Transport is a good thing
I joined the transport industry because I love transport.
I don’t mean I love trains or buses: I couldn’t really care less about the actual vehicles.
I love transport for what it enables. I love the fact that is the life-blood of society: the way families get together, businesses are formed, affairs sustained and jobs created.
I believe that more people going to more places is good for the world.
Is it really?
I ask that because it’s been a tough year for this set of beliefs.
Lockdown proved that, actually, we can do virtually everything I described above without leaving the house (though I feel sorry for people attempting to sustain affairs. That, I think, must be tricky on Zoom from the box room).
And, in fact, the whole damned crisis was caused by transport: if no-one went anywhere, all we’d have been dealing with was a few sick pangolins in Wuhan.
This comes together with the climate crisis to create a mood in which the right answer is for us all to just travel less.
The 20-minute city
Into this atmosphere steps the notion of the 20-minute city. This is the idea that everything you need should be 15 minutes from where you live. People shouldn’t need to travel for an hour to reach employment, shopping or medical care. If you can penetrate the paywall, you can read an article from the Sunday Times about 20-minute neighbourhoods here, including an embarrassingly hipster-sounding description of Walthamstow, where I live.
I totally buy into the idea of the 20-minute city. I love living where I can reach everything I need with a short walk or bike ride. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve never considered moving to the countryside. But what I don’t do is take the next step to say that travel is, therefore, a bad thing.
Should we close the restaurants?
Transport is a bit like hospitality. Obviously, no-one needs to eat out. We could all survive quite happily with food from our nearest supermarket. Eating out is inefficient, wasteful and expensive.
It’s also joyful and a major contribution to the economy. So is transport.
But the climate?
But while transport is a good thing, it has two big negative externalities (economist-speak for downsides). The first is that it consumes a lot of space. 5% of land in the UK is devoted to transport, compared to just 1% for all housing.
The second is that it generates a lot of greenhouse gases: 28% of all greenhouse gases are generated by transport, compared to just 15% for all housing.
Therefore, the first rule of transport planning should be to prioritise modes of transport that consume less space and generate the lowest emissions.
Bizarrely, space efficiency by mode doesn’t seem to be a statistic published by Government but we can make some estimates. A double-deck bus will be most space-efficient, followed by walking or trains, followed by cycling and scooters, followed (after a big gap!) by cars.
Carbon-efficiency is known, and sees cycling followed by scooting, followed by electric trains, followed by buses, followed by diesel trains followed (after a big gap!) by cars.
Depending on the circumstances, transport planners should be prioritising active travel or public transport - but never cars.
The climate crisis needs to be fixed and transport must be part of the answer not the problem.
More trains, please
The Government is currently embarking on a huge road-expansion programme. They’re widening the A66 (I know this because they announce it every other month) and the A1 (they announce this all the months they’re not announcing the A66) plus many other roads round the country.
They must stop! Roads are carbon-wasteful and economically inefficient.
We don’t need new roads to generate economic growth. No-one could conceivably suggest that London hasn’t thrived in the 21st century. In the 20 years from 1998, London’s share of GVA (Gross Value Added; basically GDP) increased from 19.2% to 23.8% of the national total. I may be wrong about this, but I believe that this extraordinary increase was achieved with TfL building just one single road in that entire time period (the Coulsdon Relief Road, since you ask).
But we did add a lot of bus capacity, plus the Jubilee line and various extensions to the DLR.
So in a world in which HS2 is somehow on the hit-list for environmental campaigners and in which there’s a danger that sustainability becomes synonymous with draining the pleasure from life, let’s remember that travel is a joy, transport is an enabler but do it the right way.
