Are Trams Socialist Read online

  Moreover, the very nature of the methodology has trapped the promoters into making suboptimal decisions in an effort to squeeze out a better benefit–cost ratio. The emphasis on time savings means that the line has very few stations and the stations it has are poorly ­sited, with five (if one includes Crewe) of the nine being on the fringes of the urban areas they are designed to serve, making them far less useful for passengers. The other four, incidentally, are terminus stations, which are far less useful than through stations as they serve fewer destinations and require much longer turnaround times. The need for speed has prevented, for example, the obvious step of buying off the Chiltern protesters with a station to serve them because that would slow the trains down, damaging the business case. It has also led to the line being built to the insanely fast standard of 400 kph, a speed used by no other line in the world and which would require massively increased energy consumption over the 300 kph that is standard on most high-speed lines elsewhere.

  Finally, there is an enormous logical contradiction at the heart of the business case. A large proportion of the time savings accrue to travellers who would otherwise have taken conventional trains. They are based on the notion that time spent on trains is regarded by passengers as wasted. In fact, with the widespread use of mobile technology, business travellers can use their time on trains very profitably and those making a leisure trip can also watch a film or read a book, time for which they do not really need to be notionally compensated. Ministers have refused to rework the methodology on this basis, knowing that it would struggle to pass the normal departmental criteria. HS2 is a political project pushed through as a grand projet by politicians for reasons that do not stand up to analytic scrutiny. In effect, it is transport policy on a whim.

  Chapter 7

  It’s the politics, stupid

  This is not a polemic against the car. Nor against technology. It is, rather, an argument for the development of a genuine transport policy, not the haphazard flailing about that has long characterized the actions of transport ministers. It is not too far-fetched to say that there never has been a transport policy in the UK. John Prescott’s White Paper came closest but was killed off by what he called the ‘teenyboppers’ of Number 10, terrified of the motoring lobby.

  Any coherent policy has to start with the appropriate use of motor vehicles, especially in urban areas. We would not start from where we are now if we were given a blank sheet on which to create a transport policy. The notion of allowing a free-for-all on roads – a scarce and finite resource – makes no sense economically, socially or environmentally.

  One of the ironies of the availability of new technology in transport, highlighted in chapter 5, is that its most potentially transformational use has largely been ignored. Modern information and communications technology allows for variable pricing, which means that parking or train tickets could be priced differentially according to the time of day or year. For that reason, the low-cost airlines are not always low cost – try booking a summer August Saturday on Ryanair or easyJet to a Mediterranean resort! Yet the most obvious use of this technology would be for road pricing. Roads are a scarce resource, which, as mentioned previously, are free at the point of use: a practice that makes any self-respecting economist tear their hair out. There are exceptions, of course, such as the London and Stockholm congestion charge zones, motorways in countries like Italy and France, various bridges and tunnels, and even the odd turnpike in the US, but they represent a tiny fraction of the world’s road network.

  However, for the most part, roads suffer from the tragedy of the commons. Rationing is by congestion rather than price. Their usefulness in economic terms is eroded away by congestion and overuse. Free roads ensure that transport provision is suboptimal. This is, though, a political rather than a technological failure. The government in Singapore has managed to impose a comprehensive road pricing system thanks to the fact that, according to The Economist, the city state has both ‘democratic’ and ‘authoritarian’ aspects. It is, seemingly, the latter that are needed to impose road pricing. In the UK, both Edinburgh and Manchester tried going down the democratic route, asking local voters to decide on charging for road access, only to be comprehensively rebuffed, partly because of fervent media campaigns against the measure. Ken Livingstone managed to impose the charge without seeking a prior mandate, but was re-elected after its imposition, not least because few people ever drove into central London anyway.

  Parking, too, is not charged for efficiently, in the precise economic meaning of the term. In most urban areas, there is paid parking, though in an effort to lure people to town centres some local authorities adopt a ‘free’ parking policy in their multi-storey car parks to match the provision at large out-of-town superstores. There are pressures, too, on public services such as town halls and hospitals to provide ‘free’ parking. However, even where parking is charged for, the methods tend to be crude, often with a fixed charge irrespective of the time of day or the demand in particular districts where there are popular amenities. While controlled parking zones have been introduced in many residential areas, they are still limited to areas under pressure from outsiders seeking to park to commute or shop. Most people in the UK can still park outside their front door for free, and it is precisely because many see it as a fundamental right that local authorities have often been reluctant to begin charging for what is, again, a scarce resource. The truth is that if parking were paid for at market rates, it would be unaffordable in large swathes of many urban areas.

  The solutions lie with the politicians. The question that they never address – and one with which I have teased newly appointed transport ministers in the past – is: do we need more transport or less? The answer, of course, is that we need more of the right sort of transport and less of the wrong sort. That is not an easy concept for politicians to stomach. They are terrified of being seen to limit choice or to prevent people exercising their democratic freedoms. This leads to ridiculously ill-informed policy decisions. Several ministers I have spoken to have been aghast when I suggest that, just possibly, making it more difficult for people to have lager-fuelled stag parties in Riga or Sharm el-Sheikh is hardly an onerous restriction. On the one hand, they recognize the problems – ranging from climate change to congestion – of not charging the real costs for transport, yet on the other they are terrified of doing anything that is perceived as imposing extra costs on travellers.

  To formulate a coherent policy requires a better understanding of what transport is for. Ever since the invention of the railways, transport has largely been about mobility rather than access. The distinction is key. Mobility is the means to an end, accessibility is that end. While a few journeys are made for the sake of it, such as on a heritage railway or a cycle ride into the country, most travel is to get somewhere, not for the journey itself – contrary to the picture always given by car ads, showing people travelling on uncluttered roads.

  Once the distinction between mobility and accessibility can be understood, a coherent transport policy can be developed. It is not about waiting for the right technological development. The motor car was supposed to bring about many of the freedoms now being ­suggested by the promoters of driverless cars. The fundamental error of transport policy based on the spread of the automobile is precisely that it was designed to increase mobility rather than accessibility, and it resulted in planning policies that then actually reduced accessibility for many people.

  The negative aspects of decades of car-based policy, such as the crowding out of other road users and the encouragement of urban sprawl, which, in turn, entrenched the car’s primacy, were all too easily ignored. The car provided fantastic extra mobility for those who could afford to own one, but by destroying alternatives the options available to those who did not were greatly restricted. And, even more ironically, as cars increased in number, their advantages began to be outweighed by their disadvantages.

  That is why the emphasis of a future transport policy needs t
o be on accessibility rather than mobility, a requirement that is all the more important as people increasingly gravitate to live in cities rather than rural areas: for the first time in world history more than half the globe’s population are now urban, and that proportion is set to increase in coming decades. It is not an easy distinction to make because, while mobility is quite simple to measure – in terms of, say, passengers per hour or distance to travel – accessibility is a more subtle idea. It is not only about how far people may be from particular facilities such as schools, workplaces, hospitals and so on, but also what is their means of getting there. Websites of both commercial and public organizations often merely state that their facilities are five or ten minutes from, say, a town centre, but that assumes people have access to cars. Those who cannot drive may find it takes far longer to access the facility in question. Therefore, the task for transport planners is to no longer go for simplistic solutions but to base their decisions on very thorough knowledge of their impact. Rather than simple benefit–cost equations based on macroanalysis, a far more complex but robust methodology based more on microdata is required.

  The elephant in the room is, of course, climate change. No coherent transport policy can ignore it. Transport contributes around a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted in the UK and yet is rarely a consideration when developing schemes. While the cost–benefit methodology does place a negative value on emissions, this is generally a small consideration in appraisals and is certainly not a key determinant. Otherwise, many major road schemes (which, as we have seen, are known to generate traffic) and HS2 (which offers no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions) would not come under consideration. Climate change is treated as a minor factor in appraisal rather than, as it should be, a core determining force. Indeed, it should be the starting point for a transport policy.

  There also needs to be a coherent approach towards the issue of congestion. The best way to reduce the overuse of roads is to cut demand, through providing alternatives. If the twin drivers of transport policy are climate change and congestion reduction, then the solutions are all too obvious. There have to be supply side measures, such as better public transport and the encouragement of walking and cycling – in Germany, cycle motorways are being built, enabling fast cycling over distances of around twenty to thirty kilometres, very achievable even for the moderately fit if there is no stopping and starting. On the other hand, there must also be measures controlling demand, such as road user charging and road tolling, realistic taxes on aviation to discourage stag parties in Estonia, higher parking charges, a more accurate relationship between carbon emissions and price, and so on.

  Cycling

  Nowhere is the failure of coherent thinking on transport more apparent than in relation to cycling. For the first two or three decades after World War II, cyclists were seen, like trams and trolleybuses, as a nuisance to the smooth progress of motorcars. Literally thousands of them were mown down. The pre-war statistics were quite astonishing. In the worst year, when 7,343 people were killed on the roads, more than a fifth of these – 1,536 – were cyclists. During the wartime blackout, the high death rate of cyclists was put down by the authorities to their failure to look behind them. With this sort of attitude, it is not surprising that cycling levels reduced year on year, with no effort to keep cyclists on the road. (There were very occasional exceptions, e.g. the excellent cycle routes built on the side of a few new dual carriageways in the 1930s (such as the Great West Road, the A4 out of London), but these soon fell into disuse and efforts to have more such paths were hampered by the domination of the main campaign, the Cycle Touring Club, by fundamentalists who were opposed to separate provision for cyclists, arguing that they ought to have the right to be on all roads.) Cycling after the war was actively discouraged by transport ministry, and while the number of deaths fell, the rate per million miles increased as more and more cars came onto the road.

  This was, incidentally, in marked contrast to situation in the Netherlands, where there was, until the early 1970s, a similar decline in cycling use. However, as the number of deaths among children increased, a campaign was started to ‘Stop the murder of our children’: of the 3,264 deaths in 1973 (a remarkably high number for a country with a quarter of the population of the UK), 450 were of children. This stimulated a campaign to improve facilities for cyclists with safe segregated routes, and a master plan for cycling was produced by the ministry of transport. As a result, cycle use in Amsterdam, which had been declining for years, began increasing gradually from around 1977 to reach the high volumes seen today. This demonstrates that the prevalence of cycling in the Netherlands is not, as is often argued, because it is flat or because it is part of an ingrained culture but, rather, because politicians decided that cycling should be prioritized.

  Cycling in Amsterdam.

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

  This has never happened in the UK. In Britain, the first tentative measures towards providing for – rather than attempting to ban – cyclists were made in the late 1970s but they were perceived as controversial. Astonishingly, when the Greater London Council, which had installed rudimentary cycle lanes on some major routes, was abolished in 1986, Kensington and Chelsea actually ripped them up, with the council leader, Nicholas Freeman, arguing that cyclists had no place on the roads as they got in the way of motorists.

  While that attitude may be extreme, this type of thinking does partly explain the failure of the British government to develop and support a coherent long-term cycling strategy. The contrast with the Netherlands could not be sharper. The nearest we have come to a master plan is a series of central government initiatives that are called ‘strategies’ but amount to little more than aspirations. The 1996 National Cycling Strategy, launched by Steve Norris, one of the few transport ministers who actually understood the advantages of cycling, promised to double the modal share of cycling journeys by 2002, but it did not set out a road map of how to achieve that. The Labour government replaced that strategy with Cycling England (on whose board I sat) and for a three-year period provided funding of £60 million, which was used to stimulate cycling in a series of demonstration towns and to roll out the Bikeability programme, the replacement for the cycling proficiency test. While this by no means provided sufficient funds for a nationwide programme to boost cycling, it did provide some concrete examples of how it could be done.

  In a fit of ‘not invented here’, Philip Hammond, the first transport secretary in the subsequent coalition government elected in 2010 abolished Cycling England while still claiming to maintain support for cycling. A series of announcements ensued, usually made by David Cameron wearing a cycling helmet, but while there has been support for the occasional project, the government crucially has no budget line solely dedicated to expenditure on cycling

  While a few towns with a tradition of cycling, such as Cambridge, York and Chelmsford, have experienced continued growth, the one city to benefit from considerable cycling investment has been London, where a massive increase in cycle use, stimulated from the grass roots largely by young people commuting to the central zone, has almost forced local politicians to respond. On some city centre streets, cyclists became the dominant users in rush hour. A few boroughs responded by installing cycle routes but many of these were inadequate or took users on a circuitous route.

  There was, however, a breakthrough in 2012, when the mayor, Boris Johnson, promised to spend £913 million over the next nine years on cycling. Although on examination some of this money was wishful thinking and there was considerable initial underspending on the allocation, it did represent a statement of intent and a genuine step change on previous policies. After his first election victory in 2008, Johnson had embarked on an ill-thought-out programme of cycling superhighways that proved to be expensive and poorly designed, which was highlighted by a series of deaths on the main route in east London. In his second term, however, Johnson is delivering two mostly segregated cycle path
s that could – if his successor seeks to continue the programme and has the ability to push it through – be the backbone of a series of routes through central London that will revolutionize cycling in the capital and deliver a massive expansion. Interestingly, Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, has one of the best records on investment in cycling, initially allocating 5% of its budget to cycling back in 2012, with a promise of increasing that by 1% every subsequent year, a policy that crucially has cross-party support. As a result, cycling’s modal share in the city has increased at least eightfold since the nadir of the early 1980s when it was just 1%.

  Are trams socialist?

  There is no doubt which country has the most well-thought through and coherent transport policy. Switzerland has a truly integrated system where buses meet trams that are then timed in with trains. The railways work to a clockwork pattern, so that they depart at the same time every hour, and they have enjoyed consistent investment for generations. Switzerland was the first country in the world to enjoy a fully electrified railway and the high quality of its services combined with the relative cheapness of an annual season ticket mean that it has more journeys per head of population than any other country in the world.

  There are two key aspects of the Swiss system that underpin its success: it is based on cooperation rather than competition (the derogatory description would be ‘monopoly’) and it is a product of a highly decentralized political system where much decision making is made at the local level. Although it is difficult to imagine, Switzerland at the beginning of the twentieth century was a poor country and, while it was not a participant, suffered economically from both world wars as the country’s trading routes were disrupted. When the economy recovered after World War II, the priority was to ensure that transport facilities were developed quickly and it was seen as inefficient to create services that competed within or between modes. Unrestrained market forces are seen as wasteful.