Good day my good friend.
It has been wonderful seeing so many of you good readers over the last couple of weeks at Active City York and Transport Practitioners Meeting. There were so many of you to mention here, but I wanted to say thank you for your kind words. Hearing them really helps me with writing this, as apart from opens and click-through metrics its hard to get any feedback at all. So any is welcomed. I hope that you all enjoyed yourselves at the respective events.
I write this as my train from Manchester is gliding through the Staffordshire countryside. Lets see if I can knock this out before I get to London shall we?
📅 Mobility Camp is back, and this September we are going to Cardiff. It promises to be an amazing day. It would be amazing if you can be there, or maybe sponsor the day.
💼 I am also available for freelance transport planning consultancy, through my own company Mobility Lab. You can check out what I do here.
🗣️ Stop Bleating On
This week, we got to find out about what schemes had been spared the chop (no more lamb puns, I promise) in the Spending Review, as the Transport Secretary made a statement to the House of Commons on what schemes will be funded by the Government over the spending review period. The nice little map shows what schemes have been spared the axe, and the ones which are to undertake a review of their viability and affordability. Or as its known in local government, government asking councils to pony up the cash or it will face the axe. So lets just assume that those that are going to be reviewed or delayed until later are cancelled in all but name.
For what its worth, I think that this is a grown up and rational exercise that the government has gone through. Network North is arguably the worst strategy for transport spending I have ever seen in my life, cooked up over a weekend by senior advisors at a party conference to help soften the blow of a planned announcement on HS2. It promised the moon on a stick with only a vague hint towards cost savings from the HS2 money pit that seems to be devouring all before it right now. It should never have been taken seriously as a policy, and is now rightly consigned to history.
The job of popping the Network North bubble was always going to be hard, and sacrifices needed to be made. With pet schemes shifted back or cancelled to the frustration of communities across the country.
That does not, however, mean that what has been produced is good. Nor that there are not still serious flaws in the government’s thinking.
The first thing that gets me is what seems to be a complete lack of strategy in any of this. The Infrastructure Strategy was published barely a month ago and is not mentioned in the slightest. Nor is any reference made to the forthcoming Integrated National Transport Strategy. Even more than that, previous announcements on major transport projects, such as the Lower Thames Crossing and Government clearly stating their preferences for extra runway capacity at Heathrow and Gatwick are not mentioned, and certainly not mapped. And you really have to dig to discover how transport strategies of the sub-national transport bodies are in any way related to any of this. If you want to do this, I recommend reviewing the scheme lists in their respective Strategic Investment Plans, and cross-referencing to those announced this week.
It reads more like a policy announcement which isn’t a policy announcement. It’s a response to the spending review and its implications for transport, as opposed to a coherent plan placed in the context of well-established strategy for doing something. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat, as Sun Tzu once said.
Then there is how it is presented. A cursory look at the map does a very good job of hiding the fact that railway infrastructure upgrades really got the short end of the stick. The vast majority of the blobs on the map are locations where feasibility into doing Access for All schemes at stations will be done. Don’t get me wrong, accessibility improvements at stations is vital work that should have been done 30 years ago. But the way that it is used to dress up a strategy that doesn’t actually promise to deliver them is pretty poor form.
So is the postponement of the Midland Mainline electrification to Sheffield. This project is a perfect example of constant meddling and mind-changing hampering delivery and letting down communities across the country. What matters as much as having sufficient funding to deliver is having consistent funding to deliver. If you know that a project is being committed to, within a certain budget envelope, over a number of years, it provides an incentive to learn and improve and deliver similar such schemes better.
In truth, the UK has badly needed a rolling programme of rail electrification for a while. Under Network Rail Control Periods, the rail industry should be set a target of electrifying a certain mileage of line every year, consistently, for 10 years. That way, dedicated teams can be established and achieve efficiencies through constant learning and improving their practice. But instead, government funds electrification on a scheme-by-scheme basis. The result is that a region of the country whose rail network is as bad as the North claims its own is gets overlooked. Again.
As for the road schemes, it seems to me that anything that had got the Outline Business Case stage stood a chance of getting funding, while everything else is now under review. Some of the schemes have questionable business cases in my mind, and there certainly seems to be no inherent logic in the distribution of the schemes that have had funding committed. Maybe the decision was based on the strength of the business case of each, with those seen by central government as having a strong chance of being delivered in this Parliament getting the nod.
Oh, and where is the mention of walking, wheeling, and cycling? Again, it is up to the reader to connect the dots to active travel investment elsewhere. Because it seems that this kind of coherence is not being demonstrated here. Who knows, maybe this coherence is in the mind of a SPAD, or in the notebook of some poor person in the Treasury.
If your community got the scheme that it has wanted, your area is actually benefitting from planned rail infrastructure upgrades (East West Rail is mentioned, so I am not too displeased), or you worked on a scheme that is a slam-dunk in your mind and it got funded – good for you. You have a right to feel positive about this. Plus as I mentioned, this was a necessary exercise for government given the woefulness of Network North and the funding environment we find ourselves in.
But this isn’t a plan. The Government says it has a plan for delivery, and despite lots of strategy publications, I am yet to see this coherent plan. Maybe it will come in time. Until then, I personally am yet to be convinced.
👩🎓From academia
The clever clogs at our universities have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
TL:DR – CCTV and Lighting.
The role of social perceptions on willingness-to-pay for innovations
TL:DR – If people see others are willing to pay for innovations, they are more willing to pay for them themselves.
TL:DR – Current classifications of rural aren’t helpful in framing rural transport problems.
TL:DR – Different types of fares affect accessibility more than others do.
😀 Positive News
Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.
- London borough that doubled 20mph zones shoots up league table of best places in capital to walk and cycle (MSN)
- Princess Victoria Street is now (almost) permanently pedestrianised (Bristol 24/7)
- Bristol – Portishead railway reopening funding in place (Railway Gazette International)
- County’s buses to get new routes and improvements (BBC Suffolk)
- Town centre junction closed to buses and taxis in pedestrian priority trial (Jersey Evening Post)
📺 On the (You)Tube
Geoff Marshall rode the Settle and Carlisle Line and it is joyous. As I can confirm, it is an utterly stunning railway. You should ride it.
📚Random things
These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport, and not just think about transport itself. I hope that you enjoy them.
- Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized (Wired)
- Firefox is fine. The people running it are not (The Register)
- How Greece came back from the brink (Financial Times)
- Why ‘Brain Drain’ is an incomplete story of migration (VoxDev)
- Why Texas ‘Flash Flood Alley’ Is So Deadly, Explained by Geology (Scientific American)
📰 And finally…
A dinosaur museum found dinosaur bones under their own car park. Its not quite as sensational as the bones of Richard III being found under a car park in Leicester, but the irony is funny.
As for this week’s music, after Black Sabbath’s very last performance last Saturday in Birmingham, it could only be the amazing Crazy Train by front man Ozzy Osbourne. This song has the best guitar intro ever, performed by the legendary Randy Rhodes. Sit back and enjoy the riffs.
Mobility Matters 