Are Trams Socialist Page 6
The italics are mine, and they are there to highlight the fact that test drivers clearly make many decisions on the way that the cars are driven. The bus did not stop, and it hit the slow-moving Google car at around fifteen miles per hour, causing extensive damage but no injury.
This incident clearly illustrates the dilemma about ‘driverless cars’: they will be expected, eventually, to take risks and that will inevitably result in them causing some accidents, with all the issues that that entails. The four-way stop sign, greatly favoured in residential areas in America, could easily turn out to be a permanent bottleneck with robot cars. The programmers are now thinking of creating software that would enable the cars to break the safety rules to allow for these situations but this could, by definition, cause an accident that was the robot car’s fault. It may be a catch-22 too far for their developers.
There is an assumption among many advocates of driverless cars that they would become some kind of communal resource, rather like the Santander bikes in London, because they would reduce the need or desire for individual ownership. But there is no evidence for that. The ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ aspect of car ownership may be weakening, as cars all look the same and seem to be predominantly black or silver, but it still remains, as attested to by the ridiculous number of Chelsea tractors, not just in Chelsea but throughout London. The twin revolution of driverless cars and common ownership may well prove to be a myth, or at least not deliverable in the sort of time frame that would allow today’s policymakers to consider it.
The key issue is whether driverless cars will result in an increase or a reduction in mileage. If driverless cars live up to their promise, it appears logical that they would attract people out of public transport given their flexibility and the fact that they provide private space – all the current attractions of driving without the need to waste time controlling the damn thing. Driverless cars may well, then, replicate the failed transport policies of the past and exacerbate, rather than solve, the fundamental problem of the commons, i.e. the overuse of communal road space that is provided free. We have been here before. The motor car was originally sold as a panacea to transportation problems. How much easier, its promoters said, it made getting from one’s current location to precisely where one wanted to be. However, that only worked for a while. Once cars became more widely used, sheer numbers of vehicles and parking restrictions made that impossible. Many people still think that having a (free) parking space outside their front door is a fundamental human right but, especially in the urban context, fewer and fewer are able to enjoy that luxury.
The same doubts about the game-changing nature of technology applies to driverless trains or other developments on the railways, such as moving block signalling, which means that trains are no longer controlled by external signals but by radio waves sent into the cab to ensure they maintain a safe distance from the train in front. While this may result in more trains being able to use the tracks, the nineteenth-century technology of rails on sleepers still prevails and is the limiting factor. The cost of providing extra tracks remains prohibitive and is the biggest barrier to expanding the system.
Electric cars are another technology that flatters to deceive. There is a wide variety of technologies, ranging from hybrid to pure electric vehicles. Hybrids clearly only offer partial environmental benefits, and even electric cars, until they are powered by sustainable methods, still create CO2 emissions. Despite the fact that fully electric vehicles offer considerable advantages to the consumer, with far cheaper fuel, and to society at large, with lower emissions, uptake of electric vehicles has been slow, even in Paris where there are lots of recharging facilities – the main advantage of which has been to provide free parking for users!
The purchase price of electric cars remains far higher than for conventional cars, despite government grants, and concerns about driving range, given the paucity of charging points, are a limiting factor to their use. The cost of new batteries remains high and though there are now some deals that involve simply leasing the battery, reducing the risk to the driver, the overall cost still has to be paid for by the user. In addition, electric vehicles will only contribute significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gases if the power they use is generated sustainably. The European Union wants 20% of energy to come from renewable sources by 2020, a target that the UK will struggle to reach given the changes to subsidy arrangements brought in by the government soon after the 2015 election.
Technology, therefore, has to be the tool of the transport planners, not their master. Some of these ideas may be partial solutions or at least alleviate problems, but they do not address the fundamental complexity of transport issues. Policymakers have at times been lured by visions of the future that seem to be a panacea. I remember those pictures from the 1960s of people being propelled by backpack rockets or sitting in tiny little aircraft that would get them to work. More significantly and prosaically, the Buchanan concept of separating cars from pedestrians was actually implemented in places as diverse as Birmingham and the Barbican. The hard truth is that there is no silver bullet that will simultaneously solve the downsides of transport: congestion, pollution and energy use.
Chapter 6
Can’t we build ourselves out of trouble?
Transport policy has for decades been driven on the basis of ‘predict and provide’. There is going to be more demand for road space, so build it – or at least try to. Policymakers have been able to do this because transport is seen as a public good. In other words, the norms of capitalist provision, of meeting supply and demand, do not apply. Public goods can supposedly be consumed by people without detriment to others seeking the same service. That is the theory. But in practice, as we have seen, that does not work, because ultimately supply has to be limited. It is probably in China where the authorities have gone furthest in trying to prove that it is possible to keep on feeding demand, and even there they seem to have given up as attempts to build a seventh ring road around Beijing are now being abandoned.
In the UK, predict and provide was the prevailing ethos in relation to car use pretty much from the end of World War I until the cost and contradictions of the policy came home to roost towards the end of the twentieth century. Aviation policy, too, has largely been determined by the predict-and-provide ethos and, given the growth in railway passengers, it is now being applied to the rail industry, though the lumpiness and cost of investment is a deterrent.
While there has been increasing scepticism about basing transport policy on such a simplistic notion, weaning transport planners and policymakers away from it has proved difficult. This is partly a consequence of the widespread use of cost–benefit analysis, the dominant methodology for calculating the advantages of new transport schemes. The basic notion is sound: when considering whether or not to build a scheme, the promoters are required to set out the benefits and costs that will result. So far, so good. The costs of a scheme are fairly obvious: the direct spending required to build it and an assessment of indirect costs, such as, for example, noise pollution or environmental degradation. However, it is the nature of the benefits that is far more controversial. The methodology used by the Department for Transport (called WebTag) relies very heavily, for most schemes, on time savings made by users of the new infrastructure. These are then monetized, averaging around £25 per hour per person but varying considerably depending on the mode of transport of the user and the reason for travelling, with business travellers being rated more highly than those undertaking leisure trips. These time savings make up a very high proportion of the savings for most schemes, and these savings in turn become the core of the business case on which the Department for Transport and consequently politicians rely in order to sell their plans to the public.
However, the figures produced by this method have little relationship to reality. It is fanciful to assume that small time savings – often, in the case of a bypass or minor road scheme, amounting to just a minute or less per person – rep
resent real value to the economy. In one of the most farcical attempts to justify a transport policy on this basis, in a 2011 Department for Transport press release, Philip Hammond (then the Transport Secretary) claimed that increasing the speed limit on motorways from seventy to eighty miles per hour ‘could provide hundreds of millions of pounds of benefits for the economy’ because people would get to their destinations slightly faster (he omitted to mention the fact that there would be more accidents, resulting in additional delays).
In fact, cost–benefit analysis was never originally intended to demonstrate whether a scheme was worthwhile but, rather, was meant to be a fairly rough-and-ready method for comparing different projects. It was first used widely in the 1960s in order to give planners a way of convincing politicians that they should sanction schemes but it has become an indispensable tool for the promoters of any transport project, even very small ones such as altering a junction layout. Now, cost–benefit analysis has turned into a massive consultant bonanza that purports to give very precise figures for the future value of a scheme over, say, thirty years by rolling up annual benefits to provide an estimate of the project’s present value. We therefore get ridiculous headlines in the media saying that a particular transport project will be worth £10 billion or £100 billion to the economy over the next thirty years. This has as much accuracy as predicting how many pigeons will land on Hyde Park next month, and yet the whole of transport policy is geared towards the approval and delivery of schemes that deliver the best benefit–cost ratio. This tends to favour bigger schemes as the benefits can be presented as very large, and also results in ignoring schemes that deliver benefits other than time savings.
Indeed, the lack of infrastructure in the UK can be put down to an obsession with the narrow assessment of their value in terms of business cases that fail to take into account a whole raft of wider considerations. The obsession with producing a precise number for the long-term value of a scheme, based on the methodology of cost–benefit assessments, has been highly damaging in both stopping very useful schemes from being built and encouraging others, notably roads, that should not.
No cure for the roads addiction
The roads programme has not been subject to the same political vagaries as the railways. There was never a Beeching of the roads, even though the same kind of statistics about how most of them are little used could be applied. There have been ups and downs in the investment programme, certainly, but by and large few politicians dare speak ill of the ‘need’ for better roads.
The Labour government of 1997–2010 reined back on the new roads programme, in line with the scepticism about predict and provide. However, the coalition government that succeeded it began, once again, to talk up road investment, culminating in a promise in November 2014 by the Chancellor, George Osborne, to spend £15 billion on new schemes over the ensuing five years. Ministers, as mentioned previously, are keen on stressing they are implementing the biggest road building programme since the Romans but in fact, nowadays, road investment is largely about incremental addition: a short link to avoid a bottleneck, say, or the addition of a lane.
The basis of the large road building programme, however, even on a predict and provide model, is weak. Despite the increase in car registrations, the number of miles travelled by cars has remained virtually unchanged from the turn of the century until very recently, when there has been a small upturn. The Department for Transport, however, predicts that there will be strong growth in the next two decades even on a model based on increasing fuel prices. The situation is therefore somewhat muddled. The low cost of fuel may well have resulted in some short-term increase but predictions of a significant rise in mileage are much more uncertain. The greater use of new forms of communication such as video conferencing, the increased potential to work at home afforded by broadband, the reluctance of young people to buy cars and drive, and even developments such as the miniaturization of electronic goods may all mitigate against increased demand for road space. However, information technology can work both ways, reducing the propensity to travel for, say, meetings, but also encouraging travel by increasing connectivity. The increase in popularity of living in town centres, where car ownership tends to be lower, is another factor that may account for reduced demand, since luxury flats can be sold in central London without car parking spaces. Moreover, it is highly likely that politicians will eventually be forced into considering road pricing given the reduced revenue from fuel tax as cars increase in efficiency and the use of electric and hybrid vehicles increases.
Nevertheless, the default position of politicians on transport policy when predictions of increased demand are made remains to launch further expansion of road capacity. Since, as argued previously, it is almost impossible to increase capacity in urban areas because of opposition, the roads programme is oriented towards inter-urban and regional transport, which is not where there is serious congestion on the network.
While investment in trunk roads has continued apace, the same is not true of local roads, where spending has suffered severe cuts in recent times. All but 5% of roads are managed by local authorities, and those authorities have been subject to a series of cuts that, by 2015, had left them with a shortfall of £8.6 billion (according to the Local Government Association). While such figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt, there is evidence that the condition of roads is deteriorating throughout the country. A report by the RAC Foundation called ‘The condition of England’s local roads and how they are funded’ suggested that 4% of A roads and 8% of B and C roads are in need of maintenance work and that an estimated 2.5 million potholes need filling annually. The government periodically announces special funds to fix potholes but has traditionally been more ready to support road construction rather than routine maintenance.
The strange case of HS2
When politicians are intent on doing something, their own, supposedly evidence-based, approach goes out of the window. The lure of being remembered for a scheme is sometimes too tempting, even if by the time ribbons are cut they will be long gone. That is the only possible explanation for the cross-party support for HS2, the high-speed railway that will link London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. The business case in terms of the benefit–cost ratio is incredibly tenuous for such a massive scheme given the huge proportion of the transport budget it will take up: including rolling stock, the cost is expected to be £50 billion (including some contingency or optimum bias), a figure that is widely expected to increase.
Yet the momentum behind the HS2 scheme appears to make it unstoppable. Already some £1 billion has been spent on it and there is all-party support. Despite the cost and deep cuts to government spending, George Osborne sees it as the centrepiece of his Northern Powerhouse and, more generally, of his desire to improve Britain’s infrastructure.
It is quite difficult to unpick precisely how HS2 has become all but a fait accompli despite the widespread doubts about its viability among many transport planners and professionals. There had long been discussion of a high-speed line north of London, but it was firmly rejected in the mid noughties when Alistair Darling was transport secretary. However, in opposition, the Tories began to put forward the idea and it was picked up by Lord Adonis, who was Labour’s transport secretary in the party’s final years of government. He created a government company, HS2 Ltd, to draw up a scheme to link London with Birmingham and the North. However, the study started from the wrong place. Instead of assessing the current state of the railway, its bottlenecks and the best way of making improvements, the focus was solely on a high-speed line. Moreover, because it was announced in tandem with the Labour government’s commitment for a third runway at Heathrow, the line was routed westwards out of London to ensure it could connect with the expanded airport rather than, as would have been more logical and shorter, northwards.
On assuming power as part of the coalition in 2010, the Tories, who had put forward a different route, endorsed the Labour idea and began to invest s
erious resources into drawing up detailed plans. Because there was support from all three main parties – the Lib Dems were hooked too – there was very little discussion of the fundamentals behind the project. However, its raison d’être kept changing. The claims for the line’s environmental credentials, such as reducing the need for short-haul flights or reducing fuel consumption, did not survive close scrutiny. HS2 Ltd’s own preliminary report suggested a range of greenhouse gas outcomes with a median of approximately no effect. Nor could time savings justify the line’s construction. Its supporters, realizing that promoting the line as saving half an hour or so for travellers between London and Birmingham was not winning over sceptics, switched the focus of justification for the line. It was, they now argued, needed in order to increase capacity between London and the major cities of the North and would help to bridge the north–south divide. That, too, has been challenged because research by Professor John Tomaney found that similar schemes elsewhere have tended to favour the larger, already more prosperous, urban centre rather than the smaller cities at the other end of the line.
The politicians, therefore, had to rely on having a strong business case. Only there wasn’t one. Despite the numbers sounding good – ‘HS2 will bring £15 billion benefits to the economy’, according to a study by KPMG – the fundamental business case remained poor. For the line to Birmingham, the benefit–cost ratio remained just below 2, which, by the standards normally applied by the Department for Transport, meant the scheme was moderately good value. While the ratio improves for the whole scheme to around 2.7 (the ratio remains something of a moveable feast and it is giving the system too much credit to accord these numbers a precision that cannot be justified by the methodology), that still remains a poor basis for such a massive amount of expenditure.