What Vision-Led Planning Means for Transport People

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 that 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 that plan. If 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.

The reason this 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 the vision.

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 abot what we can and can’t spend money on.

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, that are creating lower-cost models for connecting places onto 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 are connected by bleak strips of tarmac unserved by (meaningful) 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 Thameslink Programme. What can we do with that?”, “Oh, the Northern Hub means we’re getting faster trains to Manchester. Cool”, “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…

20th Century Transport Planning Failed. It’s Time To Do Something Different

20th century transport planning has taken us to a bad place.

Not a terrible place. But, equally, not a good one.

Where we started

If we go back to the end of the Second World War, Britain had the densest railway network in the world, trams in virtually every town and city (and often in between) and a comprehensive bus service. 

Since then, much of the railway, all of the trams and some of the bus service has been closed down.

The M8 in Glasgow, one of many motorways ploughed through Britain’s inner cities

A country that previously travelled by public transport shifted to primarily going by car. Many of our cities, especially outside London, were scarred by inner city motorways and the countryside is now rarely tranquil. 

These trends happened globally, and Britain suffered less than many.

Moreover, London is something of the outlier. While the trams have gone, the rail network continued to expand.

Unlike elsewhere in the UK, 63% of journeys in London are made by public transport.

It’s not a coincidence that London is also the only part of the country that has retained its comparative prosperity with peer group cities in the rest of the world.

What went wrong?

The painful truth is that, in many respects, the problem is with… transport itself.

Transport planning retreated into itself to focus primarily on the planning of transport.

The primary objective of rail and road networks became simply to expand capacity in response to demand, with an occasional side hustle in getting people there faster.

As you could only ever increase capacity or improve journey times where there were already connections, this meant that the transport network became more and more focused on certain corridors.

The Elizabeth line is never this empty

The busiest tube line in London, the Victoria line, was built to relieve congestion on the Piccadilly line. The busiest rail line in London, the Elizabeth line, was built to relieve congestion on the Central line. Between them, these two mega projects delivered just one new station: Pimlico. 

The rail network has become more concentrated, as the focus became adding more capacity on the most popular routes. This has been a huge success: two-thirds of the 1940s network now carries more passengers than ever before (Covid aside).

Intercity routes are almost all hourly, and many are even more frequent than that.

But the focus on the core has corresponded with a retreat from the places where people actually live. 

As a result, outside London, a small minority of people travel by public transport while almost everyone who lives in a home built since the war lives somewhere in which public transport was neither meaningfully considered nor provided.

In the 1950s, estates were designed around cars because they were the future. Now they’re designed around cars by default.

Yet this is a reality that isn’t working for anyone. There are two big issues

Issue 1 - too much focus on existing routes

The focus on capacity and journey time means that places not already served will never get served.

The old transport planning joke goes “There’s no demand for a bridge: no-one crosses the river.”

Except that it’s not a joke: it’s literal policy.

Excluding HS1 (which doesn’t serve the local area), when I was born, there were five locations with Thames crossings East of Tower Bridge: Rotherhithe, Greenwich, Woolwich, Blackwall and Dartford.

Since then, a further ten have been built: eight of them at one of the five existing locations (the other two are the Jubilee line, criss-crossing the Thames, as part of a project explicitly designed around placemaking Canary Wharf, not capacity).

Wouldn’t people want to cross in some other place?

We don’t know: there’s no bridge, so no data. With no demand data, we’ll never build a bridge.

Yet the example of the Jubilee line suggests they might…

Issue 2 - Not being part of places

Transport schemes are designed in isolation from their wider environment.

I didn’t count HS1 as one of those seven river crossings, because it doesn’t actually connect the north and south bank of the river, though it does have a river tunnel.

The nearest stations are at Ebbsfleet, where it serves a giant car park, and at Stratford, where it misses the largest rail interchange in East London.

Transport schemes are designed by transport people for transport objectives (typically capacity) as opposed to for human objectives.

We invest about £20 to 30 billion each year in new transport schemes.

If you asked people in their local areas what they would like, they’ll tell you they want their kids to be able to play out, to be able to walk the local shops and to be able to get back from the pub without having to get a lift.

But our schemes to increase capacity have simply enabled more of us to go faster on existing routes.

If we’d invested £1 trillion (roughly how much we’ve spent in my lifetime, in today’s money) on meeting those needs, we’d have ended up with very different environments.

Which means - Road by Default

The result of the two issues described above is that you get the transport system we have today: world-leading public transport on high capacity corridors while most people live car-dependent lives that they’d rather not have been forced into.

That happens because when new homes are built, in the absence of anything else, they are connected to the world by a shiny new road and nothing else.

Of course they are: if the focus for investment is capacity, then a road that doesn’t exist is at the bottom of the pecking order as it’s literally empty on day one.

That means the cheapest transport solution imaginable, which is a strip of tarmac.

Even if that doesn’t actually deliver any of the things people want (kids able to play out, walk from the pub, etc).

Reasons to be Cheerful

It’s not all been bleak since the war. For a start, the capacity-focused schemes have still delivered some genuinely good outcomes. The frequency of rail services in the UK are some of the highest in the world. 

And some exciting new projects have been delivered that don’t meet the description above: the Tyne & Wear Metro, Manchester Metrolink, the Nottingham trams. 

But it’s unfortunately the case that most of the good stuff has happened in London.

There are two reasons. 

The first is that the capacity-focused system benefits London, as it’s got the highest usage already.

That’s why every virtually river crossing in East London has been duplicated and why the Elizabeth line was built. Newcastle would love a new river crossing and Manchester keeps asking for an underground railway.

But London has also adopted examples of the place-based approaches that are the future for everywhere.

The DLR is a great example of a place-based project. It was built not to relieve existing congestion but to catalyse new development. So was the Jubilee line.

When the DLR opened, much of the Isle of Dogs was literally derelict. There was no existing demand, but there was the potential for future demand. 

This was derelict wasteland when I was a kid

These are the circumstances that our conventional transport planning systems struggle with. And, back in the 1980s, they struggled again. The DLR only just got approved. It made it because it was delivered at an almost unviably low spec. But it was approved, making the regeneration of the Docklands possible. It was rapidy followed by the Jubilee line, doing the same job but on a reasonable scale. Imagine now if we’d attempted to regenerate the Docklands without public transport. Well, you don’t need to imagine because the country’s full of abandoned industrial land that’s not been provided with its equivalent of the DLR. 

And it’s not just with the Docklands regeneration that London shows the way.

London has a clearly defined spatial plan, which defines the objectives for each part of London. That then cascades into the Mayor’s Transport Strategy, which defines the objectives for TfL to deliver against that plan. Both are statutory docments: the Mayor is compelled by law to write them. As I wrote in this blog post, imagine a world in which the Government was forced to write a Britain Plan.

Well, that’s not happening anytime soon, but what is happening is a dramatic change to how we do plans locally. And this has big implications for transport people. 

Next week, we’ll talk about what needs to change for transport people to deliver Vision-Led plans

Place, Timetable, Project - not the other way round

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 end up taking many of 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.

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 a viable timetable. 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.

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 using a train path through the busiest platforms. Andrew Haines, outgoing 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 between them 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) despite Farringdon being one of the most restrictive locations for high-rise buildings in central London due to the Protected Views 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).

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 serves 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 (sometimes known as Northern Powerhouse Rail) is another piece of spectacular infrastructure created first. What trains will run on it? Who knows. What is it designed to achieve? Dunno.

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 start by imagining what we want life there to be like.

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, 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. 

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 I’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 or DLR because each is close to 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. Maybe 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 the line, 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. Obviously.

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

The Overground 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 £billion, and a mixture of small projects (like in Walthamstow Marshes), new bike lanes, shared bike docking stations and investing in local employment options would have reduced demand for travel back down to the existing capacity. 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. 

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.

Feast-Famine Electrification with Noel Dolphin

Why does electrification in the UK cost so much more than in the rest of Europe?

And why does it always seem to go wrong?

In today’s episode I talk to Managing Director (UK) of Furrer+Frey, the leading Swiss engineering company.

We delve into the root cause of the problem: the way HM Treasury makes funding decisions, which results in a feast-famine environment in which teams are trained, mobilised, demobilised and the skills lost. Repeatedly.

We also discuss whether it’s going to get any better…

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

Risk-Taking, Rules and Death With Dan Garrett, Founder of Farewill

Founding a startup is hard, but it’s even harder when you’re dealing with the most painful and emotive moments in peoples’ lives.

That’s what Dan Garrett decided to do when he created Farewill, now the country’s largest “Deathtech” firm.

His business enables peoples to self-serve themselves wills, as well as offering other services including probate and even cremation.

How do you move fast when you’re dealing with something as important as death? How do you get the right balance between risk, rules and pace?

That’s what we discuss in today’s episode.

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

The Great Ghent Renaissance with Filip Watteeuw

𝗙𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲𝘂𝘄 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝘂𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘆𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁, and the Alderman responsible for transport and mobility policy.

He took over the portfolio and immediately set about trying to make Ghent a more beautiful, peaceful city.

As I can confirm from having visited, he really succeeded! But not without a lot of difficulty, even including death threats.

Today’s episode is a masterclass in the art of transport changemaking: the focus on experimentation, clear strategy and the need for urgency.

He also highlights the power of storytelling, the limitations of data and highlights that, despite the death threats, the Circulation Plan helped him increase his majority at the next election.

Come with me to Belgium and see just what a motivated, inspiring transport changemaker can do.

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

A Role Model for Everything that’s Wrong with Public Transport in this Country

A few weeks ago, I had a rather startling experience.

I wrote a LinkedIn post highlighting my favourite example of a commercial bus route. A role model for others to follow, I said.

A bunch of people replied to say that the operator had scrapped it.

“What!”, I replied. I was genuinely astonished.

But it was true.

It turns out that the route is not a role model to follow but a role model for everything wrong with public transport in Britain - and what I’m trying to fix.

Scrapped

The route in question is the Lands End Coaster; a circular open-top bus that ran round the Lands End peninsula in West Cornwall.

We’ve been visiting the area every year for the last forty years, so I know it well.

Go back 20 years, and the bus route was the 1/1A. It was the kind of struggling, infrequent rural bus route that exists all over the country.

Then the local operator, First Kernow, started experimenting.

They added some open-top buses at high season. They started playing with the route - changing the times, tweaking the destinations, fiddling with fares. Over the decades, they evolved this struggling backwater bus into a popular, packed, seven-day-a-week anchor of the local visitor economy.

I can’t begin to describe to you how busy these buses were.

Throughout high season, they were invariably full and standing. Even at shoulder season, they were packed.

There are very few bus routes that combine high fares and high demand. Just the most basic back-of-envelope calculation says that this single bus route must have been making a six-figure profit every year.

This was one - which is why I said it was a role model.

Porthcurno and the Minack Theatre - just two of the destinations previously served by the Lands End Coaster

Why’s it gone?

The reason First Kernow said they had to scrap it was as follows:

"Unfortunately, a significant reduction in Cornish tourism last year, added to falling passenger demand and rising cost, has made running these open-top buses commercially unviable.

If that is true, then First is saying that they’ll abandon two decades of incremental growth and investment as a result of one bad year.

Really?

First are currently applying for Open Access rail services all over the country. If I was a stakeholder in one of these places, I’d feel a bit worried. Take that statement at face value, and it says that they’ll pull the whole thing if one year goes awry.

However, it still doesn’t make much sense. I was in Cornwall last year. If tourist numbers were down, they weren’t that much down. Quite frankly, given that these buses frequently had to leave people by the side of the road, a small reduction would have got them to the position where they were just full. If you can’t make money on a route with full buses and a high fare (even with a slight downturn), it’s not the route’s fault.

And even if it’s true, it’s still an appalling response.

If we take at face value that the route was unviable in its current form, then, do something. Play with times, play with fares. If that doesn’t work, do a deal with the council. These services were much-loved with entire businesses depending on them. The scrapping had been trailed by local papers with dismay for months. If you can’t find a way to save it, this either reflects a worrying lack of urgency to maximise revenue or suggests they’ve given up trying. 

Moreover, this is how it has been announced on their website:

i.e. they’ve scrapped the name, and gone back to the old “1 / 1A” number it had twenty years ago. Back when no-one used it.

Now, the open top buses may have been commercially unviable, but the name can’t have been.

Yet, they’ve made a deliberate decision to scrap something with equity.

Google “Lands End Coaster” and you’ll find five pages of positive reviews of that bus route. How many bus routes in Britain have five pages of positive Google content? And yet, they’ve just chucked the lot away. Why?

Well, I think I’ve found a clue.

The First Kernow website has been replaced with a new one, with a new journey planner.

Let’s do a search for the most popular journey on that route: Penzance (the largest town and rail hub) to Lands End (the biggest destination)

Eh? WHAT?

Walk for 14 minutes from Penzance to… Lidl?…

I know that Lidl - it’s on the very edge of town.

But the bus starts at the bus station (which is conveniently next to the rail station) and then goes through the town centre.

The journey planner is, in effect, telling me to walk along the bus route for 14 minutes in order to get on at a budget supermarket. I think we might be starting to understand the falling passenger numbers!

Sennen Cove, as seen from the top of the Lands End Coaster

Lost Customer Connectedness

This is very basic stuff being done very badly indeed.

Penzance is the hub of the West Cornwall network and Lands End the key destination. This is the equivalent of the national rail journey planner telling Londoners headed to Manchester that they’d need to board the train at Watford Junction not Euston and no-one noticing.

We are clearly looking at a business that has lost all focus on its customers.

I find it frustrating because I work with teams in our sector trying to go in the opposite direction.

They’re trying to innovate, to make things better, to drive growth. The casualness with which First has thrown away the results of twenty years of their own effort sticks in my throat. This stuff is hard!

Over the last decades, they’d built a strong brand, an established product and - above all - thousands of customers. I want to weep on behalf of all those teams I support who are actually trying!

And there are other reasons I find this particularly frustrating.

Partly it’s because I know this route so well. I use it annually. I’ve seen it grow. Also, my mum lives there and uses it every month. She can’t drive so the existence of this open-top bus route has been a huge joy to her that has been taken away based on a rationale I struggle to reconcile with observable reality.

Partly it’s because it unnecessarily reinforces so many negative impressions of the bus industry. The Government announced billions for trams in the Comprehensive Spending Review. Ask city leaders why they want trams and part of the reason is that once a billion quid has been put into the ground, the service isn’t going to be withdrawn. Trams have many other benefits but part of the motivation is to avoid bus companies doing things like this!

And partly because it feels to me that it’s going in precisely the opposite direction from the direction our sector needs to go in. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the coming world of AI. Here’s a quote from my blog post on the future AI economy:

As more tasks are handled by machines, people will actively seek out positive, enjoyable human experiences.

You can see this happening on the high street. In posh areas, the supermarkets are still there, but they’re joined by butchers, bakers and greengrocers. The kind of shops that vanished when we embraced efficiency… but are now making a comeback. Why? Because people like them. They enjoy the interaction. They’re willing to pay for it.

Transport needs to master this zeitgeist.

Right now, much of public transport still feels utilitarian. Efficient. Functional. And often… joyless.

If we want people to choose public transport - not just use it when they must - we need to make it experiential. Warm. Personal. Human.

First already had the ultimate experiential route, and they’ve chucked it away after one year’s marginally reduced trading.

Regular readers will know I’m an optimistic soul but sometimes the dam bursts.

It didn’t have to be this way.

I know there is an alternative path because I work with teams who are, in the context of a sector where driving change is always hard, trying to develop services that customers want to use. Trying to find growth. Trying to improve. Building a future for our sector.

Because public transport can be joyful. It can be branded, beloved and financially sound. I used to use the Lands End Coaster as my proof.

But it only works if we stay connected with our customers, treat them as people, notice when our own journey planner gives stupid advice and value progress as something worth protecting.

Accountability: Passenger Railway Governance (Copy)

How it used to be done

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This post is about accountability: it doesn’t review other areas of the GBR consultation.

It argues that GBR needs a broader-based accountability model than one based on TfL, as the Mayor is directly accountable to Londoners in a way that the Secretary of State is not directly accountable to voters.

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There have only been three models of passenger railway governance in the last century.

Until the Second World War, the railway was run by “the big four” railway companies (LNER, GWR, LMR and Southern): private firms but subject to state regulation.

Then from 1948 to 1994, the railway was run by the British Railways Board: politically led but independently operated.

Then from 1994 to Covid, the railway was run by contract, with specifications defined in tenders issued by the Department for Transport, and codified in franchise agreements.

As we move into a new era, will the accountability plans for GBR deliver for users?

Back to the Future

The accountability model for GBR is similar to that of British Railways: an operationally independent organisation subject to a Board appointed by the Government. Here’s what the consultation says:

GBR will, therefore, be held to account first and foremost by the Secretary of State through its Chair and Board. The Secretary of State will appoint the Chair and have a clear role in the appointment of Board members...

This is also very similar to the accountability model for TfL. Indeed, Great British Railways has its genesis in the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, in which Transport for London was explicitly referenced as a model. It feels like distant history (it was four years ago!) but here’s what it said:

Under these reforms, Ministers will hold Great British Railways to account through a structured framework underpinned by legislation. Ministers will take key funding decisions and have strong levers to set direction and pursue government policy. The Secretary of State will be responsible for the appointment of the Chair and agreeing the framework for pay, including any performance-related pay. They will also be given statutory powers to set long-term strategy and have powers to issue guidance and mandatory directions to Great British Railways on any matter at any time, creating a relationship between Ministers and Great British Railways akin to the one shared by the Mayor of London and Transport for London.

This is dangerous.

The TfL model looks superficially appropriate for GBR but there are very important differences.

The London system works on the basis that TfL‘s customers and the Mayor’s voters are more or less the same people. The Mayor is scared of the voters and TfL is scared of the Mayor.

Mayoral elections are more or less single-issue votes on transport (as the mayor has such limited wider powers), meaning there is direct accountability from users’ experience to TfL‘s actions through the Mayor.

None of these things are true at the national level.

GBR customers and Transport Secretary voters are completely different groups of people. GBR customers are millions of people spread nationwide; the Transport Secretary is elected by 70,000 people in their own constituency. The fear that the Mayor has of being held to account at the ballot box for their transport decisions simply won’t apply: general elections are fought on many issues but, sadly, transport is never one of them. Anyway, Transport Secretaries know that by the time the election comes around, they’ll probably be doing a different job. Since 2000 we’ve had three Mayors of London and 14 transport secretaries. We’re already onto our second since last July’s election! Being honest, the key ‘customer’ of the Transport Secretary is the Prime Minister (who controls their promotion prospects), not rail users (who do not). This is a very different dynamic from the Mayor of London.

This is important because the Mayor is TfL’s only source of accountability. There are very few constraints on the Mayor. If he wanted to, the Mayor could double fares and halve the service. What the Mayor wants, the Mayor gets; what the Mayor doesn’t want, nobody gets. TfL is more like a medieval court than a governance structure. To deliver for customers, the whole system relies on the Mayor being guided by a desire to deliver for voters.

Would GBR provide the best possible service with such a governance model? And how could the Transport Secretary be the engine of accountability for rail users everywhere from Cornwall to Castleford? Even if they were certain that they’d be held accountable by the voters for their decisions as transport secretary (which they won’t be), is it even credible?

Relying on the TfL model of political accountability is setting GBR up for failure.

Now, you may ask why I say this, given that the TfL model is not hugely different to the old BR model, with an “independent” Board and a Chair appointed by the Secretary of State. The answer is that ministers (and the DfT) have got used to a far greater level of control in recent years. When the British Railways was created, it replaced the Big Four (the British Railways Board itself came a few decades later). The working assumption was that railways were run by independent railway companies: professionals were in charge. Ministers and the department meddled (a lot!) but not to the extent they do now.

It’s very hard to give the DfT total control and then expect them to let the professionals get on with the job. I know the consultation says that ministers won’t meddle, but if ministers control appointments to the Board and the Board is the accountability model then.. they will. Trust me, they will.

Indeed, only last week, the Government abolished NHS England precisely because the Prime Minister believes that ministers should make decisions “at the heart of Government”, and that an arms-length body like NHS England reduces accountability. If that is the Prime Minister’s expectation, any future Secretary of State will expect phone calls from Downing Street on operational detail. And we can’t always assume we’ll have a Secretary of State with the knowledge and experience of transport that we do now.

Moreover, it’s hard to argue that pre-sectorisation British Rail was a model of efficiency and innovation. If the GBR governance model looks like the old BR governance model, we’re in danger of a combination of stagnation and meddling.

“Strong” Passenger Body

Luckily, the consultation pre-empts this problem. There are 52 references to the “powerful” new passenger watchdog that will be created. This watchdog will do lots of great stuff to champion the interests of users. However, the document is silent on how the watchdog will be appointed. We can therefore assume that, like Transport Focus, the new watchdog will be appointed by the Secretary of State. This is a big issue. Why do we need a new watchdog if we already have one? The reason must be that Transport Focus isn’t actually seen to be standing up for rail users. That’s not a criticism of Anthony Smith, the CEO of Transport Focus for most of its lifetime. To quote Matthew Engel in his book Eleven Minutes Late, being appointed by the Secretary of State

…puts Smith roughly in the position of a court-appointed defence lawyer in a Soviet show trial. He is allowed to put in the odd word on behalf of his clients - and indeed is frequently quoted in the news media - provided he does not do so too vigorusly.

It is probably no coincidence that the only time Transport Focus made the news ‘vigorously’ was when it shot down the entire booking office closure programme in 2023: after Anthony Smith had announced his retirement but before he had actually left.

The “strong” passenger body - if appointed by the Secretary of State - will be in the position of being asked to hold their boss to account. Ever tried doing that?

Moreover, there is no independent budget for the passenger watchdog. DfT would sometimes use budget as a source of (strictly unofficial!) leverage over Transport Focus, and that was when Transport Focus was holding to account private train operators. When the new watchdog is threatening to put out a report heavily criticising GBR or DfT, it would be superhuman of the Secretary of State not to use the leverage of the Transport Focus budget as a way of gently nudging the watchdog to reconsider.

The consultation may use the word powerful repeatedly: but power doesn’t come from adjectives: it comes from budget and independence. Without it, the watchdog will have neither bark nor bite.

What Do The Europeans Do?

Britain is unusual in having undertaken a wholesale privatisation of its railways: in Europe, there have been experiments with open access but there are still dominant national train operators with semi-detached infrastructure operators. So the situation is not dissimilar to the position the UK will find itself in post-nationalisation.

So how does governance work across the channel?

Well, the model varies across different countries, but there are some important similarities.

In most European countries, there is a contractual relationship between a client (typically a Government agency) and the operator (often the national operator). This is different to the model adopted for British Rail, in which BR was an arms-length agency responsible to a nominally-independent Board. The contractual model creates a specific client (national or local Government) and a provider (the railway). In the model envisioned, these decisions all happen within the walls of GBR.

Typically, in most major European countries, the national DfT-equivalent specifies service standards for long-distance trains with local regions contracting local and regional trains.

Long distance

Across much of Europe, the high-speed network (what I’ll define here as the ‘pointy nose trains’) is operated commercially. ICE, TGV or Frecciarossa trains have timetables that are largely defined by the national operator in response to customer demand, sometimes with some high-level service standards determining that a certain number of trains must call at certain smaller stations or be extended onto branch lines that would otherwise not be served. Pricing is often commercial. Brits complain about Avanti pricing, but try getting a TGV from Paris to Annecy in the ski season and then grumble about Manchester!

There is more rigid specification for what I’ll call the 'flat-fronted’ long-distance trains (branded as InterCity in almost every mainland European country). These are trains similar to the British CrossCountry network that connect up multiple cities with fastish trains that stop comparatively frequently. Equivalents to CrossCountry’s Scotland to Cornwall trains include the Italian Intercity trains linking Lecce (in the heel of Italy) to Milan (in the north) and the two-hourly French Intercités trains between Marseille and Toulouse.

A German InterCity train - this is contracted by Government to DB to operate

If Britain were to adopt this approach, then the core LNER, GWR (high speed) and Avanti trains would be run commercially by Great British Railways without much Government interference.

The slower trains run by Cross Country, East Midlands Railway, South Western Railway and GWR trains would be covered by a more rigid InterCity contract, that looked rather like a franchise passenger service requirement.

Prices would stay high on the long-distance network at peak times (and be largely unregulated) but this would generate revenue that would help pay for the railway. Flexible walk-up tickets would be at risk, though the ‘cliff-edge’ crowding impact of the end of the peak period would also end.

The slower InterCity trains would probably be pretty similar to those today, both in timetable and price. It’s hard to imagine the DfT moving away from the current spec for these trains, which is a pretty regular hourly clockface timetable for a core, national network.

Local and regional

In most European countries, central Government doesn’t get too involved in local and regional services. Most European countries have strong regional Governments. Germany and Austria have Lander (states), Switzerland has Cantons while France and Italy have Regions. These are regions with developed local identities, well-established Governments and a lot of political influence. In most of continental Europe, these regional Governments determine the service they want and then contract with a railway company to deliver them. While there are smatterings of commercial tendering, the vast majority of these contracts are awarded to the national railway operator.

Replicating this creates an immediate problem for the UK, as we don’t have regional Governments.

The average population of French Regions is 5.1 million; of German Lander 5.3 million. Britain just doesn’t have credible governance bodies at this scale: British counties are far too small. Sub-National Transport Bodies (STBs) have been created specifically to try to take on this role but they’ve not got the capability or the political strength to perform the role that the regions perform in most of Europe. Sub National Transport Bodies would need much bigger, well-resourced transport teams (which means bigger budgets) and the political credibility to represent their region. Both seem unlikely to emerge any time soon.

However, there is a potential solution and, as is so often the case, Switzerland looks like being the model.

The average Swiss Canton has a population of a bit less than 500,000. This makes them equivalent to the Strategic Authorities being set up through the Devolution White Paper. As a reminder, the White Paper asks counties to develop proposals for local authority mergers to create new entities with a population of around 500,000. The big difference between the new Strategic Authorities and the STBs is that once the Strategic Authorities exist, they will be politically powerful and well-resourced: combining all the resources of the existing local authorities. If the Cantons have a role in Switzerland, it’s one that the Strategic Authorities could take on in GBR.

And it turns out that the Cantons have a pretty big role.

The Cantons are responsible for regional and local transport planning and funding. Even though they are far smaller than French Regions, they still negotiate contracts with Swiss operators for regional rail services, buses and other modes of transport - and provide cash for doing so. Indeed, one of the reasons why Switzerland has such a comprehensive local network (Switzerland has the highest density of rail lines in Europe) is because there’s always a local Canton buying (and therefore protecting) local services.

Now you may ask how on earth it can work. After all, there are 26 Cantons. England will have more than 100 Strategic Authorities. Is it even credible that all these organisations can specify services? After all, trains don’t operate in neat borders. Endless trains cross between Cantons: what if different Cantons want different things?

I asked this question when I visited SBB, and the answer is basically that they talk and make long-term decisions. (When I visited last year, I met the team working on the 2050 timetable! The 2037 timetable was already set). There’s plenty of time for the various Cantons to get together and figure it all out. The sense I get is that while it all results in a set of contracts, the creation of those contracts is a process of human-to-human discussion and collaboration.

That’s a great model but it’s counter-cultural for the UK.

Britain works on the basis of short-term muddling through. If we’re to adopt the Canton model, we’re going to need to become better at long-term planning and dialogue.

But that doesn’t seem a bad ambition…

Small is beautiful

One other lesson from Switzerland: there are multiple local railways.

The largest Swiss Canton, Graubünden, buys its service almost exclusively from its local operator Rhätische Bahn (RhB), 51% owned by the Canton of Graubünden, 43% by the federal Government and the rest by small municipalities. Other vertically integrated railways include Bern Lötschberg Simplon Bahn (BLS) and the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn (MGB). These railways are also generally primarily owned by their local cantons.

A Swiss train operated by BLS

In this post last year, I argued that private v public isn’t a core determinant of good service for users but small v big is. Maybe the fact that 40% of the Swiss rail network is operated by dozens of small, independent operators is part of the reason why it’s so good. Those firms benefit from the ‘small is beautiful’ principle, and it also means that the national operator SBB isn’t quite the behemoth it would otherwise be. Indeed, the Swiss Government recently obliged SBB - as part of its long-distance network licence - to start contracting some inter-regional services to the local operators. The DfT in Switzerland does not want a single, large dominant national operator as - even in a fully-integrated network - it recognises that competing operators have the potential to inspire innovation.

Are there lessons for the UK here?

When the Cornish branch lines no longer have a local GWR franchise keeping an eye on their interests, could they become a small, vertically integrated railway, part-owned by Cornwall Council? Would all the various branch lines in the East Midlands be better off as an independent operator? Would the campaign to reopen the Ivanhoe Line have a greater chance of success if there were a small, agile operator headquartered locally, trying to find cost-effective ways to get the job done and working closely with the local community of which they were part? That railway could be owned by the East Midlands Combined Authority.

Penryn station: could this be part of a new Cornish branch lines rail company?

There is a real danger that if branch lines become part of a much broader GBR funding settlement, they will always be the losers. Realistically, how big will Penryn be, when seen from London (or Derby)? Or Bottesford.

If they have their own bespoke railways, it becomes much harder for them to be chipped away.

Now, I can hear many of my readers complaining that this would be absurdly inefficient: with endless duplication. As I wrote about earlier this year, I’m not so convinced that gigantic organisations are necessarily more efficient. The reduced duplication can be more than offset by the increased inefficiency of how long it takes to get things done.

Dangers of decentralisation

The Swiss experience illustrates one of the benefits of decentralisation: France shows the risks.

Brits have a tendency to be impressed by the French rail network as a result of their experience of TGVs. But the downside of Regions playing a big role in buying services is that they can choose to spend their money elsewhere.

Take Pont-Saint-Esprit, for example. It’s a town of 10,000 people (about the same size as Ludlow) in Occitanie in southern France. The nearest city is Avignon, about 30 minutes away. But make sure you don’t miss the train: there are three in the morning peak and two in the afternoon peak, and that’s it. No nipping into town for an hour. This is pretty typical of rural branch lines, though many French stations have far less service than this: indeed, many railway stations have SNCF services provided exclusively by diesel buses.

Now, fair enough, presumably Occitanie feel they have better things to spend their money on than train services. As a taxpayer, you may agree with them.

But from the narrow perspective of public transport, this may not be a good thing.

Local accountability runs the risk that the railway is at the bottom of the funding pile for cash-strapped Strategic Authorities.

However, it’s important to note that this risk also applies if the whole thing is run centrally.

The reason local rail services in the UK have been protected better than those in France in recent years largely results from the contractual tangle of the privatisation model that makes cuts hard.

Because DfT has to formally specify the services it wants and only does so every seven years, there’s an obvious ‘moment’ when cuts can happen. As a result, journalists are observant and the political danger (even for a transport secretary likely to change jobs) is high.

Whereas a GBR operated with the governance envisaged in the consultation would be very vulnerable to local cuts through salami slicing the service down without anyone really noticing. Penryn currently has a train every thirty minutes. Who’d notice if, for reasons of operational convenience, a few half-hourly slots got missed out? And then it because hourly? And then a few gaps emerged so a few of the hours there was a two hour gap? And then it became two-hourly? And then it becomes like Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Accountability

One of the lessons of the European experience is that the decision-making process is separate from operations.

Key decisions are made through a formal negotiation between the railway and its client (national, regional or local government) and written down in a contract. This is important as it maintains clarity on what the specification actually is, and prevents salami slicing.

The TfL model uses the Mayor as a proxy for the customer, but even then, the fact that decision-making and operations are centralised in TfL for some modes (like the Underground) has an impact, and not necessarily a positive one.

My former colleagues at TfL won’t like me saying this, but when a problem occurs in one of the contracted bits of TfL (e.g. the bus network or DLR), the atmosphere is one of accountability: the operator must fix the problem. No excuses. When, however, it is a directly operated service like the Underground, there is much more awareness of the challenges that have caused the problem and why it is genuinely tough to fix. As a result, TfL can let themselves get away with things they would not let their subcontractors get away with. And that’s in an environment with the Mayor breathing down their necks as a genuine voice of the customer. If a centralised GBR faced a problem with the Weymouth to Westbury line, would anyone really care - unless the Transport Secretary happened to be the MP for Yeovil.

Whatever model is created needs to be clear what the method of accountability is going to be.

In London, it is the Mayor. In the UK privatised railway, it is a contract. In Europe’s nationalised railway, it is a contract. We need one, and my argument is that it can’t be the Transport Secretary.

Fare Box

There is, of course, one more potential source of accountability. It’s the one used by virtually every private business from McDonalds to Microsoft: the paying customer.

The best possible form of accountability is to have to offer your services to someone and ask them to pay for it. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy running Freewheeling (and previously enjoyed running my startup Sn-ap). There’s a discipline and a focus that comes with being a purely commercial business.

The problem is, of course, that railways have a much broader social purpose and - as a result - we wish to have more railway than the fare box will pay for.

However, it’s not a bad idea to create as much commercial discipline as possible.

Indeed, one of the more intelligent acts of old British Rail was to recognise that while the railway as a whole consumes subsidy, there are bits of it that could be run as commercial businesses. InterCity was profitable and Network SouthEast was given an explicit goal of becoming profitable. The remainder of the railway was hived off into a rather amorphous mass called Regional Railways (as writing “The loss-making bit” on the sides of trains wouldn’t have been so attractive).

This wasn’t a bad model for Network SouthEast and InterCity - and it worked, with quality and ridership accelerating. It wasn’t so good for Regional Railways but then, to an extent, it was only an error of omission: they had been somewhat neglected before and they were somewhat neglected afterwards.

If sectorisation provides some important lessons, then the advent of open access provides even more. The East Coast shows the benefits of competition between operators. So does Italy. Travel on the regional network in Italy and you’d think Trenitalia’s paint scheme was a hyper-cool urban grunge style modelled on graffiti - until you realised it’s just that all the trains are covered in graffiti. But the Frecciarossa network is fantastic: with service offers driven up by competition from Italo. Countries that have opened up their long-distance networks to competition (like Italy and Spain) have seen quality go up and prices come down. France operates its network commercially but the only meaningful competition to the SNCF services comes from a funky startup with vividly-coloured trains called OuiGo. It’s owned by… ah… SNCF and uses old SNCF trains, deliberately made uncomfortable.

Some ideas on Improvements

I’ve poked some holes in the consultation but there’s lots of good stuff to build on. It’s thoughtful, intelligent and pragmatic. But, inevitably, humans being what they are, a consultation issued by the Government proposes that the accountability mechanism for a business owned by the Government should be the Government, with the assistance of a watchdog appointed by the Government.

Here’s how we can keep all the good stuff in the consultation but tighten it up a bit.

1. Passenger Rail Should be Run on a Commercial Basis Where Feasible

One of the successes of sectorisation was that Network SouthEast and InterCity were treated as businesses. Railcards, now seen as discount schemes, were commercial tools. Privatisation was a bit like Tesco Clubcard being seen as so valuable it should be protected by statute.

Some people criticised the accounting that enabled these bits to be treated as commercial but I would argue that was something of a masterstroke. It’s also the same model that’s adopted in most European countries, where the ‘pointy nose trains’ are run commercially, in competition with cars, coaches and planes. In some countries like Italy and Spain, they also run in competition with Open Access operators. We should replicate this model for our pointy nose trains.

Our ‘flat-fronted trains’ should replicate the model of European equivalents, and have a direct contract with Government, so it’s explicit what the DfT is buying. In many ways, the paper describes a bit of this, by describing a continuation of the High Level Output Statement (HLOS) and Statement of Funds Available (SoFA) process. It’s just that for the long-distance passenger railway, this should culminate in an explicit, written contract so everyone can see what has been bought.

2. Regional and Local Rail Should be Specified and Funded Locally

Local rail services - such as commuter and rural lines - should be overseen by regional transport authorities, not Whitehall.

• New Combined Authorities and Strategic Authorities should take control of regional rail contracts, ensuring they are integrated with buses, trams, and local needs.

• Local rail companies should be encouraged where viable. The Swiss model, where regions own small local railways, could be replicated in Cornwall, the North East, East Anglia, the East Midlands and in many other places I’ve not thought of.

As you’re considering governance models, just ponder the Cornish branch lines or the re-opening of the Ivanhoe line. If these feel distant from the place where decisions are made, we’ve not got it right yet. And don’t be fobbed off with regional structures or local HQs: the key question is who’s the customer? For services for which there isn’t enough farebox revenue to ‘buy’ the service, who’s paying?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: what about the interfaces? How do you allocate capacity between a regional rail contract (which wants to prioritise the city services) and a long-distance service? The answer is that it requires discussion and compromise. But if these are contractual with GBR, then it’s explicit. Putting everything into GBR doesn’t make those trade-offs go away: it just means that the decisions will be taken behind closed doors.

3. A Truly Independent Passenger Authority

Instead of the government appointing a passenger watchdog that reports to the Transport Secretary, it should be:

• Statutorily independent (like the National Audit Office)

• Funded through a levy on GBR and operators, rather than government grants

• Given legal standing to challenge GBR in court

This would give rail users a powerful voice, independent of ministerial priorities.

4. A Contractual, Not Political, Relationship Between Government and GBR

The fundamental problem with the current GBR plan is that it gives ministers both operational and strategic control, leading to inevitable micromanagement. (Again, I know the consultation says that GBR is operationally independent, but it won’t be. Not when it does something that the minister doesn’t like).

There needs to be a clearly defined contract between government and GBR, specifying outcomes (e.g., punctuality, reliability). Again, we’re close to this with the HLOS and SoFA - we just need to complete the circle.

Conclusion

There are multiple ways to skin a cat. (So they say. Is that actually true? I’ve never tried to skin a cat but I feel sure there must be a best way…).

So there are multiple ways of doing railway governance.

But the conclusions I take from this little canter round Europe are:

• It’s all about accountability. In a natural monopoly, who’s holding the railway to account?

• One size doesn’t fit all: different parts of the network can have different answers to this question

• Intercity networks can be operated commercially, with open access as one of the key drivers of accountability, and the farebox as the other

• Central government should specify the high-level intercity network it wants for the economic success of the country: including the additions that wouldn’t otherwise be included in a commercial network (Newark, for example)

• The new strategic authorities will have a key role in defining the services they want from their areas - but it’s crucial they have the budgets to deliver them

• It may be that the previous success of Network SouthEast can be recreated: maybe with a joint DfT/GLA specification.

• The trade-offs between urban, rural, intercity and freight services are real: but putting them all into GBR doesn’t make the trade-offs go away, it just makes the decisions less acountable

• This is difficult and complex, and needs to be got right.

• Don’t just create a single GBR bureaucracy reporting into DfT and expect anything other than gradual salami-sliced cuts. A natural monopoly, meddling and a lack of accountability will not be a good combination

This is one set of conclusions but others are possible. This stuff is complex and there will be more than one right answer.

Final thought

I really do want to emphasise that these are difficult, complex and important questions.

DfT, GBR, the Combined Authorities and the Strategic Authorities are going to have to work hard to get this right. They will make mistakes. Be gentle with them and give them the space to experiment, learn, refine and improve. It’s in all our interests.

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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

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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