Car use

Car usePublished papersTravel

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.

Car useTravel

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.

Car useTravel

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.

Car useTravel

The House of Commons Transport Committee is enquiring into the British Strategic Road Network. Written submissions have been published, including my own. While most of the evidence submitted is reasonably predicable, given the established positions of the organisations concerned, I was particularly interested in the offerings of Ian Williams, a very experienced former transport consultant, now at Cambridge University, and of the consultants WSP. They both draw attention to changing patterns of land us, particularly increasing urban density, which are limiting the growth of car travel.

There is an ongoing debate about the future magnitude of road traffic growth. At its most broad brush, this is ‘peak car’ versus continuation of historic growth trends. At a more granular level, account needs to be taken of local demographic changes – where people choose to live and work, and how, in consequence, they choose to travel. On the whole, higher urban densities mean less car travel and more rail, both urban and interurban.

Car use

Two articles in the Financial Times highlighting a decline in car use.

In the City of London there are plans to remove cars from two busy roads to improve the environment for pedestrians.

In the US it is reported that young city dwellers are driving less, forcing the motor industry to rethink the role of the car.

Both these reports are consistent with trends in the developed economies in which the revival of city centres is facilitated by welcoming the young and pushing back the car.

Car usePublished papersTravel

I presented a paper (Metz ETC 15-9-13) at the recent European Transport Conference held in Frankfurt. This shows how car use in London rose from about 5% of all journeys in 1950 to 50% by 1990 – no surprise there. But then it started falling, to 38% currently, and projected to fall further to 30% before 2040. This is surprising since car use has always risen with growing incomes. However, in London we have not built new road capacity, which has constrained car use to a steady 10m trips a day for each of the past 20 years. But because the population has been growing, these car trips represent a declining share of all travel. This is the clearest illustration of the phenomenon of Peak Car.

I also suggest that growing cities in developing countries, where car use is still low, may be able to avoid this peak and move directly to a more sustainable level of around 30% for a city of 10m. The key policies to achieve this are to provide rail travel for work journeys since this can get business and professional people out of their cars, and limit parking in the city centre to keep buses, taxis, good delivery and emergency vehicles moving.

Car useTravel

The UK Department for Transport recently published updated road traffic forecasts based on its National Transport Model. Continued growth is expected. By 2040 road traffic is forecast to be 46% higher than in 2010, implying an increase in congestion (measured as time lost) of about 114%. Despite this increase in traffic, CO2 emissions are forecast to decline by around 15% from 2010 levels, reflecting fuel efficiency improvements and use of biofuels.

In the view of many of us, these forecasts are implausibly high. For instance, the increase in car traffic in London by 2040 is put at 40%. Yet car traffic in London has hardly changed in 20 years, reflecting the constraint imposed by road capacity which no one is proposing should be relaxed significantly. More generally, the DfT forecasters reject the idea that car use has peaked on a per capita basis, evidence for which is emerging in most developed economies. It is probably too much to expect the forecasters to revise downwards traffic projections at a time when the Government has announced a big increase in expenditure on the roads system.
Car useTravel

An interesting report from the Institute for Mobility Research, part of the BMW group, on the declining car use by Generation Y, those born between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. A useful addition to the growing literature on an important demographic trend in developed economies which is contributing to the cessation of growth of per capita car use.

Car useTravel

The UK Government has announced a substantial programme of road repairs and construction. While the case for repairs is strong, will the proposed new construction represent value for money? A recent evaluation of 58 ‘major schemes’ implemented by the Highways Agency found time savings to road users at peak usage of only three minutes on average. The Department for Transport’s appraisal methodology multiplies small time savings by a large number of drivers and a standard value of time to generate acceptable benefit-to-cost ratios. But such benefits are notional and the impact in the real economy is unclear.

The most congested parts of the trunk road network are adjacent to population centres, where local traffic impedes long distance traffic. Road improvements permit expansion of the former, the latter gaining little. It remains the case that we can’t build our way out of congestion.

Targeted transport investment can certainly have substantial economic benefits, witness the regeneration of London’s Docklands made possible by investment in the rail network. But the Government’s intention ‘to build all Highways Agency road projects’ seems unlikely to result in commensurate observable economic benefits. We need a fresh look at the economic case for road investment.