I've felt for some while that we have our transport planning, infrastructure, investment and systems all, as my mum would put it, kecky-pooky. Just to give one example - there were 5.2 billion passenger journeys on buses but just 1.9 billion journeys on railways, yet public subsidy for rail is double the subsidy for buses (including the cost of giving every old person who wants one a free bus pass). The problem is that, whenever there's a problem with rail travel - a method of travel that is never used by half the population and which accounts for less than 5% of total journeys - it's all over the news as pundits and politicians fall over each other to tell us that a couple of late, overcrowded trains is a national scandal.
The real national scandal (if this is the currency we want to deal in) has been the gradual depriving of many communities from anything that looks even remotely like a reliable public transport system. It's no damn good giving older people a free bus pass at enormous cost if there aren't any buses for them to make use of the pass. Yet that is the reality of the UK's upside down approach to investment on public transport. There's a £48 billion investment plan for the existing rail network plus the eye-watering £55 billion or more for HS2. And we haven't even got to such delights as Northern Powerhouse Rail or extending high speed up to Scotland!
By contrast, the road investment strategy amounts to just £15 billion (there's an additional £1.9 billion for cycling and walking - which add up to more journeys than rail) and there is a further £12 billion or so directed through local councils, regional mayors, LEPs and combined authorities. Bear in mind that 95% of all journeys and over two thirds of all passenger journeys take place on roads. Yet government - urged on by campaign groups like the Campaign for Better Transport - still bungs ever more money into rail networks.
The problem is that too many people have heard the words "modal shift" and think it's a realistic option to get more people "out of cars and onto trains". I've heard this at just about every single combined authority meeting without any consideration of how on earth an over-capacity rail network that amounts to less than 10% of miles travelled can provide this modal shift. Worse still we are stuck in a planning model that says people travel to work in central business districts - the curse of Christaller lingers in transport planning meaning that the reality of people's lives is not reflected in how systems are designed or, indeed, what sort of systems get built.
Here's a quote from Laberteaux, Lance Brown and Berger, writing in Infinite Suburbs about what they call Interburbia:
"...in documenting the actual quantities of population, jobs, and transportation movements, we reveal that a planning focus on the developing suburban nodes and their infrastructural linkages (rather than suburb to city core) would more closely match the urbanizing processes we confirm on the ground. A renewed infrastructural focus on intersuburban commuting along with parallel policy and design solutions could help create a better interface between the flexible, service-based economy of suburban environments and the majority of the US population who live and work there."To translate this a little and by way of illustration, let me talk about my neighbours. Firstly, none of them use public transport to get to work. And the location of that work includes Halifax, inner suburban Bradford, Skipton, Cowling, Bingley and Otley. Only two people have work that takes them to the nearest city centre - the node around which transport planners will work - Bradford.
This pattern will be repeated again and again throughout the UK's urban areas - people don't live in suburbs and commute to inner cities, they live and work in suburbia. Even in London with perhaps the world's more extensive public transport network, the majority of journeys are by car and most people do not work in London's central business districts. Yet intraurban transport planning - look at Crossrail - is all about moving people to and from suburbs to the city centre. And interurban planning is about moving people from one central node to another central node.
The result of this is that expectations of transport investment from most decision-makers (MPs, councillors, government policy planners) are influenced by the loud voices of, mostly richer, people who use trains including, of course, the editors of newspapers and employees at the Department for Transport. Plus of course all those blokes who are still psychologically attached to their train sets. This means that the interests of road users - including those 5.2 billion bus journeys - are of secondary importance to those of rail commuters whinging about how much the tickets cost and that there's a delayed train because the engineering works over-ran.
With driverless options and the advent of a 3D transport environment (the current one is largely 2D), very expensive fixed rail systems - a transport form that takes people from one place they don't want to be to another place they don't want to be - become harder and harder to justify. Yet UK transport plans seem to be trapped into an accelerating investment in new and upgraded rail systems despite this not having the remotest chance of delivering modal shift at any scale.
Trains really aren't the answer to the UK's transport challenges - they ignore the reality of people's lives, fail to recognise choice, are expensive and inefficient, suck in subsidy that amounts to a regressive tax on the less well off, crowd out new and innovative options, and fail to encompass emerging technologies. It's not that trains aren't the solution, it's more that they're the problem.
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5 comments:
Several things could be done to rectify these trends. First and foremost, alter the law such that all fines for any civil or criminal infraction are passed to Central Government, and not to whatever local body has decided that someone ought to pay a penalty. The reason I say this is that councils tend to view parking fines, and if they get the chance general traffic fines as an easy cash-cow to boost their income.
Secondly, recognising that the majority users of roads are cars and removing almost all bus lanes would be another step forwards. Bus lanes amount to Zil lanes set aside for a tiny proportion of users (buses and people with fake plates) that take up valuable space and give nothing back.
Finally, a clarity of vision about roads also needs to be imposed. Different roads do different things, so imposing blanket 20 speed limits is a recipe for trouble. Cars are most fuel efficient and least polluting at speeds between 40 and 50 mph; trunk routes intended for rapid transit in cities should have speed limits set around 40 or thereabouts to efficiently move cars around; large secure multi-storey car parks are the best solution for a council looking to make money off car users.
To get more people out of cars and onto trains they would need to completely reverse the Beeching cuts. Then ensure that there were no strikes too.
Absolutely right to observe that trains "take people from one place they don't want to be to another place they don't want to be" - but the same is true of buses, although the gap between actual and desired locations does tend to be smaller.
The genie of personal transport will not easily go back into the bottle - better to acknowledge that and provide an infrastructure for the future, rather than the expensive nonsense of 19th century systems like trains, particularly the ridiculous 'Big Train Set' that is HS2.
In my region rents on out of town office parks are static/falling unless it is Grade A & even then lease lengths are coming down, so there isn't much new development going on. The speculative development (with an anchor) and rental growth is happening in urban areas close to transport hubs.
Speaking to developers & agents, they say the market is respoinding to demand as car ownership rates are falling especially amongst graduates as they don't want to spend 60 mins a day sat in traffic & commit a large part of their disposable income to owning and running a car.
So businesses are having to respond by locating themselves in city centres to attract next-gen staff.
There is an element of confirmation bias in transport spending, through induced demand, if you plan & facilitate for inter-suburban car travel then, as that is easy & convenient, a lot of people will do it and you look very prescient.
The problem is this country (outside of London) has never planned or facilitated for any mode since the war except the car, so you get Local Authority transport planners (like Dan above) thinking the solution is more roads and faster speeds will have less congestion, as though that hasn't been tried before.
The market and world are changing, transport uk needs to do the same.
We have had more than adequate evidence from the 20th century that car based transport systems don't scale and therefore don't work, except to drag people into traffic misery and envelop regions in smog.
That UK public transport including buses and trains doesn't work well is a condemnation of poor UK planning, but not of the idea of better transport systems. You don't have to travel far to see things done much better. I wish more British people would travel to the continent and witness it for themselves . Maybe they would be less willing to put up with the poor planning back home. In any case, nothing is perfect of course, and there's plenty of car driving on the continent, however in many, many places you can live perfectly happily without a car and be freer too without the costs and maintenance requirements.
There remains the difficult problem of retrofitting smarter transport systems onto poorly planned existing UK communities so that they grow in a better direction over time. Again, though, this is not new and has been tackled by other countries: plenty to learn.
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