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Molly Magid: Welcome to UC Science Radio, where we conduct interviews with a range of scientists to learn about the big issues facing our world and what science is doing to help. I'm Molly Magid, a visiting Fulbright student at UC. Today, I'm talking with Dr Simon Kingham. He's a Professor of Geography and the Chief Science Adviser for the Ministry of Transport. He studies people and how we move around our towns and cities. The data he collects helps us understand the impact of things like cycleways and parks on our physical and mental health.
Kia ora Simon. I am curious about lots of things about your work, but primarily just what do you do? What is your role at the university and outside? And what's your research?
Simon Kingham: I'm a Professor in the School of Earth and Environment. I'm a geographer, a human geographer. So the things I'm interested in are anything I guess, to do with the urban environment and the impacts the urban environment has on our well-being and our behavior and our health. As part of that, I direct the Geo Health Laboratory, which does research for the Ministry of Health. So we only do research for them that is of particular policy relevance.
I've also done research on transport and well-being and it tends to all be with end users. And I do that three days a week, because at the moment I am also seconded to the Ministry of Transport as their Chief Science Advisor. So in normal times, I spend a couple of days a week in Wellington and my role there is to ensure that policy is evidence-based. So I have lots of conversations with people. I'm asked to comment on policy documents, and I'm often asked to comment on the evidence base for those documents.
So when you say you work with end users, what exactly does that mean?
SK: It's a range of people, so a lot of the projects I do will be with government, for instance. So they might be with central government people. But it's also with people at the city council, the regional councils, so we might do a project where we're working on something that's of particular relevance and use to them. But it also goes down to a different level. Quite a few of the courses I teach actually involve students doing research projects with community groups. So they might be residents associations, some are private companies, some are forms of NGOs. But a lot of them are actually residents’ associations, so it varies from residents’ associations up to central government.
What was your path to this research and to academia in general?
SK: When I was at school, if I go way back to then, I was at a place called Lancaster in the North of England, which is quite a good university. And I met two people there who influenced me. One was one of my lecturers, a guy called John Whitelegg, who was a passionate transport advocate. And I remember one lecture that really stuck with me because he didn't turn up. And we wondered why this guy hadn't turned up to the lecture. And then it turns out, I don't know if this was an urban myth, nut I think it probably was partly true is that he had tied himself to a tree because someone was trying to chop it down and he didn't think it should be being chopped down. Because he was an absolute activist, an environmental activist. But he was passionate about transport. And he used to talk about things that are very popular nowadays in terms of sustainable transport. But this is 30 odd years ago, so he was ahead of his time in that respect.
Then I met another guy, a guy called Tony Gatrell, who persuaded me to do a PhD. And he was really interested in health inequalities and geography of health. And I guess that got me into doing a PhD. And to some extent, I've never actually in many ways not never actually made a hard decision to do what I'm doing, I've kind of fallen into things. But certainly those two people were people who really influenced my decision to do what I'm doing.
So to look at all your projects, they seem to me somewhat unrelated. So you've done things with air pollution and cycling, but also mental health after disasters and non-fluoride toothpaste use. All these things I've seen that you've done, and it's just made me wonder what connects them all?
SK: So I guess there is an overarching theme. And I guess the overarching theme is the impacts of where we live on our health and well-being. And I would say that's the overall theme. Generally most of the research I do is urban, so it's about urban environments and well-being. But then the other part is, I think I'm a person who is less focused on a particular theoretical area and much more focused on taking opportunities. Some of these opportunities have arisen because of research funding. For instance, I used to do a lot of work on air pollution and well-being. And then the funding for that in New Zealand really disappeared. So I find I've changed direction slightly according to funding, and then opportunities happen.
So something will happen. You alluded to the mental health projects, and the earthquakes in Christchurch happened. I managed to get some funding and employ a PhD student and we did a project looking at mental health and geography after the earthquake. An interesting thing about that project was--this is where the geography comes in--that we know that a lot of people moved house (in many cases a number of times after the earthquakes). And therefore, it was really important to be able to track people through time because you couldn't just look at the address that they were at at the time of the earthquakes or the address they were at at the time that they were diagnosed with a mental health problem. You actually had to be able to track them through time. And that was where the geography came in. Really interesting project, I think it has real direct policy impact, but it was to some extent taking an opportunity. I guess maybe that's one thing I've been quite good at, is seeing opportunities and thinking, well, it's kind of related to what I do. But you're absolutely right, my research is a little bit all over the place, but it's within that broad theme of urban environments and health and wellbeing.
Going back to that project you talked about, I was really interested in the mental health effects of the disaster and what happened here. So what did you find?
SK: Often the way we look at the impacts of the environment on wellbeing is, we look at the address you’re at when you when you intersect with a health service or you are surveyed or something. But actually, in the context of that, we found that that address location often was meaningless, because some of the most affected people by the earthquake actually ended up living in places that weren't particularly affected. So if you went back to where they lived, you'd go, well, actually, that place wasn't affected, but they got mental health problems. And so in this case, it was actually anxiety. So what we actually found is if you track them back, you could find that sometimes it was where they were at the time of the earthquake, which was a far better indicator of impact on life, but also the amount of times they'd moved and where they moved to and from.
We found that immediately after the earthquake, if people stayed in their community, they seemed to do better because they because they had that strength of community. So the people who stayed had the strength of community to make jokes about the toilet not working and the houses being broken, and that was fine. Whereas the people who initially moved went into a new place that had no social connection around them and they struggled.
You then go a year later and it changes round because the people who’ve moved have started to establish themselves in new communities. But the people who have stayed where they are, suddenly it's not quite so fun, having your toilets broken after a year, when the shops nearby are closed because they got damaged in the earthquake. The school might have closed, a number of your community moved away, and suddenly it's not quite so fun. Then there were also interesting things about people who went away and came back. There was a whole range of things according to where people were and how and where they'd moved to. So basically what we found is that moves, where people are relocated to was often a much stronger determinant of impacts on mental wellbeing than actually the address they were living at at the time, which is the traditional way of looking at it.
That's really fascinating. So if there was no limit on the budget that you were given. What is the one thing that you would do to change the world or to fix a global problem? A big question.
SK: We actually don't need unlimited budgets. I mean, one of the things I'm passionate about is designing communities so that they are better for health and wellbeing. So, for instance, I think we know that people like living in neighborhoods that are green, where the traffic is slower and there's less of it. They like living in neighborhoods where they can walk to parks and walk to shops nearby. I think most people, a lot of people actually don't particularly choose or enjoy driving long distances to places. But they do it because they don't have a choice. When you give people good public transport and you provide good infrastructure and good places for people to walk and cycle, they actually like doing that.
At the moment, while we're locked down, I'm seeing and talking to a lot of other people, there's a lot of people out walking and cycling. I suspect that part of the reason they're out walking and cycling is because there's very little traffic and they actually quite enjoy it.
So if we could create a society where we gave people those choices, we could actually see very different outcomes. I think we'd see better community, I think we’d see improved mental health and wellbeing we'd see increased physical activity. And to some extent that doesn't need money, it actually needs strong political will. It needs good evidence to demonstrate that the outcomes are good, which I think there is, and maybe that needs a bit more research. But I think to some extent its things which may not be dramatically expensive, but need strong political will.
We also know that in many places in the world there are strong vested interests in keeping the status quo. So we know historically car companies, for instance, going back 50-60 years, have managed to change laws to make it less attractive to walk. Well, I see that sort of stuff happening, and what can we do to change some of those sorts of things. So we don't need lots of money, we need political will and we need a different mindset and different thinking.
Yes, I saw a lot of your work had to do with cycleways and putting these into Christchurch itself. And I've only been living here for a few months, so I don't know what it looked like before now, which for me it feels very safe to be able to cycle around and have these paths to go on. But I'm curious about what sort of transformation happened to create that infrastructure and what the process was like of convincing people that this was a good thing to do and that the city should implement it.
SK: Yeah so it's interesting. To some extent, the earthquakes were the tipping point and the change, because there's been a lot of infrastructure change and investment. The major cycleways are part of that. So we now have this program of 13 major cycleways and some infrastructure in other places. But when I came here in the early 2000s, the policy at the time was that we had painted cycleways, that we’d paint a small strip at the side and called it a cycleway. My thoughts of what the evidence was telling us were “that's not going to help”. It's actually probably just a bit of a waste of paint, to be honest. But I was told at the time on numerous occasions that all we had to do was wait till the network was complete. Once we had lots of painted cycleways, people would start cycling. And I just didn't believe it because I thought this is not going to make people who are not cycling feel safer. It might help the very small number of existing cyclists.
We were talking earlier about how I got into research. So I managed to get some funding back in 2009 and with a colleague, an engineer. And so I'm a geographer, he's an engineer, we had a study looking at what was stopping people cycling in Christchurch. The likely outcome was people didn't feel safe, unsurprisingly, which we kind of knew, but we had to do the research to show it. But the really interesting thing was that people said what they absolutely needed was to be physically separated from traffic to feel safe. What they needed was to be away from traffic.
So we showed them lots of examples of infrastructure and we came out with the preferred forms of infrastructure. This was done for the New Zealand Transport Agency, for the government. We told the city council about it. Subsequently, and I don't know how direct the influence was, but clearly as a result of that, post-earthquake Christchurch now has a policy of that you have to build separated cycleways. All around the country, there's now an acceptance and I think our research might have helped, but there were other things as well. So now we have separated cycleways.
There's still some "bikelash”: people argue against it and they get very protective about road space and they don't like giving any to cycleways. But we're now seeing a very different city to the city of fifteen years ago. So if you'd come fifteen years ago, there would've been maybe one separated cycleway in the whole of the city. And now there's a network of them, some being built as we speak.
So the physical infrastructure has changed. What about people's behaviours? Are there more people who are biking?
SK: Yeah, the council have cycle counters out and there’s evidence that the number of people biking is increasing dramatically and we would expect it to. And again, this is exactly what the research tells us. There's a mantra called “build it and they will come.” That's come out of Portland, Oregon, in the US. One of the cycle planners there really pushed that phrase. He said, actually, if you just build small amounts of cycleway, you'll increase more people. There's no tipping point. As you put more cycleways in, more people cycle because people cycle in the area where the cycleways are, so we need to keep doing them. We're starting to see that happen, and we're transforming the city and of course, in the central city, now we have reduced traffic speeds, which helps as well. We're having shared spaces and other things which are built on evidence-based policy, which is great because we are seeing a change in the way people are traveling.
What sort of policy recommendations do you work on at the Ministry of Transport?
SK: I'll give one example. At the moment, the way we raise revenue to maintain our transport infrastructure is something called road user charges or petrol tax. So when you buy your petrol, 70 cents of it is tax. If you have a diesel vehicle, you pay road user charges. So it works out to be the same amount of money, the same cost, but a slightly different way of collecting it.
What people are thinking about in the future is we might change the way we do that so we could collect it all electronically. So you'd have some sort of box or something in your vehicle, which is what a number of trucks do at the moment. And as you drive, the distance dictates how much you pay. What you can then do start doing clever things. You can charge people where they're driving. So if we decide we don't want people driving past schools when the kids are going in and out of school, you might say, well, we're going to charge more for that to try and change behaviour and to modify the impact. If you have certain roads that really aren't designed for heavy trucks, you might try and charge trucks a bit more to go on them to cover the extra cost of maintenance for that sort of road. You could change the way you charge according to time of day, according to the routes you go on, according to the infrastructure you're driving on. And that actually potentially transforms the way you fund transport so you can manage where transport goes. So the Ministry's doing some work on that. And I've been feeding into that work and having a lot of conversations with people about some other things that it might be able to do.
And you have this really interesting role of being able to work with lots of different bodies in government and in councils and different things like that. But you are more of a social scientist and work directly with things that impact people. So I'm wondering, for other sciences, do you see a role for them to be involved as you are in creating things that go out into the world more and are more applicable?
SK: Absolutely, I think it's taking advantage of or creating those opportunities. So ecologists, you know, are interested in stream restoration. They can do that academically and sitting in a lab, and every now and then go and do some fieldwork. Or they can actually go out and do it with communities and with councils and with governments and actually impact change. If you look at microbiologists, they can sit in a lab and do their work or they can actually say we've now got a pandemic, and actually what we know about it is really interesting and we want to inform the debate. And you look at like Siouxsie Wiles, who could sit back and do her own thing or she can actually come out and say, I want to help make a difference here.
There's a whole range of science where you can change behaviours, you can impact policy, you can advise people. I think it all comes down to partly your personality, but also what you feel you want to do.
Periodically in my life I have disagreements with people where I say look basically, we're paid by taxpayers, we're paid by the government or funders, student fees. Do we not have an obligation to do something for the people who pay us, i.e. the government? And some people go, well, you know, this obscure theoretical research might lead on to something interesting. And I'm going well it might not though, shouldn't we be doing something to help the people who actually pay us? But yeah, I am slightly unusual, I think, in academia.
I think it's also may have something to do with the recognition of the importance of science and research to actually back up decisions.
SK: Yeah, and I think you're right. Most elected people I see are genuinely interested in evidence-based policy. Not all, but I think that a lot are and that might be something slightly about the New Zealand psyche. It might just be a period of time that we're in that we particularly have that. Certainly the politicians I talk to and the people who are actually ultimately making those decisions genuinely seemed interested in evidence. They want evidence and they genuinely say, we really want to engage on this idea.
I had a really interesting meeting yesterday where I spoke to some people at the City Council. At the moment I'm really interested in the behaviour change we seem to be seeing: of more people out walking and cycling. Will people in a year's time have gone back to what they were doing before, or will some of these people who've tried it and go, actually, it's not that bad continue to walk and cycle? Will they continue to engage in the local neighbourhood? Will people have changed? So I spoke to the City Council and saying, look, I'm interested in doing a piece of research on this. And they were really excited. You know, they're going to kind of work with me on this. I spoke to people at the Ministry of Transport and said, I'm really interested. And they said the same.
So here's a project which to me is academically interesting in terms of, if you change people's behaviour, you forcibly change people's behaviour, do they then take on some of those good behaviours that come out of that in the future? And academically, it's interesting. But actually, you've got central government and local government also going, this is really interesting, because we want to see if we can somehow use that in policy. So there's an example of the sort of thing I think is quite exciting. And people are genuinely interested in evidence to impact policy in this country at the moment.
And also just taking a positive view in a time where things seem pretty scary and uncertain and saying, ok this big global crisis is happening, but what can we see as a positive outcome of that? Perhaps it will change people's behaviours in these ways.
SK: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, every cloud has a silver lining and hopefully this could be one of those silver linings.
So I think this might be a good place to end on a positive note. Thank you so much for talking with me.
SK: No problem. Nice chatting, nice meeting you.
That's it for today. For more information or to ask a question about any of the ideas raised in this show, feel free to send UC Science a message by e-mail, Facebook or Instagram. Thanks for listening!
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