‘What’s the point of HS2?’ is the title of a good article in the London Review of Books by Christian Wolmar, a well-known commentator and author on railway matters. He outlines the history of the high speed rail project and the current state of play, exercising critical yet balanced judgement. He perhaps underestimates the growth of demand for rail travel resulting from declining car ownership and use in London in particular, but there is inevitable uncertainty about any projection of future travel demand. Overall, a fairly agnostic conclusion, which I largely share.
Cycling and gentrification
An interesting blog in the Financial Times relates the growth of cycling in London to the process of gentrification. In the rest of the UK, cycling is most common among those working in the lower-skilled parts of the economy – a situation precisely reversed in London, where over 5% of professionals and 4% of managers cycle to work. Growth of cycling over the past decade has mainly been in London and some other urban areas, whereas in the majority of local authorities cycling in fact declined.
Electric bicycles
The Financial Times reports growing sales of electric bikes in Europe, 850,000 sales in 2012, and 400,000 last year in Germany. Manufacturers include Bosch, Daimler and BMW. In China, 30m are sold annually.
The electric motor kicks in when you start to pedal and then only with a force commensurate with your own efforts. Electric bikes overcome two disadvantages of ordinary bikes: hills and getting damp from sweat.I look forward to trying one.
Parking
I attended the British Parking Awards 2014 as the guest of Landor LINKS, publisher of Parking Review and also of the print edition of my book ‘Peak Car: the Future of Travel’. The worlds of parking and of traffic overlap, of course, although those of us concerned with travel and transport tend not to pay much attention to immobile vehicles. Nevertheless, you can’t make a trip by car unless you know you can park at your destination – this limits car use in city centres where parking is strictly controlled. And people driving around looking for a parking space can contribute significantly to traffic congestion.
I learned about these services, which seem helpful
Parkopedia provides details of parking spaces in 40 countries.
SmartPark provides drivers with real-time information about unoccupied on-street car parking spaces using sensors set in to the parking bay – being trialled in London in Westminster and Camden. Drivers can use a mobile phone app to find which nearby spaces are free.
Driverless cars
The Independent Transport Commission has published a useful report on automated cars, authored by Scott Le Vine and John Polak of Imperial College London. The tone is generally agnostic: ‘The impacts will be mixed, some good and some bad, and there will no doubt be surprises and unintended consequences along the way.’
I am skeptical about the impact of driverless cars on the transport system. They would be essentially taxis with robot drivers. Taxis are useful, and we would make more use of them if vehicle automation brought down the costs, but the impact on road speeds and congestion does not seen likely to be large.
NNNPS
NNNPS stands for National Networks National Policy Statement. The UK government has issued a draft for consultation. This covers national perspectives for future road and rail developments and is intended to be approved by Parliament and provide a settled input to local planning enquiries into specific schemes.
There is quite a lot wrong with the consultation draft. I have submitted a response Metz NNNPS response 26-2-14. My main concerns are the following.
There are good reasons to suppose that the National Transport Model substantially overestimates future demand on the Strategic Road Network. The traffic projections do not therefore provide a sound basis for the scale of investment planned by the Government. The Model needs to be made public and available for independent audit.
A major shortcoming of the NTM is its inability to model the consequences of a strategic choice between greenfield and urban housing to accommodate the growing population.
There is a good case for investment in the network where this can make land accessible for development, consistent with planning policy. However, constructing additional carriageway is not an effective means of reducing congestion.
The main problem with congestion is the uncertainty of journey time. This is tackled most cost-effectively by provision of reliable predictive journey time information.
A strategic issue for national Government is where to accommodate the UK’s growing population since this will determine the kind of investment needed in the transport system. In London, transport investment can be planned to respond to population growth. Nationally, there is no such coherence.
Motorbiking in India
I’m back from a motorbike trip in southern India with my son Ben. We were on the road for seven days between Trivandrun and Mysore. This picture shows us traveling through a tiger reserve, so no people, no stopping, little traffic and in fact no tigers to be seen. Generally, the roads were very crowed with motorised two-wheelers, cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians. What was remarkable was the skill everyone exercised to avoid collisions, a good example of ‘shared space’, the concept that we can safely share road space if we look out for each other. The absence of a kerb, general in India, signals that the road is to be shared. This was the case in the developed countries in the past, until it was judged that pedestrians had better be segregated from vehicles for their safety. But now we think that such segregation can be successfully reversed, with no loss of safety. My experience in India is that a rider/driver is naturally very alert to others on the road whose behaviour my be hard to anticipate.
mo
Demand for air travel
The Airports Commission has published its interim report on possibilities for additional runway capacity in the London area. An important question is the extend of future growth of demand for air travel. The Commission reviewed the Department for Transport’s demand model and made minor adjustments, leaving unchanged the central expectation of substantial further growth.
I take the view that the market for air travel by UK residents may be nearer saturation that is usually supposed. Dr Anne Graham of the University of Westminster and I made a submission to the Commission to this effect, setting out our arguments. This was acknowledged in a footnote to a technical appendix, but evidently we did not persuade the Commission to shift from the conventional wisdom.
My forthcoming book, Peak Car: the future of travel, will set out the case for saturation of travel demand as a clearly established phenomenon in daily travel, with a likelihood that it may apply to air travel as well.
Peak Car in Parliament
The House of Commons Transport Committee is starting an enquiry into the Strategic Road Network. An important question is the magnitude of future demand for road travel, whether it will continue to grow in line with rising incomes, as the Department for Transport expects, or whether income is no longer an important factor, as the proponents of the ‘peak car’ idea argue, myself included. The Committee has commissioned a useful summary of the evidence from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) – albeit agnostic in its conclusions. We will see what the Committee makes of it.
Shanghai and Beijing
I took the opportunity of a visit to China to view the traffic and transport provision. Arriving at Shanghai by air, I took the Maglev to the city – speed 300kph, journey time 8 minutes. From the map the terminal seemed fairly near my hotel so I took a taxi – a big mistake in the morning rush hour, needing to cross the river on one of the few bridges, tightly congested. A colleague on the same flight who travelled from the airport by metro beat me to it. But I did have a good view of the elevated road network designed to adapt a historic city centre to the car.
The Shanghai metro is extensive and efficient, with all signs and announcements in both Chinese and English. The city is being developed with high rise housing, typically 30 stories, so rail is essential. I would guess that the mode share for car is fairly low.
I went to Beijing by the high speed train at 300kph, from the new rail station situated next to Shanghai’s airport for internal flights – no attempt to bring this rail route to the city centre.
Beijing is extraordinary. Apart from the historic monuments, it seems that the whole city is being comprehensively redeveloped, with the traditional single story courtyard housing demolished, replaced by tall modern office buildings and apartments. The road network is extensive – wide avenues, 6 ring roads and 9 toll expressways. By attempting to cater for the car, the amount of traffic is excessive – over 5m cars registered – and serious congestion is the result, not just at peak times.
One feature of both cities is that the large majority of motorised two-wheelers are electric, thus silent and non-polluting. In Beijing this is the consequence of legislation to limit air pollution, in Shanghai due to the lower running cost of electric propulsion.
My impression, albeit from a brief visit, is that Shanghai has successfully coped with the car by not adapting too much, whereas Beijing, by attempting to accommodate more, has paradoxically a much more severe traffic problem.