Mini Switzerland with Thomas Ableman (From Yimbypod)

Do you listen to the YIMBYPod with James O’Malley?

Well, if you do, I’ve got some alarming news for you - next week, you’ll be hearing me.

James O’Malley asked me to come and tell him about Mini Switzerland, the national demonstrator of Swiss-style transport integration I’m trying to will into being in the Hope Valley.

Take a listen for why I believe Mini Switzerland is so key to the future of rural transport across the UK, how the Swiss have got it so right and the way I’m hoping we can learn from them.

If you want to hear more from YIMBYPod, you can find it right here.

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

A reply to a Reply

Dear Omer,

Thank you for your reply [link] to my blog post asserting that 20th-century transport planning failed.

I am delighted to continue the conversation.

Did 20th-century transport planning really fail?

You are, of course, right that it would be fiendishly difficult to prove it failed without a counterfactual of the last eighty years.

But just because we can’t prove something doesn’t mean it’s not true.

If a jury fails to convict a murderer, it doesn’t mean they’re not a murderer, just that they got away with it.

In this case, it may not be possible to convict twentieth-century transport planning of grievous economic and social harm, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

A reminder of my core argument: that as a result of the dominant approaches in the twentieth century, public transport retreated from the places that people actually live and became more and more concentrated on a small number of high-volume corridors (which saw considerable capacity investment).

Today, 43% of Brits have to walk more than 30 mins to reach a railway, tube or light rail station. A fag packet calculation would estimate it was probably around 10% at the start of the century.

I suggest that this was harmful, not just ecologically and environmentally.

Here, m’lud, is my evidence:

• London is the only place in the UK that continued to expand rail capacity post-war (Victoria line, Jubilee line, DLR, Elizabeth line) and the only place to have a defined standard to ensure public transport serves every residential community (all households within 400m ). London is also the only place in the UK to achieve productivity levels equivalent to their European benchmark (as evidenced by the Centre for Cities), and is - by a large margin - the most economically successful part of the UK

• London’s economy and population have both grown rapidly since 1980. Prior to that, economic growth was anaemic and population was declining. There are multiple reasons but London gave up attempting to build new roads around that time (M11 link road excepted) and moved towards public transport, place-based growth. In this video, from 6:07, I talk about that moment of transition when the first attempt to connect Canary Wharf to the City by Highway was augmented (and ultimately dwarfed) by the DLR. Even if you can argue that London could have grown without this change in approach, it’s certainly proof that a road-based approach was unnecessary.

• Many of the approaches used in the 20th century have been reversed. We no longer build inner-city motorways, which makes it unlikely that the M8, M602, A40(M), M41 (etc) were good investments.

• The core purpose of transport is access to other places. Good quality public transport is not available to most residential communities outside London but the UK is too densely populated for good quality private transport to be viable outside rural areas. The result is that suburbs outside London have neither good quality public, nor private transport. These places tend to be economically deprived.

• House prices are heavily correlated with public transport access. There is a consistent decay curve in every city. This suggests that public transport is economically beneficial, yet it was cut in the 20th century.

In summary, if it succeeded, then what we’ve got now is what was intended. Outside London, that seems implausible.

Anyway, I know that’s not core to your argument, but I thought it worth making the point, seeing as you gave me the opportunity.

The aims of postwar planning

In your response, you express scepticism towards vision-led planning. You suggest that postwar planners were motivated by economic growth and by a positive “Futuroma” vision.

I don’t think that’s right: I think they were motivated by traffic.

There had been a pre-war surge in car ownership and this looked likely to continue. It wasn’t unreasonable to extrapolate this forward and see that prewar road capacity would be overwhelmed. “Predict and provide” wasn’t a philosophy designed to deliver economic growth: it was a panicked reaction to save our cities.

Obviously, the creators of “Futurama” were motiviated by the Futurama vision, but I don’t think that’s what motivated the transport planning profession of the twentieth century.

Britain doesn’t “do” vision very well (something I’m keen to help it change!), whereas we do panicked muddling-through brilliantly. It’s a core skill!

Indeed, the lack of vision in Britain compared to France was one of the key learnings from the policymakers that I recently (along with colleagues from Create Streets and CBT) took to France. The French have a set-up that allows vision.

The Known Flaws

Before getting onto the crux of your argument, I was fascinated to read in your reply that the flaws in transport appraisal were known as soon as it was created.

The fact that appraising road schemes by journey times doens’t work as it ignores the demand generated, and it ignores what happens at the end of the road is well known now.

What I didn’t know is that it was well known then.

What a truly remarkable counterfactual hoves into sight (and, then, sadly recedes) if we imagine that this had been acted upon back in the 1950s!

Now let’s get onto where we disagree (and I think you’re right: we do).

Place-Based Planning

As you rightly say, our opinions then converge around the idea that it would make much more sense to do Place >> Plan >> Project, as opposed to Project >> Plan >> Place.

We also both agree that it is deeply countercultural for this sector, especially for the big infrastructure operators.

It’s going to be hard to get there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Ask the Spreadsheet

But our opinions diverge at the end.

You say:

I strongly believe that whatever we think is needed, we need to develop an objective system of appraisal to make decisions. We can't simply say "this is the vision" and test schemes based on whether they get us there or not.

I say that is precisely what we must do.

You agree with the proponents of numerical appraisal that there must be some empirical appraisal yardsticks, you just think that the current ones are flawed.

I, by contrast, argue that the concept is flawed, for two reasons.

1) It doesn’t avoid any of the risks you describe. You fear vision but the authors of the appraisal methodology are the authors of a vision. It is just a vision expressed in numbers. To remind readers that you suggested an appraisal that looks something like this:

• Access.

• Land values.

• Health and environment.

• Justice.

I think these are very sensible. But they are a societal vision. I suspect that there are some people who would value different things.

Therefore, we have to allow different places to define what it is that they want, and then appraise based on judging whether or not their schemes are likely to achieve those outcomes.

I’m afraid we need appraisal folk to become a bit more humble and accept that they are only there to mark the homework but not set the questions.

Appraisal should not be trying to tell us what we want. It should be testing whether what we say we want is plausibly delivered by what we propose to build.

At the moment, the appraisal system is the vision.

Worst case, it determines what gets built, to the detriment of what cities actually want.

Best case, people build what they want but reverse-engineer it so that they manage to also tick enough appraisal boxes.

Replacing time savings with justice doesn’t change the fact that it’s not an appraiser’s job to decide what a city should have.

I fear that your desire for objectivity is just as likely to bake in a world view as either “Futurama” or me, running workshops with Combined Authorities on their transport vision. I would just argue that we’re being more honest about it.

With all best regards,

Thomas

What Vision-Led Planning Means for Transport People (Preview)

NPPF

The National Planning Policy Framework is the overall instruction document for England’s planning authorities.

A new version was published in December 2024, and this is what it says:

This is important stuff. Vision-led transport planning is a very different approach from what we’re used to.

As we discussed in last week’s post, transport planning in the UK is typically infrastructure-led.

This turns the approach on its head.

To understand what this means, let’s look at what changes for each of the key stakeholders involved:

Planning Teams

These are the folk whose lives are going to change the most.

Vision-led transport planning means that there needs to be a vision to lead the transport plan. And, crucially, it’s not a transport vision - it’s a holistic place-based vision.

It describes the aspirations of local people (e.g. kids able to play out, able to reach local services on foot, easy access to work, a sense of community, an attractive streetscape), many of which have transport implications - but which go far beyond.

The vision is anchored in a future date. This is important. A vision is about the destination, not the incremental steps from today’s reality. It says that “By xxxx date, yyyy will be true”.

It’s not an intuitive process for most of us. Currently, we do transport planning the way we do our own career planning. We look at how things are, and think about the next steps from here.

Vision-led planning is like learning from Michael Heseltine.

For younger readers, Michael Heseltine was an ambitious young Tory who was famous for having written a career plan as follows:

25: Millionaire.
35: MP.
45: Minister.
55: Cabinet.
65: Downing Street

(he achieved every one of these goals, though he only made it to Downing Street as Deputy Prime Minister).

Vision-led planning is about setting out where you want to get to first, and then figuring out how to achieve it.

This means that producing the vision requires lots of iterative work with the transport team and local infrastructure owners, as the vision needs to be ambitious but realistic. What is possible by a date requires work to establish, but the process starts with defining what good looks like as an end-state.

I can’t emphasise this enough: the vision is outcome-based, not project-based.

It doesn’t list schemes, it lists deliverable outcomes for residents and the economy.

Obviously, to produce a viable list of outcomes, you’ll have worked through some schemes with the transport team that would deliver those outcomes, but the outcomes are key.

A role model here is General Eisenhower. A quote to keep in mind is:

Plans are useless but planning is essential.

What he meant by that was that the goal was to reach Berlin. To achieve that, he had a fully worked-up plan. He’d done lots of planning. But he wasn’t wedded to a plan. As circumstances changed, he’d adopt a different plan. As long as he reached Berlin.

While the vision will have targets, it’s got to be human-centric, not metric-centric. It describes the place as opposed to the numbers. That doesn’t mean there won’t be measures, but it’s got to be clear why.

So, for example, you might want very safe streets. You might want a target that there will be zero serious road deaths or injuries. Good target. But the why is because kids need to be able to play in the street.

You might want a high share of public transport journeys. But the why is that you want all residents to be connected to economic and social opportunities, regardless of access to a car.

Starts with the lives people want to lead and the economy you want to create.

About business cases:

The reason the outcome is crucial is that when we create projects, we need to be able to articulate a rational explanation of why the project will lead to the outcomes. This is important because you need to be able to measure the business case for the projects.

We’re not going to do this using a traditional transport BCR. What we’re going to do is measure whether the projects will lead to the outcomes described in the vision. That’s why it’s so important to be able to be clear on the why.

For example, if we’re saying that everyone in residential areas needs to be able to access jobs and opportunities without a car, that’s how we’re going to measure the projects.

Two final warnings to planning teams:

1) Don’t allow your transport colleagues to simply pitch you the schemes they’ve always wanted to do. We’re doing vision-led planning. That means the vision is in charge.

2) Don’t simply hand over tracts of land to developers and allow them to build what they want. The transport plan only works if the housing that’s built is designed to deliver the vision. Just as you can’t deliver the vision without transport solutions designed to deliver it, so it also requires that the housing (or offices or retail parks, etc) are absolutely and rigorously designed to deliver the vision.

Transport Teams

The great news is that your job is about to become much more interesting!

Forget a lot of what you’ve learned so far, and focus on iterating and problem-solving to achieve the vision.

It’s a much more fun job!

However, there are certain things you’re going to have to do in order to make this work.

Firstly, step away from the models - they won’t necessarily help you. Most transport models were designed for the traditional predict and provide / incremental-from-where-we-are style of planning.

Instead, you’re working iteratively with your planning colleagues to create plans and projects to deliver a vision.

About business cases:

It’s at this point that you need to be imaginative about business cases.

Combined Authorities (and future Strategic Authorities) either have or are likely to have large capital budgets for transport schemes. So money is available. But we’ve got some hard-grained assumptions about what we can and can’t spend money on, and we need to change this.

Vision-led schemes DO NOT need positive BCRs based on the old way of doing things. This point can often worry people, so let’s be absolutely clear. Listen to my interview with Jonny Mood, Director of the National Audit Office, on my podcast. He couldn’t be clearer - you need to be able to demonstrate that the scheme delivers the vision, not that it ticks an old-style BCR benchmark.

That’s why your iterative work with the Planning team is so important - the schemes need to deliver the vision and the vision needs to be deliverable by the schemes.

Even though you can build a business case out of the vision, that doesn’t guarantee the funding.

Vision-led planning doesn’t create a magic money tree - a scheme that costs £80 million in the old way of doing things will still cost £80 million in this way of thinking.

So you also need to think imaginatively about costs and revenues.

Can you deliver the scheme at a lower cost than would be done traditionally? Look at the Very Light Rail scheme in Coventry, which is in the process of proving a method for delivering trams at a quarter of the normal UK cost.

Look at tram-train schemes in Sheffield and Cardiff, which are creating lower-cost models for connecting places to the national rail network.

Look at the traffic circulation plan in Ghent which made the whole city centre largely car-free at low cost, simply through a handful of street closures.

The examples are out there, but a traffic model won’t help you find them: so focus on the real world.

As well as being imaginative about the project, you also need to be imaginative about the funding.

Does your vision include new housing? I expect it does. Can you fund some of the transport with land value capture? You can hear how this was successfully used on the Northumberland line on my podcast.

Moreover, it’s likely that the vision will be generating fare-paying customers. Assume them in business cases: and don’t be too cautious. The Northumberland line has seen five times as many passengers as forecast, which means a much higher proportion of the cost could have been covered by land value capture if that had been assumed.

Be entrepreneurial about funding your solutions to deliver the vision.

Now, the warning for you: you’re going to have to become a really good ring-leader.

Do you remember the episode of Yes Minister in which Jim Hacker meets representatives of the road, rail and aviation industries? Each one lobbies him for funding, claiming that only their mode can deliver the country’s transport goals.

That’s your life in future.

Previously, you’ve been able to sit back and see what National Highways or Network Rail dropped from the sky onto your patch, and then react.

That won’t do going forward - you’ve got to proactively work with each to work out what they can do for you to deliver your vision.

It’s complex and iterative because they’re talking to every other authority at the same time.

That’s OK - iterative is fine.

Just be demanding on behalf of your vision.

Infrastructure Owner and Transport Operator

OK, this is the tough one. Vision-led planning requires a real change in approach for infrastructure-owners and operators.

As I wrote about previously, the vast majority of transport investment in recent decades has been initiated by Network Rail, National Highways (etc) trying to solve legitimate problems (generally insufficient capacity for demand).

This has resulted in more and more infrastructure being concentrated on fewer and fewer corridors, while the places where people live get less and less public transport.

Infrastructure owners have a vital role in initiating, developing and delivering projects.

But these projects need to be initiated to deliver the visions of the places they serve.

This is a complete reversal of how infrastructure owners currently plan their projects.

Currently local places are expected to react to centrally-created plans. “Oh, Coddleswap station is getting direct trains to the City of London thanks to the Superspeed Programme. What can we do with that?”, “Oh, the Northern Powerplant means we’re getting faster trains to Manchester. Cool, is that an opportunity?”, “Oh, the Silver Ring roundabout is getting an upgrade. Shall we put a business park there?” etc

In future, the infrastructure planning needs to be much more bottom-up and connected to local places.

Obviously, each infrastructure project can’t meet everyone’s needs. But it needs to be designed around the place-based visions.

It means infrastructure owners need to be much more connected to the visions emerging in their vicinity. That’s a new job.

As an infrastructure owner, if you have a need yourselves (e.g. capacity) be (highly!) imaginative about coming up with ideas to solve your problem that also achieve the visions of the places you interact with. 

Also, remember that you can use your own real estate to deliver the local vision. Maybe you can reduce demand on a rail line at peak times by using local land for new employment?

And, if you’re Network Rail or TfL or a bus company or a Combined Authority transport team, remember that the local vision is likely to be about getting you more customers.

Approach it in that spirit! Be imaginative and flexible about creative ideas to make it work.

DfT

The most important change required is from DfT.

They need to be willing and able to apply the spirit of their own Government’s framework and approve schemes based on the vision.

That means doing exactly as the NAO require (do listen to Jonny Mood if you haven’t done so!) and judging not based on the DfT’s own appraisal methodology but on whether the scheme achieves the objectives that the local vision has set. It’s not for central Government to overrule the vision, as long as it’s broadly consistent with Government policy.

This is a big change as it requires civil servants to accept that you do sometimes have to judge between apples and pears, because some places want apples and others want pears.

See yourselves as the clearing house of experimentation. Some imaginative business case methodologies will fail and others will overdeliver. Can you help smooth the risk and reward for authorities without feeling the need to apply a central methodology?

This is a big change but will make you one of the most powerful agents of positive change in the sector.

What it all means

Vision-led planning - done right - could lead to dramatically better transport outcomes.

The danger is that a sector used to models will attempt to create models to deliver it.

Vision-led planning isn’t about models: it’s about… vision.

The task now is for everyone in the transport ecosystem to focus on the skills necessary to make the most of the opportunity.

Those are the skills of collaboration, iteration, experimentation and long-term strategic thinking.

Step away from the model…

Place, Timetable, Project - not the other way round (Preview)

Do you remember the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch?

“You’re playing all the wrong notes”

“I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”.

The reason why transport in the UK is in a mess is that we sometimes make the right decisions, but we take them in the wrong order.

Underperforming

Firstly, when I say transport in the UK is a mess, what I mean is that it underperforms against its potential.

We have one of the best public transport networks in the world. But given we spend £40 billion on transport, we bloody should do.

The problem is that we could get so much more at little or no extra cost, if we simply made decisions the right way round.

What we should do is plan places, then timetables, then projects.

We tend to do the opposite.

Infrastructure-first

Transport investment in the UK typically starts with a scheme to solve an operational problem: generally a lack of capacity.

• “Thameslink trains through London are at capacity”> The Thameslink Programme

• “The West Coast mainline is full” > HS2

• “Manchester Piccadilly is crowded” > Ordsall Chord.

Looking down the list of transport investments of recent decades, virtually all of them are about increasing capacity (which, as per last week’s post, tend to increase demand on existing high-demand corridors, making public transport provision ever-more concentrated).

Once we’ve got the project, then we plan the timetable. 

Then timetable

It’s often a disaster. 

The Thameslink Programme’s infrastructure turned out not to support the timetable envisaged. The routes were too complex and caused conflicts with other trains. As a result, places (like Littlehampton) that were promised Thameslink trains never got them, the full capacity was never delivered and the launch was a humiliating disaster for the railway.

HS2 is the most expensive railway ever built (almost certainly globally) but still doesn’t have a viable timetable. We’re literally building a railway and don’t know how we’re going to use it. This is how the Swiss would have done it.

The Ordsall Chord cost £100 million to connect Piccadilly and Victoria stations in Manchester but for which no viable timetable exists as using it actually increases crowding at Piccadilly by repurposing a train path through the busiest platforms. Andrew Haines, former Chief Executive of Network Rail, described the phenomenon well:

"The Ordsall Chord is a classic example of a fantastic piece of infrastructure which has unlocked great new journey opportunities ... but where the new infrastructure was not supported by a sufficiently rigorous operating plan. Nobody really looked at how we would reliably operate 15 trains an hour, across six flat junctions in the space of a few miles, with disparate rolling stock, much of which will have travelled for several hours picking up potential delay on the way."

Time and time again, we start with the scheme, then move onto the timetable. Finally, we look at the place it’s in.

Finally Place

Place being at the end of the food chain is how we end up with the absurdity of the Thameslink Programme and Elizabeth line turning Farringdon into the best-connected business location in Britain (direct trains to three airports, the City, Canary Wharf, the Excel exhibition centre and Stratford).

Why’s that an absurdity?

Well, Farringdon is one of the few places in London where it’s virtually impossible to build high-rise buildings due to the Protected Views of the dome of St Paul’s from Primrose Hill and Parliament Hill, and the listed streetscapes of Clerkenwell.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting changing these protections - just highlighting that Farringdon’s a slightly daft place for… Farringdon station to be.

Farringdon is a bonkers place to put Britain’s best-connected business station

HS2 is creating the second-best located business zone in Britain in Old Oak Common (direct trains to two airports, 7 of Britain’s 10 largest cities, the City, Canary Wharf, blah, blah). But the railway had already made all kinds of irrevocable decisions when the masterplan was created. And the masterplan focuses on new homes, despite the potential for Old Oak to be a better Canary Wharf than Canary Wharf. 

All over the country, spectacular new infrastructure doesn’t deliver for the places it’s in because we drop the infrastructure as if from the air, but it’s not an integral part of the place it serves. 

The £18 billion Elizabeth line serves stations like Taplow that are surrounded by fields and not earmarked for houses (the houses that are gonna be built at Old Oak Common, perhaps?). 

In Ebbsfleet, we had the potential for a sustainable new town. But the station appeared where the high-speed line wanted it, even though it doesn’t connect with the local line that passes just north of the site, nor with any local transport (other than buses) to connect people to the new houses being built. As a result, Ebbsfleet consists of low-density, car-dependent houses, barely acknowledging the station for which it was built. 

The Manchester - Liverpool Railway (part of the newly announced Northern Powerhouse Rail) is another piece of spectacular infrastructure created without really considering place. What trains will run on it? Who knows. What is it designed to achieve? Dunno. You get the strong sense of a scheme that results from wrangling between Mayors, not because we know what the timetable will be.

Now, for clarity, all of these are useful. I’m a fan of new transport infrastructure. We need more in this country. Anything built will end up being used: it always does. (Find an underused railway opened post-war. There are precious few). So if the Liverpool - Manchester railway gets built, I’ll be cheering.

But we could do so much better. 

What we want is transport infrastructure that’s useful, with a timetable that works, supporting housing that’s attractive and sustainable. 

The way we get that is by reversing the order.

Instead of Project >> Timetable >> Place, let’s try Place >> Timetable >> Project

Place first

Let’s imagine that instead of Ebbsfleet being built around the station that the High Speed line provided, let’s imagine that first of all, it was decided what a sustainable new town in South East England would need. 

Let’s imagine we started with what we want life there to be like. i.e. what would the residents want? Well, even though there aren’t any residents in a non-existent town, we know from both research and from property prices what people want. 

They want an attractive, spacious house with green space for their kids to play in.

They want really good quality local services within a short walk of their front door.

They want a sense of community and to know their neighbours. They want to be able to get to shops and services without having to drive, to be able to walk home from the pub, not to have to ferry their teenager to parties, to be able to commute to the office comfortably and quickly. 

Given that we know that’s what people want, our starting position should be to write that down and say that what we build must give it to them.

Immediately, that makes some decisions for us. A sense of community and good local services means a certain level of what is called “gentle density”. It’s just economics: if you want a local shop and a local pub (and a local train service!), there need to be enough local people to be the customers.

The desire for green space and the need for gentle density means most of the space must be either housing, gardens or parks - so we can’t have lots of car parking. Again, these are decisions that make themselves.

Luckily, our people don’t actually want to have to own lots of cars: their preference is not to need a car at all. So that means we need reliable, plentiful public transport and great quality active travel. 

Oh, and the requirement for an easy commute means that the local travel network needs to connect to a train into town.

What we’ve done here is written out a “vision”: it doesn’t say where each street needs to go, or even make the transport choices. But it’s set some parameters for what we need to build. 

Once we’ve got our vision, we can then start thinking about the timetable. 

Timetable

We do this before we plan the infrastructure, as we need to know that everything connects up. 

Transport is a system. It’s no use building a rail line from our new town if there’s no capacity on the mainline for trains to run off the branch. (Like the Ordsall Chord)

It’s during this phase that we learn whether we need a tram or a light rail line or a railway branch or an autonomous shuttle or a caravan of camels. We’re interested in whatever transport solution can meet the vision. That will be different in different places. 

In London, which is better than most of Britain at this stuff, similar developments at Barking Riverside and Thamesmead naturally lend themselves to being connected by Overground and DLR respectively, because each is close to an existing line of one of those modes. That’s fine. This stage is about optioneering to fulfil the vision. The key thing is that the vision is king.

Once we have a timetable that we’re confident stacks up, then we develop our chosen scheme. 

Project last

Finally, we work out what transport we need. Maybe Ebbsfleet station as built is perfect. Maybe we should have had a station better integrated with the local rail network. Maybe that extra gentle density housing could have generated enough revenue to enable us to put a local tram to connect Ebbsfleet station with the surrounding area - possibly from Gravesend to Bluewater via Ebbsfleet, so people can have access to their local market town and to the shops without a car. I don’t know - I’m no expert on Ebbsfleet. The point is that it’s only now we figure out the transport.

One of the things that might be shocking for transport people is… it’s not all about us. What I mean by this is that transport problems might be solved with place-based solutions.

Let me give you an example from a place I know: Walthamstow.

In 2009, £6 billion was spent upgrading the Victoria line to the highest-capacity metro in Western Europe. In the peaks, a train runs every 90 seconds. It can move nearly 40,000 people every hour. It’s a transport triumph. 

Maybe we didn’t need to do all that, though. 

Let’s imagine that when the managers of London Underground in the mid 2000s had been faced with operational problems (the Victoria line trains were so full that they were causing delays and the kit was life-expired), they had not automatically reached for the lever of upgrading capacity, but instead had said “We’ve a business case to invest billions to solve our problems. How can we best spend those billions in a way that best enhances the vision for each place that we serve and solves our operational problem?”.

In Walthamstow, most commuters go on the Victoria line because…. that’s the line we have. Quite a few go on the Overground because… we also have that. They don’t use the lines we don’t have.

I mean, obviously.

As a result, no-one goes by train to the megahub of Stratford, despite it only being a few miles away.

Because you can’t.

However, the Overground from Walthamstow crosses the line to Stratford in Walthamstow Marshes.

It would probably have cost around £80 million to connect them up. If people could get jobs in Stratford, maybe fewer would need to go on the Victoria line. That would make Walthamstow better, despite us not getting our tube upgrade. 

What would it have looked like to try to meet the visions of each place on the Victoria line?

Maybe we could have entirely avoided the need to increase capacity on an existing route. 

That’s a huge mindset shift. 

But let’s imagine that replacing the life-expired trains and signals would have cost £ 3 billion, and the other £ 3 billion had been spent on a mixture of small projects (like in Walthamstow Marshes), new bike lanes, shared bike docking stations and investing in local employment options to make it easier to live and work in the same place, that would have reduced demand for travel back down to the existing capacity and made all the places on the Victoria line better places to live.

That would be a better way to spend the billions, right?

Moving Beyond Predict and Provide

The transport paradigm of “predict and provide” is associated with excessive motorway expansion.

“Just one more lane will solve it” has been tested to destruction in Los Angeles, though parts of the M25 are competitors.

It still happens (constantly!), though there’s been a consensus for decades that predict and provide is not suitable to plan roads. 

But the public transport sector is also fond of predict and provide.

In fact, it’s the primary public transport planning approach used in our country. I wrote about this last week.

Look back at the big list of projects up top (Thameslink, Victoria line, HS2, etc) and they’re all Predict and Provide projects. 

But it’s officially consigned to history, even if - as is so often the case - the old has died before the new has been fully born.

The new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) issued last year says:

View fullsize

That means that it’s not just my opinion that we need to switch the order of decision-making: it’s Government policy.

Now we just need to do it.

Next week, I’ll go into more detail on Vision-led planning.

Organisational Change (through Ecology) with Tom Geraghty (Copy)

Tom Geraghty is now an expert in psychological safety at work, but he started out as an ecologist.

A career focusing on how organisations actually work combined with his knowledge of ecosystems to make him realise something very important: organisations are ecosystems.

So he started thinking about what it would mean to consider organisational change through the prism of stewardship of an ecosystem and it turned out to be rich soil, if you’ll pardon the pun.

In today’s episode, you’ll learn what “substrate” means and why nurturing it is critical to landing innovation in your organisation.

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

Nationwide Digital Ticketing with Tina Christensen (Copy)

This year, Denmark will replace all its public transport ticketing systems with a new fully pay-as-you-go digital app.

Customers will get a transformationally better service; operators get a cost saving. What’s not to like?

This is all being delivered by the “Rejsekort & Rejseplan”, a dedicated organisation devoted to transport ticketing and information.

It is run by Tina Christensen, who tells me all about the culture change necessary to deliver this digital transformation.

It’s an inspirational story for any country further behind on digital ticketing (which is almost all of them).

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

The Home of Transport Innovation

Let me sell you the idea that Walthamstow, my home for the last 18 years, is Britain’s centre of transport innovation.

Come for a walk with me….

A mock-up of the Victoria line trains to be used at opening

The First Automated Metro

First stop, Walthamstow Central station.

This is the end of the Victoria line which, when it opened on the 1st September 1968, was the very first fully-automated metro anywhere in the world.

Since then, we’ve had the DLR and subsequently the Central, Jubilee, Northern and parts of four other lines have also had the trains drive themselves. Dozens of global cities have followed suit. But Walthamstow’s where it started, way back when Hey Jude was at Number 1.

And I literally mean Walthamstow is where it started: the very first train left Walthamstow Central for Highbury & Islington at 7:32 a.m.

the Inventor of the Modern Bicycle

Leave the station via the High Street exit and turn right. At the traffic lights, it becomes Church Hill.

This is where John Kemp Starley lived.

There were bicycles before John Kemp Starley, but they were penny farthings and - for most people - unusable.

Starley figured out how to use gears and chains to make both wheels the same size (and thus enable a normal human being to be able to both board and balance).

His company was called the Rover Cycle Company. After a bit, they removed the word “Cycle” and it just became Rover.

The names lives on as the last letter of JLR, Britain’s most successful car company, and in the Land Rovers and Range Rovers that scatter the streets of Walthamstow.

But - I’m glad to say - far more common than cars from his company are bikes to his design.

Frederick Bremer with his car

The first Petrol Car

Turn right at the church and walk through the churchyard. You’ve now reached the Vestry House Museum. Go inside (though not right now: it’s closed for refurbishment) and take a look at the Bremer car.

This was the very first petrol-driven car in the country.

At the time, it was assumed that new cars would be electric but Frederick Bremer thought that the internal combustion engine had more promise. So, in 1892, he built a car.

Having created the technology that would go on to revolutionise every aspect of life in the twentieth century, what did he do with it? Umm - he used it to potter round the streets of Walthamstow.

You know how the Brits have a reputation for being great at inventing stuff but terrible at commercialising it? Well, Frederick Bremer proves this is not a new phenomenon.

The same year as Frederick Bremer built his car in Walthamstow, a fella called Henry Ford did something similar in America. I wonder what happened to him?

The first powered flight

Now return to Church Hill and retrace your steps to the High Street. Carry on until it becomes Coppermill Lane and then follow it to where it ends on Walthamstow Marshes.

Here, on the River Lea floodplains, a freelance inventor called Sir Edwin Alliott Verdon Roe rented two of the arches in 1909 under what is now the Weaver line of the Overground.

There he built a plane. On the 23rd July, he flew 900 feet across the marshes, in Britain’s first-ever powered flight.

His company Avro went on to design the Avro Lancaster.

Honourable mentions

The invention of modern cars, modern bikes, modern metros and modern planes are the key reasons why I argue that Walthamstow is the home of transport innovation.

But there are some smaller things too:

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods - the modern craze for culture wars about closing streets to cars but leaving them open for bikes started in Walthamstow. While the rest of the country tore itself apart over Brexit in 2016, we argued about “Mini-Holland” as it was then known. Campaigners against the scheme took a coffin through the area to be traffic filtered, to symbolise the area’s death. Nine years on, it’s thriving. If you want to see a successful scheme for turning car-filled suburban streets into beautiful places for humans, come to Walthamstow.

Blackhorse View from Walthamstow Wetlands

Transit Oriented Development - TfL has grand ambitions to make money from property, with a new property company Places for London having recently been established. The poster boy for this approach is Walthamstow’s Blackhorse View. Where once there was a station car park, now there’s a thriving, dense development with outstanding access to public transport. As they literally live in a station car park…

Cycleways - cities all round the world have been busily installing segregated cycle lanes since 2020. Paris is famous for it but even New York has got in on the act: there’s a shiny, bright green cycle lane down Broadway, no less. Not everywhere in Britain has joined in the party, but Walthamstow has been building cycle lanes with gusto since long before the pandemic. Here’s TfL’s cycle map for Walthamstow and the equivalent area of Wimbledon (exactly the same distance from central London in the opposite direction).

Night Tube - we’re now used to the Underground running all night at weekends, but it never used to happen. It opened in stages starting on the 19th August 2016. But where was the very first train? Well, it was the 00:10 from Walthamstow Central, of course.

Innovation

I hope you’re convinced that Walthamstow is, indeed, the home of transport innovation.

Therefore it only remains for me to mention that if you’re thinking of hiring a transport innovation advisor, speaker or facilitator: you want one from Walthamstow.

It’s in our blood…

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“As Low as Reasonably Practicable.” Have we forgotten the “Reasonably?”

“Oh, be reasonable!” is something we’ve all said to our spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend.

But what is being “reasonable”?

That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

The concept of “reasonable” comes up throughout English law. Criminal convictions must be beyond “reasonable” doubt, contracts often require consent not to be “unreasonably” withheld and negligence is when actions fall short of what is “reasonable”.

But nowhere in law is “reasonable” defined.

That inherent flexibility is the concept’s greatest strength: it is subjective and forces you to think. What would the reasonable person think? And, yes, the “reasonable person” exists in law and, no, they are not further defined.

ALARP

In the world of transport and mobility, we encounter reasonableness in the context of “ALARP”.

ALARP is a key principle in risk management, particularly in occupational health and safety. It requires that safety measures and policies must reduce risks to a level that is As Low As “Reasonably Practicable”. This involves a balance between the level of risk and the time, trouble, cost, and physical difficulty of taking measures to avoid or reduce the risk.

The law, however, doesn’t provide guidance as to what actually is “reasonable”.

Seal the windows?

Photo by Mick Baker from Flickr

One of the more memorable Exec meetings I was involved in when I was Commercial Director of Chiltern Railways involved an ALARP conversation.

This was when we still operated a handful of older mark 3 carriages with droplight opening windows in the vestibules.

The conversation we were having followed on from an extraordinary episode in which a customer had found himself on a train running non-stop to Bicester when he intended to travel to Beaconsfield.

Instead of doing what you or I would have done (travelled to Bicester and got another train back), he did what seemed to him - in that moment - the obvious thing to do. He went to the vestibule, dropped the window, waited until the train passed through a station (at 80mph) and threw himself out.

The idea, I think, was that he would then wait for a train to Beaconsfield.

He, of course, did not succeed in doing so, as he suffered multiple injuries from the fall though - thankfully and miraculously - he survived.

When the Police interviewed him in hospital, they were expecting to find evidence of mental illness, but he was quite sane. He was someone who found themselves on the wrong train and didn’t deal with it particularly well.

The conversation in this Exec meeting was what we should do.

After all, this customer had demonstrated a risk that we had not successfully mitigated: that someone could quite deliberately open the window and hurl themselves out of a moving train.

The first option was signage. After all, there was nothing in the train that advised passengers on the inadvisability of jumping out of it when it was moving. Signs are cheap and easy to put up - and is often the first response (which is why so many stations are now a festival of warnings and instructions). But would it have actually mitigated the risk? After all, there was already a notice warning not to “lean” out and, surely, he couldn’t have got to leaping without first leaning.

At the other extreme, we could have withdrawn the trains from service. This would have entirely mitigated the risk. However, it would have resulted in a significant reduction in peak time capacity. Other trains would have been overcrowded and, very likely, some people who would now have to stand every day would have decided they’d rather drive their own car. These people would then have had a vastly higher risk of death or injury than they did previously: even if the death or injury would have occurred on someone else’s network, not ours.

In the end, we concluded that the combination of door locks and signage on the trains already had reduced the risk of people falling out to the lowest level that was reasonably practicable. Preventing someone from deliberately hurling themselves out of the train could only be mitigated at disproportionate impact. Other actions, like signage, would have been performative and ineffective.

So we did nothing and it never happened again. Those carriages have now been withdrawn.

Safety first

Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that “reasonable” means easy. It does not mean that there’s no need to take actions just because they are hard to do.

We only had one Exec meeting on droplight windows but we had many on ATP.

ATP stands for Automatic Train Protection, and it was a system that prevented trains passing red signals. Given that red signals prevent collisions, this is a very good thing to do. So back in the 1990s, British Rail created two experimental ATP systems. One of these was installed on part of the Chiltern Railways route.

By 2011, the system was virtually obsolete and the manufacturer warned us of their intention to stop supporting it.

Given that virtually every other railway in the country operated without it (and was fine), surely we should just accept that and move on?

But the problem is that it was practicable to keep it going. It was a bloody nightmare and it was expensive but it was practicable. And given the nature of the risks that ATP mitigated, it was reasonable to do so.

But, of course, it wouldn’t be practicable forever.

What we were seeking to do was to minimise risk. That didn’t have to be achieved through this precise system.

So my colleagues in engineering spent many (many!) hours figuring out alternatives that would achieve the same net risk reduction across the route but with supported technology and eventually settled on an enhanced version of the industry-standard Train Protection Warning System (TPWS).

I am no longer at Chiltern Railways but I suspect that ATP (now into its fourth decade of life) is probably - somehow - still going, while the enhanced TPWS is being installed. Though maybe it’s now enjoying a well-earned retirement.

Either way, in this case, reasonably practicable meant a huge amount of hard work.

As Low as Reasonably Practicable

The problem with a flexible definition is everyone can decide what is reasonable.

If there is expected bad weather, is it practicable to reduce risk?

Yes.

Is it practicable to reduce risk to zero?

Yes.

How?

Don’t run any trains.

A number of years ago, that would have been considered an absurd solution. Yes, it eliminates risk but people who still need to travel will still travel - just on less safe forms of transport.

Here’s one of many examples: Storm Isha in January 2024.

And here’s the service update for Avanti West Coast, Britain’s most important transport artery, stretching the word “changes” in the title to breaking point:

And here’s the equivalent from National Express coaches, a form of transport without dedicated infrastructure and much greater risk of collision, for the same day:

National Express could also have prevented risk by pre-emptively cancelling everything.

But while such a course of action would have been practicable, it wouldn’t have been reasonable.

As transport services are here to provide transport.

Avanti running at 125 would create unacceptable risk. But did that mean it needed to shut down entirely? What is reasonable? The folk at Avanti had to make a judgement call but the benchmark for pushing people from the safest mode of land transport to less safe modes should be very high.

Two ends of the telescope

As someone who’s spent a lifetime promoting transport innovation, I’ve certainly seen (many!) occasions when the industry’s safety culture has made innovation slower or harder to achieve.

Good!

Because I’ve also seen this question through the other end of the telescope.

Back in 2008, my then employer National Express was involved in a horrific accident. A coach overturned on a slipway of the M1. I was the nearest person to the site and was first to the hospital where the injured had been taken.

I vividly remember being the only person in the hospital with a National Express name badge. Even more vividly, I remember being in the intensive care ward in which one of our customers was lying covered in tubes and her boyfriend was shouting at me that I’d killed her.

(I do realise, obviously, that he was shouting at my name badge, not at me - but it’s a tough gig trying to apologise to someone when they are holding you responsible for a potentially fatal injury to the love of their life. I’m glad to report that she did, in the event, survive).

This is the kind of thing that can happen when a risk is not ALARP.

But the magic of ALARP is that it does include that ambiguous, ethereal, enigmatic little word “reasonable”.

It would have been utterly unreasonable to strip out ATP from Chiltern Railways just because virtually no other passengers benefited from equivalent levels of protection.

But, equally, it would have been utterly unreasonable to withdraw our slam door trains from service.

And - just as important - putting a sticker on the window would have been performative nonsense.

I’m very glad we didn’t do that.

And I’m also glad that my former Chiltern Railways colleagues kept running during Storm Isha, even when Avanti stopped.

What do you think? Is there a balance between innovation and safety? Should we have put a sticker on the window? Tell me what you think.

Icons

Katie-Lee English on The Treasury

What makes the Treasury tick?

I bet, like me, you constantly hear references to what the Treasury “thinks”.

“The Treasury” sometimes seems to be a person in its own right.

How does the Treasury work? How does the Treasury think? What can we learn from the Treasury?

My guest this week, Katie-Lee English, spent a year working in the Treasury and talks to me about the things that have created the Treasury’s unique character.

You can subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast at Apple or Spotify Podcasts.

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Don’t tell anyone but Cycling in London is now rather good

As we unlock, I’m starting to have more in-person meetings.

One of the curious things about this is that, with lots of people working from home, these tend to be in suburban coffee bars as opposed to central London offices.

The other day, I did a veritable tour of London; starting in my home in Walthamstow, then visiting Spitalfields, Bermondsey, Stoke Newington, Clapton and back to Walthamstow.

That day, I cycled 20 miles across North, South and East London and felt entirely safe. Pretty much the entire journey was either on dedicated cycle lanes, or quiet roads deliberately closed to traffic but permeable to bikes.

It made me realise that we’ve now reached the tipping point in which London is a great city to cycle round; at least in significant parts.

Yet, bizarrely, almost no-one knows.

Had I relied on CityMapper for my journey planning, I’d have ended up going down the A10:

At least Citymapper had me cross the Thames on London Bridge (which has a cycle lane). Google would have me crushed between the traffic and the fence on Tower Bridge:

While specialist app City Cyclist would have had me wheel my bike down Joiner Street as part of my trip. Unfortunately, Joiner Street is the least streety street in London, as it’s actually part of London Bridge station:

By far the worst was TfL’s own journey planner. (I think TfL Go may want me dead). Waltham Forest received £30 million of TfL funding for cycling infrastructure a few years ago, yet TfL’s app sends me on a route that avoids all of it.

Leyton High Road is just one of miles of utterly unsuitable roads that the app navigated me along, despite alternatives being available. No-one would take a second cycle ride if they attempted to follow the route suggested by TfL’s own app for their first:

Despite it being possible to do my full 20-mile journey in ease and safety, every mainstream route planning app would have sent me along roads that were dangerous, unsuitable or both - at least for part of the journey.

This is symptomatic of a curious thing: TfL has done a superb job in achieving the Mayor’s active travel goals, but it’s not so easy to discover.

The problem comes into three categories:

1) Data

2) Legacy

3) Coordination

Data

There is no single dataset that grades roads according to how suitable they are for cycling. As a result, every journey planner uses its own set of rules.

By far the best (and the only one that came up with truly safe routes) is the Cycle.Travel website run by Richard Fairhurst, but it is barely known to the person in the street. Richard and his team have had to put vast amounts of effort into manually adjusting their rules to compensate for the lack of simple datasets.

Given the prevalence of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, this is made all the more important as - frequently - the best routes to cycle along are not main roads with dedicated cycle lanes, but residential streets with a flowerpot in the middle.

It’s frustrating, as TfL have created what they report is the world’s largest cycling database. It surveys every road in London and includes both binary data (e.g. cycle lane yes/no) and 480,000 photographs. Unfortunately, the data and photos largely date from 2017/8 and are now out of date. Excellent cycle routes are avoided by journey planners using this data because the data doesn’t know that they are excellent cycle routes. In many cases, TfL’s own database isn’t aware of improvements made with TfL funding.

Moreover, the tickbox nature of the database just doesn’t work. As an illustration, look at the photo below (this is one of the roads TfL Go routed me down on my way to Spitalfields). According to the TfL database, it benefits from an advisory cycle lane in a differentiated colour, cycle signage and cycle road markings.

And, of course, it does indeed have all those things. But it’s entirely irrelevant as the signage is out of date, the cycle lane is buried beneath parked cars for its entire length and the road markings are ignored:

Legacy

This data problem is hugely compounded by the fact that there is a dataset for a London-wide cycling network. It’s called the London Cycle Network (LCN) and it was a project that ran from 2001 to 2010. During that period, a 900km long London-wide network of signed cycle routes was created. The signs are largely all still in place and many mapping companies incorporated LCN data. Apple Maps is one of them which is why, I suspect, I was sent down the road photographed above, as it’s a London Cycle Network road.

But the LCN is now entirely out of date. The photo above shows a road in Waltham Forest, in which TfL have invested £30m upgrading cycling infrastructure on virtually every other road except this one. This is almost the only road in Waltham Forest you wouldn’t want to cycle down - but it’s the one the TfL app sends you down, because it’s relying on a provider that is using a legacy dataset.

It’s absolutely critical that the LCN is reactivated and updated. The road photographed above should not be considered part of a cycle network but until the LCN is formally updated, it will remain so by default.

Coordination

The third big issue is that the London-wide network of cycle routes has been developed in dribs and drabs through different projects and funding pots; and they don’t gel together.

On my journey from Walthamstow to Spitalfields (i.e. the way I actually go, not the way any of the apps would send me), I start on the C23 cycleway and then move onto the Q2 cycleway. The Q2 was a TfL project delivered by the boroughs, while the C23 was a borough project delivered using TfL funding. As a result, the C23 stops on the border of Waltham Forest, around 30 yards from the Q2. Someone cycling up the Q2 would have no idea that the C23 (an outstanding route with dedicated, segregated cycle lanes its entire length) starts just out of line of sight.

If you go onto the TfL website to look for a map of cycle routes, you will easily find one. It’s the TfL “Cycleways” map and it shows all the TfL Cycleways. But only the TfL Cycleways. In Walthamstow, we are also served by the National Cycle Network Route 1 but this entirely traffic-free route is missing from the TfL map as it is not a TfL Cycleway. As are many other safe routes that happen not to have been created as a TfL cycleway.

One of the most useful cycle routes in central London is the East-West corridor across Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia along Torrington Place (and a bunch of other roads). It comprises entirely segregated cycle lanes in both directions but it pre-dates the Cycleways programme so doesn’t make the map:

All over London, lack of coordination means that cycling feels more like a series of individual schemes than a coordinated network.

Sweat the small stuff

Cycling in London at the moment is a bit like trying to use the bus network if none of the buses had destinations and only some of them had numbers. It’s perfectly do-able but it’s a lot more effort than it should be, and most people - frankly - won’t bother.

Given that in 2016 TfL committed to spend £154m per year on cycling infrastructure and then increased it further during the pandemic, it’s a real shame that so much expenditure and effort is underutilised.

Getting a single version of the truth dataset would not be super easy as definitions of cycle quality would need to be created that reflect actual experience as opposed to just infrastructure. But cycling benefits from a passionate lobby and if the definitions were right, the data could be crowdsourced. Updating the London Cycle Network requires ongoing operational investment.

To be honest, in terms of usage, spending what it takes on getting the data right (and to update the London Cycle Network) would be a much better use of the next tranch of cash than building more infrastructure that is hard to find - and it certainly wouldn’t take £154m.

It’s cycles + buses, not cycles or buses

I’ve written on these pages previously on this point, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say that it’s all about alternatives to the car. That means that more cycling is good and more buses is good. The challenge is making sure that new cycle infrastructure is at the expense of cars (thus creating an incentive for modal shift) and not at the expense of buses.

A bus lane is not a prospective cycle lane; it is a bus lane and we need more of them. Given that bus speeds have been falling in London for much of the last decade, it’s critical that the new cycle infrastructure is an enabler to car-free living (which will benefit all modes of transport). When schemes are developed, the detailed choices made on each occasion must have as the goal to maximise the attractiveness of the high density and low carbon modes of transport. That means buses and bikes - and not cars.

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