This blog provides data and information about air pollution levels in Crystal Palace, where I live. Like many urban places it suffers from high levels of air pollution, which has a significant impact on our health. Nitrogen Dioxide pollution is bad for our health. It reduces life expectancy, and makes lung and heart conditions worse. The government’s Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) estimates that between 28,000 and 36,000 people die as a result of all forms of air pollution every year in the UK. There was a lot of local concern about air pollution after Croydon Council introduced its ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhood’ policy. This blog post doesn’t pass any comment on the policy, but I hope helps people to discuss policies armed with the available facts. There are two sections to this post: Monitoring conducted by Bromley Council on Anerley Hill. This shows pollution levels on…
Tag: <span>pollution</span>
I’m going to take a silver lining from the commotion that the small pilot Low Traffic Neighbourhood in Crystal Palace has caused – namely that a lot of people are now talking about traffic levels and air pollution. One of the two campaigners trying to remove the LTN measures has said their second aim, after removing those measures, is to improve local air quality. Assuming all the interest is genuine, I’ve written this blog to set out some facts about traffic and pollution and some options to try to address the longstanding problems blighting Crystal Palace. By the way, the pictures above were taken in 2014, when I last wrote about traffic in the area. Congestion and pollution is nothing new, here! Traffic in Crystal Palace Let’s zoom in from the national to the local, to understand this properly. Road traffic in Great Britain increased from 255 billion miles travelled…
I’m not a very regular cinema-goer, so I’ve never felt particularly passionate about the campaign to bring one to Crystal Palace. But I do fully support the Picture Palace campaign in trying to keep 25 Church Road as an assembly/leisure building for the local community, in the face of repeated attempts to turn it into a church. We have planning rules that designate the building a certain “use class”. This one is D2, which means it is protected for uses like a cinema, dance, concert or bingo hall, gym or skating rink. It’s the only facility of its kind in an area already blessed with lots of fantastic places of worship. This area of planning policy exists to ensure we have a good mix of facilities in the local area, and can be used by councils to prevent communities being overrun with cafes and takeaways, or losing valuable office space. I hope…
One of my top priorities for the Crystal Palace and Anerley area would have to be traffic reduction. Every day on my way home from work, walking back from the station or cycling down the hill, this is what I see: The crawling queues are similar around the Triangle and down the other main roads in the area. This is bad news, if only because it’s annoying to be stuck in traffic! Plus, it snarls up buses and makes them less reliable. Here is another pair of pictures, this time showing air pollution in the area. The map on the left shows the quantity of deadly nitrogen dioxide emitted by vehicles each day, and in case you’re wondering the dark blue along Crystal Palace Parade is about the same as the Strand in central London, while the pollution down Anerley Hill is similar to that on the roads leading north…
In the past couple of months I’ve been able to combine work and my mapping hobby, working on a web site about air pollution in London. I’m going to be speaking about this at the October geomob meeting. I’m lucky enough to live in one of Europe’s most polluted cities. Air pollution causes more early deaths than obesity and road collisions, and is only bested by smoking. The Mayor published some really good open data on pollution levels, which of course is incomprehensible to ordinary folk. So despite having a sense that it’s not the cleanest city, Londoners don’t know all that much about the problem or how it could be solved. We want to help change that. Our first splash was a map showing the quantities of some major pollutants dropped on sections of roads across the capital, so Londoners could find out – how polluted is my road?…
While we’re benefiting from all this rain in London, which keeps air pollution at bay, I’ve been wondering about including pollution data in OpenStreetMap-based routing engines. The trouble is that I lack the technical skills to implement this, so I’m writing this post in the hope that somebody might be inspired to give it a go. Air pollution is the second biggest cause of premature deaths in the UK after smoking. Here’s a little league table of nasties taken from Department of Health data: Smoking – 87,000 premature deaths per year Air pollution – 29,000 Alcohol – 22,000 Obesity – 9,000 The main pollutants in cities are particulates (PM10, PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and nitrogen oxide (NO). Unlike the pea souper fogs of years gone by, these are invisible to the human eye but very deadly. They’re most concentrated on busy congested roads and around airports – so unsurprisingly in central London,…