Are Trams Socialist Read online

  Transport services are mostly locally controlled and financed. Taxes are levied locally by the communes (gemeinde), who keep some 70%, the cantons (20%) and central government (just 10%) – just imagine the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s face if that were suggested in the UK. Moreover, in the hyperdemocratic way of the Swiss, important decisions on local spending are subject to a referendum. The federal government plays an important coordinating role but the services – buses, trams and trains – are provided by a mix of local authorities, the post office and private companies.

  At the urban level, Zurich encapsulates the Swiss approach. It has been through many of the same issues as London but has produced very different answers. In the 1950s the municipal authorities began to suggest that trams were getting in the way of motorists and needed to be put in underground tunnels. The idea was for a ‘balanced approach’ that would enable motorists to access the city centre easily as the roads would be cleared of the trams. The plan to make this radical change was put to a vote in 1962 but, despite the support of local planners and councillors, it was rejected by the public because of the cost. A similar second attempt was made a decade later and failed again. Gradually, an alternative suggestion emerged, inspired by the ‘small is beautiful’ concept developed by E. F. Schumacher. Instead of being held up by cars, trams would be given priority, and the system improved. Eventually this was put to a public vote in 1977 and passed narrowly, changing the whole focus of Zurich transport policy that remains to this day, as a plan for urban motorways to be built into the city centre was also rejected around this time. The notion of a balanced approach was abandoned. Instead there was an overtly pro-public transport ethos. The crucial aspect is that the whole system works in an integrated, seamless way. All rail lines were provided with regular-interval services and were coordinated in such a way that connections were easy and guaranteed. Trains wait for each other when there are delays. Even small outlying towns and villages are given a guaranteed connection. Any settlement with just 300 residents, jobs or educational places must be provided with a basic service, within 400 m (or 750 m if there is a rail station nearby). Services normally run from 6 am to midnight at intervals of sixty, thirty or fifteen minutes depending on whether the area is rural, suburban or urban, respectively. Some busy areas have all-night services. The key is standardization of provision and guaranteed service levels, which guarantees very high levels of usage. Consequently, Zurich has the lowest modal share of car transport of almost any city of comparable size in the world.

  Zurich: the home of rampant socialism?

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

  Paul Mees, in his book Transport for Suburbia, sums up why the approach is so successful:

  Zurich’s success ... [is] a triumph for public ownership, and for public strategic and tactical planning. Although the private sector does play a role in the ZVV’s [Zürcher Verkehrsverbund] system, all the system innovations from tram priority to integrated fares to the pulse-timetable system came from public sector bodies.

  He points out that many of these initiatives came from the public, not from the experts. It is the highly democratic Swiss system, which gives so much power to the local level, that ‘force[s] city, cantonal and national public transport planners to come up with cheaper, more effective ways of competing with the car’.²⁰

  To counter the argument that such a centralized system has to be bureaucratic, the number of staff actually employed to oversee the Zurich system is tiny. According to Mees, in 2007 just thirty-five people worked to supervise a system used by 10 million people every week. Contrast this with the vast bureaucracy of Transport for London, which has 400 people on annual salaries above £100,000.

  Probably the most significant aspect of Zurich’s success is that it demonstrates that low density is not a barrier to the provision of good public transport. Zurich’s transport covers large areas where the overall density is as low as thirty-two people per hectare, on a par with suburban areas in American cities. The success of the transport system is, as with cycling in the Netherlands, down to politics and institutional arrangements not to demography or topography.

  And Switzerland unequivocally provides the answer to the question in this book’s title: are trams socialist? The best tram systems in the world are in Switzerland, a country whose last socialist resident was probably Lenin, before he took that famous train ride, and whose governments are perennially rather right of centre. Trams are a collective form of transport that is economically efficient. Oddly, it is the roads that are run on a socialist basis, as they operate like the queues for fresh bread in Soviet Russia.

  This is not a sensible way of allocating resources. Investing in trams or indeed in better bus services such as the now very widely adopted system of Bus Rapid Transit would be a far more efficient use of the limited funds available for transport investment. It would not, though, be socialism.

  The Swiss experience, too, suggests that perhaps we can be a bit more optimistic about how a democratic system can deliver a coherent transport policy without the authoritarian approach of Singapore, or indeed of China, which is beginning to recognize the damaging impact of its support for the motorization of its cities and to take measures such as banning private cars on bad smog days. Instead, one could envisage that the new generation of politicians are the sort of people who were brought up with little or no interest in getting a driving licence at seventeen. Imagine, instead, a generation of politicians who begin to wield power and approach the issue in a much more coherent way, understanding the twin imperatives of reducing the impact of climate change and tackling the issue of ever-growing congestion?

  For the moment, though, it is possible to characterize the British approach as almost directly opposed to the Swiss system. One example suffices to sum up the absence of any long-term approach. In 1966 and, again, thirty years later, in 1996, bridges were built over the Severn near Bristol to improve links between England and Wales. On neither occasion was it thought to be a good idea to incorporate train tracks to facilitate better rail travel. Instead, trains still go through the four-mile Severn tunnel, the longest in the UK apart from those on High Speed 1, which has such a huge drainage problem that it has massive pumps operating constantly to avoid flooding. Consequently, trains are limited to sixty miles per hour, adding at least a couple of minutes to every journey between the two countries. Contrast this with the construction of the massive five-mile long Øresund bridge linking Sweden with Denmark that was ­completed in 2000, combining both rail tracks and a motorway.

  The British policy approach relies on the encouragement of competition, privatization and a light touch from government, and it is highly centralized, with very little power at the local level. It is, therefore, the institutional structure, the politics and the prevailing culture that explain why Britain fails in terms of its transport policy. All those can be changed over time, though it will not be easy. As mentioned previously, there are some forces pushing us in the right direction. Young people, for example, are less interested in car ownership and driving. More people are living in urban areas, where public transport and sustainable modes are easier and cheaper to provide. Information technology and advances in ticketing methods offer the opportunity to make accessing public transport more efficient and easier. George Osborne’s emphasis on decentralization could be seen as a move in the right direction but, unless it is backed with devolution of financial control, it will do nothing to remedy the fundamental flaws in the British system. Any attempt at transformation needs to start with a recognition of our failings and a willingness to address them, as well as a key cultural change. That is probably the hardest bit.

  Transport heaven?

  While it may be a bit academic to try to define an ideal transport policy given all of the above – as well as the fact that the Conservative government elected in 2015 is unlikely to adopt any coherent approach to the issue – it is nevertheless worthwhile to try to set out
some basic thoughts because the mood can change so quickly (for example, HS2 was for many years considered to be utterly unnecessary but then, suddenly, at the end of the noughties it became the favourite policy of all three major parties). The absence of a clear policy is made worse by the short-termism of government in relation to transport, with decisions on taxation or investment made on the basis of narrow and immediate political concerns rather than any long-term assessment of needs or in the context of any overall vision. As I write this, it is being reported that February 2016 was not only the hottest month on record globally, but that it was way off the scale: a statistical outlier. Climate change may still not be at the heart of government policy in the way that it ought to be, but it could suddenly move to centre stage. It may take the odd cataclysmic disaster or a rapid rise in temperature, but at some point climate change will become – like the war did in 1939–45, say – the key determinant of all aspects of government policy.

  In that context, it becomes easier to set out a series of principles that would determine a rational and sustainable transport policy. The approach must start with an assessment of what transport policy is for. It is not, most assuredly, simply about creating more infrastructure so that people can travel further and faster. It is, as mentioned above, about accessibility, ensuring that all citizens can reach the places they need to for work, leisure, education, medical care, friendship, and so on. That means a far more subtle approach to targeting transport investment. It also means taking into account inequality. The right transport policy interventions, targeted at deprived areas or groups of people, can be transformational in unexpected ways. Infrastructure investment, currently focused on big projects like a road tunnel under the Pennines and HS2, would therefore be much better targeted on tram schemes in urban areas, which have tremendous regenerative potential, and on simply ensuring that the humble bus offers a decent service to those without cars.

  The second key principle must be that demand management is a key component of policy. The concept of ‘predict and provide’ should be consigned to the intellectual wilderness where it belongs, and instead there should be a policy of trying to minimize the demand for travel through better provision of facilities, planning and appropriate pricing. This would need to be accompanied by a strategy of encouraging people into the most sustainable forms of transport, which, for the most part, means anything but individualized motor transport (and of course air travel, but this is a very small share of domestic transport movements). The most obvious method, of course, would be a universal road charging mechanism, flexible enough to ensure that peak users of busy roads paid the most while those on deserted routes paid little or nothing. Politically, this has proved impossible to implement, but that is partly because politicians have shied away from initiating any kind of sensible debate on the issue. Given that road user charging could start off as revenue neutral if it replaced fuel tax duty, implementation may not be as difficult as politicians assume, especially as the technology is now readily available.

  A key part of demand management is the adoption of what are known as ‘soft measures’. These are policies that do not involve any investment in hardware but, rather, are aimed at changing behaviour. Initiatives such as Smart Travel schemes, where individual households are presented with their transport options in interviews, are expensive, but they have been shown to bear fruit, with more people using public transport or walking or cycling when they realize what alternatives are available.

  A third key principle would be devolution, though this must come with genuine financial independence. It is no coincidence that those parts of the country that have the best record of transport investment, such as London, Scotland and Manchester, are those with a greater say over infrastructure investment priorities. London is the most compelling example. It already had a fantastic network of transport infrastructure, but thanks to devolution and being given control over its finances (plus the added advantage of being able to bully national politicians by arguing that London is a great growth generator and that transport is vital to that growth), it has, since the mayoralty was created in 2000, created a new network of railways (London Overground), massively improved bus services, imposed a congestion charge to help finance improvements, established a large network of hire bikes, created a series of ‘cycle superhighways’, obtained a promise to be given control of much of the suburban rail network, and has two massive rail investment schemes due to be completed before the end of the decade (Thameslink and Crossrail). This cannot be replicated easily in any provincial cities, obviously, though Manchester – with its greatly expanded tram network and the soon to be realized assumption of control over its bus network – is showing the way. Crucially, though, devolution must go together with money, as otherwise it will be a poisoned chalice.

  There is no silver bullet in any of this but the establishment of a transport policy – or even a debate about one – would be a good start. Certainly, as I have argued, waiting for a technological fix is a mug’s game. Technology may be a stimulus for improvements but it is no panacea. Transport planners and, indeed, many politicians are fully aware of the inadequacies of the present situation and know many of the answers. They understand the ways in which a far more rational distribution of transport investment could be made, moving away from grands projets and ‘predict and provide’ and towards smaller but locally significant, even transformational, schemes, but Realpolitik inevitably intervenes. Measures that impact motorists are seen as too controversial, while the lure of the big project is often simply too strong. One day, however, possibly in the not too distant future, the imperative will be to avoid climate change disaster and, more prosaically, gridlock in our cities, and a coherent transport policy will consequently be adopted. Let us hope that it is not too late by then.

  Endnotes

  Quoted in K. Hamilton and S. Potter. 1985. Losing Track, p. 73.Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  C. Reid. 2015. Roads Were Not Built for Cars, p. 134. Front Page Creations.

  P. Bagwell and P. Lyth. 2002. Transport in Britain: From Canal Lock to Gridlock, 1750–2000, p. 90. Hambledon Continuum.

  M. Hamer. 1987. Wheels Within Wheels: A Study of the Roads Lobby, p. 36.Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  Bagwell and Lyth (2002, p. 94).

  Quoted in C. Reid (2015, p. 58).

  House of Commons Debates, 9 May 1977, volume 931,983.

  C. Buchanan. 1963. Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas, p. 47. Penguin Special Edition.

  Preface to Buchanan (1963, p. 10).

  See Buchanan (1963, p. 62).

  British Road Federation. 1963. Towns and Cities, p. 12. British Road Federation.

  See Hamilton and Potter (1985, p. 87).

  Public Record Office, CAB (Cabinet Office), 134/915.

  See Hamer (1987, p. 68).

  Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment. 1994. Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic, p. iii. Department for Transport.

  D. Henshaw. 1991. The Great Railway Conspiracy, p. 51. Leading Edge.

  C. Austin and R. Faulkner. 2015. Disconnected: Broken Links in Britain’s Rail Policy, p. 9. Ian Allan.

  C. Ledgard. 2010. What happened to the 10-year plan. BBC News Website, 18 January (http://bbc.in/1UexE1i).

  M. Sivak and B. Schoettle. 2015. Road safety with self driving vehicles: general limitations and road sharing with conventional vehicles, p. 7. Report, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

  P. Mees. 2010. Transport for Suburbia, p. 142. Earthscan.

  Photo credits

  ‘Plymouth: a town centre fashioned for the motorist” (page 33). By Smalljim (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

  ‘Twyford Down cutting’ (page 43). By Jim Champion (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http:/
/creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

  ‘Nottingham tram’ (page 57). Malc McDonald [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

  ‘The driverless car: a game changer?’ (page 68). By Grendelkhan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

  ‘Cycling in Amsterdam’ (page 97). By Steven Lek (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

  ‘Zurich: rampant socialism’ (page 102). By © Roland Fischer, Zürich (Switzerland) – Mail notification to: roland_zh(at)hispeed(dot)ch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25610112.