Forget the flowers, what you'll need in San Francisco is a load of money for the rent

San Francisco is a great city. Today it's a great city filled with billionaires, something that rather explains its problems (or why they're not being sorted out). But San Francisco, in one respect, isn't unique but just the best example of how to truly, utterly screw up your housing markets.

We arrived in San Francisco by train. Sorry, we arrived in San Francisco on a bus (an hour late bus) because the train doesn't go to San Francisco, it finishes in Emeryville on the other side of the bay. So we arrived at a bus station, a bus station without a taxi rank (I guess because the sort of people who arrive in San Francisco on a bus aren't the sort of people who use taxis). It seems that, for all its progressive credentials, San Francisco's relationship with public transport - at least the sort that brings people into and out from the city - is not great. As, it seems, Google employees discovered with their benign employer laid on buses to work.

Anyway. Having got a taxi (big thanks to the bloke in the bus ticket office who rang for one - pretty sure it's not the first time), got to our hotel and settled in by having some nice pasta and a hugely expensive bottle of white wine, we'd a city to explore. And what better way to do this exploring that by buying a bus ticket!

The Big Bus was great. For a couple of days we'd access (at a good San Francisco price) to their buses as they toured round San Francisco. And some of these buses have a guide - in our case a thirtysomething Jewish guy with a beard and ready wit. As we went round the city he described the sights, elaborated on the history and pointed out things we might not have otherwise noticed.

So the bus is going up Market heading towards the Tenderloin as our guide starts to talk about the rent - and why it's so damned high. All this is nicely mixed in with the history of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Pointing to some early 20th century apartment buildings, our guide, says: "there are SROs, let me tell you about SROS".

SRO is an acronym for 'single room occupancy' and it's a form of tenure where, for your rent, you get a room with a basin. Pretty good stuff if you're a single, sort of itinerant, construction worker looking for somewhere to sleep whilst you rebuild the earthquake and fire ravaged San Francisco. Cheap, fits the bill and better than a washing line. But in 2019?

Our guide asked us to guess what the rent is for one of these SROs. The usual to-and-fro banter ensued concluding with a shocked silence when he said; "$700-800 a month." If you want a room with a private bathroom, it's over $1000. It really is an obscene amount of money to rent a room in a boarding house. Yet this is the consequence of policies that prevent new high rise development, constrain the development boundaries of the city and provide a myriad of excuses and justifications for stopping or slowing new housing development. Unless - as our guide pointed out - you're rich enough to afford to pay the $7,500 monthly rent in a new development near the (splendid but ever-so-slightly pastiche) San Francisco City Hall.

There are a pile of reasons why the rent's so high in San Francisco but most of them are down to the combination of creating thousands of new, exciting and well-paid jobs but not building the thousands of homes needed to house the people who're taking up those exciting and well-paid jobs. This is why folk in Chinatown are complaining about the lack of housing, why there's twice as many homeless than in Chicago despite San Francisco being a third of the Windy City's size, and why folk in the Mission were stoning buses taking Google employees to work.

Just witness the madness of trying to get a launderette listed as a historical landmark just to stop a housing development!

The first hurdle came when the Planning Commission ordered a detailed historical review, based on a claim that various community groups had offices on the property in the 1970s and 80s, so the site might qualify for preservation. The resulting 137-page study cost Tillman $23,000 and delayed him an additional four months. It found that the laundry didn't merit landmark status.

But Tillman's project was still far from being approved. City law says that any individual or group, no matter where they live, can pay a $617 fee to appeal a decision by the Planning Commission. In this case, the challenge came from an organization called Calle 24, which declined Reason's interview request.

Calle 24 is one of several neighborhood groups determined to stop gentrification in the Mission, a neighborhood that's home to a working-class...

I'm not sure whether Tillman has got to build his apartment block yet but it beggar's belief that, in a city with an acute housing shortage, it can take best part of a decade to get permission to build some of those much-needed homes. When I talk of the stupidity of planning, this is what I'm thinking of - an endless parade of hoops and jumps that must be negotiated just to start digging the foundations for a development.

The city responds to its housing problems with a veritable first aid kit - rent controls, ordinances on building standards, grand affordable housing strategies and much else besides. Except, of course, for the thing that really would make a difference - allowing more dense development in San Francisco suburbs and using the city's economics and political clout to get more land released for housing in the Bay Area generally.

San Francisco is a particularly egregious example and, in its defence, is constrained by its geography - being stuck on a peninsula limits the scope for development. But the same issues - rents soaring, lack of development and lots of supposed solutions that don't actually face up to the supply problem - can be seen right across the world: New York, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Edinburgh, Auckland, Sydney, city after city where urban growth is bounded and reasons not to develop outnumber reasons to let people build. And in all of these places the result is high prices, rising rents, overcrowding and dissatisfaction with city and national authorities response to the problems.

If your policies for housing in a growing city don't include making more land available, allowing higher buildings and apartments in suburbs and ending daft zoning restrictions then you are failing - it shouldn't take a national government, as has happened in New Zealand and is happening in the UK and US, to tell local places that they're strangling their success with over-restrictive green belts, urban growth boundaries and that parade of reasons - environmental, heritage, landscape, bats, shadows, chimneys - not to develop. None of this will suddenly make these cities cheap places to live, the cost of success has always been higher rents, but it will start to make the liveable again.

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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.

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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.

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Buses aren't saving the planet...

One of the usual arguments against suburbs is essentially "cars are bad for the environment". This statisitc - from the USA so data may differ for other places - tells a different story:

The average car on the road consumed 4,700 British thermal units (BTUs) per vehicle mile in 2015, which is almost a 50 percent reduction from 1973, when Americans drove some of the gas-guzzliest cars in history. The average light truck (meaning pick ups, full-sized vans, and SUVs) used about 6,250 BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015, which is also about half what it was in the early 1970s.

By comparison, the average transit bus used 15 percent more BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015 than transit buses did in 1970. Since bus occupancies have declined, BTUs per passenger mile have risen by 63 percent since 1970. While buses once used only about half as much energy per passenger mile as cars, they now use about a third more.

Hmmmm.

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Why existing infrastructure is more important than new infrastructure

I like John Sanphillippo's perambulations around suburban USA. We spend too much time looking at big cities with their skyscrapers, trams or tube systems and air pollution. Suburbia is really important and undervalued by planners - it's true to say we probably need more of it.

Anyway Sanphillippo makes this telling observation about US land use:

After several years of traveling around the country in the presence of city planners, economic development officials, elected representatives, engineers, production home builders, professional consultants, and groups of concerned citizens I’ve come to my own personal unified theory of America’s land use future. The short version is that we’ve got the built environment that we have and the overwhelming majority of it isn’t ever going to change much. If you want to know what things will look like in thirty or forty years… look around. That’s pretty much it.

Sanphillippo then goes on to observe that, for much of America, the big challenge will be looking after this infrastructure - roads, sewers, water supply - as much as it will be about new infrastructure. For Europe, with largely privatised utility suppliers there's less of a problem (if you want to see the case for a privatised water supply system look at the tragedy of Flint, Michigan) but we can see glimpses of the issue with the underinvestment in our road system. Indeed the contrast between the investment in maintaining rail systems and road systems is striking especially given the dominance of roads in transportation and their poor safety record compared to rail.

The public policy mistake is to focus on the excitement of new infrastructure like HS2 rather than on looking after the existing networks. Sanphillippo's point tells us this is the wrong approach and that we should be seeking to make more efficient use of exisitng systems for the very straightforward reason that those existing systems will make up 95% or more of any future system.

A final observation is that the coming transportation revolution - digital, driverless, drones and so forth - has to fit into the existing network as there isn't the time, capacity or cash to make the changes to public infrastructure. This is a challenge for those developing these new transport technologies and also a reason why places with less of those legacy systems such as Africa start the revolution with an advantage.

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Building tomorrow's suburbia - some thoughts and connections

I'll start with this blog from Orwell Prize winner, Graeme Archer - perhaps the best conservative writer in Britain.

But what – to quote a character in an early Ruth Rendell novel – is supposed to be so wrong with suburbia? A desire for a nice bit of garden and good (selective! free!) state schools; the desire to be unsurprised, should one hear English spoken on a bus; the desire for one’s country to have its own bloody passport, for God’s sake – to list just a few Mayist-Tory objectives which leave the Left spluttering with saliva-specked fury – these aren’t desires, shall we say, uncommon to those whose grandparents were in service, whose working-class parents went out on shift or opened their cornershop before dawn, so that their tiny “bought hoose” was warm and that their own children – I’m talking of myself, of course – had enough time and encouragement to study. So that they - I - could end up in suburbia, from where I commute, despicably, to and from work.

There is still, however, a desire in suburbia to make that place less affordable for the rising sons and daughters of today's working classes. Giving us this sort of commuting:

A study by online estate agent Emoov seen exclusively by City A.M. has found it would be cheaper to buy a house in seven of the UK's largest cities, fly down and stay in a budget hotel for a week, then fly back at the weekend than it is to live and work in the capital.

This isn't about rent controls, densification, or even finance - it's our bonkers planning system that's created an oligopoly of builders in an over-regulated environment of deliberately restricted land availability around the UK's golden goose of London. And it will kill that goose before long.

In the meantime the plight of high rents brought about by urban containment policies with continue to generate angst-ridden social commentary - most of it nonsense:

When they return to Britain, they face the near impossible task of buying a home without help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. I have earned more from my move up the property ladder than all the money I have earned at the Guardian in the past 17 years. This exponential increase in property values relative to incomes, particularly in parts of the south-east, will not be seen again, for a generation at least. Why aren’t the younger generation rebelling? Maybe they simply can’t afford to.

Truth is that, housing aside, the coming generation will be better off than we are - the rise in technology will see to that. And we could solve the housing crisis too if we stopped trying to plan our way out of it. Starting with embracing new ideas - not the crushing of good space standards that our housing minister (he's from Croydon which explains a lot) wants but real ideas:

London’s biggest housebuilder Tony Pidgley, boss of Berkeley Homes, has been experimenting with kit homes. “It’s a culture change but there’s a compelling case for modular,” he says.

He has committed 20 per cent of his output to factory-built homes, and plans a bigger amount in future via its own modular housing factory.

The first “Urban Houses” for the company’s 5,000-home scheme in Kidbrooke, south-east London, are already rolling off a Midlands production line, creating good-looking town houses with roof gardens.

And while we're about all this we need to think differently about transport. The days of the private car are coming to an end. Not only is there little need to own a car in a city like London but autonomous systems and digital connectivity mean that we can summon transport when we need it rather than have it sitting there doing nothing for most of the time. OK it's a couple of decades away but, for transport and transport infrastructure that's the timescale - we should be thinking about our cities accordingly. Meaning more space for this sort of initiative:

Toronto has more than 2,400 publically owned laneways, covering more than 250 linear kilometres of public space. This offers a huge amount of untapped potential for multi-purpose public space. Consisting of planners and urban designers, The Laneway Project works with city officials and community groups to green, beautify, and breathe life back into these back alleys in the city.

Or for making new use of redundant infrastructure:

Anders Beremsson Architects (ABA) have been commissioned by the Kungl Djurgårdens förvaltning (Swedish Royal Court) to investigate the potential of repurposing twelve power towers. The towers are located in the urban national park, Norra Djurgården, in central Stockholm. ABA has proposed transforming one or two of the power towers into sky-high picnic towers.

Or more space for the increased leisure time the robots will give us:

The idea for the project emerged in 2010. Every year, a so-called cultural capital is named by the European Parliament, and in 2010, the city of Essen in the Ruhr region was designated the European cultural capital. We launched a project called Still-Leben (Still Life), during which the most important highway in the Ruhr region, the A40, was closed to car traffic for a day. The A40 is a highway with six lanes. In one driving direction, we set out a long picnic table and on the other side, in the other three lanes, people could circulate as pedestrians, on their bikes, rollerblades, or whichever way they chose, between the city of Duisburg and the city of Dortmund, which is a distance of approximately 50 miles. That day, I biked from Essen to Dortmund and for the first time in my life I was in a traffic jam caused by bikes — a completely new experience. 3 million people came out for the event.

Town planning is mostly about stopping things from happening not making places better. We should change this to allow a bit of inspiration - everywhere we look there are fantastic projects hacking their way through thickets of bureaucracy. Helping these projects should be the priority for planners rather than dreaming up some sort of perfectly zoned and balanced utopian city. Help us build tomorrow's suburbia.
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More evidence we've reached Peak Car?

America is car central, the nation most wedded to the wonders of the private motor vehicle. The target of this sort of hyperbole:

Cars for everyone was one of the most stupid promises politicians ever made. Cars are meant to meet a simple need: quick and efficient mobility. Observe an urban artery during the school run, or a trunk road on a bank holiday weekend, and ask yourself whether the current system meets that need. The vast expanse of road space, the massive investment in metal and fossil fuel, has delivered the freedom to sit fuming in a toxic cloud as your life ticks by.

Now, leaving aside that politicians never promises cars for all - the market delivered cars for everyone all by itself - this is a typical reaction. George Monbiot even uses the phrase "carmaggedon" to describe how the ever increasing numbers of cars is destroying our health and the planet.

I've mentioned 'Peak Car' before and there's an ongoing debate in the USA about whether total car mileage is rising or falling. Nevertheless, in a land designed around the car, this is significant:

About 87 percent of 19-year-olds in 1983 had their licenses, but more than 30 years later, that percentage had dropped to 69 percent. Other teen driving groups have also declined: 18-year-olds fell from 80 percent in 1983 to 60 percent in 2014, 17-year-olds decreased from 69 percent to 45 percent, and 16-year-olds plummeted from 46 percent to 24 percent.

However, for those in their late 50s and older, the proportion of those with driver's licenses is up about 12 percentage points since 1983—although down more than two percentage points since 2008. The only age group to show a slight increase since 2008 is the 70-and-older crowd. 

The cost of cars and the concentration of young people in ever denser cities means that those generations simply aren't bothering with the expense at all. It would be helped if cities liberated public transport from unions, special interests and the antediluvian thinking of authorities but this shows that cost and convenience still lead to different decisions. We may indeed have passed Peak Car.
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Legacy transport and housing systems - barriers to better cities

Cities are changing. Or rather cities should be changing but most of them aren't because local (and national) governments plus attachment to legacy transport systems means that this change isn't happening.

West Yorkshire - by world standards a pretty wealthy place - is consulting on its transport strategy for 2016-2036. Illustrating the lack of ambition is that the chair of the transport committee thinks it'll be a stellar achievement if we have an integrated ticketing system in place by 2036.

I'd like us to talk about Olli and his friends:

Meet Olli, Local Motors’ 3D-printed, autonomous, electric shuttle bus. Designed to streamline shared transportation systems around the world, this self-driving car could be the answer to public transportation issues. On top of it all, Olli is partially recyclable.

As long as you have a smartphone, where ever you are is a bus stop. And wherever you’re going is the next stop. The Olli app puts control into the palm of your hand. App accessibility allows users to find existing routs, share an Olli, or charter an Olli of their own. Set pick-up and destination locations, ride from point to point, then pay through the app. Much like Uber, just call Olli through the app and it will show up to take you to your destination. Plus it talks to you!

If you're saying that autonomous vehicles aren't a central part of future urban transport systems then you're trapped in those 19th century legacy systems - trains and buses (at one meeting that same chair talked about using canals more). Mind you we've the same problem with housing where innovative solutions using new technology aren't getting the attention they deserve:

Italian innovator Massimo Moretti launched WASP with the goal to “create a means for affordable fabrication of homes, and provide these means to the locals in poverty stricken areas.” WASP’s affordable housing solution combines 3D printing with biomimicry, drawing inspiration from the mud dauber wasp that constructs its home from one of the world’s oldest building materials: mud. The choice of clay and mud inputs for the portable BigDelta was a conscious choice; although many 3D printers use cement, Moretti chose earth because of its low environmental footprint, local availability, and natural insulating benefits. Based on previous prototypes, the BigDelta will presumably build full-size houses using open-source software and a mixture of mud, clay, and plant fibers for reinforcement.

So you think folk won't want to live in a mud hut?

Atelier Koé’s mud home will be built in Ghana at the beginning of 2016 and the Nka Foundation are calling out for participants to come and join the build. The process of building will give participants (many of whom are professionals or architecture interns), a deep insight into the possibilities of local African materials.

And it'll look like this:




The same goes for other materials - if we're to get unviable city sites recycled as housing we have to change the model, to forget the problems of 1960s system-build and look at non-traditional materials.

The problem is that our urban design, building, transport and infrastructure planners are still working with those 19th and 20th century legacy systems. The result is that we respond to the challenges of housing and moving growing urban populations through a combination of regulation, price fixing and subsidy. We'd rather subsidise commuter fares or impose rent controls than plan for the space to allow markets to meet need affordably.

There are plenty of other opportunities - from pop-up housing to taxi drones - that need to be looked at in our city planning. But I'll be surprised if any local plan from a UK council even allows for these ideas to be explored. These local plans as well as the economic plans, housing strategies and transport plans simply assume that there won't be any technological change and proceed accordingly. Yet a glance at both house building and transport suggest this is absolutely not the case. We're on the cusp of an autonomous vehicle revolution that will completely change urban public transport, free up space currently dominated by parking and allow more public space as a result. Yet the only response from city authorities appears to be the ramping up of regulations to protect the taxi industry.

In housing new building approaches and technologies might see self-build made simple and easy. Yet building regulations are used (some might say with the connivance of the housing building industry) to resist experimental approaches and planners stick with their clunky approach to land allocation and urban design.

It's time city leaders started to change their thinking and, instead of simply following the tramlines laid by urban planners, started requiring those planners to develop space for different approaches to housing and transport.

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Interesting stuff I found down the back of the sofa (plus a comment on grammar schools)

Trade is good.

Clearing out my pockets - here's a few things (other than lint and misformed paperclips) I found:

Big cities are bad for health (this sort of reminds us what public health really is about):

Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the vaccine alliance Gavi, points to the recent increase in the scale of densely populated urban areas, many without adequate sanitation, as turning containable illnesses like Zika and Ebola into pandemics. Dense urbanization may not have created Zika, which causes newborns to have unusually small heads, he notes, but it has accelerated its spread from a mere handful to a current tally of 1.5 million cases this year.

Tokyo doesn't have a housing crisis - because it has sensible (aka laissez faire) planning rules:

Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

Ideology presented as fact - the curse of economics (here's a good example of the genre):

Is there a good economic reason why Brexit in particular should require abandoning austerity economics? I would argue that the Tory obsession with the budget deficit has had very little to do with economics for the past four or five years. Instead, it has been a political ruse with two intentions: to help win elections and to reduce the size of the state. That Britain’s macroeconomic policy was dictated by politics rather than economics was a precursor for the Brexit vote. However, austerity had already begun to reach its political sell-by date, and Brexit marks its end.

And globalisation (meaning free trade and immigration since you asked) is good for the working class:

There isn't an economy in the world — now or ever — that could have endured such massive blows without a major hit to its people. But the worst that has happened in America is stagnant wages. Remarkably, our quality of life has continued to improve.

They never tell you how fast Africa is growing (or that it's down to capitalism - also socialism was what made Africa poor):

Some of Africa’s growth was driven by high commodity prices, but much of it, a McKinsey study found in 2010, was driven by economic reforms. To appreciate the latter, it is important to recall that for much of their post-colonial history, African governments have imposed central control over their economies. Inflationary monetary policies, price, wage and exchange rate controls, marketing boards that kept the prices of agricultural products artificially low and impoverished African farmers, and state-owned enterprises and monopolies were commonplace.

The rise of the far-right is down to the EU (prize for spotting the huge factual error in the article):

All “civilised” politicians in the founding EEC nations agreed nationalism must be overcome. Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Socialists, Euro communists, all the mainstream Continental political groups agreed that old-style patriotism was at best embarrassing, at worst dangerous and wicked. This meant that ordinary Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Belgians who wanted to stay French, German, etc had no-one else to vote for but extreme nationalists. Anyone wishing to oppose ever-closer union had no other home than among the xenophobic fringe parties.

It's not just technology but finance that's changing car ownership:

With the rise of companies like Uber and Lyft, it’s clear that we will need to see advances in new ownership models to support tomorrow’s transportation landscape. In fact, Uber recently received a $1 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs to fund new car leases. Uber (and Wall Street) are also recognizing the need for more flexibility with this deal — especially at a time when Americans are making larger monthly payments than ever on their cars and taking out record-size auto loans.

The impact of Brexit on projections for housing requirements (sexy stuff I know):

In summary, the current basis for UK estimates of housing need are already predicated on a 45% drop to total net-in-migration by 2021, so for Brexit to have any downward pressure on planned housing targets in Local Plans, it would need to be assumed that Brexit resulted in European net-migration to the UK falling to virtually zero over the medium to long term. This seems unlikely.

A brilliant article - essentially a film review - on small town poverty and decline in the US mid-west (and a glimpse of why Trump):

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

Finally I can't resist a comment on grammar schools. They really aren't the answer to educational challenges but at least the Conservatives are looking at system reform rather than saying the solution is putting more money into institutions - big urban comprehensives - that are failing children.

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"Gimmicks" - or transport innovations at they're known outside West Yorkshire

Tomorrow's driverless taxi?

The West Yorkshire Combined Authority is going out to consultation on its transport strategy. This is a strategy and plan intended to set the direction for transport in West Yorkshire up to 2036. In doing this, the WYCA is acting quite properly - transport schemes are expensive, slow to develop and take a long time to implement so a twenty year planning horizon is sensible. You can contribute to the consultation through the page on WYCA's website.

At the recent WYCA full meeting - where the leaders of West Yorkshire's five councils plus a couple of others tagged on for good measure (like me, for example), we discussed this transport strategy. Not in much detail - these meetings are never big on detail - but enough to get a feel for what it's proposing. And it's not very good.

The strategy is linear seeing challenges such as congestion, air quality and connectivity as solvable only with existing technology - trains, buses - and new infrastructure (roads, bike lanes and so forth) within the existing spatial circumstances. Thus we are keen on HS2 and HS3 (or Northern Powerhouse Rail - NPR - as afficionados will now call it) as transformational schemes and we bemoan the lack of foresight at the Department for Transport in not allowing us to build our exiciting and innovative new 'bus-on-a-string'. As if the 19th century technology of the trolley bus is somehow a solution to 21st century transport challenges.

In setting objectives, the strategy focuses on modal shift, getting journeys shifted from nasty bad cars onto lovely buses, trains and bicycles. The strangest thing about this policy is that it is essentially backwards looking in seeking to move people from a 20th century transport system (the car) onto 19th century systems (rail, bus, bike). And while this is all fine it represents another triumph for anti-invention green strategies.

In our discussions, I mentioned emerging transport technologies - autonomous vehicles, drones, zero-emission vehicles - and wondered why, given the strategy runs to 2036, none of these emerging transport systems was considered worthy of even consideration in our planning? The chairman of the WYCA's Transport Board and the Leader of Kirklees Council dismissed this suggestion. The former thought the 'holy grail' would be to have an integrated ticketing syste across rail and bus by 2036. For Londoners, this is us taking 20 years to introduce the Oytster card system you guys already have.

For the latter, Cllr David Sheard, these new technologies are "gimmicks" and we should focus on "real-time data" (which we already have through the Metro phone app) and "smart ticketing" (those Oyster cards again). The extent of West Yorkshire's transport innovation will be to introduce a system London already has and to improve another system already available in West Yorkshire. And we want to be some sort of powerhouse? With this sort of thinking we'll be lucky to keep up with Manchester let alone close the gap with London.

So, for the benefit of my colleagues on the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, here are some of those gimmicks being introduced elsewhere in the world.

Singapore is gearing up to become the world's first "smart nation", with another deal to bring self-drive taxis to the city.

The city authorities signed a deal with start-up nuTonomy to test autonomous vehicles in March.

Now Delphi Automotive will also offer a small fleet of automated taxis to carry passengers around a business park.

The driverless cabs could reduce an average $3-a-mile ride to 90 cents, the firm said.

Initially, the cars will have drivers, ready to take over if the system fails but the plan is to gradually phase the human out in 2019.

And - even more creative:

A drone that can transport humans has been given the go ahead to carry out trials in the US.

The Ehang 184, which was first unveiled at CES 2016, is a small, personal helicopter that can transport a single passenger. Rather than one large rotor above the body, the "taxi drone" has four rotors underneath the body, resembling a remote control drone.

Ehang will start running tests in Las Vegas later this year in the hope that it could eventually be used as part of the state's transport system, according to a local publication.

Buses might not be so dull:

A driverless electric bus is set to be trialled in Perth in a test run for the use of autonomous vehicles on West Australian roads.

The staged trial is being conducted and funded by WA's RAC later this year using a French-made electric shuttle bus.

With no driver, it will use three-dimensional sensing technology to carry 15 passengers at speeds up to 45 kilometres per hour.

And there's autonomous delivery systems:

"Whilst driverless vehicles once sounded like science fiction, it's now within our grasp," said Domino’s Pizza UK marketing director Simon Wallis. "Harnessing this innovation for pizza delivery opens up a new world of opportunities for us."

The vehicles navigate via GPS technology and feature an onboard Pizza Interface (PI) that calculates the fastest route to the customer.

Plus drone delivery of course:

Amazon will step up its drone tests in UK airspace after winning approval from the Government to lift strict flying restrictions in a major boost to its plans for unmanned delivery aircraft.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has granted the internet retailer special permission to test its aerial vehicles without several of the rules that typically bind drone pilots.

The agreement will see Amazon move a step close to Jeff Bezos’s dream of fleets of drones delivering small packages directly to shoppers within 30 minutes.

Or, on a bigger scale, semi-autonomous freight trains:

Six convoys of semi-automated “smart” trucks arrived in Rotterdam’s harbour on Wednesday after an experiment its organisers say will revolutionise future road transport on Europe’s busy highways.

More than a dozen self-driving trucks made by six of Europe’s largest manufacturers arrived in the port in so-called “truck platoons” around midday, said Eric Jonnaert, president of the umbrella body representing DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo.

And the landing of drones in drone ports:

Foster + Partners has unveiled the first full-scale prototype of its Droneport concept at the Arsenale, which is designed to transport medical supplies to remote regions in Africa using unmanned flying vehicles (+ slideshow).

The structure is the inaugural project from the Norman Foster Foundation, set up by the British architect to anticipate technological advances in the field, respond to humanitarian needs and encourage a more "holistic" view of architecture.

All this is before we've got to a world where autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles begin to replace the car as the dominant form of personal transport. This requires us to think about ownership, to look at the way in which we licence taxis, road safety and pedestrianisation. Instead we're going to fuss about installing better bus stops and holding interminable meetings to discuss ticketing arrangements between trains and buses. And instead of infrastructure investment paving the way for autonomous vehicles, drones and other innovations, we'll spend it on trying to shift one-in-thirty journeys from the car to some other form of transport.

With the collapse of the tram and trolley bus proposals for Leeds, there's the opportunity to step over our obsession with trains and buses and to plan for the future that emerging technology is taking us to. Sadly, the leaders of West Yorkshire think that's just "gimmicks". Seems to me we need some new ones - leaders that is, not buses and trains.

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Creating a Yorkshire Powerhouse - it's down to us not the government in London

My eponymous great-grandfather was born in East London. Tragically he died young - in his thirties - leaving a widow and young children. He died in Wakefield.

This isn't some terrible story of loss or tragedy and nor was my great-grandfather one of those victims of industrial capitalism. He was a wine merchant. Not only is this a noble calling but it explains why he ended up in Wakefield. Put in simple terms there was better business to be had (and perhaps less competition) in Yorkshire than there was in London. As my boss, Judith Donovan, said to me when I arrived in Bradford on 27 July 1987 - "A hundred years ago, Bradford was the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world."

How things have changed. Now, too often, Yorkshire paints itself as a victim, bashed and battered by the tides of globalisation, ignored or patronised by the powers down in London. It is a theme we hear again and again from 'leaders' in Yorkshire - that somehow the economic gap between England's greatest county and those southern nancies is down to the perfidy of national government. London is rich because, as if by a dark magic, all the good stuff in England is sucked away from places like Yorkshire for the folk living in that huge city to spend on fancy bus tickets, overpriced coffee and criminally-priced one-bed apartments in Stockwell.

Here's the Yorkshire Post:

Yet the frustration is that Yorkshire has so much more to offer and that this region’s limitless potential will not be maximised until the Government invests sufficient sums in this county’s human capital – school standards have lagged behind the rest of the country for an unacceptable number of years and are having a detrimental impact on job prospects – as well as the area’s transport and business infrastructure so more world-leading companies can be persuaded to invest here.

Today is Yorkshire Day and it is worth giving the Yorkshire Post its due for setting out an agenda for the county that genuinely reflects much of the debate going on up here. But it's a shame that the habit of holding out the cap and fluttering those Yorkshire eye-lashes still remains. No-one's denying that Yorkshire - and the North for that matter - needs investment but when all they hear is the regional politics version of "got some spare change for a coffee" is it really a surprise that government doesn't rush to help out?

Take education. The Yorkshire Post rightly highlights how Yorkshire's levels of educational attainment lag behind those elsewhere in England and in many ways this is a scandal. But what's the bigger scandal - that politicians in London aren't throwing cash at the problem or that the leaders in Yorkshire haven't got any plan, policy or strategy to address the problem? Where's the education 'summit' bringing together political and business leaders from across the county? Why haven't local education authorities - along with schools - pooled their investment in educational development and improvement?

The same goes for transport. Again the Yorkshire Post reminds us that Leeds is the only big city in England without a tram system or metro. And that - quite rightly - the government pulled the plug on that city's latest wheeze, a new 'bus-on-a-string'. I recall sitting in a meeting - in some slightly tatty, anonymous office block in Leeds - and formally giving Bradford's support for what was dubbed 'supertram'. And I remember adding, at the end of the presentation, that it was a great shame said 'supertram' wasn't going to Bradford or, indeed, anywhere near Bradford. The single busiest inter-city commuter route - Leeds-Bradford and vice versa - didn't register.

So - again - where's Yorkshire's transport plan? Have the transport great and good gathered to set out how we'll respond to 21st century challenges in transport? Or have we just sat mithering about ticketing and real-time information as if they're the answer to the question? Why should - other than for reasons of political calculation (hence Cameron launching the 'Northern Powerhouse' in Shipley) - central government do anything for Yorkshire when Yorkshire's not doing much for itself?

Even on devolution, political calculations - both sub-regional and by the political parties - has meant deadlock. Yorkshire - after London itself - is the only English region with a genuine identity. Yorkshire Day really is a thing (my friend Keith Madeley and the Yorkshire Society deserve a lot of credit for this). We really did showcase the glories of the county through the Tour de France and its child, Tour de Yorkshire. And the county really does have everything - except, that is, the leadership to get on with devising responses to our challenges without waiting on someone in London first giving us the thumbs up.

I learnt a couple of important lessons recently. The first was during a meeting with Lord Adonis following the National Infrastructure Commission publishing reports on Crossrail 2 and Transport in the North. The lesson was that London had prepared, done the legwork, written a plan and set out how that city would fund half the cost in the time Northern leaders had drawn up a scope for a possible plan the content of which wasn't set. London will get the money because London knows what it wants. Here in Yorkshire we just ask for more transport investment - we have no plan.

The second lesson is that London's planning is far deeper - more granular as the trendies put it - than any spatial or urban planning anywhere else in England. In part this just reflects the fact that London is a city and has a coherence (and obvious centre) that Yorkshire doesn't have but it also demonstrates that our fragmented systems of government, business leadership and administration won't allow for that level of planning. Here's what I wrote in June about New London Architecture's exhibition:

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

The Yorkshire Post is right to make the case for the county and to present it to the Prime Minister. But we also need to make the case for bringing the county together, for a new agreement - with or without devolution deals - to work together on planning for Yorkshire's future. If - in some few years - we can take people to an exhibition put together by a private organisation demonstrating how Yorkshire's people, businesses, charities and landowners share a clear, radical and creative plan that is being put in place then we will be changing the county for the better.

I fear that, after a brief flurry of excitement and a modicum of political grandstanding, the Yorkshire Post's welcome initiative will be lost. Not because folk in Yorkshire don't want their county to be better but because we've not made our own plans for making the county once again, the richest place in the richest country. So long as we wait for handouts from London this won't happen.

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Why Africa will leave us behind later this century

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We're still building railways - nineteenth century technology albeit jazzed up with improved kit. Africa - on top of sophisticated mobile telephony (and banking) - will have this:

Norman Foster is often hailed as the inventor of the modern-day terminal-style airport with his design of London’s Stansted. And now, his new plan is to build the world’s smallest airport. For drones. The dynamic, futuristic technology of drones is still mostly associated with the military. But the endless opportunities of the speedy and compact air vehicles are quickly being discovered as their use is expanding in commercial, scientific, recreational and other applications. It is estimated that over a million civilian units were sold in 2015.

Who needs expensive multi-lane highways when, for a fraction of the cost, you can zip in the goods, medicines, and people needed to make the place tick on a drone? And then watch the produce of formerly remote - now connected - places fly off to serve the world. Brilliant.

In the (currently) rich world we're stuck with a creaking and high maintenance transport network because, in a world of drones, autonomous cars and driver less buses, we've convinced ourselves that the answer is spending all the spare cash on high speed trains.

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Why rail-led modal shift is a myth - and we need different thinking on transport

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The data is from Australia but it won't be any different in the UK:

In 2013–14, there were 178.5 billion passenger kilometres travelled on capital city roads in Australia and 12.6 billion passenger kilometres travelled on urban rail networks. I’ve written before that this share is unlikely to change for the simple fact that only around 10% of metropolitan wide jobs are based in central business districts of our major cities. Agreed, it’s an important 10% for public transport because PT best serves a highly centralized workforce as you find in CBDs. Commuter rail in particular relies on a ‘hub and spoke’ model, mainly designed to ferry people from into and out of CBDs.

Let's develop transport policies that actually respond to the challenge rather than direct investment on the basis of having had a train set as a kid.

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'Growth for The North' - taking local ownership of the Northern Powerhouse

At a recent LGA meeting we heard from Lord Adonis, chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission and former transport minister. It was interesting, not just from the insight he gave into the work published on Crossrail Two, Northern transport connectivity and energy connections but for the context he have for decision-making. It is that context that is relevent to any discussion about the 'Northern Powerhouse'.

Much of the debate around the Northern Powerhouse is characterised by either negativity (witty statements like 'Northern Poorhouse' or 'Northern Powersham', for example) or else by an emphasis on devolution to 'metro-mayors' in the 'core cities'. It seems to me that this misses the point and worse reinforces two unwanted images of The North - as supplicants arriving cap in hand at national government's doors asking for more, and as a bunch of rivalrous, squabbling places unable to get their act together on priorities for economic growth. I would add that the capture of the agenda in some of those cities - Manchester especially - by the idea of 'inclusive growth' drags The North still further away from the place it needs to be to deliver on a Northern Powerhouse.

Lord Adonis made the observation that Crossrail Two got the green light for two reasons - the planning, costing and economic impact work was undertaken and sound, and Transport for London (TfL) as well as the London Mayor were committed to provide 50% of the scheme's funding. The result is that a £16 billion scheme will actually cost central government less than half that amount releasing the economic benefits (that show up in GDP figures and growth) to the whole nation. This is the sort of deal any national government wants to see - regardless of politics.

Right now there is not only no agreement or consensus in The North about infrastructure investment priorities but there is no mechanism for business in The North to do what's happening in London and fund 50% of that investment. There are any number of schemes and projects - ranging from the lunatic (a trans-Pennine tunnel under the High Peak) through to the sensible (reducing rail travel times east to west). And although Transport for the North has made a start with sifting these options and alternatives, it has made only a little progress and it isn't clear how its governance or administration functions. Crucially there is no means for The North to capture business contribution (for example via a business rates supplement) as national government is reserving this supplement for those places who take George Osborne's shilling off the drum and accept a 'metro-mayor'.

If, to use an eminently sensible idea, Transport for the North were to propose a new motorway linking the M56 to the A1(M) North of Bradford and Leeds, the expectation is that central government - through its agencies - would stump up all the cash. And the same would go for HS3, widening the A64, a rail link to Leed-Bradford International Airport and an upgraded Pennine crossing from Newcastle to the M6. We have to find a mechanism for local contribution and pooling that potential business rate supplement should be the best approach - assuming national government can set aside its obsession with Heseltine's rewarmed core city focus and the idea of 'metro-mayors'.

The essential requirement if we are to deliver the infrastructure elements of a Northern Powerhouse is cooperation between Merseyside, Manchester, Leeds-Bradford, Teeside and Tyneside (and the rest of The North) rather than the creation of competing entities based on travel-to-work geography in regional cities. This isn't to reject city devolution or even the idea of mayors but rather is to say that a Northern Powerhouse is best served by a bigger vision encompassing the whole of The North rather than a set of visions focused on the challenges of city government.

We're talking here about infrastructure - indeed specifically transport infrastructure - but there are other areas where The North needs to collaborate rather than compete - our education system underperforms compared to London and the South East, our urban mass transit (where it exists at all) is limited and not focused on economic growth, our cultural sectors lack bite, arts funding is London-centred, and we still experience a steady trickle of the bright and best to elsewhere in the world.

The problem, however, is compounded by the approach of city leaders and Northern Labour politicians to the problem - the Northern Powerhouse may not be a reality as yet but it's only going to become one if you get behind the idea and make it work. Simply shouting a lot about The North's problems and blaming all of this on central government isn't especially conducive to getting any commitment - let alone momentum - behind the idea of working together with that government to improve The North's economic performance. If the only approach is to stick a begging bowl under the treasury's nose and say 'fill it up please' then we will never have the growing, self-reliant and powerful North of England that surely everyone up here wants.

It is possible for leaders in The North to make this work but we won't get there if all our time is spent waiting for someone else to jump, fussing about how too much of it is about Manchester (or Leeds, or Newcastle), or making sad noises about how badly done to we all are. The work of Transport for the North, albeit quite tentative, suggests that wider collaboration on a similar basis around the whole economy not just transport is far more important than the geography of a 'combined authority' in Yorkshire or the list of 'asks' in a city devolution scheme. We need to take the idea of Transport for the North - cooperation, collaboration - and create something like 'Growth for the North' that's prepared to fund the feasibility and prepare the ground for more central government investment in The North alongside similar investment in growth from The North's businesses and residents.

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If we're not planning for 'robocars', we are planning wrongly.

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OK we're talking about America here but the point remains a strong one:

The rise of robocars may accelerate metro area decentralization. Congestion will be reduced, and the greater safety of driverless cars may permit higher speeds on metro area beltways and cross-town freeways. Once taxi drivers are replaced by robot taxis, the cost of taxis will plummet and the greater convenience of point-to-point personal travel anywhere in a sprawling metro area will make rail-based mass transit obsolete except in places like airports and tourist-haven downtowns. As in the past, most working-class families with children will probably prefer a combination of a longer commute with a bigger single-family house and yard to a shorter commute and life in a cramped apartment or condo.

We need to understand that this will happen and it will make all our debate about the negatives of personal transport obsolete. This also - with the need to travel also reduced by technology - rather undermines the idea that we will cram ourselves into enormous, dense core cities while the wilderness is recreated as that technology reduces farmland acreage.

Our debate about housing, transport and much else is stale and limited so long as our long-term planning is predicated on urban densification to reduce the impact of the private car. Driverless vehicles as a mass transit solution may be 30 years ago but this is not a massive planning horizon and the places that design themselves to meet this world will be the winners.

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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.

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If we want to protect the environment, we need to fall in love with the car again

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New Start magazine is home to the most predictable and dated of approaches to regeneration. A bunch of folk wrapped in the New Economic Foundation, Green Party, Agenda 21 line of anti-development, anti-car, anti-freedom beliefs that simply don't reflect the reality of either regeneration or the thrust of transport technology. Here's a classic of the genre from the misnamed Campaign for Better Transport:

We know our reliance on cars is bad for us – bad for our health, bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Yet the way we plan and build continues as if it were still the 1950s and the car a watchword for freedom.

And so on in this vein. Each illustration of the car's evil is ticked - 'clone towns', 'subtopia', 'car-dependent ghettoes', 'foorball pitch sized car parks', 'retail parks'. And the glorious alternatives to economic growth are celebrated - 'improved public health', 'revitalised town centres' and 'tackling carbon emissions'. Plus of course the desire that planning rules should be changed "so economic growth is no longer allowed to trump essential considerations like environment and health". As if planning rules do anything at all but limit economic growth - it's what they're designed to do.

My problem with this - and all the stuff about "strong public transport links with discounted ticket prices, the establishment of cycling routes and initiatives such as free bike workshops all contributing" - is that it completely fails to recognise the direction of transport technology. All the most innovative and green developments in transport are about roads and transport on roads - from smart road surfaces and electric vehicles through to flexible urban pods and lorry peletons the future of transport lies with clean green vehicles using a new generation of roads not with 19th century technologies like trains, trams, bicycles and trolley buses.

Technology is making roads dramatically safer and allowing greater capacity while the development of hybrid engines and more efficient transmission systems is making vehicle significantly less polluting. New materials reduce the carbon emissions in manufacture and make recycling or waste reduction easier. In time vehicles become smaller as technology eliminates collisions allowing for more flexible parking systems.

The problem is that we have a planning system that sees roads as a problem and cars as a curse rather than seeing these systems as a more flexible, safer. reliable and sustainable solution that railway tracks or other systems dedicated to single uses. Most public transport solutions (with the honourable exception of electric buses) rely on this exclusivity - from bus lanes and tram lines to swathes of countryside ripped up to accommodate high speed rail. It really is time we set aside this obsession with old technology and began to support investment in the exciting technologies of tomorrow - technologies based on the shared space that is the highway.

If we want a sustainable transport future then the answer lies in working with technologies that make roads more flexible, safer and faster. We need to embrace the idea of increased road capacity and smoother traffic flow that smart road technologies will bring. Above all we need to remember that the car still is a watchword for freedom, is still the preferred means of transport for the majority, and that driverless technologies open up that freedom to people who right now can't access the car. We need to fall in love with the car again.



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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.
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Another reminder why we need to spend more money on our roads

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Even in London:

More than half of Londoners commute to work by car or other light vehicles (including car pools). Transit accounts for about a quarter of commuting, while about 10 percent of commuters walk to work. Approximately six percent usually labor mainly at or from home.

And there's a reason for this - despite the supposed dominance of commuting to central London most of the region's employment isn't in that central business district (defined as the four central boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Southwark and Lambeth plus the City of London - ought really to include Tower Hamlets and Kensington as well):

Despite its strong CBD, the London area is anything but monocentric. Approximately 85 percent of London area jobs are outside the central business district.

The commuting we hear about (very loudly on assorted social media most mornings) is primarily folk travelling in from outer London and the fringe of towns on the edge of London. Yes it's important but this transport system has taken the lion's share of UK transport investment for the past decade or so. It is tome to rebalance and start investing in the transport network everyone uses - roads.

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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?
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