Travel

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The Department for Transport has published a report on understanding the drivers of road travel, prompted in part by the debate about Peak Car – the cessation of growth of per capita car travel seen in Britain and many developed economies. This is accompanied by a literature review prepared by RAND, a consultant.

DfT concludes: ‘after a decade of virtually flat traffic levels – driven in part by falling company car use, rising costs and stagnant or falling incomes – the outlook is for traffic at an aggregate level to continue growing again – as these factors stop having an impact or trends reverse – and population growth of 16% (to 2037) continues to mean many more millions of people wanting and needing to travel by car. But this traffic growth may continue to be at a slower rate, in line with the growth seen in the decade before the recession (an average of 1% per annum) as more people live in cities and urban areas and have access to different modes of travel, as the link between incomes and traffic weakens, and as other factors such as homeworking and online shopping continue to grow and reduce car demand.’

DfT promises new road traffic forecasts as well as an Analytical Strategy to tackle the key gaps in evidence. However, the more important task is to rebuild the National Transport Model as an open and transparent model available to all. The NTM appears to be projecting car traffic growth at twice the rate of population growth, which seems too high. The Model needs to be unpacked and its workings scrutinized in detail.

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London is probably the city with the best travel and transport statistics, thanks to the efforts of Transport for London, published annually as the Travel in London Report series. Report 7 was recently issued.

Chapter 8 deals with the relationship between transport, travel demand and land use, both historically and for the future. The evidence is clear that development of land responds to the improved access arising from transport investment. This is of course not surprising – the earliest railways did just that. What is surprising is that conventional economic analysis of transport investment proposals disregards the increased value of land made more accessible. This is why investment appraisal based on the value of time savings to travellers is hard to relate the benefits to the economy that are the modern motivation for transport investment.

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The Department for Transport has published its Road Investment Strategy with details of £15bn expenditure on the Strategic Road Network. I have a critique of this programme published in Local Transport Today. I argue that, as ever, you can’t build your way out of congestion, but you can use the digital technologies to help drivers use the network more efficiently under congested conditions. The Highways Agency places far too much emphasis on the civil engineering technologies, and too little of the digital technologies.

Metz LTT Roads pdf 18-12-14

 

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An insightful report from economic consultant Volterra highlights the inadequacy of the standard approach to transport investment appraisal, which focuses  on time savings to travellers as the supposed main benefit. As Bridget Rosewell, author of the report, observes, there is a mismatch between central government’s ambition to boost jobs growth and economic prosperity in cities and the system used to prioritise transport investment and funding. She rightly argues that better transport, land use planning and devolution go hand in hand, and that for London and other cities, an integration of land use planning and development with the transport investment is central to economic growth.

It is significant that this study was commissioned by Transport For London and Transport for Greater Manchester, both organisations evidently dissatisfied with the Department for Transport’s approach to centralised decision making

Car useTravel

Transport for London has issued an interesting report on the factors driving changes in travel behaviour in London, in particular the substantial shift from private to public transport in recent years. Aspects discussed include supply influences (eg investment in public transport), demand influences such as changes in income, and structural changes in London’s economy and society.

The report is comprehensive in its approach, which is valuable, but it doesn’t attempt to rank factors in importance. My own view is that the key decisions were not to increase London’s road capacity to meet the growth in car ownership nationally, to invest instead in London’s rail system, and to control parking in central areas to keep essential traffic flowing.

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Jim Steer is a distinguished UK transport consultant, founder of Steer Davies Gleave. He was President of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, 2013-14, and gave a very interesting Presidential Lecture last March, now available in print and well worth reading.

An important theme is the relation between land use and transport investment. A key reason for the success of London in recent years is the requirement on the Mayor to prepare a spatial plan for the development of the city that provides a sound basis for planning transport investment. In contrast, what’s missing is a national spatial plan, and hence we lack an adequate basis for planning national investment in transport infrastructure.

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The Mayor of London has published a plan for consultation concerning the capital’s requirements for infrastructure investment to 2050. A supporting document has more detail for transport investment.

What drives this investment is the expectation that London’s population will grow to 11.3 million by 2050, compared with 8.3m currently. The Mayor is required to develop a Plan for London to accommodate population growth and support economic growth. Transport investment is needed to link new homes to new jobs. A range of possibilities is considered for the location of employment and residence, together with the transport investment needed for each scenario.

These plans will repay careful study. My initial reaction is that the approach, in which planned land use change determines transport investment, is well conceived.

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The City Growth Commission has published a report on Connected Cities – how their economic growth depends on transport and digital connections. This includes criticism (p 32) of the usual approach to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which does not take into account the full range of economic benefits resulting from infrastructure investment in cities, including land value uplift. The Commission argues: ‘The importance of thinking beyond a simple reliance on current CBA models cannot be stressed enough.’ This is a very sensible conclusion, in my view.

Car useTravel

David Begg has prepared a useful report on the prospects for driverless vehicles, particularly in London. Driverless trains are already with us and could be more generally deployed as rail routes are upgraded, with useful cost savings. Driverless cars are on the way, but the impact in urban settings is less clear, particularly the effect on congestion. Driverless cars could make safer and more efficient use of road space through reduced headways and less need for parking spaces, but could also boost car use through increasing the attractiveness of the car for urban trips, in the way rail travel has become more attractive as a place to work while on the move.

I’m a bit sceptical about the likely uptake of driverless cars, which I see as effectively taxis with robot drivers – useful but essentially an incremental improvement, not a game-changer. We shall see.

Car useTravel

A roundtable meeting was held recently in London at the instigation of the New Zealand Ministry of Transport to consider the prospects for car travel – growth, peak or plateau. The report prepared by Glen Lyons and Phil Goodwin is a useful summary of the present state of understanding.