Are Trams Socialist Read online

  In one of those bizarre political twists, the Conservative government that was elected in 2015 appears to be prepared to allow some local authorities the freedom to control bus services in their areas providing they agree to a package of measures, including the election of an executive mayor, to devolve power. Manchester was the first area to benefit from this policy, but there have been moves to expand it to several others, including Cornwall.

  Where are those trams?

  After becoming less fashionable than bloomers and plus fours, trams eventually began to again be recognized as a very effective form of urban transport. France led the way in Europe, with new tram systems in Grenoble and Nantes in the mid 1980s, and even in car-­dominated North America systems began appearing in places as diverse as Calgary, Portland and San Diego. Britain was slow off the mark, opening its first schemes in Manchester and Sheffield in 1992. London got its only tramline, the Croydon Tramlink, in 2000, and so far, if the historic Blackpool system (which has now been given new rolling stock) is included, eight urban areas can now boast systems. The latest one is in Edinburgh, where the massive cost overruns and delays have probably killed off any hopes of new systems being built for a generation. There are also the Tyne and Wear Metro (1980) and London’s Docklands Light Railway (1987), which are classified as light rail though unlike trams they do not run on roads, but again this is a story of missed opportunities. Most of the new British systems, particularly those in Croydon, Manchester and Nottingham, have been successful and well patronized. The Nottingham system benefited from finance generated by a workplace parking levy – the only such scheme in the country but one that clearly has the potential to provide funding for other new transport infrastructure.

  Nottingham tram.

  Source: photo by Malc McDonald (see page 115 for full details).

  France, for example, which closed all its systems in the post-war period, now has twenty-seven networks, including in modest-sized cities such as Valenciennes (population just 43,000) and Caen (109,000), the equivalent of cities such as Grantham (population 41,000 – but a tram network would surely send Margaret Thatcher spinning in her grave) and Stroud (population 115,000) being blessed with trams.

  In the UK, John Prescott, when he was transport secretary, did try. He published a transport plan in 2000 that suggested twenty-five tram lines would be built across the country by 2010, paid for partly by road pricing in many towns and cities. Neither the road pricing, apart from in London, nor the tram schemes, with the exception of the one in Nottingham, saw the light of day by the proposed date of 2010, nor in fact by 2016. This failure was partly due to the fact that Prescott’s genuine enthusiasm and support for the idea was not matched by his colleagues round the Cabinet table. Transport was seen as being of minor interest but, worse, other ministers were terrified of the negative effects of raising the cost of motoring. The launch of a White Paper in the summer of 2000 coincided with a series of protests by truck drivers over the increasing cost of fuel. Although Chancellor Gordon Brown’s policy of a fuel tax escalator had by then been abandoned, more than 80% of the cost of fuel was tax and the truckers took action by blockading several refineries. While they relented before any serious shortages developed, the fear that they would rise up again was to colour future transport policy.

  Moreover, in France and most other European countries, local authorities, which are often very keen on big transport innovations such as light rail, are able to draw up plans and drive them through, usually with some support from central government. In the UK, by contrast, local government is weak both financially and administratively, which means that the initiative for such projects has to come from central government, where the zeitgeist can change all too quickly.

  In an email he sent to me, Oliver Green, the author of Rails in the Road: A History of Tramways in Britain and Ireland, explains how it has proved impossible to get a scheme off the ground in his home town:

  In Oxford trams could have a major impact on the horrendous traffic problems both of Oxford City and the surrounding county, and could be linked to branch rail lines to Cowley and Witney to relieve the congested main A40 into Oxford. The problem is that City and County never cooperate (political opposites) and neither of them work properly with Network Rail or the Highways Agency to coordinate plans. We seem to be obsessed in the UK with doing everything as cheaply as possible, so at the moment the best our local authorities can come up with are bus lanes and more park-and-ride schemes which will not be adequate.

  The failure of Prescott’s plan was, in fact, more fundamental: it was not just about tram schemes but was a missed opportunity in what could have been a seminal moment in British transport history, changing the course of transport policy. The ideas in the plan were in fact based, in somewhat watered down form, on the radical thinking of Professor Phil Goodwin, an adviser to John Prescott who had also been influential on the committee that produced the 1994 SACTRA report discussed earlier. Goodwin had, it seemed, managed to finally persuade the government that what he called a ‘New Realism’ was required, a rejection of the idea that transport problems would be solved by building new roads. He later told the BBC:

  a lot of people associated with the rethinking of transport policy felt the same thing … a feeling that yes, this was the first time maybe that professionals and politicians were seeing eye to eye.¹⁸

  However, Prescott lost his hands-on role in the Department for Transport in 2001, and it was the arrival there of Alistair Darling the following year that killed off most of Prescott’s cherished schemes. Darling was keener on balancing the books than on leaving anything to posterity. He was to be in post for four years and made it his duty to ensure that virtually no significant transport schemes were given the go-ahead, apart from measures to improve safety on the railways after the series of accidents in the aftermath of privatization.

  The only subsequent attempt to create a national transport strategy or plan also came to naught. The Eddington Report on Britain’s infrastructure needs – commissioned by Darling when he finally bowed to pressure to have something to show for his tenure at transport – was published in 2006. However, whether by accident or design, Darling had chosen the right person to ensure that nothing much would result. Rather than advocating a series of massive new investments and additions to the network (as had been widely expected by people within the transport industry), the author, Rod Eddington, who had been an aviation executive, broadly concluded that transport links within the UK were pretty good and there was no need for a network of high-speed lines or major improvements to the road system. He did, however, predictably want to see expanded airport capacity and better links to ports. In order to help congestion in overcrowded cities and on key inter-urban routes, he advocated the gradual introduction of a road-pricing scheme – something that politicians have never dared to put forward because of fears of widespread opposition. Like Prescott’s effort and previous ‘we must do something’ efforts at the department, Eddington’s report was allowed to gather dust on a Whitehall shelf and is rarely referred to today.

  Chapter 5

  Is technology the answer?

  The current transport situation was reached because of an obsession with a mode of transport that provides great benefit to the individual at a cost to wider society, in conjunction with a failure to recognize the value of collective forms of transport, despite their ­proven value.

  Rather than addressing the fundamental imbalance in transport policy, policymakers often dodge the issue by looking to technological development as the solution. The starting point, however, must be to ask: if technology is the answer, what is the question? What are we trying to achieve? What, therefore, are the major transport problems that technology could and should be addressing?

  The problems can be set out in two broad categories. The first is the inadequacies of the system. In other words, the fact that it is in many instances difficult to get from A to B, whether through lack of infrastructure, poor service
s or excess demand. The second category concerns the negative effects of transport, such as accidents, air pollution, energy consumption, environmental degradation and, again, excess demand causing congestion and overcrowding.

  When it comes to the first category above, there is no doubt that technology can be very useful in numerous ways. There is no shortage of examples. The installation of digital information at bus stops to show when the next service is arriving has made bus travel far more efficient – enabling people to make choices about whether to wait or use an alternative mode of transport. The provision of hire bikes in many city centres has been made possible by technology that monitors when they are taken out of their stands and returned to them. Technology has also greatly improved the ease with which people can take public transport. No longer do passengers have to queue up at ticket offices: they can open the gates and access the system using their smart cards (such as Oyster in London) or simply with a contactless bank card. Big data is proving invaluable in improving traffic flow on city streets, with every vehicle now becoming a source of information, and the ever-growing sophistication of traffic light systems contributes to reducing congestion.

  Uber is probably the most interesting example of a use of technology in the transport field that superficially appears to offer only enormous benefits but that, as we drill down to consider its effects, creates major problems, too. On the face of it, what’s not to like? Uber offers the chance to call cabs via an app wherever you are (and you can use the same app in Birmingham, Berlin or Beirut) and then your fare is paid via the internet, obviating the need to fiddle with change (and probably tip) – and normally, except at times of very high demand, at a far lower cost than conventional cabs. The driver will be known to Uber, and passengers are able to rate the experience, ensuring that there is a high standard of service. (Hopefully, the driver who told a woman passenger in a miniskirt that she was inappropriately dressed was not allowed to remain on Uber’s books!)

  However, the investors in Uber are not interested in the provision of a better service for urban taxi users. They are concerned only with making a profit, and doing so involves disrupting the existing taxi industry. There is no doubt that in many major cities restrictive practices designed to regulate the industry – but also protect its drivers, who are often a powerful local lobbying force – have meant higher charges than the free market would deliver. They also have meant, certainly in London, the guarantee of a quality product with high safety standards and relatively good customer care (though when I watch, as I frequently do, taxi drivers sitting on their butts with their engines running at St Pancras while tourists struggle to load their suitcases into their cabs, I do accept that the industry could do with a bit of a shake-up). The requirement in London for a prospective cabbie to take ‘the Knowledge’, which generally takes a couple of years, is a way of limiting newcomers to the business and has pretty much been made redundant by the introduction of satnavs. However, Uber threatens to do much more than simply give the existing taxi industry a somewhat deserved kick in the rear end. Its aim, ultimately, is the complete disintegration of institutions like the black cab trade.

  Because the rules governing the influx of new private hire drivers, the definition that covers Uber, are so lax, Transport for London does not have the ability to control numbers. The technology that has allowed the creation of Uber has therefore led to a sharp increase in traffic in central London as Uber drivers, who are exempt from the congestion charge, hang about, like prostitutes in Amsterdam doorways, waiting for business and cluttering up the streets, reversing a trend that has seen traffic in central London steadily decline or remain static in most of the years since the introduction of the congestion charge in 2003. So while Uber may have brought down fares somewhat, it has also caused major disruption. And if the taxi trade were to be wiped out by the newcomer, would those fares remain low?

  None of these examples represents a transport revolution. Much of the recent technological development is about making systems more efficient, rather than creating totally new forms of mobility. Ticket offices can be closed, toll booths can be eliminated and traffic lights can operate more efficiently. Sure, one benefit of new technology is that it enables the implementation of ideas that would otherwise not be economically feasible. A bike hire system on the scale of the London Santander Cycles scheme could not be provided like a left luggage office of the 1950s, with cap-doffing men issuing bikes from a back office and collecting them back with complaints about scratches! (It is interesting that, for the most part, hire cars are still issued in this way, though the Paris Autolib’ system is changing this, as are various initiatives such as Zipcar in the UK and elsewhere.) At the end of the day, though, it is simply a way of loaning out bikes to people in the way that late Victorians did in public parks. Knowing when the next bus is coming is hardly rocket science either. I remember being in Oakland, California in the early 1970s and simply ringing up to find out when the next bus was arriving before leaving the house in which I was staying – and that was perfectly reliable.

  Largely, then, it is not technology that drives change – instead, it is the other way round: change demands technological developments that then become financially viable. The notion that technology is developing far faster now than ever before, and therefore will engender far-reaching changes, is misplaced. The inventions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the real mould-breakers. Before the railways, no one had travelled faster than a horse could gallop, and the development of the telegraph and, later, the telephone similarly sped up communication, which had previously relied on four-legged animals, to the speed of light. Electricity improved people’s lives in rather more fundamental ways than the mobile telephone has.

  Nowhere is this more marked than in the discussion of driverless (or, rather, robot) cars, which have attracted massive media attention and have been presented as a solution to today’s transport problems. Yet any considered examination of their potential suggests they will create just as many new problems as they will solve. In particular, they do not address the fundamental issue of the shortage of road space, nor of the environmental degradation caused by existing vehicles – not only pollution but the land use taken up by roads and parking. Even if cars used no energy and created no polluting ­gases, they would still be a blight on urban areas.

  The driverless car: a game changer?

  Source: photo by Grendelkhan (see page 115 for full details).

  In any case, despite the billions being invested in them, robot cars so far remain a highly experimental concept that is nowhere near coming to fruition in any meaningful way. While aspects of driverless cars such as cruise control and automatic parking have been introduced to today’s car fleet, the technology of allowing autonomous control of a car while the driver sits and reads her copy of the Financial Times or plays with his tablet is nowhere near ready.

  Google cars have driven more than a million miles around California, but in very restricted conditions and limited to twenty-five miles per hour. That compares with some three trillion miles driven annually in the United States. Moreover, they are only able to be controlled automatically in good conditions: ‘the current prototypes of self-driving vehicles cannot yet operate safely in fog, snow, or heavy rain’, according to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.¹⁹ While better sensors may overcome these problems – researchers suggest that heavy rain is the most difficult of these to overcome – there are doubts about whether the cars will be able to cope with more extreme events, such as a flooded road or a power line that has fallen on the roadway. Talk, therefore, of widespread introduction within a decade or so, which some promoters are suggesting, seems fanciful or even downright impossible.

  Moreover, they have had a disproportionately high number of crashes, albeit minor ones. The cars in California had accumulated eleven such accidents by the middle of 2015, and in February 2016 a prang with a bus was actually caused by the ‘driverless car’
. While the earlier incidents were not the fault of the automation, it may be that human drivers find the behaviour of driverless cars less predictable. Most of these accidents were rear-end shunts and the excessive caution of the robot cars is thought to have been a contributory cause. They slowed down or stopped in a situation that the driver behind did not perceive as being dangerous.

  This demonstrates possibly the biggest difficulty that robot cars would face in emulating human driving conditions. Consider, for example, how drivers pull out of side roads into busy but relatively slow-moving roads – they inch out, creep and eventually some kind-­hearted driver slows down to let them out, something that is much easier in the UK than in many other countries. Think of the number of human interactions that take place between drivers and the skill needed to ensure that the car in the side road inches out just enough to induce someone to let them through but not so much that an accident is caused.

  This is in fact precisely the sort of event that occurred in the first accident caused by the ‘driverless car’. The incident report is very revealing in that it demonstrates the extent to which the ‘driverless car’ is nothing of the sort as the test driver is expected to make key decisions. The Google car was attempting to turn right at traffic lights (on red, which is allowed in the US) and had got into a bit of a tangle with some sandbags, forcing it back into the middle of the road. The report then says:

  A public transit bus was approaching from behind. The ­Google AV [automatic vehicle] test driver saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV to continue.