walkit.com

From the blog

DIY lavender field in central London

Fed up with the way your local community looks?

Maybe the power to transform it lies in your hands…

Have a look for yourself – here's the route from Waterloo (6 mins), Victoria (25 mins) and London Bridge (19 mins).

More at www.guerrillagardening.org

Why sometimes, you really really should take the stairs...

Forget the risible BMW ad, this is what joy is all about.

(And who's behind it?….Volkswagen!)

CHASE raise an estimated £22,000 from London Bridges Walk

LONDON BRIDGES WALK A SUCCESS!

Over 300 walkers gathered outside the Tower of London for a seven and a half mile sponsored walk across nine of London’s iconic bridges on Sunday September 27 to raise money for CHASE hospice care for children.

Walkit.com was on-line partner to the event, which is in its fourth year.

Walkers, all wearing CHASE tee shirts, set off at 10am in bright sunshine from the Tower of London, waved off by CHASE organisers. Groups of walkers included families, some supported by the CHASE service; as well as CHASE supporters, friends and members of staff.

Everyone had a booklet which included a general knowledge quiz on sights they would see along the route.

Nine bridges later, after crossing Lambeth Bridge they reached the Imperial War Museum for a street party with refreshments and a raffle and later, a chance to chat to CHASE staff and take a look around the museum exhibitions.

CHASE hopes to raise £22,000 from the event this year. CHASE event organiser Michelle Nippress, said “Thank you to everyone who took part and helped to make the day such a success. The fact that the weather was really nice and warm made such a difference. Thanks also go to walk.it com for their on-line support and to Forresters Financial Services who sponsored the event.”

“The money raised at this event will make a real difference. We need to raise £4 million every year to continue supporting families with children not expected to live beyond the age of 19 and the majority of this money comes from donations and fundraising – which is why events like the London Bridges Walk are so important.”

To find out more about CHASE visit www.chasecare.org.uk

What should we do about walkit.com's carbon footprint?

Most people believe that as a society we've got to cut our carbon emissions, year on year, and drastically.

But if you're down the pub (or wherever) chatting with friends, and you start talking about climate change, it's often difficult to detect any sense of urgency about people changing their own behaviour.  Who, hand on heart, can claim that their personal carbon footprint has decreased year on year recently (I can't)?  Who even has a good handle on what their personal carbon footprint is (I sort of do through Act on CO2)?

Reasons abound as to why we may not personally be blazing a trail:  'it's them, those cross-Atlantic flight addicts who need to change', or 'business needs to take the lead', or 'government's got to set the right framework/incentives'.  And all the while we veer further away from the path we need to take to hit the 2050 reduction targets.

But what about walkit.com's responsibilities as an online business?  A few years ago there was some fashionable twaddle aired about a new internet-led knowledge economy where we would all 'live on thin air', when in fact the world wide web is increasingly energy hungry, and often helps catalyse increasingly unsustainable patterns of consumption.

So where does that leave walkit.com, and its own own operational carbon footprint?  Well, here are some of our challenges:

• Three of us work from home, so as a business, we have no direct control over energy consumption there, and have the added difficulty of trying to work out how to apportion energy consumption to the home, or to work
• Three of us work from a managed office, where negotiations about procurement of energy are complex (to say the least).
• As we're based in 3 different parts of the country, and have many meetings around the UK, we do quite a lot of long-distance rail travel.
• Our computers and servers may not be the most energy efficient, but the expense, time and business disruption associated with moving over to new ones would be considerable.

Of course there's lots we can do – switch off computers when not in use, cluster meetings to minimise travel, use teleconferencing, buy new kit with carbon emissions in mind etc. etc. – all the usual stuff.  And we do most of them, maybe not with total rigour, but certainly with good intentions.

But when we look at something like the 10:10 campaign (to commit to cut emissions by 10% in 2010), I don't think we can honestly sign up to it.  We'd struggle to even work out a baseline for our 2009 emissions.  And as walkit.com's traffic grows, and we grow as a company, if anything, our emissions are likely to go up, not down.  We could try to get our relative emissions down, but relative to what:  Full time (equivalent) employees? Turnover? Office square footage? Unique users of walkit.com? Pages served by walkit.com?  Routes generated by walkit.com?

And surely relative reductions aren't good enough, when we live in an 'absolute' world!?

We could of course 'appropriate' some of the emissions reductions resulting from walkit.com users' behaviour change – but measuring that is difficult, and anyway, surely that is their carbon saving, not ours?

Lastly, we could offset, but that opens up another can of worms…

'We've all got to urgently reduce our carbon emissions, but, ummm…here are walkit.com, we're…excused?'  Is that just a tad complacent?

What do you think?  Should we:

• Get real, everyone (whether individually, or as an organisation) has to do their bit when the threat from climate change is potentially so serious, so walkit.com must cut its emissions, whatever it takes.
• Do our best – use our common sense to try and keep our CO2 emissions as low as we can, but don't necessarily get bogged down in identifying the last kg of carbon that needs to be managed.  Maybe offset too.
• Stop navel-gazing – we'd be better spending our time improving and expanding our service to help other people lower their carbon footprint, rather than agonising over our own carbon emissions.

Should pedestrians wear helmets?

We came across this piece from last year on the Copenhagenize blog (”For the love of bicycle culture. 100% independent advocacy. From Copenhagen”).

There's a very active debate in Denmark (as here) about the whole helmet/no helmet debate when biking.

So Copenhagenize thought they'd put a question to the head of the Danish Pedestrians' Union:

Question: I can see that the statistics show that pedestrians are at risk from head injury. I can also see that the Danish Traffic Safety Board and Danish Cyclists' Union are currently attempting to promote bike helmets. Does the Danish Pedestrians' Union have plans for promoting helmets for pedestrians so we can reduce the number of injuries in traffic? Pedestrians are at a higher risk than cyclists. Wouldn't it be a good idea?

Answer: Hi, Mikael. No, we haven't considered promoting helmets for pedestrians on the street. There are several reasons [choose freely];

1) We haven't even thought about it.

2) People who are injured in solo-accidents usually get injured in their home instead of the traffic. So people should probably wear helmets in the shower, instead.

3) Our primary goal is to get all the different players in traffic to obey the traffic laws so that traffic accidents become, in theory, impossible.

4) It ruins your hairdo.

5) You can't pull your rain hood over the helmet.

6) We risk changing peoples' attitudes and making it look like it isn't that dangerous to hit pedestrians – “But they have helmets on!”

In the big picture you shouldn't expect us to inconvienence pedestrians with this kind of promotion in order to 'save' them from the stupid mistakes made by drivers/riders of vehicles in traffic.

Actually, I think that motorists would stop hitting pedestrians immediately if it became widely known that pedestrians will explode with a large BANG and scratch the paint job on the car.

Best regards,

Dansk Fodgænger Forbund – www.fodtrafik.dk Mikael le Dous

A little satire excusable in this debate, or are the issues too serious?