Given Sacha’s family links, we’re covered air pollution Glasgow a few times in this blog! We’ve been in Glasgow and Western Scotland over the past week. So with our first travel blog of the summer not quite turning out how we expected, we thought we would delve into matters north of the border this week.
As we reported last time, there were early signs of hope for Glasgow - once known as one of the most polluted cities in the UK - from the low emission zone. The good news is that these signs of hope are looking real, with reported reduction of emissions of one third. And since that article, the improvements look to be continuing. It does seem that Northern England is now home to the cities with the biggest pollution problems.
Get out of my Voi
However, cycling infrastructure still seems to be in its infancy. Sacha took a Voi for a mid afternoon city centre trip and didn’t see anyone else cycling (though admittedly we saw a few more on the subsequent weekday; and apparently ridership was high during the Commonwealth Games last month). Locals have told us of annoyance of bike lanes being full of rubbish and not very welcoming. Electric bikes are pretty key given the city’s hilly terrain, so availability is something - but actual use at scale and replacement of car journeys would be even better!
Nonetheless, getting out of the city and to a windy beach on a Scottish Isle is almost always going to be a good thing for avoiding pollution! We went to the Isle of Bute and registered 97% and above for our daily AirTrack scores. The sea air, lack of traffic and industry and favourable weather (read: wind and rain!) all contributed.
We also went for some breezy seaside runs, somewhat different from our sweaty Spanish ones! We scored 93% each time with low pollutant levels, and almost optimal times considering local conditions.
Post script
Today is GCSE results day (hope everyone got what they hoped for, particularly if they sat exams during periods or in locations of high pollution!) This has made us ponder whether air pollution ever features on the school curriculum. As the second biggest risk to health (after high blood pressure), one would hope so! And education could usefully cover both avoiding polluting practices, as well as protecting your own health.
However, we have seen precious little evidence for this, apart from standalone projects such as SAMHE, which put the responsibility onto interested teachers to integrate air pollution knowledge into their teaching. It’s effective and important, as this study from Central Asia shows. So what are we waiting for?