Two Wheels Good

It’s a steep hill from our apartment in Georgetown to the Embassy in DC.  In the mornings, I’ve tried to reconcile myself to this by reminding myself how healthy it is to start the day with a walk up a hill.  I’ve had some success.  But the journey home was less enjoyable for the first few weeks.  It’s just quite a long walk at the end of what are often long days.  But my life has been revolutionised by investing in a Capital Bikeshare key.  This means I combine the joy of a (very) speedy downward cycle home with being reminded of the very similar scheme in London, the Boris bikes.

You can therefore imagine my excitement at meeting the man who was behind the DC Bikeshare scheme, Gabe Klein, who is now Chicago’s Commissioner for Transport on a trip at the end of last week to the Windy (and snowy) city.  Great plans are afoot for Chicago’s transport system.  There’s a big focus on sustainable travel – encouraging people to cycle (Chicago will get its own bikeshare system, and they plan to have 100 miles of protected bike lanes) and walk.  We talked about the need to make ‘non-car’ transport safe – and to communicate that it is safe – to the public.  But we also talked about how tomake it easy for people to take advantage of the alternatives around – so that they want to do so.  And a lot of this reminded me of the British Government’s continued interest in “nudge” – the idea being to change what people do, not through law or some kind of regulation, but rather just through the way options are presented and by making it easier for people to choose the best option (more on the UK’s Nudge Unit).

But just as interesting was Gabe’s commitment to finding ways of getting people to take responsibility for their own environments and for fixing problems.  In Chicago one manifestation of this is See Click Fix.  This kind of individual and local empowerment is at the heart of the British Government’s Big Society initiative.  And getting individuals to contribute to bigger objectives is something that we’ve seen on a big scale in collaboration between Britain and the US on the science side, with the fantastic Galaxy Zoo which led to the creation of the world’s largest database of galaxy shapes, essentially through lots and lots of individuals gazing at pretty pictures of the galaxy and reporting what they saw.  With Sir John Beddington on his way to the Embassy as I write, it’s nice to be reminded that collaboration between everyone from small school children in different countries to the British Chief Scientist and the highest levels of the US science world is how we get the best results.