Ian Walker’s blog

Why I hate pedestrians

2009-10-22T08:51:00.004+01:00

You know what I hate? Pedestrians. That self-satisfied, striding, boot-bedecked bunch of scum. Is it just me, or does the country suddenly seem to be full of them? I've never tried walking anywhere myself -- why would I? I'm a successful adult -- but it seems I can hardly travel down the street these days without one of them stepping off the pavement in front of me without looking, their face set in a holier-than-thou expression as they jump out of the way of my car in a burst of expletives. Something clearly needs to be done, and it's good that the government are starting to realise this.

The thing is, it's not just that pedestrians are all smug and annoying when they bang on about "health" and "pollution". That's sickening enough, but if their smugness was the only problem I could just ignore them - after all, they and their silly 'shoes' flash past quick enough when I get going, and their smugness can't penetrate my car's tinted windows. But the thing is there's more to it than that, because have you noticed that even though pedestrians walk millions of miles on our road system every single day, they contribute nothing at all to the cost of that road system? They have thousands and thousands of miles of dedicated pedestrian-only travel routes -- pavements, they're called, or sidewalks if you're that way inclined -- which they don't pay a penny for! Whilst honest motorists are taxed left, right and centre, they don't pay anything at all for all these facilities they enjoy. It beggars belief.

And recently, of course, it's got worse. As I'm driving up the street I constantly come across pedestrians walking across my part of the road to get from one of these pavements to another. I mean, what the hell...? Do they want the shirt off my back as well? They've been given vast tracts of pedestrian-only routes, where I'm certainly not allowed to drive, but apparently this isn't enough for them. Oh no, they want to keep encroaching into my space as well. Sure, we've all heard these walking zealots who say that it's because the 'pavements' don't form a joined-up network, meaning they can't walk to where they want to go without having to step onto the road from time to time. Aw, bless their little hearts. To pedestrians I say this: get off my part of the road. If you walk there when I'm coming along then I'll happily run you down, that's all.

In the long term there's clearly only one solution to all this. If pedestrians want to walk on our streets, which we pay for with all our driving taxes, then they need to pay their share and take their part of the responsibility. Anybody who walks anywhere should undergo training, should have to pay an annual tax towards the facilities they enjoy, should display a license plate so they can be identified, and should each be made to carry insurance in case they are ever involved in any accidents. Until then, they can sod off back to Shoeville or wherever it is they go when they aren't freeloading off the rest of us.

Open source, open razors and how I learnt to love Microsoft (sort of)

2009-07-24T07:31:00.015+01:00

Photograph by Andrew Dyer.

I've made two little lifestyle changes in the past few months. The first was that I started using Linux as my main operating system. I've long been a Mac user, and used Windows at work, but decided out of pure curiosity to see how Linux had advanced since I last used it, during my first job, about 10 years ago. Well, all I could say was 'wow'. I tried a few different Linux flavours - Ubuntu, Linux Mint (best choice for newcomers, I'd say), Crunchbang (not for newbies!), and, above all, Kubuntu, where I have found a happy home. When I saw there was so much excellent software out there - for free! - I saw that I couldn't really justify continuing to pay for software as I had been doing, and practically overnight made the switch to running Kubuntu as my main operating system.

The second big change was that I started shaving with an open razor. A friend had made this switch some time ago and pointed out all the advantages: it gives you a better shave than even the most expensive Gillette-type blades and is a one-off purchase, with no ongoing costs. The two of us were at a meeting in Hanover and spotted a shop which specialized in razors. I snapped one up and spent many happy hours chopping my face to ribbons, whilst basking in the warm glow that comes from knowing I'll never again spend money on razor blades.

Whilst mopping up the blood one day, I realized there was actually quite an interesting parallel between open source software and open razors. Now that might sound a bit weird, but bear with me. Both these changes - the new razor and the new OS - involved a lifelong shift to no longer paying for products, and no longer supporting large and cynical corporations (look up the origins of Gillette if you want to know why I use the word 'cynical'). Moreover, both these changes involved learning new skills, and both were initially a little bit difficult. But most interestingly - and this is the point I'm working towards - both gave me a new respect for the mass-producers of razors and software. It was only when I started using the open razor that I saw just how amazing my previous razor was: I could carelessly flick it around my face in moments, without worrying about cuts, in a way I never could with the open razor. Yes, it didn't shave quite so close, but it did a really quite impressive job, all things considered. It works just fine for a lot of people. There are better things out there, but why would most people need to look for them when they're pretty well served with the standard fare?

And it was just the same with the operating system. It was only after switching to Linux, and seeing just how difficult it is for the people who write an operating system to make it work with the thousands of different computers that exist, that I realized just what a clever job the folks at Apple and - particularly - Microsoft have done. Windows isn't perfect. It doesn't shave as close as Linux, to push the metaphor too far, but it does a really quite impressive job, considering. It works just fine for a lot of people. There are better things out there, but why would most people need to look for them?

So in summary: learning to shave with an open razor stopped me being a Microsoft basher. I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere.

Public advice: we need more information

2009-06-30T07:43:00.006+01:00

I keep finding myself pondering government advice, and how we really need more information if the genuine aim of this advice is to change people's behaviour for the better. Take the UK government's advice on drinking alcohol safely, where men are advised to drink no more than 4 units of alcohol a day (so 28 per week, 21 for women). Now, I don't believe for a second that this particular figure is based on anything more than guesswork and the perceived need to provide some (any) figure, but it is useful for illustrating my wider point, which is that with any advice like this, how exactly are the public supposed to translate the number into action? You see, I can think of at least 4 completely plausible interpretations of this 28-units-per-week advice:

If I drink 28 units per week then I will definitely come to no harm
If I drink 28 units per week then there is a 95% chance I will come to no harm
If I drink 28 units per week then there is a 50% chance I will come to no harm
If I drink any more than 28 units per week I will definitely come to harm

So which is it? This really matters, because each interpretation would lead me to respond in a totally different way. This is something I keep finding myself thinking about with any sort of official advice on behaviour: we need more facts about how the advice is arrived at if we are to make sensible decisions about whether and how to change our behaviour. Or at least I do: others might be happy to follow dogma ;o)

Finally, big cheers to Google. When I searched for "five a day" its top result was "five a day = 5.78703704 × 10-5 hertz". Superb!

Hello, Orange!

2009-05-29T13:41:00.005+01:00

I just sent this message to the Orange mobile phone company through their website

Hello! As you'll notice I've chosen the 'I'm not an Orange customer' option at the top of this form. In fact, I haven't been an Orange customer for over a year. However, I'm really pleased to see that my not being an Orange customer hasn't deterred you from sending me regular quarterly statements saying I owe you £0.00. Thanks for keeping me informed! It's nice to know that, as a non-user of your services, I don't owe you any money. I was already pretty certain that I don't owe you any money - what with not being an Orange customer and all - but it's nice to be reassured. Presumably you send similar letters to the 5.95 billion other people around the world who aren't your customers, to reassure them too?

On the off-chance you would like to stop sending me these statements - saving yourself some money, my postman some effort and our planet some trees - the statements come with the account number xxxxxxxx written on them. I have telephoned you about these statements at least three times before now and have, on each occasion, been assured that my account is definitely definitely definitely closed - definitely! - and I would not get another statement, so I don't know if this number will be of any use to you. I offer it for what it's worth, with the knowledge it might be as random and meaningless as your telephone operators' assurances.

Best wishes, and have a good weekend,

Ian Walker

Research with People published

2009-04-15T18:16:00.005+01:00

It's a red-letter day in the Walker household. My textbook, Research with People: Theory, Plans and Practicals has been published. This is a practically based introduction to the issues involved in human testing. It is written to work for anyone who needs to collect information from people - medics, psychologists, sociologists, management types, etc. - and also works for readers who don't carry out research but who want to understand the research process so they can better make sense of what they read. Enjoy!

Bicycle overtaking and rebuttals

2009-03-16T13:10:00.005Z

Something I've become slightly infamous for is my 2007 work on drivers overtaking bicyclists. A couple of weeks ago I was alerted to a US website where somebody called Dan Gutierrez posted a surprisingly angry critique of my findings as well as some data from his own replication of parts of the study (the main document is here [pdf]). Dan found some different results to me, which is great as I've long expected there would be differences in driver behaviour between the UK and the US, particularly because of differences in road design between the two countries. However, rather than simply conclude our countries are different, Dan seems to conclude I'm either a big numpty who can't do research, or a deliberate liar. Either way: ouch, Dan.

Two weeks ago I emailed Dan to try to clear things up, but haven't had a reply, so I thought I'd reproduce my email here. Given he's been quite so stinging about my work in a public forum I feel I should have some right to reply. And, more critically, I spent ages writing this email and at least by posting it here the effort is less wasted. Again: ouch, Dan.

Dear Dan,

Hello! Someone recently pointed me to your online article discussing the findings of the bicycle overtaking study I conducted a couple of years ago. I had a look at your document and I have to say, I was slightly surprised by the general tone, and use of words like 'deceptive' when referring to my presenting findings. But hey! I've been called worse things than that. I hope you don't mind my writing to try and clear up one or two things, as having read that document I almost feel I've offended you somehow?

First, the graphs. I'm a big fan of How to Lie with Statistics too, but I really wasn't trying to hide anything with those graphs. They were intended primarily for use by my colleagues, who regularly use graphs of this sort and who would be totally familiar with the practice of truncating the y-axis. It's done simply to make the differences that exist clearer, to facilitate discussion, not to hide the overall magnitude of an effect - I'd fully expect people to look at the bottom of the axis and see it doesn't start at zero. I'm also satisfied I didn't build up any insignificant differences into significant ones by plotting the graphs this way - I can give you more details to explain this if you're interested.

Moreover, you're dead right that the overall mean passing distance is about 4 feet, but I think by focusing only on the average passing distances you overlook the really important thing, which is all the variation in the data. As you'd expect, the gaps drivers leave when passing cyclists vary a great deal. The distribution of gaps wasn't far off being a Gaussian distribution - a bell curve - which means most drivers left an amount of space somewhere near the average, a few left a massive amount of space and, critically, a few down in the left-hand tail-end of the distribution left very little space indeed (in fact, two of the drivers I encountered left less than zero space).

This last point, about the small number of drivers who leave very little space, is probably important. Every day, many cyclists are passed by motor vehicles. And we know that some of these events end with the cyclists being hit, sadly. Given there are drivers who leave very little space indeed (to the extent some leave less than none), I'd say that it probably does matter if the average gap left by drivers gets smaller. If the average gap gets smaller, this very likely means the whole distribution is shifting along to the left. It's probable - but by no means proven, certainly - that if the average gap declines by one inch, the very near misses shift by an inch too, so all the vehicles that would have just missed the bicycle by a whisker (which we know happens fairly often) instead become vehicles that just hit by a whisker. And the bigger the shift in average passing distance, the more near-misses might become hits. Noone can prove this, but given there are so many near-misses already every day, I really wouldn't want to see drivers doing anything to decrease the gaps they leave, even by only a centimetre on average. I don't know what your thoughts are on this tail-end issue?

You went on to mention that I didn't also look at riding in a position to command the lane. There is a cultural misunderstanding here! British roads are quite small compared to yours (typically an urban lane is about 2.5m wide; often half that size in the countryside). The 1.25m riding position is pretty much in the centre of the lane, so you can take those 1.25m data as being the centre-of-the-lane commanding data you were looking for. Also, you're totally correct to say that drivers did change their behaviour in response to changes in bicycle lane position - I think I said something to that effect in the paper's discussion - but the key point remains: as the bicycle moved further towards the centre of the road, the gap between it and passing vehicles tended to decline. That's why I said 'to a first approximation' vehicles don't respond to changes in the bike's position: I know they do respond, but they don't respond enough! As you say, a 1 foot move by the bike led to a 0.75 foot response in my data; the further out the bike was, the smaller the gap between it and the passing vehicles. Hence my saying 'to a first approximation': that statement was worded to convey my surprise at this finding, not to ignore it. (Incidentally, I suspect the strange disappearance of the helmet effect at the 1m riding position in my data is something to do with this position forcing motorists to approach the centreline of the road; at 1.25m they definitely have to cross it, but at 1m I suspect they had just enough space that they tried to stay entirely within the lane. Or something like that. You have to remember this was the first study looking at such things, and it wasn't clear in advance that the centreline would be an issue. Research builds over time.)

The difference between our countries' road systems, which I mentioned above, is the key to the final part of your paper. I'm honestly really impressed by the lengths you've gone to in collecting in those data. I'm on record saying that I'd expect other countries (especially in North America) to see different results to those I found in the UK, and that I'd love it if people were able to test this. That was why I was quite surprised to see that when somebody finally did do this test, it was in a document that seems distinctly hostile to me! It's great that you found something different to what I found - we now have concrete data showing there's a difference between our countries. But might it not have been fairer simply to describe this as what it is - a difference between our countries - rather than suggest I don't know what I'm talking about?

Anyway, this was only going to be a short email and it's grown into a lengthy one. I write in a genuine spirit of friendship, rather than to moan, although I fear it won't come across that way. I doubt either of us likes the idea of cyclists being struck from behind by passing cars (which, in the UK's accident data at least, has a really high probability of killing the cyclist). Any information we can gather which might make this less likely is incredibly valuable. I hope in future we might work together, rather than in opposition, towards this goal.

With good wishes,

Ian

Quite reasonable, I hope you'll agree. It's a shame we cyclists can't get along more. Goodness knows, we should be united against the common enemy.

Science stories: the devil IS in the detail but you've got to look for it

2009-03-01T15:13:00.014Z

One of my colleagues, Chris Ashwin, made a bit of splash in the news this last week from being involved in a study on the genetics of optimism and pessimism. Looking at the Guardian article, which the link takes you to, I saw something in the readers' comments which was painfully familiar:

100 people from God knows where isn`t really representative of humanity. Was is a nice day? How healthy were the volunteers? How old? What were they being paid? Its all in the detail folks, or is that my cynicism gene kicking in?

Oh goodness me, but aren't you clever? I saw an awful lot of this sort of thing when my bicycle overtaking work was being reported a couple of years ago: again and again people would write comments which essentially said "This three-paragraph newspaper report I've just read doesn't mention X. I can't believe this researcher didn't consider X! The whole thing is clearly bollocks!" An entire study is dismissed because some detail isn't immediately in front of the reader's nose. You can see this behaviour whenever science is reported in the media.

Of course these details matter in scientific research, which is why researchers write up their procedures with painstaking care in journal articles so the details are there for everyone to see, examine and judge. Typically, this sort of information runs to several closely-typed pages for any given study (I've looked at Chris's paper and the procedure and results run to over 1200 words). So why on earth do people expect to find the same level of reporting in a newspaper story or blog post? Do people think scientists spend years doing research and then, faced with the challenge of reporting their findings, dash off a quick press release in five minutes before moving on to the the next project? Or is it that they believe the details don't exist, and that teams of professional researchers manage routinely to overlook undergraduate-level design issues when doing their jobs?

It's great people are thinking about what they read and showing some critical thought, but can't they take the logical step and actually look for answers to their questions rather than simply assuming the answers don't exist because they're not in a newspaper report? Am I wrong to find this dismissal of people's efforts so irritating?

Invading Poll-land

2009-02-25T08:36:00.007Z

Did you see the BBC's report on how, contrary to what we all thought, the UK actually loves religious values and wants more religious influence on our lives? Now I should start out by saying, for the record, I'm not a big fan of religion and don't think people should have a say in law-making, or how I live my life, simply because they feel more comfortable living by the moral standards of, say, an Iron-Age Middle-Eastern society. I fully understand why people would feel more comfortable with the simple black-and-white morals of an ancient and distant society, which save one dealing with the scary complexities of a modern pluralist society, but then I also fully understand why other historical re-enactors like to dress up as Vikings at weekends.

Anyway, as I wasn't sure I believed the BBC's conclusions - which claimed the majority of Britons wanted much more religious influence over their lives - I thought I'd delve into the source of the data a little, to see if they would persuade me. It turns out the survey was conducted by a polling organization called Comres. Comres, on their website, boast all sorts of big-name clients and proudly declare they are a member of the British Polling Council and the Association for Qualitative Research. Sounds like a group of researchers who know what they're doing.

Looking at their portfolio of 'Social polls' is interesting. Most of their recent 'social polls' have been about religion, and all these were conducted at the behest of Christian-interest groups. Hmm. Why might Christian-interest groups give so much business to Comres? I wondered.

I then went back and looked at the results of the Comres/BBC poll [PDF link]. Gosh, what detailed analysis! The data are there, broken down in minute detail by gender, age, social grade and region. Big pages full of scary numbers: this looks like a thoroughly rigourous and scientific study!

But let's look at these numbers in a little more detail. Down on page 3 we can see how the sample of 1045 people breaks down into religious groups. Of the 1045 people surveyed, it turns out 639 were Christians and 279 were of no religion. Now this immediately sent alarm bells ringing. To show you why, let me digress slightly into some introductory sampling theory...

In human research, an early step is to identify the population of interest. This is the group about which you want to reach a conclusion. For example, if you want to learn something about the opinions of all the people in the UK, your population is 'all the people in the UK'. In an ideal world you would then conduct a census, whereby you speak to every member of this population. At the end of such research you know exactly what are its opinions.

Of course, when you're dealing with really large populations - like the population of the UK - conducting a census becomes logistically difficult so you instead use a sample. A sample is a subset of your population which you hope will behave exactly like the population. In other words, it should be the population in miniature, a microcosm of the population. You are hoping it will behave exactly like the population, whilst being of a manageable size. If it does, that's great: you've learnt something about a big population from studying a convenient number of people. But if your sample is in some way biased, or behaves differently to the population as a whole, you will reach false conclusions about the population. The only information you have about the population comes from your sample, so every effort must be taken to ensure that sample isn't biased in some way. Ideally this is done by keeping the sample large, and using methods such as random sampling to choose the people included.

And this is what first worries me with Comres's sample. This survey is being used to represent the views of the UK population (it certainly is in the BBC article). For it to have any validity, then, the sample has to be a smaller version of the UK population - it has to look just like the UK population, in miniature, or else we can't meaningfully generalize from it. But there's the thing: the UK population isn't 64% Christian and 28% non-religious (I'm ignoring Comres's 'weighted' numbers as they haven't bothered to report what they were weighted by). Nor is the population of the UK 0.02% Muslim, and nor does it have exactly 10 times more Muslims than Jews. This sample is clearly biased. With the majority self-identifying as Christians, whatever the sample 'says' is simply going to represent Christian views (at least to the extent Christians all agree with one another on things). Strange - you'd expect a member of the British Polling Council to be a bit more careful than that.

Where did this sample bias come from? Critically, we cannot know. Any sort of proper scientific report would contain full details of how the sample was recruited, so we could read the report fully informed and judge its findings according to the strengths or weaknesses of its methodology. But Comres's report doesn't bother to say how the sample was recruited. Given the massive skew towards representing Christians, I'm tempted to suspect they did a lot of their polling outside churches, at religious group meetings, or something similar. But I don't know, because they don't tell us. Nor do we know how they defined groups like 'Christian', 'non-religious' and so on. This lack of detail really matters: you're going to see very different results if you define 'Christianity' as 'I actively go to church at least once a week, am born-again and believe Jesus Christ is my personal saviour' or if you define it to include all those people who say they're Church of England as a sort of 'default' option because they don't feel very strongly one way or the other (like my mother), or who choose that option because they feel 'spiritual, like there must be something bigger' and so won't choose the non-religious tag. In this case I suspect Christianity was defined somewhat like the first of these options, and the wishy-washy undecided made up the non-religious group. But again, I can't tell because these crucial details aren't reported.

Moving on from the sampling, let's look at the survey itself. It included questions like "The media reports my religion fairly and accurately (agree/disagree/don't know)". From experience of similar surveys I can tell you this is a very strange question to ask someone who is not religious. It simply doesn't make sense - not having a religion is not a religious position, except possibly for some of the more hard-line atheists. Asking someone who isn't religious about their religion is like asking someone who doesn't own a hat about their hat: what are they to answer other than "Huh? I don't have one"?

But it seems Comres have something of a history here. Let's look at their questions in other surveys. How about their "Rescuing Darwin" survey, conducted at the behest (i.e., payment) of Theos, a Christian think-tank? Here we see questions like "Young Earth Creationism is the idea that God* created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years. In your opinion is Young Earth Creationism: definitely true, probably true, probably untrue or definitely untrue". With 11% saying this is definitely true, again alarm bells are ringing about which particular evangelical church they got their sample from (and again, they don't tell us), but let's ignore that for a moment as we're looking at the questions. How about question 3: "Atheistic evolution is the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd. In your opinion is Atheistic evolution: definitely true, probably true, probably untrue or definitely untrue" with 30% saying 'definitely untrue'. I'm sorry, is that question dispassionate and scientific, carefully designed to elicit opinion, as it should be, or is it emotive and written in the language of fundamentalist Christianity? There's plenty more of this sort of thing in Comres's oeuvre.

(* 'God' you notice. Not '...the idea that a powerful entity created the world' but 'God', with a capital letter.)

So what's the conclusion? Basically, it rather looks as though Comres have established themselves as the polling organization of choice for religious groups wanting to find the 'right answers' in national opinion polls. With dubious questions which only make sense to a subset of those questioned (seriously: go and read the rest of the Rescuing Darwin questions), and apparently biased samples (which we can't even properly evaluate, without information on where they came from), they seem always to support exactly what the paying customer wants to find - which is nice, as that's a good way of getting repeat business.

I'm tempted to call for important organizations such as the General Medical Council to stop giving their business to such a polling organization, but I think the bigger question here is why on earth the supposedly dispassionate BBC News commissioned this particular organization - with their track-record of questionable polling in the interests of religious bodies - to conduct their snapshot survey of religious feeling in the UK. And I'm also curious as to why the BBC didn't notice the rather flagrant sample bias in the data they eventually received. I would be very very interested in knowing the religious background of the individual who commissioned this 'research'. Very interested indeed.

And this is where I turn all Ben Goldacre: this doesn't really bother me because of its religious aspects, but rather because it is the sort of thing which gets proper and effective researchers a bad name. Public opinion polls can play an important role in testing the Zeitgeist, and also contribute a great deal to our modern discourse about society. But for them to have any use they have to be done properly, and reported transparently. This sort of thing not only breeds distrust of opinion polls in general, but is also a classic example of how you can't just believe any sort of research reported in the media but rather need to go back to the source of the data and evaluate where they came from. I know this for a fact: I learnt it from a rigourous survey of me.

EDIT: Here's something I just typed in the comments to this post. Oh, and there's another issue I forgot to mention in the post, which is a shame as it was one of the things that really bothered me. One of the questions was "Our laws should respect and be influenced by UK religious values (agree/disagree)". Surely that's two questions rolled into one! That question was rolling people who think the law should respect religion into saying they also think the law should be influenced by religion. Because those are really quite separate ideas: personally I wouldn't be too worried by the first part of the question (as I think the law should respect our right to believe what we want), but I'd vehemently oppose the second part of the question. Tricksy, I'd say. I do wish I'd remembered to put that into the main article!

Population: at last someone's mentioned it

2009-02-02T18:07:00.004Z

I've been thinking for quite a while now that in environmental debate, the one thing nobody mentions is the impact of having children. Thank goodness someone's mentioned it in public at last. Now I'm no biologist, but I'm fairly sure having children is the only way we can hang around as a species. But that said, we can't really have them without there being an environmental impact. It's something we really need to talk about more.

Book cover

2008-11-24T14:02:00.004Z

How exciting! I just got the cover proof for my first textbook, Research with People. This is an introduction to designing and carrying out human research. It aims to cover every discipline which involves human study - psychology, medicine, economics, etc. etc. - highlighting the common themes which run across them all. Clearly you'll need several copies.

First Watch: 2008

2008-10-04T15:44:00.003+01:00

I have a long-standing beef with First Group, and the government that gives them a licence to print money. I've just had a look at their latest annual report and was unsurprised to see that their rail profits have risen yet again, to £120 million pounds from £108 million last year. And I have to stress that this is profit, not turnover.

The thing is, this is the second year in a row in which the government has allowed First to issue fare increases greatly above inflation. Who are you working for, government? I mean, really?

A (red) herring in the shower

2008-10-03T18:43:00.004+01:00

A few days ago I was asked by Tom Vanderbilt, author of the very readable and interesting book Traffic, to write a piece for his blog summarizing my thoughts on bicycle helmets (thanks, Tom).

Karl McCracken has written some interesting words on the subject as well today. The thing I'd like to pick out of his post is the issue of showers. Like Karl, I have again and again heard people say "Oh, I'd love to cycle to work but we don't have any showers so I can't." Let's have a little look at this, shall we?

When I was doing work on how drivers overtake bicycles, I needed somewhere in Bristol to store my bicycle between testing sessions. I called Sustrans and asked them if they had somewhere I could keep my bike. "Yes, we'll find somewhere," they said. "Just turn up."

When I arrived, where do you think was the one place in the building - a building where everybody cycles to work - that was unused? The shower. And sure enough, that's where the bike was stowed.

Item 2. Last year I attended a meeting at the CTC's headquarters in Guildford. Again, this was a building where everybody cycles to work each day. I saw their shower, and I don't think it had ever been used once.

I think we can learn something from this. Here are two buildings in which the whole staff cycle in every day, and in neither is the shower used. It is clear that showers are a red herring. Like bad weather, they seem a huge concern to people who do not cycle but, after only a little experience, everybody realises it is just not the issue they thought.

So heed my words, people! Of course you'll be a little sweaty the first couple of times you cycle to work because you're not fit! Give it a fortnight and it will no longer be an issue. My workplace is on top of a mountain and I've never showered after getting there. If I have been a little sweaty, simply rubbing it off whilst it's still wet is all that's needed to avoid any smell. And cyclists: spread the word. We need to fight this barrier by showing people that it's just a non-issue if they will only try.

Or could it be that people know showers aren't really an issue, and use a lack of showers in their workplace as a way of justifying a no-longer-acceptable preference for driving? Oooh, what a cynical thought.

Res ipsa loquitur

2008-07-14T17:44:00.003+01:00

I'm not the most classically educated person on the planet. Indeed, my school only really taught football. But I had to chuckle when I saw the following on a review of an iPhone game on Apple's App Store:

I don't get it - at the time of writing this, there are 3 top-rating reviews, but the app has ZERO downloads. This is not the only app with such a dubious rating profile, so as always "carpe dium" - buyer beware!

What's changed, behaviour - or the willingness to talk about it?

2008-07-01T14:27:00.007+01:00

The University of Bath, who graciously stick a few quid into my bank account each month, have just completed a large survey of how people get to the campus. The headline finding is that between 2002 and 2008 the proportion of staff driving to the university has dropped from 69% to 58% and the proportion of students driving has dropped from 29% to 12%. Proportions of people catching buses, walking and cycling have gone up.

So does this represent a dramatic shift in behaviour? I hope it does, and that's certainly how the university will perceive it. But this is a campus whose many and massive car parks are groaning, despite being greatly expanded in area since 2002, and where the buses do not appear any more full or numerous than they did 6 years ago. This all leads me to suggest an alternative interpretation for these findings: people who drive are no longer as willing to discuss it as they were in 2002.

If you regularly do something 'wrong', would you take the time to complete an optional survey on that behaviour? How about if you do something perceived as virtuous? It just seems quite likely that these days, a cyclist or pedestrian is more likely to fill in the survey - and thus receive a little glow of satisfaction from talking about their sustainable travel habits - than a driver who will more likely receive a little twinge of annoyance at yet another attack on their habits. So the survey captures a greater proportion of the cyclists and pedestrians than the motorists, which creates an illusory shift in travel behaviour.

Unfortunately, I can't see a solution to this which doesn't involve obliging people to take part in surveys. But as short-distance car-use becomes less and less socially acceptable, we'll have to expect to see more bias of this sort creeping into transport surveys. And we need to be very careful we don't interpret this as people driving less and cycling more!. Mark my words, this mistake will happen.

Of course, if I'm correct in my interpretation, we might try to read these figures as showing that driving to the university is 100 * (1-(58/69)) = 16% less socially acceptable amongst the staff than it was 6 years ago, which is at least a small victory!

I am a scientist...

2008-06-27T16:12:00.005+01:00

I've spent the past two weeks taking part in an event called I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here. This was funded by the Wellcome Trust and was all about forging links between professional scientists and school students to further the students' understanding of science and remove a lot of the mystique that surrounds the area.

I was in a knockout contest against four other scientists - two cancer researchers, a chemist and a cosmetics researcher. Over the fortnight students from around the country bombarded us with questions about our work (and ourselves!), and we took part in many frantic live chat sessions where we were grilled mercilessly and made to defend our work in short snippets of text. They voted somebody out every few days.

And the result of all this is that after a week of eliminations, yours truly has been chosen by the students as the winning scientist. I win £500 for science communication - woo-hoo! I'm very surprised: I really thought one of the cancer researchers would get it (not only did the students clearly see cancer research as really worthy, but they were both much nicer than me in the chat sessions!).

But tempting as it is to gloat about winning, I see this as a victory for psychology rather than me. From the questions I was asked (which you can read if you look at the website - log in as a guest and choose GCSE 2 from the menu at the top), it was clear this was an area that the school-aged students simply hadn't been exposed to, and which they found really interesting. School science teaching is rooted in the 'big three' of physics, biology and chemistry, and these are massively important subjects. But there is clearly an appetite for psychology amongst the students too. Already hugely popular as an A-level, it's time for a lot more schools to start offering psychology at GCSE too. If nothing else, it surely would act as a powerful way of keeping girls interested in the more scientific end of education.

Segways and the law

2008-06-21T09:12:00.004+01:00

Here's a cutting I ripped from the painfully inoffensive Metro newspaper a few weeks ago. It's about the House of Lords - Britain's strange, unelected upper chamber - discussing whether Segways should be legal. I love this story, because there are clearly so many layers of untold story behind the scenes...

Lords: Give green light to Segways
Scooters known as Segways should be allowed on the roads, peers said yesterday. The electric two-wheelers got the backing after peers tried them out.... Segways are used by police and the public in parts of Europe along with the US. There have been concerns here about safety. But [Liberal Democrat] Lord Redesdale said: 'I drove one straight at Earl Atlee and failed to do him any damage at all.'

Doesn't that last sentence just reek of disappointment?

[Edit: I just found the whole debate here. There are a couple of words missing from Metro's report... "I drove straight at the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, with his consent, and failed to do him any damage at all - unfortunately!" I was right about the disappointment!]

The family minibus

2008-06-11T15:45:00.009+01:00

I have a neighbour who regularly travels with his wife and their two children. To move the four of them around, he bought a minibus with 20 seats.

'Why have you done that?' I asked, choosing my words carefully. 'There are only four of you - wouldn't a car make a lot more sense? It would take up less space and use a lot less fuel.'

He gave me a level look. 'But once every six weeks it's my turn to take my son's football team to their match. I need a vehicle with 20 seats.'

'Er, okay. But why not buy a normal car and just hire a minibus on the odd occasions you need one?' I asked. 'It would be a lot cheaper, and probably easier for you.'

'Oh, who can be bothered with that?' he replied, and stomped off.

Okay, so this neighbour is fictitious, but I've had almost exactly the same conversation with many people, with the only difference being that the numbers are all 5 times lower. There are so many people who buy a car with five seats primarily to move one person around. When challenged, they always point out some achingly unusual event as justification ('What about when I need to take rubbish to the tip?') I mean, what's that? Twice a year? Three times?

As plans for congestion charging force us to think about the consequences of our travel more and more, it is the sheer bone-crunching illogic and irrationality of this thinking that drives me crazy. Cars are fundamentally badly designed in various ways (e.g., their need for huge slurpy soft tyres to stop them flying off the road), and one of their basic design faults is that they take up the same amount of valuable road-space to convey one person as five. As I've mentioned before, people are going to have to realise that if they travel alone 95% of the time, it is better for everyone - including them - if they get a one-person vehicle and hire something bigger on the odd occasion they need more space. It's such a shame that we're going to have to go through masses of congestion and heavy-handed legislation to make people act rationally. Bah.

Yellow lines

2008-06-09T12:50:00.001+01:00

, originally uploaded by Alex Craven.

There has to be a better way to manage parking than these eyesores.

How much work do we each do?

2008-05-29T14:09:00.019+01:00

I was pondering just now on road haulage. Lorry drivers are in the news a lot at the moment, and I was thinking about how lorries are quite a limited and old-fashioned approach to the problem of moving things around, as each of them can carry only a trifling proportion* of the freight that needs to be shifted (1,810,000,000 tonnes in 2006, just within the UK; if you were faced with a really big warehouse holding 1.8 billion tonnes of stuff and were asked to move it all, would you ever say "You know, I reckon about half a million trucks, each with its own driver, will be the best way to do that"?).

Anyway, given that we can best understand things if we quantify them, I thought I'd work out what proportion of all this freight each lorry moved on average. So using government figures I calculated:

effort = 100 * (amount of stuff moved / number of vehicles used to move it) / amount of stuff moved

which simplifies to:

effort = 100 * (1 / number of vehicles)

which told me that each lorry moves just 0.0002% of the freight. This presumably is why there is such a staggering number of them these days, either clogging motorways by overtaking one another at microscopic speed differentials, or clogging the A36 when I'm trying to get to work. Anyway, before I could do anything useful with this train of thought, I got distracted and realized we could generalize the approach like so:

effort = 100 * (1 / number of workers)

and started doing this with other professions where statistics on the amount of work and the number of workers are easily available. So here's what I've got so far, using the numbers of teachers, police officers, fishermen and GPs on the one hand and the numbers of school children taught, crimes committed, fish caught and people who might get sick on the other :

Teachers: each teaches 0.0001% of the children
Police officers: each investigates 0.0008% of the crimes**
Fishermen: each catches 0.0077% of the fish
GPs: each looks after 0.0029% of the people

Make of this what you will, but there does seem to be a case for paying teachers 8 times less than police officers, even before we factor in the relative danger :o). Oh, and well done you fishermen.

Any suggestions for other professions?

* Compared to, say, trains
** Or, alternatively, polices 0.0008% of the population if you prefer

Road Injury Severity Map of England

2008-05-27T23:09:00.015+01:00

Here's something curious. Using the Department for Transport's road accident statistics for 2006, I calculated road accident severity figures for each county in England. The DfT's accident figures include a Killed-and-Seriously-Injured (KSI) statistic, which is the count of the most serious road injuries: those leading to... well, death or serious injury. For each county, I divided the number of road accidents with a KSI outcome by the total number of recorded accidents. The reasoning was that the higher this ratio is, the more severe the outcomes of that county's road collisions tend to be and, in one sense, the more dangerous that county's roads are.

The statistics I computed gave figures ranging from just 5.6% of road accidents having KSI outcomes (in Plymouth, where it seems most road accidents tend to end okay) to 23.7% (in North Yorkshire, where almost one-quarter of all road accidents lead to someone being killed or seriously injured). I then normalized these values to lie on a scale from 1 to 100, converted these into saturation levels of the colour red and filled in the counties on a map. Yes, it took a few hours.

The map reveals a few points of interest:

* We have to work in call centres, but at least we don't get squashed too badly - Former heavy industrial areas around Manchester, Merseyside, the West Midlands and the Potteries stand out as having quite low accident severities.

* Leafy suburbs, dead bodies - the affluent south-western corner of Greater London suffers quite a lot of serious road accidents. It's so tempting to make a link to all the SUVs...

* Mad Crazy Viking Berserkers - North Yorkshire and the East Riding. One in four road accidents in North Yorkshire has a serious outcome. My father lives there. I'd like him to move away now.

* Wiltshire and Northamptonshire are really dangerous - I live in Wiltshire! Can everybody take more care please?

* Odd pockets of safety - Plymouth wins here, but there are other counties that stand out from their neighbours: Surrey, Rotherham, Newham in London.

Sadly, these statistics aren't broken down by county for Wales and Scotland. However, overall Wales is at a similar level to Southampton and Coventry, with just under 11% of road accidents having a KSI outcome. Scotland is somewhat worse, and with 17% of all road accidents ending in death or serious injury is similar to Essex and East Sussex.

My hope in doing this was that novel insights might reveal themselves if I looked at the accident data in a new way. I wondered if there would be a North/South split, or patterns that follow motorways. Perhaps the most striking thing to emerge here is the suggestion of more serious road accidents in rural areas. (Most notably, wherever there is a city that has separate figures from the county that surrounds it -- Reading in Berkshire, Leicester in Leicestershire, Poole in Dorset -- the city always has a lower accident severity score than the surrounding county.) This seems on the face of it to support the idea that higher levels of road crowding and reduced speeds are good for reducing the severity of road accidents, although we must also consider other factors specific to rural areas such as twistier roads which give poorer visibility, and possibly higher levels of drink-driving. But then we have to explain why Devon and Cornwall -- perhaps the most rural and twisty-roaded counties -- aren't particularly bad.

Like all good data explorations, this raises more questions than it answers, but I think it shows the value of looking at data in novel ways.

Drinking and driving

2008-05-23T07:20:00.008+01:00

During a commercial break on television last night I saw two adverts in quick succession. One was for vodka. Vodka is great stuff, but the advertising can't tell me this. It has carefully to ensure that no images or messages are used which might make me see it as enjoyable, because this could make me, as a blubber-minded member of the public, use it irresponsibly. And in case there's any lingering doubt about how much I'm not supposed to enjoy the vodka, the advert is plastered with the slogan "Drink responsibly" and points me to a website where I can learn how to drink less.

This advert was followed by one from Renault, selling a car which plops out noxious pollutants, is built to exceed the legal speed limit and is quite capable of killing innocent people. It was marketed with lots of exciting images of the car being driven wildly and ended with the slogan "Serious Fun". You can watch it, if you like.

Isn't there an inconsistency here? Alcohol: most people people enjoy it but it can cause harm if abused = constant warnings and can't be marketed as making your life more fun. Cars: although some people enjoy them, they cause harm when used normally = no warnings, and the marketing can promise sex and fun in return for using the product.

Surely the time has come for car companies to go where the drink companies have gone? Renault could have an advert which focuses solely on some minor aspect of the product's design -- the shape of the gearstick, for example, with resolutely no mention of how people might feel when driving the car. It would then display warnings like "Please enjoy the Twingo responsibly". Naturally oil companies should carry similar exhortations in their commercials too. And of course, both types of advertiser should direct consumers to websites where they can be helped to spend less money on the the products of the people paying for the adverts. Just a thought.

Fuel Prices

2008-05-22T07:39:00.006+01:00

Those of us working in transport know that, despite what the public feel, the real cost of motoring is really much lower than it used to be. The Guardian today have an analysis of what fuel really costs, which shows this pretty clearly (and fuel is only one part of the falling cost).

If, like me, your memory extends back as far as the 1970s, you should know all this to be true. Look at car ownership and use prior to... ooh, let's say 1987: a typical person owned a second-hand car and used it fairly infrequently, and the cost was a major factor in this behavioural pattern. Today the same typical person has a brand new black pickup truck and uses it to go everywhere. (Okay, I know not everybody has a black pickup truck, but it does sometimes feel that way. I can't express how much I loathe those ridiculous Nissan and Mitsubishi pickup trucks and the morons who buy them.)*

Sure, part of this is the greater availability of credit, but still: go back 20 years and there was no way the average British working person could have afforded to drive in the manner they do now. And what's the cost of public transport done whilst the cost of motoring has fallen? Yes, you've guessed it...

* Edit: Is anybody else annoyed by the names these moronmobiles have? What sort of inadequate feels the need to drive a vehicle with 'Warrior' or 'Outlaw' slapped on the side? My suggestion: everybody who drives round with 'Warrior' written on their vehicle should be pressed into the army and sent off to Afghanistan, everybody with 'Outlaw' can be lynched and everybody with 'Animal' gets sent to a zoo.

I'm really enjoying my new camera

2008-05-16T15:32:00.003+01:00

Espresso machine, originally uploaded by drianwalker.

Kitten in a basket

2008-05-15T10:23:00.002+01:00

Kitten in a basket, originally uploaded by drianwalker.

Monster loves this basket, even though (a) it's clearly too small for him and (b) there's a larger basket right next to it.

Fashion non-victims?

2008-05-02T22:21:00.002+01:00

Well, here's a surprising thing. It seems I inspired the design of this hat:

They could at least have given me a citation! Bloody fashion designers...