Transport planners are asking the wrong question - which is why their answer is always 'more trains'

Places of work are not conveniently distributed and, to make matters worse, where most people live is more disbursed than planners seem to think. Since most people don't live in dense inner-city suburbs and don't work in 'central business districts' (this is true even for a city like London), transport planning solutions founded on urban transit from suburb to city don't work. Transport planners are asking the wrong question and getting the wrong answer.

Here's Joel Kotkin talking about Los Angeles:

If you want a job in Southern California, it is very useful to have a car. The average worker in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (which includes Orange County) can get to fewer than 1 percent of the jobs by transit in 30 minutes. By car, the average worker can get to 33 times as many jobs, according to University of Minnesota research. In Riverside-San Bernardino, the average worker can get to nearly 100 times as many jobs by car as by transit in 30 minutes.

Yet, as Kotkin observes, the city managements in Southern California have "...decided only their solution — more trains — is an acceptable alternative." There's no consideration of ride-hailing, ride-sharing or private jitneys - responses that work with the dispersed nature of the place and the realities of how people live.

West Yorkshire is, you'll all agree, pretty urban in nature but its land area is a third bigger than Greater London with a quarter of the population. And, for all Leeds supposed significance (something I consider consistently overstated to the detriment of the region), the distribution of employment is such that the same applies to West Yorkshire as does in Los Angeles - if you want a job it's pretty useful to have a car.

Despite this reality, transport planners remain transfixed by the idea of the train (or some other fixed line system such as trams, streetcars or trolley buses) - transport solutions that, as one wag put it, "take people from one place they don't want to be to another place they don't want to be". We go to London, which has the most comprehensive public transport system of any major city anywhere, and say "let's do that" without appreciating the constraints of physical geography, where people live and where they work. We need a tram because Manchester has a tram.

But Manchester's tram system doesn't serve most of Greater Manchester:



So, because the tram doesn't go near where most Mancunians live, they do what they've done for years - get in their car and drive to work. Tram systems are great but still, for places that have them, represent fewer than 5% of commuter journeys.

The central problem here - one that transport planners must know but seem to ignore - is that the distribution of people and jobs simply isn't suited to the sort of mass transit solutions those planners like other than where population density is high and there has been a long history of major investment in transport infrastructure (London and Tokyo are the two best examples). Given that it is uneconomic to run relative cheap bus services into many dispersed parts of West Yorkshire what hope do we have of creating a fixed infrastructure transit system that can replace using the car?

Last night I had a conversation with some folk about buses and taxis (it started with us talking about getting the train to Carlisle). The conclusion of the conversation was that, if there were more than two of you then getting a taxi to Bingley station for the train is cheaper than using the bus. And, even with two people the extra cost of a cab is minimal (seven quid in a taxi, six quid and change on the bus). So you get a taxi that comes at your convenience, gets you there quicker and picks you up from your front door rather than have you stand in the wind and rain at a bus stop.

So the right way to think about transport in this case is "how do we make taxis cheaper, cleaner and safer". But that's not what transport authorities are doing - quite the opposite. When a system arrives (ride sharing) that promises to do just this the response of authorities is to try and stop the improvement. And the same goes for ride-hailing, jitneys and mini-buses - public authorities put regulatory barriers in the way, often at the behest of those whose interests are affected by these innovations.

This isn't to say you shouldn't have a tram (although I consider it the wrong thing for West Yorkshire) but to argue for transport planning to work with human behaviour rather than to see itself as trying to force people to change that behaviour. I never drive into Leeds city centre, not because I'm trying to save the planet or think cars are evil but because it's cheap and convenient for me to do so (especially when my wife drops me off at the station). I do drive into Bradford centre because the public transport option isn't cheaper or more convenient.

Joel Kotkin is right to criticise this sort of statement from transport chiefs (this is from the CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Phil Washington):

“It’s too easy to drive in this city. We want to reach the riders that left and get to the new ones as well. And part of that has to do with actually making driving harder.”

Since no transport system based on fixed lines can serve a dispersed population as well as the car, this attitude condemns many people to a less pleasant, more expensive and slower journey that can't be substituted for a ride on a public transport system. Yes the new capacity will fill up (although it is interesting to note that most journeys on UK tram systems outside London are not commuter journeys) but it will be marginal to the totality of journeys.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the 'decarbonisation' of road transport (what you use to generate the electricity, how to keep all those cars charged up, power grid problems, etc.) but the intention of public authorities is to do just that - we're committed to 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2040. It would be, therefore, better to invest in resolving those unanswered questions than to pile more billions into transport systems that don't even begin to answer the question we should be asking - how can people move around as they do now but more efficiently, more safely and more cleanly?

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