The last spending review gave local transport spending outside London a good hiding. It lacked the political clout and built-in funding commitments that applied to London and national rail – the evidence base for the benefits of local transport spending also had too many gaps. Worse for the big regional conurbations was that by accident or design a significant shift has also taken place within local transport spending as decision after decision on funding formulas redistributed funding from congested urban areas in the regions (where it would do most good) to quieter rural areas – or the wider London commuter belt.

Will June’s spending review be more of the same? Well if it is it won’t be because of the evidence base – which we have systematically upgraded since the last spending review, and encapsulated it on the www.transportworks.org website.

We’ve encapsulated the case for investing in transport on the Transport Works website at http://www.transportworks.org

From our report from Jacobs on the benefits of small public transport schemes to our recent ‘Case for the Urban Bus report’ we have made it our business to build a defence of local transport spending that George Graham would have been proud of. If there’s some big gaps in the evidence base for local transport spending then neither HMT nor DfT has told us what these are.

Resource spending: a three-way dogfight

Which brings us back to politics. On resource spending there’s a three-way dogfight. The cash avalanche from Whitehall into London’s transport system started when London showed it was willing to put its hand in its own pocket with the congestion charge. Since then The UK’s resident world city has been adroit in ensuring the national public funding that has headed TfL’s way has been well spent in renewing the fundamentals whilst making some transformatory and decisive shifts in the whole direction of transport policy – not least of which is on cycling.

But the public spending squeeze has led to a change in approach from London with a stress on the potential for the capital to raise more of its own funding from its pumped up, city state tax base. This is also to demonstrate to Whitehall that London ‘gets it’ that when public spending is being squeezed London needs to get its own round in at the public spending saloon bar.

Meanwhile national rail’s resource spend could only be reduced through unpalatable ideological choices on the current structure of the industry or unpalatable political choices (booking office closures, service cuts or strike-provoking moves on staff numbers, pay or conditions).

All of which puts BSOG (Bus Service Operators Grant) for the rest of the country in the firing line. In the past support for bus services would have been a soft touch but the case for public spending on bus subsidies is robust and new alliances are being forged in its support – as our recent Westminster ‘Case for the Urban Bus” event showed.

New alliances are being forged in support of bus, as our recent ‘Case for the Urban Bus’ event showed. Pictured (L-R): Konstanze Scharring, Director of Policy, SMMT; Stephen Joseph, Chief Executive, Campaign for Better Transport; David Brown, Chair, pteg; Pedro Abrantes, Economist, pteg; Claire Haigh, Chief Executive, Greener Journeys; Dr Janet Atherton, President, Association of Directors of Public Health; and Tony Travers, Director, LSE. Picture by Andrew Wiard andrew@reportphotos.com

Capital spending: small is beautiful

Meanwhile on capital funding there’s a more secure consensus around the importance of capital spending on transport to support growth. The question is what kind of capital spend? There’s something primal in politicians’ brains that triggers an urge for road building whenever there’s a recession. Perhaps it’s the trace memories of the 1930s and the heroic images of the New Deal where you could go down to the labour exchange and give men picks and shovels and send them off to build an Interstate. Whatever it is, this urge can be clearly seen in the transport spending figures where after an initial big cut in national roads spending in 2010 there was a change of mind in the 2011 Autumn Statement when spending on national roads suddenly shot up again.

But as alluring as big new roads are to national politicians, the economy’s faltering progress and with planning horizons shrinking towards the next election – the case for local transport spending outside London could benefit. This is because small can be beautiful when you want schemes that can be up and running quickly. Road maintenance, bus priority, station improvements, cycle schemes – they can all create and sustain jobs right now to make them happen, and they can deliver rapid benefits in reduced congestion and better access to employment. Plus many of these schemes formed part of rejected competition bids which were ready to roll and can therefore be easily reanimated if funding becomes available.

The big questions

So the big questions that the spending review will answer or fudge: Will the primal political appeal of new roads lead to a further splurge in national roads spend at the expense of local transport? Will national rail remain the great untouchable of transport spending? Will the Treasury wake up to the fact that whilst government talks up spending on cities the memo isn’t getting through when it comes to decisions on funding distribution formula which are actually taking cash out of congested urban areas. Will having a now largely uncontested evidence base for local transport spending outside London result in the better funding deal it deserves? Will London pull it off again?

And of course there’s a longer game beyond this spending review. Whatever happens this time round, the evidence base and the credibility of public spending on buses and wider urban local transport spend is now in a much better place. Plus London’s moves towards greater financial independence could also benefit Britain’s other urban areas. It’s been two steps forward, one step backwards and one step sideways on devolution of funding and decision making for the regional cities so far – but Boris Johnson can go toe to toe with HMT on funding freedoms in a way that the regional cities just can’t. Everything to play for!

Jonathan Bray

The Chancellor George Osborne delivered his 2013 Budget statement on 20th March 2013

Here’s our quick summary of the main points from today’s Budget 2013 announcement, focusing on those of relevance to transport and the PTEs.

Departmental spending

• Reduction in Resource Departmental Expenditure Limits equivalent to a 1% reduction for most departments. Schools and health budgets remain protected. Individual departmental budgets will be published in the 2015/16 Spending Round.
•  Departments saved £5.5bn in 2011/12 and are expected to deliver comparable additional efficiency savings each year.

Local Government

• Local Government allocations that have been set out for 2013/14 will not be changed.
• Extending restraint on public sector pay by a year by limiting increases to an average of up to 1% in 2015-16. The Government will seek further significant savings through reforms to progression pay at the 2015/16 Spending Round.
• The Government will establish a new multi-agency network to drive the transformation of local public services. The network will spread innovation from the Whole Place Community Budget pilots and What Works Centres to support other places to provide advice and support on co-designing local public service transformation. Plans to extend the benefits of the Whole Place approach will be announced at the 2015/16 Spending Round.

Governance

• Confirms that the overwhelming majority of the Hestletine Review’s recommendations have been accepted, including creation of a competitive Single Local Growth Fund, devolved to local level through new Local Growth Deals. Funding will be allocated to LEPs on the basis of strategic multi-year plans for local growth. They will be challenged to leverage private and local funding and commit to governance reform – those who offer the most will be more likely to benefit in terms of increased funding and flexibilities. The fund will be operational by April 2015 and further details will be set out at the 2015/16 Spending Round.

Transport and Infrastructure

• Using savings from Departments outlined above, the Government will increase capital spending plans by £3bn a year to improve UK infrastructure. The Government will set out how this will be allocated at the 2015/16 Spending Round. This will take a long-term approach, including setting planning assumptions out to 2020/21.
• Planned September 2013 fuel duty increase cancelled.
• Tax incentives to support the manufacture of ultra-low emission vehicles.
• Double to £10,000 the size of loans that employers can offer tax free to pay for items such as season tickets for commuters.
• Implement a series of reforms to effect a step change in Government’s approach to infrastructure delivery, supported by Infrastructure UK and new Infrastructure Capacity Plans. Government will also consider options for making more use of independent expertise in shaping its infrastructure strategy.

Planning

• Publish significantly reduced planning guidance by this summer.
• Will be asking local areas to put in place bespoke pro-growth planning policies and delivery arrangements as part of new Local Growth Deals and through City Deals.

Look out for…

• More details on many of these measures to be contained in the 2015/16 Spending Round, to be announced on 26 June 2013.

Rebecca Fuller

The urban bus – a highly effective social and transport policy

Is the urban bus the biggest bargain in transport policy? There’s certainly a strong case to be made – as our new report (‘The Case for the Urban Bus – The Economic and Social Value of Bus Networks in the Metropolitan Areas’) shows.

The key to the exceptional value for public money that the urban bus represents boils down to the fact that the urban bus is a highly effective social policy which also has economic and transport benefits. And looking at it from the other end of the telescope it’s a highly effective transport policy which at the same time has considerable social benefits.

There’s not so many forms of public expenditure that achieve so many multiple and overlapping policy objectives for every pound spent. A policy that gets young people to education, the jobless to jobs, and tackles isolation for older and disabled people. Part of the solution to problems like these that will ultimately incur major costs to society if not tackled. And at the same time as it does this it, it also reduces congestion for motorists and provides the access that city centre employers and retailers rely on. Not bad!

Over £2.5 billion in economic benefits

The report sets out all these inter-linked benefits in detail – and, crucially, puts some hard numbers against those benefits. It finds that in PTE areas alone bus networks are estimated to generate over £2.5 billion in economic benefits by providing access to opportunities; reducing pollution and accidents; and improving productivity.

The report also finds that specific bus funding streams generate significant economic benefits:

• BSOG generates at least £2.80 of benefits for every £1 of public money spent – over a quarter of these benefits go to other road users due to buses’ role in reducing road congestion.
• The national concessionary fares scheme generates £1.50 of benefits for every £1 of public money spent – a high return for a social measure.
• The non-commercial bus services that local authorities support can generate benefits in excess of £3 for every £1 of public money spent. Most of these benefits are to the bus users who depend on these services to access opportunity (like jobs, education and healthcare).

The report also finds that because of the local nature of bus services and operations, much of the bus industry’s turnover (in excess of £5 billion a year) is ploughed back into regional economies through the supply chain, and because the people who work on local bus services live and spend in their local areas.

The report highlights the key role that urban bus services play in tackling social exclusion – from linking jobseekers to jobs, to getting young people into education and training, to providing a way out of social isolation for older people.

Without the bus the report finds that ‘our cities would be more divided, the poorest and the most vulnerable would be more isolated and severed from the opportunities that many take for granted, and so much talent that dynamic and prosperous cities need would go to waste as training, education and jobs would be unreachable for many young people.’

Although this report focuses on the largest urban areas it should absolutely not be inferred that this means that there is a not a strong case for supporting rural bus services. Many PTE areas contain substantial rural hinterlands and we know just how important the rural buses we support are for keeping communities connected, for the rural tourism economy, and to tackle major problems of social exclusion in rural areas. However, this report we concentrates on the specific urban case because a good bus network is so important to urban areas it deserves this detailed analysis of the specific benefits that urban bus services bring.

A strengthened evidence base

Since the last spending review (where the collective failings of the bus industry, the DfT, and local government on assembling the evidence base on buses were exposed and punished) there has been a concerted effort, led by Greener Journeys, Campaign for Better Transport and pteg, to systematically fill the gaps in that evidence base through a series of complementary and overlapping reports. There’s more to come but the evidence base has now been thoroughly transformed. It is robust and battle ready and my sense is that decision makers are now taking it more seriously. However, there’s a long way to go. Public funding for the bus has some unique challenges in that it comes from a variety of sources, and in some ways the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) is more important for bus funding than the Department of Transport as CLG take the decisions on local government funding which ultimately determine a big slab of bus funding. And the bus is far from the forefront of CLG thinking. Bus funding is also highly revenue dependent at a time when capital rather than revenue spending is favoured by Government.

However the evidence base is there for the bus. The task now is to continue to take it to key decision makers and to find some collective asks of Government on bus funding whilst accepting that there will remain fundamental differences between many incumbent bus operators and local government on the deregulation / regulation issue. It can be done and it needs to be done if we are going to get a better result from this Spending Review for the bus this time, than we did last time around.

Jonathan Bray

We thought we would share with you our summary of the key 2012 Autumn Statement announcements of relevance to transport and the PTEs.

Transport announcements – a focus on roads

£1.5 billion will be spent on improving the road network, of which £1bn will be invested in the current spending review period.

General transport spending:

• £270m for ‘priority national and local projects to remove bottlenecks and support development’ (no further details available)
• £42 million for the Sustainable Transport Fund for cycling infrastructure, including cycling safety.
• £333m for road maintenance and £42m to develop the pipeline of potential Highways Agency road schemes

Projects in the North and West Midlands:

• £378m to upgrade key sections of the A1 (Lobley Hill and Leeming to Barton) in the North East, bringing this route from the M25 to Newcastle up to motorway standard
• £10m (from within DfT’s existing budget) for improvements to Junction 12 of the M40 in the West Midlands (starting 2013)

Projects elsewhere:

• Guarantee to support £1bn of borrowing at a preferential rate to extend the Northern Line to Battersea, to enable the commercial redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and surrounding site.NOTE: This is one of the first projects to benefit from the £40bn UK Guarantees scheme which provides guarantees to ensure that priority projects in the infrastructure pipeline can raise the finance they need. The scheme is open until 31 December 2014.
• £150m to tackle congestion via improvements to Junction 30 of M25 in London and £157m for a new link between A5 and M1 in East and dualling a section of the A30 in the South West

Other transport announcements:

• A limit on the average increase in regulated rail fares and Transport for London fares to the RPI plus 1 per cent for two years from Jan 2013.
• Fuel duty rise planned for Jan 2013 cancelled and deferred to 1 Sept 2013.
• Strengthen the mandate of Infrastructure UK and increase its commercial expertise to boost the delivery of growth-enhancing infrastructure projects. As part of this, IUK plus an enhanced Major Projects Authority will undertake a detailed assessment of Whitehall’s ability to deliver infrastructure – to be completed by Budget 2013.
• New pilot delivery model for reducing the time taken to plan and deliver new roads.
• Assessing feasibility of new ownership and financing models for the strategic road network – progress report due in new year.

Governance announcements – a focus on LEPs

The Statement highlights the success of the first round of City Deals with a special mention for Manchester’s earn back agreement with Government to unlock over £2bn of investment in transport infrastructure.

The Government welcomes Lord Heseltine’s Review and is seeking to implement as many of the recommendations as possible. A full response is due in Spring, however, the Statement sets out the first stage of the response, including the following announcements:

• LEPs will be asked by Government to lead the development of new multi-year strategic plans for local growth consistent with national priorities. They will be expected to consult with all relevant local partners. It is anticipated that the plans will provide LEPs with an increasingly important strategic role.
• To help LEPs fulfil this role, the Government will provide £10m per year for capacity building within LEPs. Each will be able to apply for up to £250,000 additional funding per year to support the development and delivery of their strategic plan.
• The Government will devolve a greater proportion of growth-related spending on the basis of these strategic plans by creating a single funding pot for local areas from April 2015. Funding will reflect the quality of the LEP’s strategic plans, as well as local need. LEPs will also be expected to leverage funding, including from local authorities and the wider public and private sector. The Government will seek to increase the proportion of spending awarded through the single pot. This is likely to include some of the funding for local transport. Further details to be set out in the Spending Review.

In addition to Lord Heseltine’s recommendations:

• A new concessionary public works loan rate to an infrastructure project nominated by each LEP (excluding London), with total borrowing capped at £1.5bn.
• A further £350m towards the Regional Growth Fund.
• Support for local authorities that wish to create a combined authority or implement other forms of collaboration (e.g. shared management) including ensuring existing legislation is fit for purpose.

Other

• Detailed spending plans for 2015-16 will be set out in the first half of next year.
• Simplification of the Carbon Reduction Commitment energy efficiency scheme from 2013, including abolition of the performance league table. Full review to be held in 2016 the tax will be a high priority for removal when public finances allow.

Rebecca Fuller

Policy and Research Advisor

I was one of the original Network Rail members and have served three terms in total (though I haven’t been a member throughout NR’s existance). My Membership comes to an end on the 23rd November

This is what I have learned

 

1. It’s a tough job but a worthwhile one – and not – repeat not – a waste of time.

It’s tough because it is secondary governance – there to give a strategic steer and a nudge, or more than that if things are going badly wrong. It’s tough because the Network Rail job is largely a practical and technical one. It doesn’t determine national rail policy (that would be much easier to have a view on), its main job is to build, maintain and operate kit which could kill people if the wrong decisions are taken. It’s tough to judge how well they are doing in any kind of detail given the technical and practical nature of the vast job that NR does. NR pays consultants to say they are doing a good job, ORR pays consultants to say they aren’t. Who’s right? Getting to the bottom of everything would be a full time job – and NR governance is part time. But the job is worthwhile. Britain’s railways are an amazing thing – and as a Member of Network Rail you get to play a part. A small but an important part. Which is why secondary governance is not a waste of time. ‘What can the Members do that NR will take any notice of?’ people wail! ‘The members are pointless!’ Not so. NR members have a nuclear option – sacking the executive. ‘So what?’ people say, ‘it’s too drastic a deterrent for it ever to be used’.  Well nuclear weapons were not used in the cold war but they certainly influenced behaviour! And NR members have influenced behaviour on safety and the management of the company (the RIDDOR affair) and on the bonus culture. And that’s the job – not running the company – but acting as a trustee of the company.

2. Value the informed mavericks.

In my three terms as an NR member the most effective members have been Bob Rixham (who skilfully used his membership to surface the RIDDOR scandal) and Tony Berkeley. I fear a smaller membership recruited by the Membership Selection Panel (with all its PLC corporate governance theology and square mile elitist flimflam) will lead to a monoculture membership made up of Home Counties FT readers with time on their hands. And if PLC corporate governance is the gold standard that we are all told we can only begin to dream of emulating, how come the banks were allowed to run riot and crash the global economy? No – what the membership needs is not self-regarding, group think. Instead it needs to be balanced, made up of people with different perspectives and life experience. And it needs mavericks.

3. Members shouldn’t waste time naval gazing about the nature of the job, and dreaming about what you would like the job to be.

The governance of Network Rail (and the rest of the railway) only changes when Government wants it to – not the members. If you want to manage Network Rail then get a job with them. The Members are secondary governance. Not shadow managers. They are also individuals who are there to exercise their individual judgement (informed by discussions between themselves and with Network Rail). There is nothing shameful about not having a collective view (see above). And remember there is no perfect governance system – for all NR’s imperfections, overall it’s done a good job since it was created. And its governance is better than if it were a PLC (I call Railtrack to the witness box your honour) or fully nationalised (if it were to be at the beck and call of a desiccated and cynical civil service culture as BR was).

4. No-one seems to be paying much attention to this but NR wants to turn itself into a global player (and perhaps then privatised) off the back of its role in running the UK rail network.

Exciting stuff for its senior staff no doubt. Mixing it with DB and the French in the race for world domination of the public transport sector. But I’m not sure the members have been consulted on this key strategic development. And personally I think NR’s main focus should continue to be consolidating the GB rail network in a more cost effective, accountable and integrated way than the current costly shambles that is the privatised railway. That’s a big enough and exciting enough job in itself and it’s what the taxpayer pays Network Rail to do.

5. Administrative hygiene.

Network Rail needs to get the basics right. Minutes of meetings, papers circulated in advance, questions responded to in a timely fashion. Members are paranoid enough as it is about how seriously they are taken by Network Rail. If NR consistently fails on basic administrative hygiene (which it did throughout my three terms of membership – despite a lot of promises) then Members become more convinced that they are being treated disrespectfully. And people really hate that! I am convinced that half of the endless naval gazing about the Members’ roles that dominates so many NR members meetings would disappear if NR consistently got the basics right in terms of proper administrative support for the members.

Thank you and good night!

Jonathan Bray

Young people are among the biggest users of bus services

Buses matter to young people. This past year, we have seen just how much. Nationwide polling by UK Youth Parliament (UKYP) of 65,000 young people in 2011, and 250,000 young people in 2012, identified ‘Public transport: Cheaper, better, accessible’ as a priority concern. Members of the UKYP at their annual sitting in the House of Commons decided that, of all the issues raised by young people, public transport should be the key focus of campaigning in 2012.

Since then, we have seen the newly formed Youth Select Committee – made up entirely of young people – choose public transport as the topic for their inaugural inquiry, something that pteg has been delighted to be a part of.

For most young people, the bus represents their main experience of public transport. The bus enables young people to access a whole host of valuable opportunities, from attainment–boosting after school clubs and weekend jobs, to visiting friends and participating in sports. These opportunities are vital to their growth and development.

Young people are already among the biggest users of buses, but they also represent the future market for bus travel. More progressive transport authorities and operators are recognising the need to cultivate this young market.

Young campaigners meet with Transport Minister Norman Baker earlier this year

Furthermore, they are recognising that young people can be powerful advocates for bus travel when we get it right – or damning critics when we get it wrong. In the age of social media, young people’s experiences – whether good or bad – have the potential to spread rapidly to their peers, their extended networks and beyond. This, combined with growing calls for increasing youth participation in decision-making (such as the Government’s ‘Positive for Youth’ statement), means that the voice of young people has never been louder, or more influential.

At local level, transport authorities and operators alike can expect to be increasingly held to account by young people for the decisions they make. This is particularly likely given that young people have been  hard hit by transport spending cuts. In efforts to balance budgets, concessionary fares schemes for this group have been cut back, whilst the evening and weekend bus services they value are often the first to disappear when times are tough.

Whilst recognising that the current spending environment is difficult, and that unpopular decisions must sometimes be made to protect services for the wider community, we believe there is still much that transport authorities and operators can do to develop a good offer on bus for young people. Our new report, ‘Moving on: Working towards a better public transport offer for young people in tough times’ aims to present ideas and generate discussion around what such an offer could include.

In developing an offer, ‘Moving on’ urges transport authorities and operators to keep three key messages in mind.

1. The importance of actively engaging young people in the process

We know that many young people are passionate about improving public transport and have some great ideas about how this can be achieved. Getting to realistic solutions means working with young people to generate a dialogue about what can practically be done. It’s about developing an offer with – rather than for – young people.

Develop an offer with – rather than for – young people

Involving young people in this way doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or time and, ultimately, is likely to save money by ensuring what is provided has the buy-in of those that it is aimed at. Listening to, and acting on, the suggestions of young passengers makes it more likely that they will use and value bus services now and in future.

2. The need to develop a package of measures

There is no silver bullet for improving bus services for young people. The offer needs to address the need for bus services that are available, affordable, accessible and acceptable – the cornerstones of any socially inclusive transport service. Only in addressing each of these can we hope to develop a service that enables young people to access the opportunities that will allow them to move forward in their lives.

In developing a package, it is also important to recognise the differences and similarities in the needs of young people of different ages. One size definitely does not fit all young people. For this reason, the ideas in our report are presented in four age categories – under 5s, 5 to 11 year olds, 11 to 16 year olds and post 16.

3. Maintain a focus on simplicity

Simplicity in fares, networks and information benefit all passengers.

We know that young people are frequently left baffled by the intricacies and eccentricities of bus service delivery outside London. It is important to work with young people to help them get to grips with how the system works, but also to try and eliminate unnecessary complexity where possible.

On fares, for example, evidence shows that young people value flat, simple and consistent offers. They have campaigned independently to secure such offers in their areas and experience suggests that, once in place, they result in young people making more journeys. One of our report’s case studies, for example, describes how a bus company introduced a new service to meet the extra demand generated by the introduction of a flat, simple and consistent fare for young people.

We hope that the key messages of this report – to work with young people to develop simple packages of measures – and the ideas it contains can be used as a starting point for discussions which will ultimately result in an offer on bus that works for young people in your area. Working with young people to develop such an offer could help build a loyalty to public transport that lasts a lifetime.

Buses matter to young people – and young people should matter to us.

Rebecca Fuller

Policy and Research Advisor, pteg

After the party conference bubble, a clearer picture of each party’s transport policies emerges

Autumn Party conferences can be a bit of a blur – mini-political Glastonburys for politicians and the travelling roadshow of journalists and lobbyists. A bubble of meetings, speeches and talk. But when you finally get on the train back to the real world you do leave with a clearer impression of where each party is at on the key transport issues.

Liberal Democrats

On transport, the Lib Dem conference is all about Norman Baker – who continues to throw his considerable energies into making the very most of his tenure at Transport. He’s doing this by shaping local transport around his own priorities – but within the context of a coalition Government that is reducing and devolving public spending.

What are Norman’s priorities? I would say:

• The mainstreaming of spending on active travel.
• Holding the line on the use of all the bus powers in the Local Transport Act 2008 (including Quality Contracts).
• Making sure that the more rural areas don’t lose out from any changes.
• And perhaps, most challenging of all, trying to find a way through the thicket of a fragmented, deregulated / privatised public transport network to get to the prize of a more integrated offer for passengers including smart and simple ticketing.

This degree of activity and intent is not a common feature in junior transport ministers (who usually cautiously read out whatever the officials give them before moving on). In some ways Norman’s approach is also a further example of ‘managed localism’ – via a series of centrally determined funding competitions – but there’s no doubt that it is proving successful on objective one especially, which is the mainstreaming of cycling in particular with local transport policy.

Labour

Meet the new Barbara Castle? If Labour is elected (and all other things remain equal in the shadow cabinet) then Maria Eagle could go right through from opposition to government. Why the Barbara Castle comparison? Well in the 1960s Harold Wilson decided that for once Government was going to make transport a priority and Castle seized the opportunity with one of the biggest packages of progressive transport legislation the country had seen – the 1968 Transport Act – which among other things created the PTEs.

At Labour conference Maria Eagle certainly seems fired up to seize the moment if she has the opportunity. If the Eagle lands at Marsham Street then a not-for-profit InterCity network, a devolved local rail network and a managed transition from bus deregulation to local transport authority control would be her priorities. However there’s a lot that could happen between then and now – and she would need the two Eds on her side too.

Conservatives

If the new Secretary of State was appointed as a ‘steady eddie’ to keep the transport brief tranquil then, not for the first time, this is already proving harder than it looks – with the west coast franchise blowing up in the DfT’s face.

But that aside, what also emerged from the Conservative party conference was:

• A very firm commitment to HS2 from McLoughlin to further demoralise the anti-campaign and to kill off the niggling stories in the press about whether it’s really going to happen or not
• The emergence of a ‘mods and rockers’ debate on buses within Conservatives who are interested in buses. Whilst new DfT Stephen Hammond continues to pursue the traditional Eighties-style hard line in favour of bus deregulation, Steve Norris told the pteg fringe that it should be down to local transport authorities to decide. Indeed there’s a fair few Conservative MPs now who are far more interested in outcomes than they are in defending the principle of bus deregulation and recognise that franchising is a perfectly reasonable view to take.
• Roads are back – kinda. Talk of building new motorways as a gut response to economic problems is becoming semi-respectable again – but there’s far from a groundswell for it and perhaps a trace memory of just how unpopular massive road building programmes can be – particularly among voters in the prosperous, over-heated South East

Time for Whitehall to let go?

This was the question that each of our fringe meetings posed in its title. And the answer at all three was a resounding yes! The will and the impulse is there…but to get the devolution that really matters off the launch pad (bus and rail) before the gravitational pull of the civil service pulls it back to earth. Now that’s the hard bit.

Jonathan Bray

When, near the turn of the last century, the riverfronts of Glasgow and Liverpool were a seething mass of industry and commerce, the resulting clogged streets led to some bold moves above and below ground to beat the jams.

In Glasgow it led to the construction of what was then only the third underground railway in the world – the circular Glasgow Subway whose carriages were ingeniously moved from station to station by a system of cables, and which opened in 1896. The Glasgow Subway still exists today (though long since electrically powered) and indeed is to be given a new lease of life with a new fleet of trains.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway, re-created by Steven Paul Wheeler

In Liverpool it was decided to go skywards rather than underground, with an overhead railway which ran the length of the seven and a half mile network of waterfront docks and warehouses – then the second largest port in the country after London.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway opened in 1893 and being the first electric overhead railway in the world wasn’t the only way in which it blazed a trail. It was also the first to be protected by electric automatic signals and only the second place in the country with an escalator (although it didn’t last long as it caused too much damage to long dresses apparently!)

Unlike the Glasgow Subway, the Liverpool Overhead Railway has not survived. Worn out by continuous use, wartime bombs and corrosion, by the fifties it needed a total overhaul if it was to carry on. The £2 million needed was not available (ironically not a huge amount when compared with the, ahem, £300 million, at today’s prices, that it cost to build) so it was closed in 1956 and demolished the year after. The invention of the shipping container consigned the city centre docks it had served to similar oblivion in the decades that followed before we reached the current realignment where Liverpool is a busier port city than ever, though the Docks are no longer in the centre and the numbers employed are of course far fewer.

Meanwhile, some of the areas the Liverpool Overhead Railway served are now reclaimed for flats, hotels and tourist attractions – such as the new Museum of Liverpool. And the Museum of Liverpool pays handsome and appropriate tribute to this unique railway which still lingers in the city’s memories and affections. The exhibition includes one of the original carriages, plenty of memorabilia as well as a relief map of the Docks and the Overhead Railway which gives some sense of the vast scale of the docks and the intricacies of the warehouses and railways lines that served them.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway is also recreated in a spectacular and beautiful animation by Steven Paul Wheeler

The video is planned to feature as part of a documentary on what was popularly known as the ‘Dockers Umbrella’.

Screen grab from the Museum of Liverpool video

The Museum has also helped put together this video which uses original film taken in 1897 to recreate what a journey would have been like over the mile after mile of busy docks in the first years of the Overhead Railway – where an electric train provided spectacular views of the sailing ships.

Well worth a visit – and demonstrates again that not all the most interesting and ground breaking thinking on transport happens in the capital!

Jonathan Bray

Front cover of D Scott Hellewell’s account of South Yorkshire’s Transport, picture courtesy of Transport Store

It may not be available on Kindle anytime soon, but ‘South Yorkshire’s Transport 1974-1995’ by D Scott Hellewell is full of fascinating material about the story of the radical years of South Yorkshire’s ‘Grand Design’ for Transport in the Seventies and Eighties (roughly the period from the creation of the PTE and South Yorks County Council in 1974 to bus deregulation in 1986). This is an era still remembered for its cheap bus fares policy but there was a lot more to it than that. Here’s five things I took away from the book. Cheap fares being the best place to start…

1. Too cheap to charge?

The policy on fares in South Yorkshire was…not to put them up. For eight years the fares didn’t go up and with inflation higher than it is today the fares became cheaper and cheaper. Eventually a point would have come when it would cost more to collect the fares than to charge them. At that point bus travel would have become free. The policy was very popular (more than a million people signed a petition to keep the policy in place). It was also effective in keeping bus patronage high and road congestion low (traffic congestion in Sheffield was lower than in any comparable city). It was not popular however in Whitehall and, interestingly, not just with Mrs Thatcher. The preceding Callaghan government also did its best to try to get the PTE to see the error of its ways although it was Thatcher that delivered the coup de gras with the Transport Act of 1984 which led to fares going up by as much as 300% in one day. Bus patronage decline and traffic congestion was the inevitable consequence.

2. Forward thinking days

However, it wasn’t just about cheap fares in South Yorkshire – far from it. The cheap fares policies was accompanied a staggering amount of forward thinking about what a modern public transport network should be doing for the area it serves. This included the introduction of minibus services to serve outlying areas (common now – but not then) and a Bendibus city centre shuttle. Bendibuses being so novel at the time it was actually technically illegal in the UK to run them, (until, that is, South Yorkshire got national Government to change the rules to allow their operation). The PTE was also determined to get cleaner, modern buses that could cope with Sheffield’s formidable hills, whilst spewing out fewer noxious fumes (air quality was and is a problem in Sheffield) and providing a good working environment for drivers. In effect the PTE was working towards a ‘Bus (or buses) for South Yorkshire’. In some ways this is similar to the way London in the past (the Routemaster and its antecedents) has gone. On green clean technologies South Yorks was also an early pioneer of battery buses and it ran a trial of a modern trolleybus (with a test track at Doncaster racecourse). This direct interest in pushing the boundaries of bus technologies was also linked to a strand of thinking around how a dynamic public sector commissioning body could help drive wider UK manufacturing and technological development and capacity (creating skilled and worthwhile jobs in the process). The PTE was also ahead of its time in promoting access to the bus network for older and disabled people. Both through concessionary fares and some early examples of buses that could carry wheelchair users. So when some people say the public sector can’t innovate on public transport…they are talking drivel!

3. The Sheffield Underground that never was…

One of the sidestories of the book is how the South Yorkshire rail network teetered on the edge of oblivion. The rail network was never a major player for rail commuters and when the PTE was set up in 1974 the patronage of entire local rail network could have been carried on 18 buses (allegedly)! It would have been if some of the busmen had their way but the railways fought back – including a BR proposition for an underground loop linking Sheffield Midland with an underground station serving the city centre. The Sheffield underground never happened (Supertram did instead). However eventually the railways were integrated into the wider progressive strategy for public transport in the area with new stations and services even if that involved a few interesting wheezes to get there. For example running a BR Summer Saturday seaside special to Blackpool on a route that otherwise the PTE would have had to bear all the costs of…

4. Nothing’s perfect…

The book is unsparing on the tensions and difficulties that always emerge around the boundaries between one organisation and another. In this case between Districts and the Met County Council, the PTE and the Districts, the Unions and the PTE, and so on and so forth. Wherever you draw the lines between areas and organisations it will never be perfect and there is always the potential for tensions, but as the author makes clear, in South Yorkshire what was collectively achieved was clearly impressive.

5. Bus policy…not so boring after all

These days in the professional / Whitehall debate, by and large, it’s spending on capital projects which is seen as the grown up thing to do, whereas current spending, (including on holding bus fares down) is rather looked down upon. But one of things that the South Yorkshire story shows for astute politicians, who want to make an impact quickly, is that current spending on bus can make the weather for the wider debate about transport – getting ridership up, generating momentum and creating an environment where further spending on transport (including capital) is seen as the right thing to do. It can also make an impact quickly and across a wide area whereas new infrastructure can take years and is site specific. Interesting too how often bus policy has actually becoming something much more emblematic and defining for politicians over the years – Ken’s fares policies and Boris’s Routemaster being one example. So, despite the obsession of most politicians and commentators with trains – who would have thought it – bus policy isn’t so boring after all!

Jonathan Bray

HS2 is on its way. Though the by now familiar arguments will no doubt continue to rage about whether high speed is a ‘good thing’ or not (environmentally, economically and in terms of value for money), this fascinating LSE event mostly parked the ‘in principle’, and HS2 specific arguments, in order to think big thoughts about high speed stations and their implications.

This blogpost is reportage of what was new / interesting to me from Sir  Terry Farrell and the wider debate. It is NOT – repeat NOT – a judgement call on those arguments

HS and ‘continentalisation’

Everyone knows about globalisation, but what HS specialises in is ‘continentalisation’. For example the Euro may be in trouble but – high speed line by high speed line – rail is steadily making national borders less noticeable and relevant.

It’s about the stations not the lines

The huge Beijing South Station (photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beijing_South_2032.jpg)

Most debates about HS are about the routes not the stations. But once a line is built it’s the stations that have the economic and city making impact. The global leader (in terms of mileage for sure) on HS is China. China is happy to build vast new stations (Beijing South is now the biggest station in the world) on the periphery of its mega cities in magnificent isolation. For China it’s about the perfect system – the perfect transport hub. It is not about city making.

At the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong – global leaders at joining commercial developments and transport hubs at the hip. Their major rail hubs have towering office blocks and vast shopping centres above the platforms. Platforms that are paid for by the office blocks and the shopping centres.

The UK has been more Hong Kong than China (or at least in London – and the UK focus of the event was relentlessly London-centric!). Indeed are the big London stations (Waterloo, Victoria and Kings Cross for example) now the town centres of the London Districts they occupy?

Shops at St Pancras – are big stations the new town centres? (Photo from the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/26/railways-uk-retail-sales-booming-recession)

And if so why not accept it and make the immediate hinterland around them more fit for that purpose? Turning a station from a bad neighbour to a good neighbour. It’s an argument that is perhaps a bit of a stretch – but then again 40 per cent of visitors to St Pancras are not there to catch a train. And to take the argument to the next level, if big stations are town centres perhaps the best model for a station is the trains under the concourse (the New York Grand Central model) so that the focus is on the space, the easy access, people, commerce, shopping – not the kit that got you there?

Old Oak Common – where’s that?

Two miles west of Paddington, development land the size of London’s Victoria Docks and a NIMBY free zone that squats on a nexus of railway junctions. It wouldn’t take much to rewrite the Underground and National Rail and High Speed rail maps around it. All of this could – could – make it the prime location for ‘UK Rail Hub Number One’.

Thinking bigger still – and joining up rail and air policy – fast trains through UK Rail Hub Number One could link in with a HeathrowGatwickLuton airport. Because the thing is London is not actually short of runways – it’s just they are all in different places. So one option is to forget the idea of one mega hub at Heathrow – or the Thames Estuary – and instead use fast trains between the different airports – one big (though geographically dispersed) rail and air interconnect. With Old Oak Common as a European superhub – sweating the connections.

For Farrell it also illustrates a wider point that countries have a choice – either you are a purist and go for the perfect logical system – the new single glossy transport hub (which runs a risk of being out of date, or outmanoeuvred by technological or social change by the time it is completed). For aviation this would mean one massive Heathrow or Thames Estuary airport. Or you are an opportunist and make the most of what you have and adapt. The latter tends to be the British way – but not necessarily a bad thing. It can work very well – if in a sub-optimal way.

Flipping London

Artist’s impression of Thames Hub airport (Photo: Foster and Partners)

Or you can take the other view which is that you do need one single mega international airport. Which in turn could ‘flip’ London. Recently all the big investment has gone east – think Stratford and Docklands. A Thames Hub airport would accelerate the trend. A west London rail hub and/or an expanded Heathrow Hub would flip London back west. Now that is thinking big…

Jonathan Bray