Trains are not the solution to any of the UK's transport problems, they are the problem.

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.

….

It's time to stop obsessing about trains - they aren't the infrastructure solution we need

Let's imagine for a minute that I'm going to give you several billion pounds for the purpose of making the North of England's infrastructure "fit for the 21st century". Let's also forget that, in the real world, this looks unlikely because when you put infrastructure schemes through the Department of Transport's models they tell you that investing in the North - compared to yet another rail scheme for London - is a financial no-no.

Now, because you're an assiduous consumer of commentary and consider yourself bang up to the minute on transport issues, you come straight back and say something like:

High Speed Rail from York to Liverpool - maybe extending HS2 to Newcastle as well

Electrification of assorted railway lines (Calder Valley, Harrogate-York, etc.)

Rail links to Yorkshire's airports and ports

Light rail for Leeds (that may or may not connect to Bradford, Huddersfield and Wakefield

New stations, new rolling stock, fancy ticket machines and ticket systems

More trains, bigger trains, faster trains...

I know this is the response most folk will give because, even in the North where 95% of people don't use trains (on anything but a very occasional basis), the reporting on transport issues is utterly dominated by problems with trains - too old, too crowded, strikes, break downs, timetable problems:: you name it the BBC, Yorkshire Post and local media will be all over it.

Tell me, when did the newspapers or television news last cover the fact that your bus is old, slow and subject to delays and cancellations? When was there a shock horror report complete with vox pops from exasperated commuters saying how the endless summer of road works has caused congestion everywhere? One of the main routes into Bradford, the B6144 along Toller Lane and White Abbey Road, has been closed for eight weeks while Yorkshire Water try to find some of the wet stuff - have there been any reports on the sheer annoying inconvenience and cost of this work? You missed it?

Yet the single most important means by which people in the North get to work is by car and, however much you might want to parade your green credentials, all that vast investment in railways won't make anything but the tiniest of dents in this traffic. And, as you all know of course, the problems on the railways result from the decision (something to do with privatisation) to incentivise increasing passenger numbers - there isn't enough capacity on the rail system. Modal shift (every councillor I've ever met who has served on a transport committee can intone this - it goes with 'get more freight on rails' as a mantra) if it is a success simply results in the rail system seizing up.

So here's an alternative list for your infrastructure investment - one better linked to reality and less to the fact that too many transport planners still have a model railway in the attic:

Bus priority schemes, new buses and better bus stations

Superfast broadband - targeting where the commuter traffic is coming from not where it's going to

Car share apps and schemes - with financial rewards for users

Properly funded road maintenance and improvement - dealing with the thousands of stalled small schemes

Deregulation of taxi and minibus - getting something like the US Dollar bus schemes

Support for employer run bus schemes

Incentives for home working and local shared work spaces

Better cycling infrastructure (including, for larger places, cycle rent schemes)

Railways - for all that they have a place - are still 19th century technology. The EU auditors recently reported that the only high speed line on the whole continent (including HS1 and the Channel Tunnel) that is profitable is the Paris-Lyon line. The money spemt on railways represents a huge subsidy to wealthy urban commuters and we're paying the price of this with potholed roads, outdated diesel buses, over-regulated taxis and the almost complete absence of any national (let alone regional) strategy for roads. It is time to line the transport planners up and ask: "do you like trains?" If the answer is "yes" then get rid of them.

...

Things are seldom as simple as they seem...

I'm discussing Council budgets and we get to the matter of shared services and specifically sharing back office functions (things like receipts and payments, payroll, tax collection and so forth). Now these are things that every local council does with the same intention and the same outcome. So, on the face of it, sharing such things ought to be a doddle.

The problem is (and it's not insurmountable since quite a few councils have merged back office with other councils) that, for all the apparent obviousness, things aren't that simple. Even if I allow for a certain amount of bureaucratic sucking of teeth - "ooh, Councillor, I don't think that's possible" - there remains the matter of systems. And unless you merge the systems you really don't realise, other than a bit of saving in senior management, much benefit from sharing.

The problem is that merging large and complicated systems is not straightforward. By way of illustration, our former Spanish bank (Banesto) was taken over by another bank (Santander) but the actual back office systems for the two banks remain - or did in October 2015 - separate to the extent that Santander operators were unable to sort out problems, these had to be done by the former Banesto people who "understood the systems".

Integrating two complicated back office systems - say those of Leeds and Bradford Councils - is only possible given time, money and a plan. To make such a merger worthwhile, we need also to know that the net savings exceed, in a reasonable time frame, the money invested in the merger. It is, while not impossible, pretty challenging to make this calculation with a high degree of confidence. Such a lack of confidence isn't really a problem if the costs are low and the savings are high. But this really doesn't seem to be the case for such back office mergers (or so I'm told).

This problem with complex systems, how they stay in place because changing them is uncertain and expensive, is repeated time and time again. Here's Jon Worth on European railways (quite literally):

After having been stuck again this morning due to lack of collaboration between EU rail firms, I started to wonder: can liberalisation of EU rail actually ever work? And, were it to ever work, what are the prerequisites to making it work?

Jon goes on to set out seven factors about the system (information, accountability, ownership, cohesion, customer rights, maintenance and ticketing) that need resolution through system design if a liberalised railway is to be delivered. Jon concludes, unsurprisingly, that:

So then, that’s the little list of issues to solve. Will the EU, and its Member States, be ready to go that far to make a liberalised railway work? And to foot the costs of doing so? I rather doubt it…

The problem for us is that, given the significance of our legacy systems (in government, transport and finance especially) and the rate of innovation in these areas, we run the risk of economic sclerosis unless we begin to grapple with the challenge of replacing those systems with new ones. There are technical solutions to all of Jon's questions but the current infrastructure (physical and social) is largely unable to carry those technical solutions. The result of this is that people find 'get-arounds' - those railways, instead of sleek transport systems of the future become anachronistic and inefficient systems superceded by driverless vehicles, drones and communications technology.

Too often this is an argument against doing anything or for merely doing things that don't impact the established order - an interactive screen here, an app there rather than having some idea how the system will look when everything is done. For all my liberal instincts, I can't help but think things are seldom as simple as we like to think they are whatever William of Ockham might have said!

....

Driverless vehicles make railways (and our fast cars) obsolete

Every time such things as the "Northern Powerhouse" are mentioned the punditry, politicians and media immediately start agitating for billions to be invested in railways. This is despite the fact that railways account for only 3% of journeys in the UK while over 80% of journeys take place on roads. I've always suspected this is something of a 'boys' toys' response - we were brought up with train sets, Thomas the Tank Engine and Ivor. We like railways.

Consider this then:

"By combining ride sharing with car sharing—particularly in a city such as New York—MIT research has shown that it would be possible to take every passenger to his or her destination at the time they need to be there, with 80 percent fewer cars."

Or:

"An OECD study modelling the use of self-driving cars in Lisbon found that shared “taxibots” could reduce the number of cars needed by 80-90%. Similarly, research by Dan Fagnant of the University of Utah, drawing on traffic data for Austin, Texas, found that an autonomous taxi with dynamic ride-sharing could replace ten private vehicles. This is consistent with the finding that one extra car in a car-sharing service typically takes 9-13 cars off the road. Self-driving vehicles could, in short, reduce urban vehicle numbers by as much as 90%."

No new trains, no trams, no trolley buses, no bus lanes - just the realisation that automated cars ('driverless' as we call them) represent the real future of mass transportation. Not only will this, combined with emissionless or very low emission engines, reduce the negative environmental impact of road transport but we'll also see a dramatic drop in road casualties.

The reality is that investment on rail transport is not going to achieve payback ahead of the driverless car revolution - those billions now promised in new rolling stock, new stations and new lines are not needed. Cities need to be investing in the infrastructure required for driverless cars and to start planning for a city that doesn't need large parts of its land set aside to parking cars. This could mean more urban green space, the release of urban centre land for new housing and increased capacity on existing highways.

A world where we don't drive other than in controlled environments like race tracks seems strange in a culture seemingly dominated by the car but this is the likeliest result of driverless vehicles. For most of us the car (however much we drool over Ferrari and Aston Martin) is a practical and prosaic thing used to get us about the place. A very expensive practical and prosaic thing too. A world with vastly fewer road accidents, where we have no need to own a large lump of metal and plastic that sits doing nothing most of the time, and where the air is cleaner and the city greener - this is the world we should prepare for now.

.....

If we're to serve tomorrow's economy we need to invest more in roads and less in rail

Since 2001 rail travel in the UK has increased by over 50% (and has more than doubled since rail privatisation in the 1990s). I'm guessing that people see this as a cause for celebration and a recognition that 'heavy' rail is part of the nation's long term transport solutions. And this celebration is reflected in the investment programme for those railways, in proposals for brand new railways and in political rows about this investment.

However there's a problem. Currently rail journeys account for just 3% of total journeys (slightly more than this as a percentage of journey miles) and we are repeatedly told - hence the investment programme - that the rail network is over capacity. Let's assume that the investment programme succeeds and rail capacity is increased thereby allowing another doubling in rail journeys (this is a big requirement that the planned investment isn't going to meet) - rail would then constitute 6% of journeys made in the UK and the system would be uncomfortably crammed to the gunnels.

Given that the billions of planned rail investment dwarfs every other planned investment by the UK government, you would assume that it would go a long way towards resolving the nation's transport challenges. Between the investment in the current network and High Speed 2, the UK's rail investment programme amounts to approaching £80bn. This compares to the road investment programme of (and I'm being kind here) less than £30bn over the same period. The UK plans to invest more than twice the amount in rail than on the road network, yet there are 20 times as many journeys by road as there are by rail. Roughly speaking we're planning to spend £40 on every rail traveller for each £1 we spend on a road traveller.

The result of this imbalance in investment is that the UK's roads are not up to scratch. Local authorities have trimmed on highway maintenance (in Bradford we underspend by 30-40% each year on highway maintenance) and have little or no capital available to deliver improvement schemes let alone new road schemes. The national investment programme - the £15bn announced in 2014 that is slightly enhanced by decisions in the July 2015 budget - barely scratches the surface of improvements needed in the strategic road network. Yet a decision to delay one small part of the rail investment programme is treated as a major political faux pas whereas the consistent and lamentable underinvestment in our roads doesn't merit media coverage let alone the sort of outcry we get from train fans.

MP after MP, from every side of the house, lines up to berate ministers, including the prime minister, about rail investment. But questions about roads are few and far between despite most of those MPs' constituents making more use of them than they do of railways. When road schemes are asked about the response is that there isn't the funds, that other schemes have higher priority or that the decision is delegated to one or other agency.

For decades we operated under a sort of 'field of dreams' myth about road investment - 'build it and they will come' was the mantra. Or rather the reverse of this - building roads increases traffic volumes ergo if we don't build roads people will shift to other forms of transport thereby saving the planet (or something along these lines):

In transportation, this well-established response is known in various contexts as the Downs-Thomson Paradox, The Pigou-Knight-Downs Paradox or the Lewis-Mogridge Position: a new road may provide motorists with some level of respite from congestion in the short term, but almost all of the benefit from the road will be lost due to increased demand in the longer term.

The problem is that, wherever we look now, this paradox appears to be weakened - in the UK traffic volumes fell for three consecutive years (something that hadn't happened before) during the downturn and, since 2010 have been essentially stable. This is a situation mirrored in the USA where there has been a significant decline in vehicle miles - the population adjusted estimate is that traffic volumes have fallen back to the level they were back in 1994. This picture - dubbed 'peak car' - reflects the logical cap to car ownership rises driven by declining household size, suburban growth and women entering the workforce (as well as increased earnings relative to the price of cars). The consequence is that we should reconsider the various induced demand models for road development:

In a world of peak car, where traffic levels are flat to declining on a per capita basis, induced demand no longer holds court, certainly not to the level claimed by those who believe it’s pointless to build roads. In fact, what peak car means is that while speculative projects may be dubious, there may be good reasons now to build projects designed to alleviate already exiting congestion.

Our road networks are pretty resilient. Despite decades of underinvestment in maintenance the network remains in place and functional (if a little bumpy). However, if we are to deliver on the demands of a new economy, turn round the economic performance of the North and meet the needs of technological change, we have to look again at transport investment priorities. Placing a bigger stress on roads makes sense both because they are the dominant mode of transport for UK residents and also because those roads will prove central to future transport technologies:

A pair of trucks convoying 10 meters apart on Interstate 80 just outside Reno, Nevada, might seem like an unusual sight—not to mention unsafe. But the two trucks doing this a couple of weeks ago were actually demonstrating a system that could make trucking safer and much more efficient.

While the driver in front drove his truck normally, the truck behind him was partly operated by a computer—and it stuck to its leader like glue. When instructed to do so, the computer controlled the gas and brakes to pull to within 10 meters (roughly three car lengths) of the truck ahead. The computer then kept the two trucks paired at this precise distance, as if linked by some invisible cable, until the system was disengaged. If the truck in front stopped suddenly, the one behind could have reacted instantaneously to avoid a collision.

It's time for a rethink on transport priorities and begin to invest in the infrastructure we need for tomorrow's economy - that infrastructure is roads.
....

Roads are much more important than railways - public investment should reflect this fact. It doesn't.

A bit of Britain's most important transport network

No matter how desperate the banana republic, the international airport is always a shimmering palace of perfume and croissants. It is only when you get out onto the dirt roads that you realise where you are.

The government seems determined to take the same approach to our own transport system: all the money gets sucked into vanity projects while transport used by the rest of us remains creaking.

And the biggest vanity project of all is Britain's rail network. The truth of the matter is that most of the public seldom if ever use a train - they are expensive compared to buses, inconvenient and crowded. But more to the point we prefer - and will continue preferring - to use the car. Just 2.4 million people - overwhelmingly in London - commute to work by train or tram. This is just over 9% of commuter journeys and compares to the two-thirds of journeys to work on the roads (by car, bus or motor cycle - adding in walking and cycling gets us to eight out of ten commuter journeys on the roads). Nearly half the population (45% in 2009/10) simply didn't use a train at all for any reason.

Yet whenever we talk about transport investment, we talk about trains. Billions is promised for new railways like HS2, for ever shinier stations, and for the polishing of existing (and admittedly creaky) networks. The need for rail investment is always hogging the headlines while the scandal that is our underinvestment in looking after the network of roads and pavements that carries 90% of journeys barely gets a mention. In 2012 the government invested £7.5 billion in the road network split roughly 50/50 between the strategic network and local roads. This compares to around £13 billion spent on railways (split between subsidising fares to the tune of £3.8 billion and the rail investment programme).

So Ross Clark is right, government in the UK is starving the everyday transport network - our roads - of funding while promising ever shinier new rail infrastructure (best part of £20 million on a new entrance into Leeds station being a fine example). Here in Bradford we need around £11 million a year to sustain our road network but are only spending about £6 million each year. With the result that the standard of the roads deteriorates year on year - the government responds by bunging one off funding for fixing potholes at councils when what is really needed is an adequate capital budget that would allow the proper maintenance of the road over a 25 year cycle.

The problem is that building grand railway schemes is popular with rail users. And rail users are mostly in London where the decision-making is done:

In 2009/10, 59 per cent of all rail journeys started or finished in London. The South East and the East of England were the regions with the next highest number of journeys but 65 per cent of journeys in the South East and 75 per cent in the East of England were to or from London.

And those train users - even in London - are more likely to be in their twenties or thirties and more likely to be in well-paid professional employment. The profile of rail users doesn't reflect the national demographic profile but the very different profile of London commuters (and higher income London commuters at that).

So we have a transport system that provides just 2% of journeys, costs the taxpayer over £13 billion a year, has incredibly low levels of customer satisfaction, is unreliable and still requires some other form of transport for people to complete their journey. How exactly is this the transport system of the 21st century? And why does it suck up so much of the attention (and investment) while the much more important road system isn't provided with the cash to even maintain it to a safe standard let alone improve it?
....

The evidence suggests new roads won't generate more journeys.

****

It has been a commonplace view - supported in the past with some evidence - that building new roads didn't work as a strategy to reduce congestion because those roads encouraged new journeys. Indeed part of the argument here was that congestion itself acted to discourage car use and encourage shifts to other forms of transport.

So, when the government announces £15 billion of road investment, we get a familiar outcry:

The government claims the investment will be transformational, creating jobs and reducing journey times. But this is wishful thinking, ignoring the inconvenient truth that new roads create new traffic while dogmatically clinging to the assertion that road building is good for the economy.

The problem with this view is that, while it seemed to be true as car ownership soared and alternative travel options stagnated, it was never the roads that created the journeys - rather those roads acted as a justification for getting the car, then getting the second car and latterly buying the kids a car. However, since 2006 (or thereabouts) the game has changed with journey miles reducing. Partly this reflects recession and the cost of fuel - although journey miles increased during previous recessions - but mostly it reflects the impacts of other changes in our world.

How road use has declined in the USA

As this graph shows (I know it's from the USA but let's remember it's a much more car oriented culture) over the last decade there has been a steady decline in the miles travelled by car in the USA. The data for the UK doesn't show the same decline but slight increases in vehicle miles here are almost entirely down to light goods vehicles (LGVs - all those delivery vans plus the ubiquitous white van). And there is nothing to suggest that upgrading roads results in increases in vehicle miles. Even back in 2003 studies showed that the induced travel effect of new roads was lower than previously thought and that induced investment and induced growth effects were larger. Put simply the economic benefits of new roads has been under-estimated while the environmental disbenefits were over-estimated - with the result that investment was moved away from roads.

Since 2000 UK public investment in railways has increased from £3.5 billion per annum to £7.5 billion compared to a rise from £2 billion to £3 billion (not even keeping pace with inflation) in road investment. And we should remember that while about a fifth of the population use trains a lot, most people seldom if ever use this form of transport (buses are much, much more important than trains). But everybody - whether they own a car or not - uses the roads. So any strategic investment in our road network is welcome especially since about half the proposed investment is going into looking after the roads we've already got - something that governments, local and national, have neglected for decades.

Among the collectivists of this world there's a view that the private car is a bad thing (I seem to remember some daft Labour MP suggesting private cars should be banned). I take a different view - the availability of a car in the drive means that people are liberated from the inconvenience of public transport and the tyranny of its timetables. Talking to a senior council officer the other day, I discovered that there are places not three miles from the centre of Bradford that not only have no trains but, after 6pm, have no buses into the city.

However, regardless of my preferences (and the preferences of most Britons), the fact remains that the 'roads create traffic' argument lacks good evidence - road investment doesn't increase trips and does increase investment and economic growth. As Aaron Renn commented in talking about the graph above:

In fact, what peak car means is that while speculative projects may be dubious, there many be good reasons now to build projects designed to alleviate already exiting congestion. 

Bear in mind that by speculative projects Renn means privately-built roads predicated on toll income not simply new roads. The assumption that traffic growth had no limits was always the weakness in the 'green' argument against new roads but it's clear that as technology - smartphones, Skype, e-commerce and so forth - eliminates reasons for journeys the numbers of those journeys declines. And road investment really does become a stimulus to growth when it focuses on reducing or removing the congestion that pollutes and plagues our lives.

....

More panic in Leeds...

****

Last year (according to the figures in Wikipedia at least) over 25 million people trooped through Leeds station on their way to work, to shop or to enjoy Leeds celebrated nightlife. And in that same year 0.00089% of those passengers injured themselves:

In the past year 179 people have been injured at Leeds, and Network Rail said most incidents occurred when people lost their balance after a night out drinking.

Revellers have fallen off platforms, down stairs and escalators and slipped on the station concourse.

Injuries suffered included fractures, cuts and bruises.

Apparently this is a 'high' figure (although the BBC don't report any comparative figures from other stations) and is entirely due to booze:

Ahmed Abdalla, 20, said: "It's the city centre, people are drunk everywhere. From the afternoon they start, early drinking, partying all the time.

"They should be more careful, it's stupid. They're putting themselves and people around them at risk. It's mostly young college boys, uni boys, and girls sometimes."

Network Rail have panicked and are putting up posters telling people to be careful when they're smashed out of their brains. This is to cope with about three incidents a week.

Seems like another moral panic. What is it about Leeds and moral panic?

....

Potholes...

****

Every Councillor needs to be on top of the pothole issue and pointing out how the council needs to act and act now to do something (specifically fill in the pothole being pointed out). We are assiduous in performing this vital task, keeping highways maintenance folk busy filling in said holes.

Then we troop into the council chamber and vote for budgets that cut spending on that vital task of highways maintenance. Local council's spend less than 5% of their revenue budget on looking after roads, pavements and footpaths. Which is down from 11% (and in actual cash terms more) in 2008.

This reflects the priority of government - national and local. The idea that looking after roads is an important function of government has long passed - even in the transport field the focus (and the spending) has been directed to railways. While we subsidise heavy rail to the tune of over £13 billion, national revenue spending on roads languishes at a mere £9 billion. And this priority - as ever - is reflected in the choices of local councils.

The odd thing is that most people, most of the time simply don't use trains. Even in London. Yet we all - whether we're drivers, bus users, cyclists or pedestrians - use the roads. Perhaps we have (in our obsession with hating the motor car and disliking the lorry) simply forgotten that it is roads that carry the lion's share of freight, that allow us to get from our front door to where we wish to go and that are the real lifeline of our economy.

That our roads - suburban, urban, trunk and rural - are riddled with potholes represents a colossal failure in government priority. We've allowed ourselves to be lulled by those green dressed sirens into accepting the wholly false premise that railways present any kind of solution to the transport needs of a modern economy. Railways merely take us from one place we don't want to be to another place we don't want to be - it's the roads that complete the journey.

Potholes are a symptom of misplaced priority not a failing of any system. We simply stopped spending money on roads. New schemes are evaluated on the basis of unwarranted environmental impact assessments meaning that, in almost every case, new roads don't meet criteria. And councils faced with tight budget settlements choose to spend on social services for the minority of residents rather than roads for everyone. And there's a reason for this of course.

Those social services carry an enormous risk - whether we're speaking of the terrible child death or the dreadful story of elderly neglect this always trumps you or I getting a broken car as a result of a pothole. So we pour money into social services - as it happens nearly all of the grant we get from central government (education aside) ends up being spent on social services. And the result of this is that we spend less and less money on looking after the roads we all use.

With the result being potholes that us councillors can point at, take action about, get sorted!

....

Writing elsewhere...on the waste of cash that is HS2

****

Over at the Culture Vultures you can read me ripping into High Speed Two:

Let’s put is more simply still – if the government put £30 billion on the table for The North to develop its transport network, do you think we’d even think of building a railway to London?

Go read - and comment!

....

High Speed 2 would damage the regeneration of Bradford

****

Not me saying this (although I agree with the argument) but a former boss of the Strategic Rail Authority:

“On regeneration, I know of no serious academics who support the view HSR will significantly reduce the North-South divide. Most research indicates the dominant ‘hub’ city benefits more than regional centres and in the regions the impact is likely to be a zero sum game.

“A Leeds HSR station would probably be surrounded by shiny new office blocks, but investment in West Yorkshire would be focused there, and the relative decline of Bradford would accelerate.”

And that's before all the suits whizz off to London on the lovely fast train we've built for their convenience!

....

Is there actually a business case for HS2 - or is it just anecdote?

****

From the select committee enquiry into the proposed high speed railway to Birmingham comes this gem from Sir Brian Briscoe, the boss of HS2 Ltd:

"We have not measured the wider economic benefits of improved connectivity. But, anecdotally, people in the West Midlands have said that transport improvements would drive other kinds of economic improvements."

We are - it seems - to spend billions on building a railway we might not need on the basis of "anecdote".

....

Differential pricing keeps overall prices lower - so smile as you stand in the theme park queue!

****

The use of differential pricing by businesses is not a new practice – from the inception of travel there were different classes with the greatest luxury rationed through pricing and we experience the same with concerts, sports events and even the purchase of utilities. Today, ticketing systems for air travel, railways and much else allow from greater flexibility – it is far easier to capture the efficiencies of advanced sales, for example, or to charge for additional or extra services.

With pricing differential comes, as sure as night follows day, the outcry. Complaints about the terrible injustice of it all. And nothing is more terrible, of course, than me paying extra so as to jump the queue. Especially among the professionally indignant like Netmums fussbucket, Siobhan Freeguard:

“I find it amazing that parents put up with it. It won’t be long before there’s a backlash.”

Siobhan is talking about Alton Towers and the terrible fact that if I fork out loads of cash, I can jump the queues on the rides. Welcome to differential pricing and note, Siobhan, that these are businesses and if the pricing system doesn’t work (i.e. have a positive contribution to overall revenues) then the business will change it or close.

But I suspect there’s still a bunch of folk out there who think the price should be the same for everyone regardless of their degree of organisation (e.g. buying tickets in advance and seeking deals linked to less busy days) or willingness to buy privileges. These are the same people who want a single rail ticket price for everyone despite the fact that this would increase the cost of travel for most intercity travellers.

What these silly netmums and other complainers don’t realise is that differential pricing provides a benefit to all users – those buying privilege are, in effect, subsidising those who are not buying such privileges. Because some people are willing to fork out extra money to jump the queue, your ticket price for the same experience (slightly delayed) is lower.

As consumers we benefit from differential pricing – from greater choice, from more sustainable businesses and from the greater yield management that flexible pricing systems provide. The impact of imposed ‘fairness’ – whether on travel, theme parks or utilities – will be either longer queues or higher prices (and maybe both).

....

Time to put the trains sets away boys!

***

The other day, some of Bradford’s finest – including the wonderful John Pennington and Andrew Mason – presented a plan to link the two stations in Bradford City Centre so as to create a link between what were the Midland and GNR networks. And very fine it looks too – might enhance the city a little although it beats me how making is easier to pass through the city would regenerate the place.

But these proposals – plus the jolly plans to open up old railways (somehow I doubt that will mean Cullingworth getting a rail link again) and build new super-fast links between the big cities – got me to thinking about railways. More particularly, to considering why we bother – spending more money on our heavy rail network is just pouring money into a splendid dead end.

The problem with railways is that they require expensive infrastructure that only trains (and certain trains at that) can run on. And this is made worse by the fact that (a common trait in public transport) trains go from one place you don’t want to be (a smelly, untidy, often unsafe station) to another place you don’t want to be.

Quite frankly, roads are more flexible, can take a greater variety of traffic in greater volumes, are cheaper to build and maintain, cannot be held to ransom by operators and suit the dynamism of the modern economy. Railways – other than as commuter transport into an out from employment nodes – are a Victorian anachronism.

And looking to the future the benefits of roads will become still clearer as road vehicles become less polluting with the advances in hybrid engines, electric vehicles and fuel cells destroying the environmental arguments against this form of mass transport. By all means invest in urban mass transit and light rail systems designed to move large numbers of folk over short, congested distances but leave off driving new railways through the countryside in some rose-spectacled, harking back to a bygone age. Railways may look good, you may like them but they are not a solution to modern transport problems.

....

Build better roads and urban systems...inter city high speed trains are rubbish

The Government - applying it's usual strategy of stealing any Tory policy that's been announced, changing it slightly and spending more money - has announced a new high speed rail link from London to Birmingham. And the usual collection of politicians who wish they had better train sets and the rail network operators were frothing about the wonderment of all this...

Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher said high-speed rail was "a vital part of a modern, dynamic economy". He also said that it would "take cars and lorries off the road, cut domestic flights and release capacity on the existing rail network, transforming services even for those communities not served directly by a high-speed line. It is the low-carbon, sustainable transport of the future."

Inter-city trains are not the solution. They travel from one place you don't want to be to another place you don't want to be. They are expensive. The rails makes them inflexible and route-bound. They are inefficient carriers of small load freight. Yet we seem obsessed by them!

I'm all in favour of urban mass transit systems - trams, local trains...I could even persuade myself to like buses. But super fast trains are a waste of money - £30 billion in this case. When they can't get a train 9 miles from Leeds to Bradford in under 20 minutes and most of us a nowhere near a railway station, super-fast trains seem just another shiny toy.

If you want to spend £30 billion linking our cities. Can I suggest building some better roads?

....