Putting transport in its place: paradoxes in transport policy

Ten years ago transport was hot news. Every week-end the Sundays would have spreads explaining how total gridlock was about to occur; road and airport expansion plans drew massive protests and the botched rail privatisation helped sink the Major Government. But in spite of congestion having got even worse, an explosion of cheap flights and assorted rail disasters, transport has almost disappeared off the political map. How did that happen?

It seems that media attention has turned to other issues – like climate change, affordable housing and social breakdown. For instance a front page story in the Post last week was about plans for 380,000 more houses in the West Midlands (that’s roughly another Birmingham), and there are worrying stories almost daily about gang violence and social breakdown. While there is a fairly obvious connection between climate change and transport, public interest seems to have been blunted by the very technical nature of the policy response (Alistair Darling even used to be accused of using boredom to keep transport out of the news).

We ought to pay more attention again to transport – not just for fear of gridlock, but because transport really does connect to today’s other hot issues.

Transport is in fact a key to the quality of the places we live in, connecting in deep-seated ways to issues as diverse as social cohesion, house prices and the economic vitality of cities.

We tend to think of transport as a fairly immediate and self-contained system. If we are asked to contemplate reducing our use of the car (for instance) our reaction is to look at the alternatives for that particular trip (Is there a bus? Is it too far to cycle comfortably? etc). The result is that we are generally very unwilling to do anything about it. But if we look at behaviour over the somewhat longer term we see that we have actually used a much wider range of responses to changing transport. Over the last 30 years we have hardly changed the number of trips we make, but the length of those trips has increased by 50%, and the amount of travel by car has doubled.

The main mechanism driving these changes is different from day-to-day transport decisions (such as were discussed above), which are typically about time of day, route and mode of transport. The longer-term pattern is dominated by our choices of location: where we live, where we work, where we go for shopping and leisure – and for businesses, where to locate, where to site depots and branches, what areas to serve, and where to source materials and services, etc. And this is where the real story starts, because these locational choices are themselves influenced by what the transport system offers.

The common view is that transport provision should respond to the pattern of demand placed upon it, and this (aka ‘predict & provide’) has also been the basis of road investment for the last 50+ years. But from the figures given above we can see that the pattern of demand is the outcome of the transport that is provided: transport leads rather than follows patterns of location and activity. When we speak of such locational choices, it is important to remember that most of this movement takes place within the existing stock of buildings – for example, 90% of the housing market is second-hand and only 10% is new. While ‘urban sprawl’ may help to confirm and solidify a more dispersed pattern, this does not have to wait upon the realtively slow process of new development (around 1% of stock a year).

This has some huge implications, for instance:

- The size and shape of our big cities (and how they relate to their hinterlands) is a direct consequence of their transport systems (thanks to satellite imagery this relationship is visible from space. What’s more, the connection has been well known down the centuries, from London’s location at the lowest crossing point of the Thames in Roman times, to the road and rail links that mean that modern London (in functional economic terms) now covers most of South East England.

- The dispersion of households away from urban centres as new housing opportunities were opened up, in new suburbs and existing towns and villages in commuting range was not a cross-section. On average, the best-off moved furthest, while the poorest stayed put. This process (reinforce massively by post-WW2 housing clearance and redevelopment has widened the social gaps between inner city, suburbs, commuter-land and outer estates. Deprived areas have become more deprived and rich areas more exclusive.

It is these large-scale shifts of people, and the associated sorting and filtering processes, that leads to neighbourhoods with concentrations deprived and vulnerable people. Once established, such areas can be extraordinarily persistent, because the transport system means that the most mobile and active escape. Hence the connections between transport, house prices and crime.

Cities are economic powerhouses because they concentrate people and activity. But mere closeness is not enough: quality of contact is as important as quantity. With the single exception of London, British cities do not do well in terms of the value added by closeness (‘agglomeration’ is the technical word) compared with their continental equivalents. This may be because whereas continental cities invested heavily since WW2 in modern public transport systems (and London had one already), elsewhere transport policy has favoured roads. The resulting dispersion and environmental degradation has tended to reduce the economic dynamism of UK provincial cities (adding to road congestion in the process).

Does road pricing offer a way out of the dilemma, by ensuring that our decisions about location are made with an eye on the real cost? The trouble here is that people see very little opportunity to change their travel behaviour in the short run, and so regard road pricing as a ‘stealth tax’ – paying more to do the same. If government sugars the congestion charging pill by reducing fuel tax, the result is to shift the tax burden from uncongested (rural) to congested (urban) areas. This would give another twist to the vicious circle of dispersion, loss of economic dynamism and increased congestion. Sir Rod Eddington described road pricing as a ‘no brainer’, but clearly some more thought is needed here.

To tap the potential of transport for change we need a new approach:

The rhetoric of ‘integration’ has been common currency throughout my career, but it has been a perpetual struggle to bring planning and transport more closely together. Sometimes it has seemed as if engineers are from Mars and planners are from Venus! But I hope to persuade planners, engineers and economists that we all need to be open to new perspectives, and to work more closely together. Only in this way can we meet the challenges we now face.

Alan Wenban-Smith
4 October 2007

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