the more we can just see it as something for, you know, everybody and something that you don't need a lot of kit for. It doesn't have to be fast it doesn't have to be competitive. You know it is almost that that that joy of the self-propelled transport, but getting getting away from the sporty side of it I think that that helps a lot because as soon as, as long as people see it as a sporty thing, they probably don't see it as relevant to themselves so it's almost getting back to. It's almost viewing the bicycle, and cycling the old fashioned way i think it's it's that different image.Laura Laker 39:38 Wonderful. Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast it's been great to hear from you. Susan Claris 39:44 Thanks Laura, it's lovely to talk to you.Daisy Narayanan 39:44 Thank youLaura Laker 39:44 Thank you for listening to the active travel podcasts lucky seventh episode with Sustrans' director of urbanism, Daisy Narayanan, Arup's global active travel lead, Susan Claris, and me, your host Laura Laker. You can find and subscribe to the active travel podcast online on our website at blog.westminster.ac.uk/ata/podcast, and you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram @active_ata. Let us know what you think, via social media or by emailing us at activetravelacademy@westminster.ac.uk . Thanks for listening; until next time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A cathedral at the edge of time, at the end of the world. A few hundred cling to life within its thick, safe walls. Humanity’s final outpost. The cathedral bells ring out in the hopes of finding more lost souls to bring to sanctuary but is there anyone actually left to save?  The Breakfast Plays: New Tracks are generously supported by the Noël Coward Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust. The Traverse Theatre is funded by Creative Scotland and The City of Edinburgh Council, with additional support from The Scottish Government Performing Arts Venues Relief Fund.

Two co-workers meet in the staff room of a non-descript corporate office. As one colleague struggles with current events across the Atlantic hitting home, the other is tasked with assessing her mental fitness. Uma Nada-Rajah’s The Watercooler addresses racism with a searing streak of surrealism. The Breakfast Plays: New Tracks are generously supported by the Noël Coward Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust. The Traverse Theatre is funded by Creative Scotland and The City of Edinburgh Council, with additional support from The Scottish Government Performing Arts Venues Relief Fund.

21st December 2012, the day the world was meant to end. The day a cult leader’s apocalyptic predictions failed. Faye and Felix devoted themselves to a doomsday that didn’t come and now, having seen the world get continually worse over the past nine years, they’re confronting their former leader with their findings. The Breakfast Plays: New Tracks are generously supported by the Noël Coward Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust. The Traverse Theatre is funded by Creative Scotland and The City of Edinburgh Council, with additional support from The Scottish Government Performing Arts Venues Relief Fund.

Dead in the woods, Ren of Ord clears her windpipe of soil, earth and rot. Sworn to enact vengeance, she rises to protect her land and her sisterhood from the fate that befell her that day upon the hill. Rabbit Catcher is a lyrical, mythical lore set within the dark, dense woods of Ord Hill, Inverness. The Breakfast Plays: New Tracks are generously supported by the Noël Coward Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust. The Traverse Theatre is funded by Creative Scotland and The City of Edinburgh Council, with additional support from The Scottish Government Performing Arts Venues Relief Fund.

Some of the most exciting active travel research is done as part of a PhD, and this is our first Active Travel Podcast to showcase a couple of recent PhD studies.These two projects, from Dr. Katja Leyendecker and Dr. Emma Mbabazi, use qualitative methods to dig into the how and the why of travel. Katja's project tackled questions around policy, advocacy, and governance, with a mix of methods from retrospective video diaries to semi-structured interviews. Emma conducted over 80 in-depth interviews with commuters, to get their ‘mobility biographies', i.e. how transport has fitted in with their lives, and vice versa, over time. They're both very different projects, but each tells us a lot about how and why things change – or (perhaps more often) don't change. Katja's work can be found at https://katsdekker.wordpress.com/ , including blogs and links to her published thesis and articles.Emma's LinkedIn page, with info and article links, is here https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmerentian-mbabazi-ab6b7459/?originalSubdomain=ug, and her PhD thesis is here https://www.ros.hw.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10399/3292/MbabaziE_1216_egis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=yTRANSCRIPTRachel 00:01Hello, and welcome to the Active Travel Podcast. I'm Rachel Aldred and I'm the director of the Active Travel Academy. And in this episode I'll be talking to Dr. Katja Leyendecker and Dr. Emma Mbabazi about their two PhD research projects. PhDs involve somebody focusing on the topic for at least three years and doing some really in-depth innovative research. So I wanted the Active Travel Podcast to also capture some of this and translate it into a form that hopefully people will be able to engage with over around half an hour of conversation with the person who did the PhD. Katja's PhD focuses on cycling, advocacy and activism and transport planning, and Emma's focuses on commuting behaviour, and what are called travel scripts. In the first half I talk to Katja and in the second half to Emma in the about their different but complementary PhDs, both using these really exciting and in-depth qualitative methods. I hope you enjoy it. Very excited to have with me today Katja Leyendecker, who completed her PhD last year in 2019, which is on cycling advocacy, activism and policy. And so hello, Katja really pleased that you're with us.Katja 01:16I'm certainly the one who was pleased, Rachel. Great. It's great to be here.Rachel 01:20Brilliant. So I've got some fairly general questions. And we'll kind of drill down into bits of the thesis as we go. But I wonder if we could just start by because you had maybe a slightly unconventional path to the PhD as well. A lot of people do. So I'm just wondering when you started the PhD, and before you started the PhD, so maybe four or five years ago, maybe even longer when you're thinking about doing a PhD? What motivated you? Was it a sudden decision or something you'd been thinking about for a while?Katja 01:52I started thinking about, let's call it going back to university. When I was still working as an engineer, so, I came out of these kinds of technical – I'm a civil engineer by training. So it's all about the applied natural sciences, big data sets, and I worked in water engineering, which certainly had to do with big data sets and analysing them, and it was numbers and figures was my life. Engineers get themselves into these careers of team leaders, project managers, programme managers, and that was part of what I did as well. But I had started to be a bit uncertain about how the future would pan out. That it felt as if there was a almost like a bit of a dead end. It was interesting to be in engineering to start with, I think I'm someone who always likes the excitement of something new, I like starting new things as well as I might add that here as well as finishing them! So it's not that I'm one of these kind of starting off projects and finishing nothing kind of person.I kind of looked ahead in engineering and couldn't really see where I was going and was slightly kind of started to be disillusioned. And it was a time of my life where I also felt being a woman in engineering is hard work. There's a lot of inequalities in that and it's often quite difficult to talk about them as well because if the field is not prepared to listen and to receive maybe a bit of mild criticism and deal with it flexibly, you know, it can be unwelcoming, and that's kind of what it felt to me at the time. And so I started looking at what's going to be my next step. And bearing in mind I was let's say 37,38 at the time that I started to think like that. And yeah so there was always the open mind to well, I've got a master's degree, go to university do another master's degree, a PhD sounds great actually, now that I think about it and and as I've always found in my life anyways, that when you start to think about something and then talk about it as well, sooner or later, some doors open and that's happened to me here that I got together with Seraphim Alvanides, who works at Northumbria University and is also interested in geography and the sociology of cycling and especially the big data streams of it. And we started to think about how we could get me into university. And that was our little project for a couple of years. And eventually it, it turned out to be the case that I had written a PhD proposal. I applied for it, interviewed for it, and it was supposed to be about infrastructure, women and space and politics. And, and that's where I started. I was 42 at the time, I was just almost on my 42nd birthday that I started my PhD jungle journey. And yeah, and that's how I got into it so sort of developed over the years and became more and more possible. And then really concrete in the end and that was exciting and scary, huh?Rachel 06:05Wow. Yeah. And that this sort of this specific idea of the PhD was something presumably very linked to some of the advocacy and activism that you were doing yourself as well as to some extent your engineering, the engineering experience.Katja 06:19Definitely. I realised Of course, later on that my mind was quite heavily shaped by my engineering training. But also when I started the PhD, it came about because I was interested in in cycle activism so nothing to do with water engineering at all, nothing with engineering and not much with water, either. And, yeah, that was the starting point for that, that in 2010. I was really starting to be frustrated and disillusioned with Newcastle Council and the politics that happened there around transport. And I had started to form a campaign, co-founded a campaign with Claire Prosper in Newcastle. So two of us got together, and then set up a petition had garnered 800 signatures, handed it over to the council. That's kind of the history to that before my kind of disillusionment started, but nothing is happening. Yeah, everything's so clear, we need to do something, we need to devise ways of getting out of this and allocating space to cycling and walking and yeah, it was the activism that got me into university it was the activism that that Seraphim and I collaborated on. That was the point where it came together.Rachel 08:04So that motivated you to sort of study it to study the activism and the advocacy and to learn more about it through the PhD?Katja 08:11Definitely. Well, that's that's almost, two years into the PhD because I got into the whole thing, with an engineering mindset, technical figures, numbers, and let's create some data sets and let's analyse them and it took me two years to figure out and it's not, through the lack of helping from others, from university folks, it took me for me personally to understand these two years to, to see that it's the activism that really interests me in it. It's the activism, how it clashes with the politics for transport that interests me as well as being a woman campaigner interested me in it as well, because we've had all sorts of talks about such as me being a woman in this, that makes it so difficult or where does it all come from? And yeah, so yet again, another not so straightforward pathway, it started off with me doing a lot of reading, talking to people, the term ethnography started to come up. And I started in something that for an engineer, ethnography, that's wholly sitting in sociology, it had nothing to do with me. And it took ages. If I look at it, through really rather critical eyes, it took kind of two years for me to have the confidence to understand ethnographic methods, feminist methods, critical theory methods, as well as you going one step beyond, which is using not just ethnography, but also ethnography. So, that was yet another final step that I, that I took. And I have to say, I mean Rosie Parnell, my supervisor, she was just, so helpful. And so patient I mean, Seraphim was patient as well, with this, this journey that I underwent. And Rosie really supported me in auto ethnography, and not just supported me, but made me understand, the important aspects of it, what I should focus on, sort of slashed the pathway free a little bit for me so that I could start to look ahead and so whilst I say it's my own journey, in the end, there were so many people sitting on the sidelines, kind of cheering me along, and really helping me and, kind of the research community as well as the activists and so many different aspects coming together that meet the PhD so multitudinous somehow as well, that's quite a few aspects in it that needed to be brought together.Rachel 11:18Yes, I mean, and that's one of the things that I found most fascinating about it was this intense mix of qualitative methods and I've dabbled a little bit with ethnography, but nothing like the intensity of what you've done. So I wondered if you could describe, for the podcast listeners who may not be familiar with this kind of methods what you specifically did in this?Katja 11:39And now just pearls of sweat start forming on my head!Yes. So that's, there's various strands to what I did. And it had to do with that I had to sort of Hoover up, I felt, quite a few years of campaigning. It was at a certain time, say 2017 that I started to get really serious about data collection. And luckily, and it had nothing to do with my PhD as such in the beginning, but I had written started writing a blog, just for my own gratification in many ways, for my self-development. I started writing that in 2015. So, I have two years' worth of blogs, blog posts, that I could analyse, it turned out to be over 100,000 words, really interesting analysis, it was a PhD in itself, when you just look at the sheer number of words. So I started looking at, very, very, let's say, conventional methods of, what are the themes in here, what did I talk about? How can I group these into themes and subsets of it? So that was really lucky that I had that data set there. But that still didn't cover anything before 2015 as such, and I started campaigning with my co-conspirators in Newcastle in particularly Claire and then later on Sally in Newcastle in 2010. So I had to find the method I thought of getting that down somewhere, gathering that and as well as analysing it, what is it that happened there? So I devised a method of a sort of retrospective video diary, I called it going back through old emails, and that was really lucky that I'm, I kept emails, the campaigning emails and that's helped to find a method of condensing them and analysing them. And the condensing happened by sitting down through 2017 every day to record three minutes worth of a summary that happened in a week's worth of campaigning, to get to grips with these kind of 5,6,7 years, and by recording a week's worth every day, for three minutes for a year, I got to these, what turned out to be 17 hours for me talking about campaigning and activism. And I could listen to that again and then sift through, and that was really interesting sift through the kind of emotional aspect that happened in it. What's what were the things that really riled me up or elated me, or what was it that really then alongside that happened, so to kind of sift through that. I don't want to talk down the emotions here at all. I think it's really important for what I was trying to do, to use those as kind of guideposts to the key things that happened, at least to my mind. And yes, I went through that process and as you can imagine, when I said about the blog posts, a hundred thousand words read through, that was 18 hours to listen for, not just once but maybe second time, third time, sometimes just letting things play in the background and you'll be alerted to: oh, you seem to be, something is really happening here. That seems to get a hold of you and go back. Listen to it again. What is it that you're trying to say here? And then doing something similar again? What are the themes here? What happened here? What is? What is the nub, what, what's the what's the key aspects? And? And yeah, so I started to have the blog post and the themes in the video diary and the themes that started to grow up through that. As well as a timeline of campaigning events, the video diary was very helpful for that as well. And then yeah, so alongside that, or maybe even before that I had started look at policy, Newcastle transport policies. And in my research, I do speak German as well as English, so it would be good - I have to say Seraphim was really helpful, he said if you speak German you have to use that somehow, not everyone can go to Germany and speak to Germans in their own language. I mean that's an asset, do it! And I had campaigning friends in Bremen, which is a city in North Germany, a big German cycling city with 25% of all trip cycled so, a real cycle city, especially from a UK perspective. And I had started to, look at Bremen a little bit and started to look at the policy there and the start of a policy comparison and it ended up, it wasn't specifically devised to be as such but it ended up in the PhD. And it also ended up as a as a book chapter in a book edited by Cox and Koglin. The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure. So that's another thing that, kind of puzzle piece that fell into place by just being interested in background analysis, I thought, which policy analysis was to me that. That in itself, though, is not a primary, produced data set, it's data that's already out there in the public domain that ended up as another chapter. So another data stream that was analysed. And then yeah, then I talked to women campaigners in Germany as well as in the UK, specifically, of course in Newcastle as well as Bremen But yeah, I talked to women campaigners with long extensive interviews again analysed for themes and understanding of what is it that happens here and also talked to Newcastle as well as Bremen, decision makers, a politician in each city and a transport officer, senior transport officer in each city as well. And that I think concludes the data in my PhD. So, it came together from various sources.Rachel 19:31Yes, I mean, it's an incredible amount of data. And did you get the idea of the retrospective video diary from somewhere else, was there other research that had influenced you on that?Katja 19:44It's, it didn't as such, very loosely though. I mean, I grabbed myself a couple of Sage publications, Sage is quite a good publisher for methods, for methodology. And I had started reading around there, what methods are, what methodologies are, again, always with a background of, some sort of - what's the feminist aspect in this, and it came through that. But as such, when I went to start looking at, it came to me, let's just put it like that, metaphysically it came to me that this would be right for what I was trying to do, namely, get this retrospectively understood what happened. As well as kind of having some sort of raw bits in there, raw feelings and emotions not being lost and not just being a technical analysis of it. It seemed to be just what was the right thing to do and it kind of it was cobbled together as such. Helpful for and very useful for what I was trying to do. But when I started looking at how to describe what I was doing, I couldn't really find anything. I mean that there's blogs, and academics have written about blogs and how our blogs are really useful. And academics have written about diaries and how they're useful. And they might well be video diaries but it might not be about this kind of retrospective diary. There were always aspects of it, which weren't quite there. So it was different pieces put together, which I still think is quite good, for what I was trying to achieve. And it kind of did the job for that. So it was right and that's kind of one feminist aspect in it. Don't be constrained, know what you're trying to do. Not where you're trying to end up, you know, that's always a different thing, more what you're trying to do. And then the method is supposed to help you along with that, rather than that there's this very set, a set of methods and that's the only toolbox you've got. No, methods are also mix and match as long as you can explain what you've done. And if it's open and transparent, always, where you're coming from as a researcher as well, and what you're trying to achieve with it, then mix and match is definitely a good way to go.Rachel 22:31That sounds like excellent advice to me. So what would you say the sort of central puzzle that you were solving with all this data? what's what's the central question that kept you going?Katja 22:43Yeah, I started campaigning and as I said, with a very technical mindset, and I had not quite made a leap into sociology, let's call it that. I hadn't quite understood that there's people theorising about how society works, how activism works, how politics work, that there's a field that's called Political Science and, or about any kind of psychosocial aspects of it. And it was that, that I had to kind of work through and the PhD as such is a working through that process of coming from a rational mindset and ending up in a wider frame of mind. That's taking the social and the political in the psychological by all means, into account as well. So that's in short, the journey that I underwent, but the original question was, why is nothing happening? To me, as well as to my fellow campaigners things seem to be logical, why things needed to change. And yes, we thought it's not going to be easy for politicians, but we wanted to work together with them to get new narratives to find out what we can say and how it could be said, by no means we thought it was going to be easy, absolutely, you put the Newcastle transport system into an upheaval, of course that was not going to be easy and it was about space. So it was heavily political and politicised. And, yeah, my question was, so five years in, starting with the campaigning 5,6,7 years after, why is it still hard. Why could we not talk to the politicians, in a way that felt conducive to inducing change. That was my big puzzle question, the big question mark that I was trying to find an answer to - why is nothing changed, why is change so extremely slow when something rational is, is underpinning all this and could be used to frame new ways to find new narratives.Rachel 25:33And so, from the research you did, how would you answer that question now?Katja 25:39Yeah, as you can imagine, with all these different aspects coming together, of which a lot of them were personal. And I underwent change the, the whole, the data sets were different to each other and needed to be woven together, somehow. So, I then started to look at the themes and how they related to each other, the themes of the blog post, the themes from the video diary as well as the women activists' interviews and then the decision makers. I made the decision first of all, start with myself that's what's interested me here, what is it that didn't get answered? What is it that I'm grappling with? And I devised the framework out of that which I then looked at, again, once I had analysed the women's interviews and what themes came out of that. And came up with a with a framework of there is automobility, and anything that that we do with cycling always, because it is, now hegemonic sits in, in in the shadow really of automobility. So you can't start talking about the bike without having an understanding of automobility and how that system, socio-technical system operates. And I in my thesis, I then split it in the framework into two aspects, the social automobility, the one that we actually do, we just enact, we have the roads, we have the transport systems, we've got our social norms. We all play our role within it, often totally unbeknownst to ourselves, and we're sort of actors in it. Often not having much space to act, we do our thing. Do the things that the space allocation, for example, tells us or that happens all around us. And yeah, and then there's institutional automobility and that is not such a new aspect, but it's the technical and political aspect of it, namely, how did we end up with those roads? Okay, we've got those roads, now. We want to change them. How could we change them? And that's me speaking as an activist here as well. So, we in Newcastle knew that the way to change that was that we have to go through the system, we have to talk to decision makers and policymakers, we have to talk to officers, and we have to talk to politicians. And that's the way to change it, or there's a chance to change it that way. So It's the institutional automobility that keeps us where we are, as every one individual person acting within the system. And the question then was and became interesting because I interviewed the decision makers. I then had my framework and wanted to appraise it against what these decision makers actually say.And then it started to be clearer that there is a framework here. That these women activists, and I don't think it's a massively gendered, particularly, framework, that activists for cycleways, for allocating space for cycling, have set up, that's the framework and what is the difference if any, to these decision makers and what they make out of it now. I didn't go to them with a framework, I went to them asking, asking them about their roles, what their responsibilities are, what they feel about transport and change and how they as a politician, or as an officer, perhaps, would bring about change. And that started to be really interesting for me because I, I had then sort of understood various aspects of it and wanted to also as with any PhD, link it to existing theory, as you well know, because you helped me with that. I then started to look around kind of political sciences, a bit more, automobility, of course that fits in sociology as well. So in the political sciences and sociology, I mean, there's one theory that's called the post-political theory. And just suddenly reading through that, it became absolutely clear that in Newcastle, we are dealing with post-political concepts, namely, that the politics have sort of receded, from the public arena, and that it's more and more difficult for the public, or for groups and individuals to make their voices heard. As well as more difficult for the political technical system, so the council, for example, to actually link back into the public arena and the public arena. I mean, sort of a concept of that people can come together and talk and devise plans for the future, talk about change, new ideas and how, what it could look like, and how could how change could be brought about. Whereas in Bremen, I couldn't really see the post-political aspects. There was a public arena, but also automobility happens there, and that's another aspect, another finding also. Through an old style of cycle campaigning as well, which was I'm a cyclist, I don't need any special space. I'm fast enough. I can cycle amongst cars, the vehicular cyclists, and that was present in Bremen. And that vehicular cycling attitude amongst campaigners always meant that if nothing needs to change, but just a change in attitude, then it was very difficult to politicise that and to make that into a political demand. Because we'd seen in Newcastle and in the UK, that over all those years, we had all sorts of liberal campaigns, get your bike out of your shed, start to cycle. It's about you, you, you, it's about you, you have to change and, and we've seen that that, for decades. It doesn't, hasn't made a difference in the uptake of cycling. In fact, it just stuck around the kind of the 2% or in Newcastle 1% of trips cycled. But in Bremen, the public arena was relatively intact, you know, there were there were ways and means and places, and communications, debates, discussions happening. It was just that the kind of the technocratic process of ‘Yeah, we don't need to do anything at all the space is fine. There doesn't need to be any engineering feat here, any spatial redesign.' It had yielded the same results which, which was the system that we've got is fine. Nothing needs to change. Now. I mean, in Bremen you do have your cycleways and people do cycle there. But I was still there and talking to activists and they felt in the shadow of automobility again, they felt not heard, not understood, side-lined, excluded, and they had this thing about them, ‘I'm just a cyclist, no one listens'. And I found this absolutely bizarre coming from the UK context where we really do know what it feels like to be marginalised, not just as a cyclist trying to enact the cycling thing but as a campaigner as well, you know being marginalised in in the demands for more space, building cycleways, they're all the latest thing now, protected cycleways, temporary ones, are springing up all over the place. And so it was interesting to see these parallels between Newcastle and Bremen but then also the absolute and utter differences that existed, but in the end having a similar result for activism, which was, ah, this is why we are stuck here. And yeah, for the hopes that I've got, I mean, Bremen can change that relatively quickly if they still have a socio-political arena in which you can debate, in which you can you can fill in information there, and it can be discussed and it's not just pushed aside and forgotten about, then great. I think Bremen has lots of cycling happening there anyways, and maybe then it can build on that and maybe come up to Dutch levels of cycling because I mean, that is there is ways to go for Bremen and that's up as well.And then Newcastle. It is, it will be extraordinarily difficult because if you've got a very closed or even non-existent public and political arena where the politics have shut themselves away they're not in this conglomerate, with the technical, with the officers, then it's going to be really hard to bring about change there. But again in Newcastle was interesting I talked to the officer and that person was actually, that person wanted change and had ideas about it and that officer found it difficult to initiate change because ultimately it was the missing public arena, so if you have to, if you want a starting point, Newcastle has to put a lot of time and effort into reconnecting and opening up that space again. Learn to in many ways learn to listen and learn to understand differences and that's through differences that the learning process works.Rachel 37:59Fantastic. Thanks so much Katja. There's loads more we could talk about about your research and your thesis, but hopefully this short conversation has given people an idea about the amazing methods that you use, how you combine them, some of your findings and the PhD process. So really just Is there anything else that you would like to add that we haven't covered?Katja 38:20Well, any PhD and particularly because mine is kind of an auto ethnographic one, it always sounds like there's just this one person doing it. Far from it. For me, it was an absolute journey, a real jungle, that I had to kind of slash my way through. And I was given the tools by other people, and given the confidence by other people, to persist with it. And to give certain directions so without my supervisors, I should probably briefly also say, this was Northumbria University. It was done on a studentship, absolutely amazing what they allowed me to do in that time. Absolutely amazing that I was allowed to combine it with personal aspects, but then also to travel around, spent loads of time, as you can imagine, in Germany, living there, living the transport system and breathing and living the campaigning, life environment as well. I can't express the gratitude to these eight women activists, who got together with me spending a lot of time, sometimes up to three hours to sit down and get on record and what their campaigning journey was, how they got into it. What was amazing. To them, and, yeah, and, of course thanks as you can imagine, to the decision makers as well. It's just, a PhD is not just a one person, feat and activity, it's a real project, that needs real people. It does need the one PhD researcher the candidate to put it to pull it together and put it together in the end. And of course that is my product. And, if anyone doesn't find themselves in the PhD, then yeah, it is my product in the end and my understanding of what people said and their themes in what we were all saying and, then a complete mixing together with all these different data streams. But yeah, it's a humbling journey. It's an absolute, I would always do it again weirdly enough, it was as scary as it was exciting.I can only say that, if you if you're interested in bringing yourself into the PhD it can be done. And it's not always easy to find the right supervisors for example for it. It was a mega project, and it felt exhilarating and deflating at the same time when I finished it. There was always these polar tension points throughout the PhD and you live in this kind of grey zone and these kind of polar tensions and once it's finished, it's kind of done. But in your head I think the PhD never finishes because it kicks off so many new things. So many new thoughts, so many new people you've met through it. And possibilities for the future. It's amazing.Rachel 42:32Brilliant. Well, thanks again, Katja. And if you want to find out more about Katja's work, I'll just direct you to her website where there are links to peer reviewed papers and that full thesis and various other blog posts, debates and so on. So it's katsdekker.wordpress.com. Brilliant. Thanks again.Rachel 43:05I'm Rachel Aldred. And I'm really pleased to be talking to Dr. Emma Mbabazi for the Active Travel podcast today. Emma completed her PhD research at Heriot-Watt University on the impacts of travel scripts on commuting behaviour. She's now a research fellow at the Uganda National Roads Authority. I'm going to talk to her about her PhD research. One of the things I found really interesting about it was it takes a social science approach to commuting behaviour using this concept of travel scripts. And I was intrigued to find out Emma that you've got a background in construction management with an incredibly high grade for your undergrad degree. And then you've ended up doing a social psychology PhD. So how was it to move from construction management to a very quantitative social science thesis?Emma 43:47I'm really glad to be here, Rachel. And yes, you are right. I do come from a more, well, I wouldn't say technical background but yeah, construction management background. It's really when I did my master's at Heriot-Watt, I did a Master's in Urban and Regional Planning. And that I, I got exposed to these social psychological issues. And I found them really interesting. Because as people, we are interesting. It's never a matter in transport, for example, it's never a matter of just let's build it and they will come. It's never that. And it's always about the people and what are they thinking and what will they do. So I find that really interesting. And I think that's, that's something we all have to consider as policy makers and as researchers. I think it's really important for us to try and understand that and see how we can help each other do the right thing in whatever circumstances we're in. So that's why I went with that. I was just really interested in that and it was a challenge because it was new to me, but I liked it.Rachel 45:02Amazing, I agree. My background is sociology myself so I'm always really interested in qualitative methods in transport and so you're investigating, your full PhD title was ‘The Travel Script: Exploring the Construction and Engagement of a Mental Structure as the Link between the Influence of Situational and Social - Psychological Factors in Commuting Decisions along a Life Course'. So that's looking at this concept of travel scripts. Could you explain for people who are listening what a travel script is?Emma 45:32Right. So we as people, we form mental representations about the things around us and they could be just mental representations to help us categorise things. So we have what we call schemas. So like a stereotype, that's a schema, you're categorising something, but at travel script is more mental representation of the things around us of the things that we know through time, because the script is looking at engaging in a particular action or a particular behaviour over and over again, based on what we know, and the more we engage in it, the more we inform what we know about it. And so that's really what a travel script is, it's a mental representation of the things we know about how we travel, about where we want to travel, and, and what constrains or enables that. And, and so how are we going to put that mental representation into practice? And that's why it has to be both the construction and the engagement because I mean, the mental representation is there, but we only see it as a person engages a particular behaviour or a particular action.Rachel 46:56So maybe, I guess, if I were a habitual car user, part of my travel script might be that buses are slow, they go around the houses, that I can't get a bus where I need to go and that's shaping my behaviour.Emma 47:10Exactly something like that. It might be just as you said, what you think about the buses, but also what you think about the car, and what you like about it and what it does for you, and what it helps you to do and the things you want to do in your life that the car enables that you think the bus or the bicycle will not do for you in the way you want it to.Rachel 47:39So I was just skimming through the thesis this morning and one of the things that I kind of like about it is that the hassle, the focus on hassle and the fact that in a lot of ways when we travel, we're not trying to get good stuff. Sometimes we're trying to avoid hassle and we're trying to minimise the amount of effort and annoyance.Emma 47:59Yeah. That I found that really interesting. And it came about really early on. When I started interviewing people, a lot of people did talk about the hassle. And but we deal with hassle in different ways. As you said, sometimes it's not that we would travel because we want this, that we all want to travel in this high-end Mercedes or whatever. It's just we travel because we may sometimes want to avoid something. Yeah. But we deal with the hassle in different ways. Sometimes the hassle is about the things in our environment. So some people think buses are crowded and when the windows are closed, it's all foggy and dirty or things like that. While other people when they travel on public transport, they'll think, ah, I don't have to think about the road. And I don't have to think about and looking at the mirrors and all that and I can sit down and read a book so people look at hassle in in different ways and all that comes from something else that we've experienced or people close to us have experienced that we take on into our mental structures.Rachel 49:09Mm. That's so fascinating. So I'm imagining you could have two people sat next to each other on the bus and having completely different experiences. One is really annoyed about the crowding and think it's foggy. The other person is thinking, ah, this is time for me. I think one of your interviewees said ‘stolen time' that they get that time back for themselves on the bus. Yes, exactly, exactly. So if we just take it back to what you did and sort of starting the thesis you say you interviewed 82 commuters, that's quite a lot, isn't it? That's an awful lot of data. And how did you choose them? Where did they come from?Emma 49:48Right. These were people commuting to the Heriot-Watt University campus in Edinburgh. So the campus is made of is made up of the university and then there are other businesses and organisations that are situated at that campus. I was lucky that at the time I was doing my dissertation, my research, there was a survey already from Transition Heriot-Watt, a general study about how people come to work. And I just requested from that person that was running it if I could have just a question of if people who wanted to be contacted for my research, and so that's how I got people responding that yes, I would like to be contacted and when they brought back those contacts, I later contacted them. Of course, I had a process of whittling it down with particular criteria and but once I had done that, I just started sending out emails. And really I was so glad that a lot of people responded. That's how I ended up with so many, such a large number for a qualitative study, I realised that but I think the way that research went, it was important for me to to have those large numbers, because then they helped me in the end to form those personas that I created with my research, to look at people with the same characteristics and try to see what persona could that take on, when they were born and what life events might have influenced them. So that's that's actually how I ended up with such a large number for a qualitative study.Rachel 51:49Mm. And the approach you took as well, you weren't just asking people what they think of the bus, you're taking this mobility biographies approach. Could you say a little bit more about how that way,Emma 52:00Right. So I was looking at the construction of a travel script alone somebody's life course. And mobility biography looks at the stability or the changes in the way in travel in someone's travel behaviour over time. And so I was looking at things in somebody's life, and how they've experienced them, and how that might have influenced the way they commute today. And I actually found that because I simply asked somebody, so please tell me how you have travelled since you're a child. So they just told me a bit of their life story, like when I was at kindergarten, my parents took me to school. Later, I asked people to start really from the time they went to university, to further education, whether it was university or college or something like that. And because that's the time we start to make the decisions, our own travel decisions, and I thought, let me start here, because there's really a lot of data before. And I found the different things in a person's mobility biography. So the mobility biographies are also influenced by other biographies. So you have like, household biographies. And that's changes in your life. Maybe starting a family, you're marrying or something moving in with a partner, or employment biographies. So that's changes in your work, or education, things like that. And your residential biographies, of course, changes in home. So all that will affect your travel behaviour over time. So I had to put all that in mind and try to see at different points in people's lives, how they travelled, or how their travel changed. And if it's been sustained, when did that start? And how long has it been sustained? And then I would know that at least the person, if it's sustained, say, maybe for five years, somebody will know this is when I started using the car and they will kind of think back to the situation around that time that made them change the car to the bus or start cycling and then start to see a certain mental structure that's being that has been built up to that point and is being enabled for that time and being sustained for that time. So that's why I took the mobility biography approach. That's why a mobility biography was important to me just to see the changes in travel behaviour, and then where they sustained and why it's sustained.Rachel 54:38One of your important turning points, I think, was around having children you specifically looked into your use. I don't think they didn't all have children, but most of them did, I think.Emma 54:46Yes, I specifically looked for interviewees that had children because from the literature that seemed to be quite a big thing and also from my pilot interviews, when I spoke to the people that had children, there seemed to be some really interesting things to look at there. Of course, I had to look at people that did not so that I could compare. But yes, this turned out to be quite an important turning point for a lot of people. Because it created quite a number of constraints, even when people's locations or there was infrastructure for cycling, or buses, and that was good enough, and they themselves said it was good enough, but just having to make so many trips regarding their children as well as their work, just changed the way people view that. But for some people, you find that when those constraints were removed, so when the children were not so little and could do things for themselves, could walk to school by themselves, for some people. I mean, they move back to the public transport that they liked. For others, it was like, Oh, well, I'm already here, and this is good and I like being in my car. And, and I'll continue with that. And I found that, I found that that that that distinction between the two kinds of people interesting.Rachel 56:13Yeah, I was gonna ask you a bit more about that as well because you say that there's the car default people and the alt default people. So could you tell me a bit more about those that distinction and what that meant?Emma 56:23Right, so in my research, I categorised people who are commuting by car at the time. I did these interviews in 2014,2015. So I categorised people who are commuting at that time. So let's say currently, but currently of 2014-15 by car, and then people who are commuting by alternative modes, which was the bus or walking or cycling as the other people. And so I would look at your travel scripts at the moment, so what it is pushing you towards you engaging with commuting with a car, let's go backwards. Or at least that's how I was analysing the data although that's not how they told it. Let's go backwards and see how you go to the car. And then for the people with alternative modes which I called alt default, so their default mode at the moment was to travel by bus or by bicycle. And so your travel script at the moment that you're engaging is that it's having you commute by bus, walking, or by bicycle. Let's try to move backwards in your life course and see how you go to that point. So that's how I got the car defaults, that's the people commuting by car currently for most days of the week. And then the alt-default, that's the people commuting by bicycle or by bus or walking to Heriot-Watt campus. At the time I did that interviews, there was another categorization of the cohorts. So I divided the interviewees into cohorts and my cohorts were looking at, there was a 1970s and 1980s, and the 1990s cohorts. This is not when the people were born. Actually I was looking at when the people turned about 17, because I know that's about the age that most people in Britain can get a driver's licence. And that's a big thing for someone to start driving, obviously. So that's how the cohorts were so that people who turned about 17 in the 1970s, and people who turned 17 in the 1980s. And then the people turned about 17 in the 1990s. And just to follow that through, whether they decided to get the car then and continue with it and the different constraints, and when that constraint was removed, say for example, most people at the time they were in a junior tertiary education. I mean, you're skint, you don't have money. And probably you live close to where you study anyway. So you walk or you cycle, or you go by bus and then when you get a bit more money and you start working, I found a number of people then decided to get cars because that enabled them to get to where they were going, but others did not. Because maybe where they started walking, they did not require a car. Or then they formed that habit of going by bus and they liked it. And then they started choosing where to work or where to live in such a way that they wouldn't have to use the car or something like that. So those are the different categories within my research that helped me to, to sort of interrogate the different narratives I was getting from people's life courses.Rachel 59:57And that's quite an interesting part of the thesis, the way, which people yeah, they've established that behaviour and then they talk about looking for a house or a flat in a particular area. But one thing I was going to ask you about actually is the Heriot-Watt is a campus University, so it's on the outskirts of Edinburgh. And I think you mentioned it moved from the city centre was that important for people the fact that it moved and it was no longer a central location. It was on the outskirts?Emma 60:22Yes, for I met a few people who were with Heriot-Watt at the time. It was in the city centre, and then it moved to the outskirts and actually, I remember one of them said at the time it was in the city centre, he was fine, he would walk, it was okay. And once they moved out, he just decided to start using his car because well the parking was free at the time, was still free at the time I was there anyway. And, and the bus is too slow. The person was just not used to using buses. The person was fine cycling. But cycling that far on the road was not something that the person was used to and the easiest thing for him at the time was let me get into my car. So the location of where you're going really matters Rachel 61:18And then the habits, you were talking about how people start using a mode and they sort of get used to it and that becomes part of their becomes part of their identity and so, once that person has used a car for a while, then they likely to carry on doing so.Emma 61:34Yes, there is a quite a bit of literature about travel identities. So people do form these travel identities and and the more you do something, the more you feel that I am the sort of person that does this, so this is me. So yes, habits are important and when people started using the car, and it became the easier thing for them. And then they started to look at themselves as the sort of people that use cars and that's okay. So they continued with it. I did find a few people who, their identity as somebody who is very much involved in environmental issues sort of overrode, or influenced their travel identity a lot more than just the way they travel. So even when they faced, let's say, really long commutes or a bus commute where they need to change buses and things like that. And they had already told themselves, let me use that phrase, they had already told themselves, ‘I'm not the not the sort of person who travels by car', let's say, ‘and so I'm going to do whatever I can to travel in in what I think is a sustainable way'. And that's how I also came up with that the different group have the habit, the habit helps us, sort of reduces the mental effort that we have to go through in making a decision. Yeah. Because you've done it before. So it's quick. But other people had to sort of dig deeper. In my research, I called it ‘an extra little thing in the system'. So that they would not just go for what is the easier. I mean, as human beings, it's normal, we go for what's easier to what, what will be the easiest decision to make. But there were those people who, even where they looked at the situation and the situation was not that enabling. They put things in there either in their minds, or in their space, to help them travel in the way they wanted to travel. And most of those people had identities that influenced more their travel identity than just the way they travel. So for example, if we have certain strong environmental thoughts about your carbon footprint and what you're doing for the environment and, and things to do with fuel and petroleum industry or things like that. And so they would choose to either use buses or cycle even when say, I mean, it rains a lot in Scotland, even when it's raining. I remember one of them told me it's not about the weather, it's about how you're dressed. So it's these little things that they either tell themselves, or we tell ourselves, it's really to make ourselves comfortable with what we're doing. I mean the car-default people are comfortable, but also the alt default, people are very comfortable with what they are doing. Even though somebody on the outside might look at them and say, Oh, what a hassle I have to change buses, I have to take two buses and take like a one hour commute to work. For somebody else it would be a no no, but for them, it's okay, I will do this, and once I get on the bus, I'll be able to listen to this programme or I'll be able to read this book.Rachel 65:32And you talked about how as well, for some of the people who use the car, but they have environmental identities, they were trying to manage that. And one of them I think was talking about, he felt bad about it so he got a lower emissions car. So there's some people who sort of managed the car using identity in that way.Emma 65:49Yes. So, as I said, people cope in different ways. We all try to make ourselves comfortable with whatever decision we make, really. Which is what we should do because if we're not, then I don't know, how we'll go around. But yes, so those who felt they had no other choice but to use the car, but had strong environmental beliefs, said it's worth it to spend more on a more fuel-efficient car or hybrid car. And that's what they would do to make themselves more comfortable with commuting by car. And this was not in any way in contradiction with their environmental beliefs, because they were trying to find a compromise of travelling by car which they know all the issues around it, all the environmental issues around it, but also their strong environmental beliefs. And so, in trying to find a compromising belief, a thought that, to spend more on a hybrid or more fuel efficient car is how is how they'll go about it. Yeah.Rachel 67:01Presumably potentially you could redefine yourself as being less environmental that, that instead it's the convenience and the speed that matters to you, for instance?Emma 67:09It's interesting that you mention that. I did not get that actually, now that you talk about it, they did not try to change what they thought they were. But they tried to change their perception of that behaviour to fit in what they thought they were. So actually it did not go the other way around. No, it was I'm behaving like this, but this is not in contradiction with what I believe or if it is, this is what I am going to do. It was never, or maybe I don't believe that. And I know that there are theories that say that the way you behave tells you, but I think maybe because I used retrospective interviews, they had already gone through that maybe subconsciously They were not going to think about who they were when they're talking about something they've done over and over again. Yeah.Rachel 68:10Yeah, yeah, it's a coherent picture of who they are now. Now. Yeah. So, but presumably, only a minority of people had strong environmental identities. So for the others, what was what was it about instead?Emma 68:25So the others, it's really the situation around that helped to help them to form certain habits. So I remember clearly one interviewee who, who talks about the fact that they wanted to teach their children certain things. And so to their children, they didn't want their children to be so used to the car. So even in the rain, they would help their children put on all the gear and the raincoats and the boots and all that and just go out with them, they had to walk to school. But the situation helped so the people who lived near cycle paths or the people who lived near a bus stop especially. That came out very clearly that the situation around and the infrastructure around them, when it is there, it helps to form the habits. And once the habits is formed, even when they moved or when they are moving, they try to stick to it. I met this young lady, she did not have children and she'd moved from England and to Edinburgh. And she said when she was in England she used to drive just because she left University and she got a car. She borrowed her mother's car first and then she got her own car and she used to go to work that way. But when she moved to Edinburgh, the first flat that she got was in the city and there was a direct bus to Heriot-Watt where she was working. And so she just, she didn't see any reason to use the car then. So at the time she'd been using buses. And when she even, when she moved flats, she was looking for a place, you see the habit had now started to form so that when she moved flats, she was looking for a place that will enable her to do that, to still travel to work by bus. So the infrastructure is is certainly important. And I think that's why I looked at both the situational factors, we cannot do away with them and also the socio-psychological factors.Rachel 70:57So, and if if we were thinking to get people out of their cars, particularly people who don't particularly have strong environmental views, would it be about the infrastructure then do you think?Emma 71:07To start with, to start with it would be about the infrastructure. And I think designing programmes that ask them to do just something small. It's not, I mean, it's daunting for someone to think I have been travelling by car for all these years, and yes, I understand all the environmental issues around but can I really start travelling by bus for every day, five days of the week? So that can be a bit daunting. And so I think it would be important to start with smaller programmes where we maybe in a workplace, Monday is the public transport day or something like that. Just something small. So when we, when they can start with that small thing, they then can move in and I think that then causes a foot in the door when someone has done something small or behaved in a certain way, but on a very small scale, they can start to build it up. And I actually did meet people who, who said, yeah, they had started by travelling one day a week by cycling, one day a week and the rest of the time they would go by by their cars. And then they worked it up to two at the time I spoke to them, they were just doing two days a week. But really, that is, those are people who, who, again, they want to, what can I say? They want to be in line with their own with their beliefs, with the thing that has touched them, but at the same time, you cannot make such a huge change. So the situation of the infrastructure is really important to help somebody because if it's not there, so if your cycle path is not there, or the road is not moving in such a way that the cyclist feels safe, or the rules on the road are not in such a way that the cyclist feels safe, then even the small thing that you're asking them to start with will be very hard for them to do because they will feel unsafe.Rachel 73:19And we've mentioned already about sort of infrastructure like bus stops and cycle paths, but were there things that you found that you thought the university was doing or should be doing to support people to travel more sustainably?Emma 73:33Well, it would have to be the university working together with the council. I mean, at the time I was there, I used the bus a lot in Edinburgh and I felt the bus was quite good. I don't know if it was just coming from Uganda and comparing it to the public transport system there. And then I actually learned to cycle when I was in, I was doing my PhD, I learned to cycle in 2015 with someone through Transition Heriot-Watt and they were offering free classes. And cycling around the university was fine. Cycling outside of the campus was not. I mean, we were okay because we were with the instructor and so we thought it would be okay with her, but I don't think I would do it on my own. At the time I was in Edinburgh, so as about three years ago, there were no dedicated cycle lanes and the bicycles had to go in the bus lanes, which was okay, because that's the space they had, but yeah, it was not ideal. It was not something that would enable somebody who wants to get into that to do it, it's the people who already do it. Other people are already proficient cyclists, but it's not the easiest thing to do. I think dedicated cycle paths would help but I don't know how far Edinburgh Council or the university itself would be willing to go to do that.Rachel 75:11I'm just going to ask, really sort of coming to the end of the podcast, if there was, if there was anything that you wanted to add, if there's anything that particularly surprised you, or you found particularly interesting about that the PhD research?Emma 75:28Well, for me in general, from the beginning, when you said it was a jump from my construction background to the social psychology, for me, so everything was different. I had not had these concepts and dealing with them myself, was different, but that's what was interesting about it, and then going out to talk to people and actually finding that you can trace these different concepts that you're reading in literature, things to do with mobility biographies, or things to do with people's feelings about these things. These are real things. I know they can sound abstract to somebody coming from that background. But these are actually real things. We don't see them, but they are real and they actually affect the way we use things or the way we behave. Just in the same way as building a road or putting together a good fleet of public transport or something, they really have the same weight, and they will affect behaving in the same, not in the same way but with the magnitude, with a similar magnitude with a similar impact that that those other situational factors will. And for me, it was interesting to actually trace that in what people were saying and I actually did not prompt them, because all I told them was ‘Tell me how you've travelled since this' and it's only after they told me the story that I then went back. And I think it is important for us, I know that in Europe and in the UK, you're already clued in to these things and, and I just hope that back here like in Uganda, people know them. It's just the policy will is not yet there yet, for us to, to read, to do research and then start implementing such things. So although I did my research in Edinburgh, my ears and eyes are always open for how that could be done back home here in Uganda.Rachel 77:44Thank you. Yeah, that was really interesting. I really appreciated the chance to learn more about your research and it's a great case for qualitative social science research in transport. So and if people want to read your thesis, they can find it via The British Library Ethos service and I'll include a link to that on the web page and also to your LinkedIn page where you've got articles that you've written, and so on. So, yeah, thank you very much, Emma. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's podcast we speak to Fiona and Annamaria from Edinburgh World Heritage.  The charity's aims are “to ensure the city's World Heritage status benefits everyone. We want to connect people to their heritage in everything we do – through the conservation of historic buildings, delivering improvements to public places, or engaging people directly through education.” Fiona Rankin, as an architect and project manager, together with Annamaria Nizi as a project officer tell us a little bit about their exciting Twelve Closes project and some other future initiatives. The Twelve Closes is an urban renewal initiative to enhance and improve twelve of Edinburgh's historic pedestrian streets running off the Royal Mile. It includes Castle Rock Edinvar's own Fountain's Close. The project puts the communities who live and work in the closes at the heart of the improvements. The project is being delivered in partnership with the City of Edinburgh Council and Edinburgh Napier University. You can explore the range of their projects on their website, which is full of stories and trails.

Welcome to the sixth session in our new Open Submissions Workshop series! The Traverse is producing a series of Open Submissions Workshops that you can view and listen to for free from anywhere in the world. Each week a professional playwright or theatremaker, both established and early career, will deliver a workshop on a particular aspect of the writing process, and elements of particular consideration for writers, aiming to practically and proactively support writers through the process of having an initial idea for a script to pitching their script to a theatre. If you have a question which isn't answered here, please tweet it to @traversetheatre or email writing@traverse.co.uk and we'll do our best to get it answered! - - - - - - - - - - To find out more about and help support the Traverse's talent development work, visit www.traverse.co.uk/support-us - - - - - - - - - - The Traverse Theatre is supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council. Open Submissions and Open Submissions Workshops are supported by the Foyle Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust.

Welcome to the fifth session in our new Open Submissions Workshop series! The Traverse is producing a series of Open Submissions Workshops that you can view and listen to for free from anywhere in the world. Each week a professional playwright or theatremaker, both established and early career, will deliver a workshop on a particular aspect of the writing process, and elements of particular consideration for writers, aiming to practically and proactively support writers through the process of having an initial idea for a script to pitching their script to a theatre. If you have a question which isn't answered here, please tweet it to @traversetheatre or email writing@traverse.co.uk and we'll do our best to get it answered! - - - - - - - - - - To find out more about and help support the Traverse's talent development work, visit www.traverse.co.uk/support-us - - - - - - - - - - The Traverse Theatre is supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council. Open Submissions and Open Submissions Workshops are supported by the Foyle Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust.

Welcome to the second session in our new Open Submissions Workshop series! The Traverse is producing a series of Open Submissions Workshops that you can view and listen to for free from anywhere in the world. Each week a professional playwright or theatremaker, both established and early career, will deliver a workshop on a particular aspect of the writing process, and elements of particular consideration for writers, aiming to practically and proactively support writers through the process of having an initial idea for a script to pitching their script to a theatre. This second workshop answers some of your questions about the Open Submissions Workshop series, our Open Submissions script initiative and playwriting more generally. If you have a question which isn't answered here, please tweet it to @traversetheatre or email writing@traverse.co.uk and we'll do our best to get it answered! - - - - - - - - - - To find out more about and help support the Traverse's talent development work, visit www.traverse.co.uk/support-us - - - - - - - - - - The Traverse Theatre is supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council. Open Submissions and Open Submissions Workshops are supported by the Foyle Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust.

Welcome to the second session in our new Open Submissions Workshop series! The Traverse is producing a series of Open Submissions Workshops that you can view and listen to for free from anywhere in the world. Each week a professional playwright or theatremaker, both established and early career, will deliver a workshop on a particular aspect of the writing process, and elements of particular consideration for writers, aiming to practically and proactively support writers through the process of having an initial idea for a script to pitching their script to a theatre. This second workshop answers some of your questions about the Open Submissions Workshop series, our Open Submissions script initiative and playwriting more generally. If you have a question which isn't answered here, please tweet it to @traversetheatre or email writing@traverse.co.uk and we'll do our best to get it answered! - - - - - - - - - - To find out more about and help support the Traverse's talent development work, visit https://www.traverse.co.uk/support-us - - - - - - - - - - The Traverse Theatre is supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council. Open Submissions and Open Submissions Workshops are supported by the Foyle Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust.

Welcome to the first session in our new Open Submissions Workshop series! Over the next 16 weeks, the Traverse will be producing a series of Open Submissions Workshops that you can view and listen to for free from anywhere in the world. Each week a professional playwright or theatremaker, both established and early career, will deliver a workshop on a particular aspect of the writing process, and elements of particular consideration for writers, aiming to practically and proactively support writers through the process of having an initial idea for a script to pitching their script to a theatre. This first workshop covers what you can expect from the Open Submissions Workshop series, some more information about the Traverse Theatre, exactly what's involved in our Open Submissions initiative, and what we're on the lookout for. If you have a for Eleanor to answer in next week's session, tweet it to @traversetheatre or email writing@traverse.co.uk by Mon 18 May and we'll do our best to get it answered! - - - - - - - - - - To find out more about and help support the Traverse's talent development work, visit https://www.traverse.co.uk/support-us - - - - - - - - - - The Traverse Theatre is supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council. Open Submissions and Open Submissions Workshops are supported by the Foyle Foundation and the Turtleton Charitable Trust.

The problems surrounding The Boat House at the western end of Portobello Prom are well known. It opened to great fanfare last year, just in time for the lucrative summer trade, It was a substantial expansion of the old Cropley's Bar and the vast majority of people saw it as considerable improvement. With a bar and restaurant, it was another reason to head to the bottom of King's Road. OK, the view wasn't perfect but the food, the service and the company were good. However, the City of Edinburgh Council threw a massive spanner in the works when it ordered the new wooden extension torn down because it didn't have planning permission. Producer David Calder has been along to speak to the owner Haren Murdochy.

The future of Portobello Town Hall is in the balance. It’s been neglected for years and it’s showing! It was forced to close its doors last year – we spoke then to Morag Phillips of the Lothian Dance Academy who almost had to cancel its annual show. It only went ahead after urgent work was carried out. Subsequently, a detailed inspection confirmed that it needed a huge amount of expenditure to bring it not just up to standard but to make it safe enough for people to use. The City of Edinburgh Council does not have the money. So what does the future hold for the Town Hall? One option being actively considered could be for the community to take it over and a working group has been set up under the banner of Action Porty to take this forward.portytownhall@gmail.com

Jimmy Norrie and Stewart discuss president Trumps latest drone strike in the Middle East and its ramifications for world peace. And as if that wasn't enough we throw in 10 minutes of ranting about Edinburgh Council's organisation of the New Year festivities and Underbelly's abuse of the citizens of Edinburgh.

Both the police and the City of Edinburgh Council are keen to encourage people to take part in ‘active travel’. That means walking or cycling to work, walking or cycling to school. A substantial amount of the transport budget is already devoted to improving the infrastructure to let this happen. The 20mph speed limit was one part of it; the creation of dedicated cycle lanes or cycle paths is another. It’s a recognition that you won’t persuade anyone to take their bike out if they feel afraid or alarmed by the behaviour of other traffic on the road; there’s a current police campaign to explain to drivers just how much space a person on a bike needs when overtaking. Within the past few days, Portobello Councillor Maureen Child took on the role of ‘Active Travel Champion’. Porty Podcast producer David Calder asked her to explain more.

Michelle Drumm interviews Jackie Irvine, Chief Social Work Officer and Head of Safer and Stronger Communities in the City of Edinburgh Council. Jackie was appointed as the President of Social Work Scotland in May 2018 and her tenure as president comes to an end in May 2019. However, as Past President Jackie will stay on as a key member of the Executive Group at Social Work Scotland. Jackie’s previous positions were predominantly in children’s services, but not exclusively, as she has been lead for criminal justice, community based health services, and adult hospital-based social work teams. Freshly Squeezed is an Iriss podcast which aims to 'squeeze' information and inspiration from key influencers in social services in Scotland. Transcript of episode Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes

After the City of Edinburgh Council budget meeting on Thursday 21 February we spoke with Conservative councillor and group leader, Iain Whyte. The Tories has a plan in their alternative budget proposal to ditch the tram project and take the special dividend from Lothian the city's bus operator, and spend that money on schools instead. Here he explains his position on Trams and what their proposal ( which was defeated by full council) would have meant.

This is the first episode of a chat with Marketing Edinburgh boss John. The body is challenged by proposed cuts to their funding from The City of Edinburgh Council and here we speak to John about what that means.

New funding for the next five years was made today by the three parties involved - The Scottish Government, The City of Edinburgh Council and Festivals Edinburgh. Here The Edinburgh Reporter spoke to representatives from all - Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop, Council Leader Adam McVey, Director of Festivals Edinburgh Julia Amour and Roger Spence from Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival

The City of Edinburgh Council have advised there will be a delay in making any decision about the Trams We spoke to the Transport Convener about it.

After the very successful public meetings, Action Westbank is now working on a report to give to the City of Edinburgh Council. The aim is to make sure that Councillors and officials understand that their existing proposals are not acceptable to the people of Portobello.

Episodes 127-248 of On the Mic contain original music. In order to comply with copyright law, these episodes are not available to download. You can stream this episode at Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/OntheMic/ or skip to Episode 249. On the Mic: Two years ago Liam Mullone changed Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviewing forever. Fed up of poor reviewers spoiling all the fun, he turned the tables on comedy critics with his 'review the reviewer' website, Fringepig. This year, in collaboration with superior comedy fanzine, 'Mustard' - Fringepig will become a fully fledged magazine. In an entertaining, wide ranging, no holds barred interview he shares what he really thinks about The List, Fest, Chortle, Broadway Baby, the Edinburgh Council, the Fringe Society and people called Amanda. First broadcast on Broadway Baby Radio in 2016. © 2016 On the Mic. For more info visit: http://onthemic.co.uk Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

For the last 21 years, Maureen Child has represented Portobello – and Craigmillar – on the City of Edinburgh Council. It’s been a challenging experience, especially now when increasing pressures are being placed on local authorities thanks to reduced budgets and reforms to what they can do. It’s been a hallmark of her time that Maureen’s been content to steer from behind, letting local people, local communities take credit for changes that have happened in their areas. Her philosophy can be summed up by the question – what matter to YOU?

Edinburgh Council make cuts to fund trams, Prince Charles blames climate change on Syria, Homeless to the back of the line.

Cornwall Council CEO Andrew Kerr is due to leave his post on 27th July for his new post heading up City of Edinburgh Council.

How pain affects the relationship between adults and young carers and tips from a family therapist. This edition has been funded by the City of Edinburgh Council and NHS Lothian’s Self-directed Support Innovation Fund. In the second of our two programmes focusing on young carers for people in pain, we hear about the effect of pain on relationships between parents and children. Family therapist Liz Forbat explains how pain can disrupt transitions from childhood to independent adulthood, especially during those difficult teenage years. She discusses with presenter Paul Evan’s his ‘martyrdom’ approach to managing chronic pain – he recalls keeping his children at a distance from it – and the dangers of building barriers between family members in a bid to protect them from the effects of the pain. We hear the young person’s perspective from Kim Radtke, who grew up with a father often made irritable and emotionally unavailable by his ankylosing spondylitis. The situation was exacerbated, Kim says, because she and her brother did not fully understand the condition and were therefore unable to empathise and communicate with their father about it. Only as an adult has she been able to make the step – so important, according to Liz Forbat – of separating the pain from the person. To find a qualified family therapist or for more information visit the UK Council for Psychotherapy website: www.psychotherapy.org.uk This edition has been funded by the City of Edinburgh Council and NHS Lothian’s Self-directed Support Innovation Fund. Contributors: * Kim Radtke * Liz Forbat, Family therapist and Reader in Cancer and Palliative Care, University of Stirling First broadcast 01.07.14 #Ankylosingspondylitis #Carers #Communicationskills #Explainingyourconditiontochildren #Familyandrelationships #Psychologicaleffectsofpain #Youngpeopleandchildren

The experiences of young people caring for people in pain and a campaign to help improve their lives. This edition has been funded by the City of Edinburgh Council and NHS Lothian’s Self-directed Support Innovation Fund. Lost childhood, financial burden, emotional turmoil and guilt – these are some of the challenges facing young people who care for people in pain on top of the caring itself. They’re often left feeling invisible, going unrecognised and unsupported for years. In the first of two programmes putting young carers centre stage, Paul Evans talks to a family about how pain has affected their lives. Erin McGuigan was hospitalised after developing debilitating pain in her limbs and now uses wheelchair and crutches. She explains how her condition has affected her brother and sisters. Her sister, Donna, talks movingly of her feelings of powerlessness, how she has encouraged Erin, and the need to keep listening and understanding. Terri Smith a Member of the Scottish Youth Parliament (MSYP), explains why and how she is campaigning to improve the situation for young carers. Hours of freely-given care saves the Scottish Government £1.4 billion a year, but often leaves young people struggling to stay in education and financially insecure. Erin McGuigan Donna McGuigan, young carer Lorna McGuigan, Erin’s mother Terri Smith, MSYP for Edinburgh and Northern Leith First broadcast 17.06.14 #Carers #Childrenandyoungpeopleinpain #Communicationskills #Familyandrelationships #Painmanagementprogrammesandyoungpeople #Residentialpainmanagementprogrammes #Socialandeconomicimpactofpain #Youngpeopleandchildren