Good day my good friend,

This week has been a bit of a scorcher, and I have spent most of it sat in my back room “office”, laptop belching out heat into a room that is already north of 30C, with a fan simply blowing hot air on me. I’m not really a summer person, in case you had not guessed.

Also, a big, big welcome to everyone who has signed up following my webinar on How to Make Friends and Influence Councillors with the excellent Mark Ames yesterday. Come in, make yourself comfortable. The kettle is on. Tea is it? One lump or two? And do you want milk with that? So, make yourself comfy and read on!

🗓️ 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. 

🎓 Varsity Blues

Nestled in the countryside of the Home Counties is a project that is not a transport project, it is an economic one. Until recently, construction workers have been busy on site creating cuttings, stablising embankments, installing many, many miles of copper wire, and even building a station outside a small town.

Now, if you live near this small ribbon through the Buckinghamshire fields, you might hear the trundle of steel wheels, and the sound of a distant train horn. Much like you may have done had you lived here in the 1960s, or even the 1990s when freight blasted its way past the end of your garden.

This quietly revolutionary project, known technically as East-West Rail – Western Section (further broken down into “Connection Stage 1” and “Connection Stage 2” – more on that later), is dwarved by the other construction project on its doorstep – HS2. But unlike its bigger brother, it is fast coming to fruition. Trains are already on test on the track between Oxford and Bletchley, with the view to starting regular services between Milton Keynes and Oxford later this year.

In a past life I worked in this project. I was the Central Bedfordshire Council representative on the East-West Rail Consortium for many years, as it slowly and diligently developed the case for re-introducing passenger train services along the old Varsity Line between Oxford and Cambridge, via Milton Keynes and Bedford. Aside from it being a chance to reopen a railway wrongly closed during the 1960s (even the infamous Dr Richard Beeching recommending keeping the line open), to me this strikes as a perfect example of something that many attempts to re-write the Treasury’s Green Book have tried to do, and failed.

It is a great example of how the strategic case for an investment trumps the value for money case, on economic terms.

If you look at the surrounding geography of the line, it does not lend itself well to a scheme such as this. Yes, there are major towns and cities along the route, namely Oxford (165,000 people), Milton Keynes (292,000), Bedford (106,000 in 2011), and Cambridge (146,000), but the density of population along the route does not lend itself to rail. There are significant sections of purely countryside. Furthermore, in almost all instances the main stations in these towns and cities are slightly peripheral to the main population area. The most extreme example being Oxford.

The clues to the impact of this are found in the East West Rail Western Section Business Case from 2018. Assuming baseline growth rates from the National Trip End Model (NTEM), the Benefit:Cost ratio of this scheme is 1.3:1. A low value for money solution. Yet the very same paragraph – in fact the very same sentence – gives clues as to why this scheme is going ahead:

The benefit cost ratio (BCR) of EWR Phase 2 is assessed to be between 1.3 (likely low value for money) and 2.4 (likely high value for money) depending on assumptions made about economic and housing growth in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc. The lower end of the range reflects baseline forecasts of population, housing and employment growth consistent with the DfT National Trip End Model (NTEM). The upper end of the range represents a ‘higher growth’ scenario which reflects the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) vision, supported by the government, of up to one million new homes across the Arc by 2050.

A quick aside on terminology here. EWR Phase 2 refers to the Western Section currently under construction. With Phase 1 being Oxford to Bicester, which was delivered as part of Chiltern Railway’s Evergreen Project. The Arc refers to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc for growth. Yes, I struggle to keep up with the terminology too. Back to the business case.

At an early stage of this project, the Consortium knew that it would not stack up as a transport scheme. The economic case was not strong enough. At that time, a conscious decision was taken, after many intense and sometime fractious officer and councillor meetings. That if this railway was ever to see the light of day, it needed to showcase how this scheme would stimulate economic growth through employment and housing growth.

We commissioned Oxford Economics to demonstrate the wider economic benefits of a railway specifically, through a much deeper dive as required by TAG at the time. You can still read the report here. The results were stark.

The scheme would result in an estimated GDP uplift of £32.2 million per annum in 2012 prices. This would result in additional tax revenues to the Treasury of £14.7 million per year. Based on figures for the construction cost at the top, the scheme would pay for itself inside 15 years. For a railway likely to still be there in a century, that was a bargain.

What made this challenging was that in order to achieve this, significant housing growth would be expected. A tough political pill to swallow. One that required focussing on not seeing housing as the price for the scheme, but the scheme as the prize for the housing. Now, there are much more nuanced discussions over housing taking place across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire right now. But let me tell you this, you do not get council’s to agree with Government on a spatial development framework for an area without some acceptance of growth. Something that East-West Rail played a part in.

The growth being planned is not small either. Across the Western Section, the Oxford Local Plan has identified a need for over 21,000 new homes by 2042. Plan:MK for Milton Keynes identifies a number of strategic sites for growth, including the huge Eastern and Western Expansion areas, constituting 4,000 and 6,000 new homes respectively. While Bedfordshire has the 4,500 home development in the Marston Vale, as well as the now famous plans for Universal Studios, right beside the line which East West Rail will run on. All with having East-West Rail being a bit part of their justification for development.

This is not a transport scheme. This is an economic growth scheme that just so happens to have trains running on it. As the Business Case for the scheme itself states:

Removing the constraints resulting from the under supply of housing, facilitated by new infrastructure including EWR Phase 2, will help support the Arc to achieve its economic potential, in part by enabling more people that want to live and work in the Arc to do so and thereby increasingly labour supply, helping business and organisations to grow by keeping them competitive.

This is a scheme where the strategic case for it has driven the justification for the scheme, not the Benefit:Cost Ratio. This, for me, is where the most valuable schemes come from. Not because the numbers add up, but because the narrative and reason for the scheme is so compelling that it justifies the scheme almost on its own merit.

In the case of East-West Rail, this was the result of a conscious decision made by Consortium Partners to move the scheme away from being a transport scheme that reopened an old railway, to an economic development project that unlocked new growth and tackled economic challenges across a region. That, to me, is a compelling reason to deliver the scheme.

My only bug bear with the scheme is breaking the Western Section down into two sections. Connection 1 will go live in December, with trains running between Milton Keynes and Oxford. Meanwhile Connection 2, where additional trains will run to Bedford via Bletchley (i.e not to Milton Keynes) along the existing Marston Vale Line, is not due until around 2030 due to the need to upgrade this line. As someone living near Bedford, the inability to run trains on an existing line is highly frustrating, meaning that every time I go to Oxford it means driving at least as far as Bletchley in the future.

Often I hear transport schemes being justified based on transport reasons. East-West Rail is a good example, where it has been spoken of righting an historical wrong – a railway wrongly closed (partially, anyway). However logical that is, that does not get things done. Transport schemes have to be economic, social, and environmental transformations first, and transport schemes second.

If we do this, then more schemes like East West Rail may get built. Personally, I cannot wait to travel to Bletchley and get my very first direct train to Oxford, the first such train for nearly 60 years. And one that will likely transform the area around it in the future. All because some brave people decided that despite the numbers, the scheme was worth it. We should do this more.

👩‍🎓 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.

Did the healthy cities pilot policy improve household health poverty? An empirical study from China

TL:DR – Yes.

Purposive transition governance for road freight decarbonization

TL:DR – A wide variety of governance incentives are needed to decarbonise road freight, and government should have a much more proactive role.

Communicating car costs: Results from stated and revealed preference experiments

TL:DR – Just providing more information on fuel costs does not affect real world purchasing decisions.

Measuring exposure to extreme heat in public transit systems

TL:DR – If an area has better public transport, people are less likely to be exposed to dangerous heat levels due to choice of services and their ability to walk.

😀 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.

• Powys County Council seeks views on how to improve walking and cycling routes (Shropshire Star)
• Works improve town’s sustainable travel options (BBC) – that town is Penzance, by the way
• Virgin orders cross-Channel trains (International Railway Journal)
• Amtrak Rolling Out New High-Speed Trains: What Northeast Travelers Should Know (Daily Voice)
• Disabled Amtrak Riders See Progress, but Still ‘Feel Like Freight’ (New York Times) – this is an improvement, if far from perfect

📺 On the (You)Tube

I never knew that I thought floating bridges were cool until I saw this video by Practical Engineering.

📚 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.

• How One Bad Project Can Poison the Entire Mode (Pedestrian Observations)
• City size and productivity (Tom Forth)
• How Wind and Solar Power Helps Keep America’s Farms Alive (Daily Yonder)
• The Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again (Undercover Economist)
• Climate politics: Understanding political inaction on climate change (VoxDev)

📰 And finally…

3 elves are cycling from the German town of St. Nikolaus to Finland’s Santa Claus Village. Actually, its postal workers, but that is not as interesting a title is it?

For this week’s music, I have been a fan of Green Day for over 30 years now, and their 2000 album Warning is vastly under-rated. In it, they moved from their punk rock traditions (that they would come back to with a vengeance in their next album, American Idiot) for more folk and soft rock. Its a great Friday afternoon listen to put you in the mood for the weekend.

This song, Deadbeat Holiday, is my favourite track on the whole album. Enjoy.