The National Transport Strategy
In an ideal world, it would have been the other way round.
The Government has now published strategies for buses, bicycles and railways - but no overarching strategy for transport.
Unlike the devolved administrations, it’s not a legal requirement of the UK Government.
Potentially it would have been better to have started with transport and then written modal strategies to deliver the overarching goals.
But, ho-hum, we can’t have everything.
Now we’ve got the modal strategies, let’s see if we can piece together the National Transport Strategy as if they had written it.
Anti-car
The thing that comes across most strongly is that this is the most anti-car Government we’ve seen in my lifetime.
I find it somewhat dizzying.
Having grown up in the 1980s and 90s to a background of Tory Government reports suggesting that chunks of the railway should be closed down and having gone on protests at Newbury against roadbuilding and having commuted to school on a London bus network that was crying out for decent funding, it had always been clear that the Tories valued private cars not public transport.
Then Labour came in, and London transport was transformed (admittedly, Ken Livingstone wasn’t actually a Labour mayor for his first term, but Tony Blair kissed and made up with him when it was clear he was going to win again).
So transport appeared to be a left-right thing; and I was firmly on the left.
But, suddenly, it is a Tory Government that appears to have the courage to stand up to the motoring lobby. In Birmingham, Andy Street is a constant cheerleader for public transport and sounds more ambitious than his counterpart in Manchester; who sounds more concerned with changing the structure than expanding provision.
But the bike and bus strategies are both breathtaking in their direct commitment to reallocate road space away from cars. This line from the Bus Strategy still generates wonder in me:
In Bus Service Improvement Plans, we expect to see plans for bus lane on any roads where there is a frequent bus service, congestion, and physical space to install one.
There is a slight issue that the bus and cycle strategies both reallocate road space to their mode. In the bus strategy, Boris is passionate about buses in his foreword. In the bike strategy, he is passionate about bikes. It’s not entirely clear which mode the poor highways engineer should prioritise if faced with a choice, or what metrics he should prioritise.
If the highways engineer wants to maximise utilisation of space, they should prioritise buses. If they want to maximise accessibility, ditto. If they want to minimise carbon emissions, they should prioritise bikes. If they want to use active travel to improve health outcomes, it’s bikes again. Nowhere does the Government set out what its top priority outcomes actually are.
Pro-road
Unfortunately, the anti-car sentiment of the bus and bike strategies is undermined by the Transport Decarbonisation plan, which recommits the £27 billion road improvement budget and talks of people driving electric cars along improved roads.
Moreover, while the bus and bike strategies are anti-car; the detailed papers that influence roads policy do not reflect these priorities.
Highways England Strategic Business Plan doesn’t play back the ambitions for roadspace reallocation in the bus and bike plans. The Government’s guidance for Lane Rental are based on business-as-usual congestion definitions which will do nothing to support the Government’s modal shift ambitions.
Reading all the papers one after the other, you’re left with (best case) a sense that the Government is trying to be pro-road but anti-car and (worst case) a strong sense of inconsistency.
Anti-competition
Along with the realisation that Tories can be anti-car is the realisation that they can also be anti-competition.
After 30 years in which market mechanisms have been seen as the way to improve customer outcomes, the strategies take an entirely different approach.
Indeed, they are positively hostile to competition, with the bus strategy rather sneeringly describing how bus companies promote their own services and ignore their competitors. Open access on rail is dismissed in a paragraph.
Instead, the way to improve outcomes is through central definition of what customers want. The bus strategy defines down to the last detail what a good bus service looks like, and makes it clear that Local Bus Improvement Plans that fail to play this definition back to ministers will not get any funding. It’s a bit like the old joke about the Model T Ford; “You can have any colour, as long as it’s black.” The rail strategy manages to be even more prescriptive than the bus strategy, even instructing the new agency that will run the railways what typeface it is to use.
The customer outcomes described by all three strategies are, incidentally, excellent. As a bus, rail and bicycle user, I can confirm that I’d be delighted if everything they say comes true.
But state specification is a totally different delivery model from anything we’ve seen from either party since the 1970s.
Anti-localism
The strategies do not seek to empower local communities. Minister knows best, and that is that. The rail strategy creates a single national body to specify the railway and relegates localism to further proposals to be published ‘in due course’. The bus strategy puts local communities in charge through Enhanced Partnerships. But the fact that they have no choice but to use Enhanced Partnerships is, again, rather Model T Ford. And given that the strategy describes exactly what the plans need to say in order to get funding, it’s a strange kind of localism. The bike strategy also describes what outcomes Ministers want to see, and sets up a brand new quango, Active Travel England, with a remit to act as an inspectorate of local authority delivery plans to check councils are implementing what they’ve been told.
Apps
One of the consequences of multiple modal strategies without a single strategy is the risk of inconsistency. The bus strategy is keen for the local Enhanced Partnerships (to be operated at local authority level; or groups of local authorities) to run their own local information and ticketing schemes.
However, the rail strategy is keen that the Great British Railway website is the one-stop shop for all national public transport. It’s not totally clear which is the dominant intent, though given the centralising instinct which shines through, I suspect it is the latter.
Pricing
There’s a lack of consistency as to the importance of cutting fares in order to achieve modal shift. The bus strategy explicitly invites local authorities to seek funding to subsidise operators’ services in order to cut fares. But the rail strategy does not - instead trailing flexi-seasons (carnets) while ducking fares reform entirely.
It feels like a more coherent approach to pricing could have been achieved if we’d started with the end goal and worked backwards to identify the interventions necessary to get us there.
Motherhood and Apple Pie
Don’t knock motherhood and apple pie. Just because something’s obviously nice, doesn’t mean it’ll happen.
As the rail strategy points out, it may be obvious that trains should have comfy seats and a table - but many don’t. The bus strategy wants every bus route to be direct as opposed to wiggly. The Government doesn’t seem to have an overarching ‘big idea’ when it comes to transport (it certainly isn’t setting sweeping modal shift targets as a way of hitting our national climate targets). Instead, the focus seems to be common-sense delivery of good service to end users.
Indeed, so dysfunctional had many industry structures become, that this requires quite a lot of work and focus. But it does mean that these strategies are time-limited. After all, what happens when all the ‘ironing board seats’ (as detested by the rail strategy) or single-operator travelcards (as criticised by the bus strategy) are eliminated?
There’s a concept called “Learned Helplessness”, which is when animals cease to believe they have any power to change the bad situation they are in. Well, in this case, the Government is putting the industry in rather a good situation with promises of both funds and improved quality. But if central Government civil servants do all the thinking, will the industry lose the ability to think for itself?
London
If you were going to attempt to write Boris’s foreword to the National Transport Strategy, it would talk about the need to provide a fantastic service. It would talk about the bravery to reallocate road space and to get people out of cars and onto buses, trains and bikes. And it would talk about his experience in London. All three strategies talk about how the Government is rolling out Boris’s (note: it was actually Ken, but never mind) success in London.
The bus strategy benefits from coordination of routes and timetables, like London. The rail strategy benefits from a centrally planned and contracted network, like London. The bike strategy benefits from a massive expansion of segregated bike lanes, like London.
Levelling up, in the context of transport, clearly means replicating London.
But what is interesting is that there is one key element of the London model that has been entirely missed: the Mayor’s Transport Strategy.
The way the London model works is that the Mayor and TfL work together to produce a strategy that then becomes the gospel for all future projects. Everything that happens in London is tested against the Mayor’s Transport Strategy to see whether it is consistent.
And the Mayor’s Transport Strategy is driven by big goals and objectives. Boris’s first Mayor’s Transport Strategy in 2010 signposted some of the key themes he was interested in (smoothing traffic flow, increasing walking and cycling, improving accessibility, reducing CO2 emissions, delivering the Olympics etc) and also enabled it to be clear what was not a priority (no further improvement in the bus network, no significant network expansions). Sadiq’s Mayor’s Transport Strategy is even more clear, with clear numerical targets to achieve an 80% non-car mode share by 2041 (from 63%), 20 minutes active travel per day per Londoner by 2041, zero road deaths by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050.
Maybe now DfT has got all its modal strategies out there (well, except roads), maybe its now time to tie it all together into a National Transport Strategy.
And maybe that needs to be driven by some big overarching national goals.
Of which, none is more important than our national climate obligations, now written into law.
And maybe the attempt to tie the modal strategies into our need to cut carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 (compared to 1990 levels) will highlight that more needs to be done. Perhaps it’s all OK really, but it feels to me that when that reconciliation of modal strategies to national goals takes place it will reveal that there needs to be a bit more carrot and a bit more stick.
The carrot needs to be lower fares: we’re not going to hit our climate targets when so many rail and bus journeys are so much more expensive than the car equivalents. And the stick needs to be road pricing.
