Air Quality in Kingston

Crowdsourcing policy ideas

Is Kingston's air quality declining? I actually sometimes sense I can feel it as I breathe in, particularly if I am going on a run?

King’s College London have monitoring stations for air quality in the Borough and you can get virtually live information on the quality of our air.

So what do we do about it?

The Council has an existing air quality strategy but it seems to focus too much on identifying we have a problem rather than actively trying to find solutions. That strategy is currently being revised. The Greater London Authority also have a program called Breathe Better Together.

Long term solutions are easy to identify and they include how we set our planning policy for new buildings that contribute to improving air quality. What we really need to do is think through how we tackle this in the short to medium term. The Mini-Hollands project will help us shift from car to bike but putting in cycling infrastructure is one thing, but what then?

So, I am looking at crowdsourcing ideas from the people that live here. Has anyone got good ideas on what actions we can take to improve air quality? Any ideas clearly have to be deliverable both financially and in policy terms but I am willing to listen to any ideas that residents might have. Are there models elsewhere that we should be thinking about?


Tweet back views on write to me at kevin.davis@kingston.gov.uk if your ideas are longer than a tweet can contain.