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.
Travel
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.
Strategic Road Network enquiry
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.
Property values boosted by Crossrail
The Financial Times reports that Crossrail, the new east-west underground rail line currently being constructed in London, is sparking office development near stations on the route, with expectations of rents rising 10% over the next decade above the baseline projection. While a business levy is contributing to the construction cost, this captures only a fraction of the rise in values from Crossrail. This office construction is part of a trend for companies to move back into central London, reversing a 20-year exodus aimed at cutting costs. Businesses find that they can’t attract quality staff outside the capital.
The general point is that new transport infrastructure, well located, enhances access and prompts the construction of commercial and residential property, the source of employment and homes. This is how the benefits of transport investment materialise. Property owners who benefit from enhanced values should be expected to contribute to the cost of construction.
HS2: capacity and connectivity
A useful study of the prospects for High Speed 2, the proposed new rail route north out of London, has been published by the Independent Transport Commission – a rare example of a report by a group with expertise but without a prior position in the current debate. The ITC identifies the two benefits of HS2 as being increased rail capacity and improved connectivity. Their conclusion is broadly favourable to HS2 provided local investment is planned to take advantage of the new line.
Limiting car use in successful cities
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.