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Um I'm now going to invite um Doctor Byrne up to come and talk. So he is a consultant rheumatologist. Yes, go, right. Um He has been a fantastic advocate for active travel um both at the hospital and in within the local community. So he's gonna get the slides shared. Fabulous, very much. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the invitation. So this first slide demonstrates very well. The difference of active and passive transport. And my second slide illustrates one of the earliest, at least in the UK restrictions to active transport. From the 18th century onwards, the Enclosure Act uh meant that private land then started to restrict people walking across it who were then called trespasses and subsequently shot. Making the point that use of public space is a political decision. And that's a theme of today's talk. Public access to private land has continued to create argument. And in 1932 there was a successful coordinated mass trespass of Kinder scout in protest of restricted access over private land. This led to the National Parks Act of 1949. Walker's rights to travel through common land and uncultivated upland were eventually protected by the countryside and Rights of Way Act. The Crow Act as late as 2000 still relevant to today. But it does make the point that mass protest against vested interest can be successful. After world war two, private car ownership surged, leading to a decline in cycling, road networks expanded, prioritizing motor vehicles over pedestrians and cyclists. And this slide illustrates well, the phenomenal growth of uh private, the private motor car And since the inv invention of the machine and the replacement of the donkey with the engine, we've had many more choices. All have proven to be relatively more expensive and therefore have required a certain seduction to persuade us to pay based invariably on convenience, comfort and speed and profits have been enormous, both for King coal, for railway barons, for big oil, for airline companies, for road building companies and with plenty of money to spend on lobbying to persuade our political masters. They have influenced how public space should be used, but they have used a slightly different language of modernization, efficiency and productivity to influence people. But this has all come at some societal costs. Whole districts have been bulldozed to make way for flyovers and childhood freedoms to play and move have been restricted, walking and cycling has become unpleasant, dangerous and marginalized. The air has become polluted and the environment degraded and made ugly, dissenting voices started to be heard in the 19 seventies and groups like sesostris founded in 1977 emerged, repurposing disused railway lines into walking and cycling routes. And their work led to the creation of the National Cycle Network in 1995 protests against car dominance have gained momentum. Certainly this did so in the 19 nineties including events like reclaim the streets which advocated for pedestrian friendly spaces and reducing our car dependency. This grassroots activism has also influenced active travel policies, Children have perhaps paid the highest price and those on the right are all the things that drivers have sacrificed for kids. Absolutely nothing. And on the left, all those things that kids have sacrificed for drivers playing in the street doesn't happen anymore. Safe school streets, lots of danger outside the school, walking to school, reduced biking to school, trivial, small walking in the park, random play crossing the streets, playing at night. Children have given up a lot of independence. They've lost a lot of socialization out in the streets and as well as that their health has been affected, increasing incidence of asthma which parallels the internal combustion engine and of course consequences about the future of the planet as we've heard today. So Children have paid a very high price both in behavioral change and they've paid the price with their lives. And you see here are the fatalities, child fatalities and how they occurred and what modality killed them. And you can see how the car has culled Children throughout the ages. A terrible terrible price that we have all paid. And speaking as a man who has seen firsthand the impact of child death within families having lost a cousin in 1969 and then lost a first cousin once removed in 2013. I've seen just how devastating this is. It's a huge, huge price to pay and one we should not be prepared to pay. Continuing the time timeline. The two thousands show increased government investment in walking and cycling initiatives. This is largely because the evidence, a crude of the health benefits of exercise, the health disadvantages of pollution and the unsustainability of trying to build our way out of congestion and progress since then has been slow and stuttering at least in the UK with some advances and some retreats largely dependent on who the Prime Minister was at the time, Tony Blair's government introduced this initiative promising to support cycling and walking with a little bit of money. And the cycling demonstration towns project. Colchester was one of them ran from 2005 to 2011. 6 were chosen in 2005. And then another nine were chosen in 2009 amongst them, Colchester and a little bit of money was provided but it was all too little and it was all too short. Cycling, England was wound up in 2011. David Cameron's government. He did a huge U turn. You may remember boasting when he came in, I'm going to lead the greenest government ever to cutting the green crap. Only a few years later when the lobbying groups, the vested interest had got to him. So cycling England was closed down. It was regarded as a quango and in the austerity cuts, cycling in England was cut, stopped and not replaced. Look at the transport budget over the time since then 2009 to today, you see that we spend about 45 billion lbs on transport. This is about double what it was when cycling England was closed down. So call it 23 billion. Then 60 million lbs is a quarter of 1%. How are you ever going to get modality shift by investing only a quarter of 1%. This was tokenism at its very worst. And of course, despite this setback for active travel, the science has continued to accumulate over the last decade or two in support of it and with concerns over the impact of the internal combustion engine to carbon dioxide levels, the efficiency of the paddle cycle has become more relevant and it remains the most efficient way of getting around. One that we should use more of cycling, runs on fat and saves you money, car driving, runs on money and makes you fat and particularly Children again because they've had their behavior restricted and activity levels reduced. We have seen an epidemic of obesity which bodes very ill for the future of the NHS. And, uh, our society has been degraded trying to accommodate the car and this is a, a view of, um, I don't know what it's called. A road in Texas. And you can imagine the argument. Just one lane.