Trains, Planes and Automobiles

by John Stewart

New Ground 60
Winter 2000

The Transport Act and the 10-Year Plan show Labour is developing a long-term strategy for public transport. However, it will be a while yet before improvements can be seen on the ground, says John Stewart of SERA’s Transport Group. And the government appears to be leaving some of the very hardest decisions on transport to the second term...

Labour's first term has been a time of solid achievement in transport. It has not been spectacular, and progress has been too slow for the electorate to notice much difference on the ground come
the next general election. But Labour has done the groundwork to enable a more sustainable transport system to be put in place.

It started with the Transport White Paper. For the first time a government set out a long-term strategic approach to transport that was based on the principle of sustainability. There had been hints of this new thinking in some of the policies of Stephen Norris and John Gummer in the dying years of the Major administration, but the Tory Party as a whole was never wedded to them. This has become crystal clear since the election, with William Hague's desperate and cynical attempts to portray himself as the motorists' friend, and John Redwood's cavalier dismissal of safety measures such as traffic calming when he was responsible for transport and the environment.

But if the Transport White Paper marked a radical break with the past, the aftermath of its publication was disappointing. Crucial momentum was lost. Instead of taking advantage of the clear public desire for more investment in public transport and safer roads, a critical year was lost as the party - and particularly Number 10 - dithered. No Transport Bill was introduced until Labour was more than halfway through its first term. No real money was earmarked for transport until the 10-Year Plan was published last summer.

This delay in coming up with real money for real transport schemes - and thus convince the public that Labour was serious about transport - allowed the "motorists’ lobby”, aided by its allies in papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, to make the running. They emphasised "the sticks" of the new policy - congestion charging, the fuel price escalator etc. The government was caught on the back foot because it did not have clear, costed plans about what "carrots" it would provide. The recent petrol blockade may have happened anyway, but the government's slowness in producing a positive, practical blueprint for transport left it fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

With the publication of the transport Plan and the Transport Act, that blueprint is now in place. It will herald significant improvements. More money will be poured into the railways than at any time during the last 50 years. Tougher regulation will help overcome the fragmentation of the system brought about by privatisation. Above all, the government is planning for an expanding rail system that will carry more passengers and earn more revenue. A far cry from the Tories' thoughts when they privatised it: they assumed and planned for a declining railway.

The amount of money going to local authorities for transport schemes is being doubled. New grants are being given to assist rural and urban bus services. Trams are back in fashion and in other ways too a new agenda is being developed. There is a recognition that car use needs to be curbed, out-of-town development curtailed, congestion and work place parking charged for and possibly motorway tolls introduced. There is a tough target to cut road deaths. Speed is now taken seriously. There is real momentum behind the moves to create better transport. The building blocks have been laid for an improved, more sustainable and more equitable transport system.

But important challenges remain for a second term. A key area will be transport and social exclusion. The 10-Year Plan provided significant money for railways and roads, much less for the three modes of transport on which socially excluded communities most rely: buses, walking and cycling.

I do not believe the government has got it right yet on buses. The Transport Act set a lot of store by Quality Bus Partnerships. These are where bus companies are invited by local authorities to enter into a partnership to run "quality" services on a given route. The local authority will usually agree to provide bus priority measures such as bus lanes in return for the company using smart vehicles. But the local authorities have little power to get the companies to do things they might not want to - they cannot, for example, specify fare levels or frequencies under the terms of a Quality Partnership.

The Transport Bill does provide for the introduction of Quality Contracts should the partnerships not work. But the government has made it clear it sees Quality Contracts as very much a last resort.

Yet many local authorities are crying out for such contracts. The contracts would enable them to put a whole group of bus routes, even an entire area, out to tender specifying routes, fare levels, frequencies, timetables and the design of vehicles and bus stops. This would be similar to the system that operates in London (which has consistently bucked the national trend and recorded a year-on-year rise in bus passengers).

Recent events in the bus industry might force the government to look more kindly on Quality Bus Contracts. Right across the country, but notably in southwest England, operators have been slashing bus services, particularly off-peak ones, in both rural and urban areas. It would be useful if this acted as a wake-up call to the government over its bus policy. At the very least, buses need the same sort of regulatory framework that the government envisages for rail.

Since most parts of the country are not served by trains or trams, high-quality bus services are crucial to tempt people out of their cars. Moreover, they always have been, and will remain, critical to low-income communities. The bus is often the only link between an isolated estate and the rest of the world. Take it away, or make it too expensive, and the sense of exclusion and neglect on the estate is heightened.

Bus fares are too high. Over the last 25 years, they have risen on average by 80% in real terms. (The cost of motoring, incidentally, for all the noisy blockades at the pumps, has stayed the same.) Labour, in its second term, needs to provide revenue funding for transport, not just so that fares can be lowered, but to ensure that its proposed capital investment is not wasted. The 10-Year Plan came up with oodles of capital funding, but without revenue support, local authorities and transport operators will only be able to build fine transport infrastructure, not a system that people will use.

Walking and cycling - the most equitable of modes - are also essential to cut social exclusion. It is probably true that most of Labour still sees walking and cycling as "add-ons" to public transport. For low-income communities, children and most older people, they are central to their lives. Ken Worpole, in his new pamphlet In Our Environment, published by the Green Alliance, writes "an access- ible and enjoyable neighbourhood is only as strong as its weakest links - the streets connecting it. Walking is both the most sociable and the only environmentally beneficial way of reclaiming the local neighbourhood."

Norman Tebbitt's infamous advice to unemployed people to "get on your bike" to look for jobs had at least one grain of truth in it: for many years there was a culture of cycling amongst low-income communities. It disappeared as poor people were moved miles from facilities and work, car ownership increased and roads became more dangerous.

Cycling still has the potential to be a key part of our transport system - for all sectors of society. There is evidence, unearthed in Car Dependency, published by the RAC in 1996, that people are most likely to switch away from cars for shorter journeys - and half the journeys we make are under two miles long. The bicycle also gives its rider an independence and flexibility matched only by the car.

For walking and cycling to realise their potential, a second-term Labour government needs to ensure local authorities have sufficient funds to put into them, but also that a tough road safety policy is implemented nation-wide. A meaningful road safety policy needs to be about more than just cutting road accidents (to which is Labour is committed). It must be about reducing danger on the roads. Britain's road casualty figures are amongst the lowest in Europe, yet people perceive more dangerous roads. The riddle is resolved by the fact that casualties have dropped because cars have become more crashworthy (thus better able to protect their occupants in a crash), and because the number of vulnerable users on the roads has dropped dramatically over the past two decades.

Larry Whitty, in a successful stint as Road Safety Minister, has developed the basis of an effective road safety policy: slower speeds; better enforcement; stronger sentences; positive encouragement of Home Zones and traffic calming. This basis needs to be expanded in a second term. The Tories will try again to portray it as anti-car. But a tough road safety policy, sold as a key element in improving people's quality of life, will be welcomed by a diverse constituency....from the villages of 'Middle England' blighted by traffic to run-down estates perched beside busy roads.

Labour, in its second term, has the opportunity to transform the lives of many disabled people. The Disability Discrimination Act has given huge impetus to developing an accessible transport system. The act requires all transport operators to take reasonable steps over the next few years to ensure their systems are accessible. The railways have traditionally lagged behind the buses and London Underground in moving towards accessibility. The government has an opportunity to rectify this by making a fully accessible system a condition of each 20-year rail franchise.

There are two further key areas that Labour will need to deal with in a second term: traffic growth and aviation policy. Both are areas of potential conflict. There is widespread recognition that traffic growth rates are unsustainable. The government has the fiscal measures to deal with this growth: congestion charging (it would be counter-productive for Labour not to support Ken Livingstone's bold plans for London); work place parking charges; motorway tolling and tax on fuel. They will need to be used if the government is to curb traffic growth, with their purpose clearly explained and the extra money raised used for visibly better transport systems and an all-round improvement in the quality of people's lives.

Any future road building needs to be very carefully targeted. Otherwise traffic growth will not be curbed. Massive road building, like the £21 billion programme outlined in the 10-Year Plan, is also likely to lead to protest, particularly from the rural areas of Middle England. The consistent message of the past decade is that, a few genuine village bypasses aside, rural areas do not like road building schemes.

Aviation will also be difficult for the government, which has always seen it as a second-term issue. It used the first term to prepare for its Aviation White Paper, which should be published in late 2001, shortly after the decision on Heathrow Terminal Five Aviation Minister Chris Mullin has committed the government to adopting a demand management approach to aviation. This is realistic, as to cater for the predicted rise in demand over the next 20 years or so would required another four Heathrows!

The government is also committed to developing regional airports. Any aviation strategy must be based on sound economics and be able to cut through the industry's propaganda to gauge the true link between regional regeneration and aviation growth. The UK must also work with other countries to cut the subsidies received by the aviation industry (for example, no tax is paid on aviation fuel), as well as give due weight to the very pressing needs of residents living under the flight paths to airports.

For many of these people, a lot of whom are on low incomes without the option of moving away, it is aircraft noise, not traffic that blights their lives. The Aviation White Paper is Labour's chance to do something about these 'motorways in the sky'.

John Stewart is a member of SERA’s executive committee and of its transport group. He is also the vice-chair of Transport 2000.

John Stewart@virgin.net