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The antidote to the culture of 'cotton wool kids'
We've featured the work of Daniel Raven-Ellison in the past.
We're pleased to publicise his latest project Mission:Explore. In their own words:IT’S TIME TO EXPLORE! 102 missions that challenge kids to (re)discover our world. Kids of any age can become guerrilla explorers and extreme missioners with missions that defy gravity, see the invisible and test mental agility.
Mission:Explore is an interactive book created by the wonderful Geography Collective in an ongoing project to further inspire enthusiasm and an inquisitiveness in young people about the people and places around them. Completing each mission will help kids develop new skills, resourcefulness and discover how their natural curiosity and initiative can lead to exciting and edifying experiences. It is geography, but not as you know it.
Mission:Explore encourages young people to get actively involved with their communities. Rather than receive royalties, The Geography Collective will donate copies of Mission:Explore to children who cannot afford their own throughout the country.
Until April 11 (the end of Outdoor Adventure Week) if anyone buys 2 copies directly from them they will give a 3rd to a child who can't afford their own.
Please help us work out what kind of beast you are
Like it or loathe it, the ads on walkit.com are part and parcel of what keeps us going.
We try and keep the most egregious examples (teeth whitening etc.) off the site, though I'm afraid we probably don't always succeed.
One way of filtering out the worst ones is to join an ad network, and for a number of years we've been part of the Guardian Green Ad Network. It calls itself “the world's leading advertising network focusing on the environment, sustainability and ethical leadership” and is designed “to join up the publishers of the best independent websites with the readers and advertisers of guardian.co.uk”.
Each year they run a piece of audience research across all their publishers in order to gain a better understanding of the demographic and behavioural traits of the users of their partner sites.
This provides them (and us) with vital information that advertisers and media agencies need when deciding where to place their budgets, and as such is key to their ability to continue to earn revenue for partner sites such as ours.
So if you had a moment it would be great if you could complete the survey - there are Amazon vouchers up for grabs.
Here it is:
http://survey.confirmit.com/wix/p1141587685.aspx
Many thanks.
Living Streets' Walk to Work Week is coming up
Living Streets' Walk to Work Week (26-30 April) is coming up!
If you want to organise something for your workplace you'll need to buy their resources by 19 March.
There is everything from posters and leaflets to pedometers, footcare kits and shoebags – perfect for letting people know about the Week and creating some healthy competition in and around the workplace.
You can find out more at www.walkingworks.org.uk/walk-to-work-week/, where you can register your workplace and then start encouraging individuals to sign up.
During the Week, all you need to do is make an extra effort to walk and log what walking you do.
You’ll be able to see how far you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned, compare your workplace results with other workplaces and even write Twitter-style ‘updates’ to let everyone know how you’re getting on!’
You can now print your walkit.com map and directions together
Another long term request that we're pleased to have resolved!
We now give you three printing options:- Print map and written directions
- Print written directions
- Print map
With the first option, the print-out also includes the full stats (e.g. calories etc) and the hill profile.
Should help you save some paper.
Circular walks now live on walkit.com
In response to user feedback, we've now launched circular walks – a unique feature of walkit.com.
So if you're looking to stretch your legs during your lunch hour, or maybe are planning a longer walking expedition for the weekend, you can now plan a circular walk from 15 minutes up to 4 hours.
We hope you'll find this feature particularly useful if you're more into walking for health or for leisure (rather than 'functional' A to B walking).
To generate a circular walk just click on the green 'Circular' tab, enter a start point (postcode, street name or point of interest), select your time and speed, and off you go.
Here are a few examples (see note below re timings):
2.5 hour walk from Waterloo Station, London (medium pace)
30 minute walk from Glasgow University (medium pace)
30 minute walk from the Custard Factory, Birmingham (medium pace)
1.5 hour walk from Piccadilly Station, Manchester (medium pace)
Why not have a play generating some routes from your home or place of work, and let us know what you think, or add a comment below.
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Please note the following from our FAQ:- Like our 'less busy' routes, we try and favour quieter streets and 'off-road' paths, but please note that we can't guarantee to find you a 'nice' walk.
- Our timings may be out by a few minutes – it's not always possible to get it spot on. We also prioritise 'less busy' routes, where we can find them, over hitting precise target times.
- Longer routes may take you out of the town/city limits, in which case the walk may be along roads (where we can't guarantee there are pavements) as we haven't yet captured footpath data in the urban/rural fringes of many of our towns/cities.
- We don't have the facility to 'drag' the route in a different direction.
Eye pod cast away?
Or eye pod download…
(apologies…!)
DfT's Sustainable Travel City project cancelled
The DfT has confirmed to us that they've cancelled their £29 million Sustainable Travel City (STC) demonstration project.
Things had gone ominously quiet for a project that was first announced back on May 13 – and surprise, surprise, 10 months later it's bitten the dust.
This will no doubt cause just a tad of frustration in local/regional transport bodies, who put in a lot of effort, at very short notice, to get their bids in last year.
Sadiq Khan has now announced that there will be an Urban Challenge Fund (UCF) instead, from which cities will only be eligible to receive money if they can show their plans will:- improve journey choice
- tackle congestion
- improve safety
- lower carbon emissions
- and promote healthier lifestyles through better air quality and more walking and cycling.
No figures and no timescale have been released for the UCF.
So just after the publication of an active travel strategy that claimed to “put walking and cycling at the heart of our transport and health strategies”, a demonstration project that genuinely had some financial welly to try and make that happen (in at least one city) has been dropped.
To give the government the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that applying sustainability criteria to a larger fund and a larger number of cities will have more impact than focusing resource on just one demonstration city.
But our guess is that proponents of sustainable travel in both local government and in the NGOs will be treating this announcement with a mixture of despair, caution … or maybe just world-weary indifference.
(And this on a day when the Committee of Public Accounts published a report saying that “the taxpayer has lost up to £410 million as a result of the Department for Transport’s inadequate management of the risks arising from the Metronet contracts for upgrading the infrastructure of the London Underground.”)
