What if the Project Is a Tattoo?

A Blog Post about Business Cases for Major Projects

A few weeks ago, I published a piece on making business cases better. It included turtles. All the best posts should contain turtles, but - sadly - most don’t.

Anyway, after I published, several of you got in touch with similar thoughts. I got this great piece of feedback:

Your writing style is very engaging.

Thank you!

I’ve made a note to use the ‘haircut vs tattoo’ analogy from now on! Not sure how/if the ‘just do it’ model applies to big projects though, they are more ‘all-over-body tattoo’ decisions!

It’s a fair challenge.

You can’t “test and learn” your way into building a new rail line. You can’t try a tram system, see how it goes and undo it if the reaction’s poor. And no one’s going to let you iterate your way into tunnelling under London.

So how do we make good decisions when the stakes are high, the investment irreversible and the consequences play out over decades?

Let’s take that challenge seriously - because it deserves to be taken seriously. And let’s break it into two parts: costs and benefits.

Costs:

When it comes to major project estimates, we can take the Bent Flyvbjerg approach described in the previous post. This works just as well for massive projects as tiny ones. Indeed, it’s where he started.

He discovered that 90% of large projects go over budget. Rail projects typically overshoot by 45%, bridges and tunnels by 34%, roads by 20%.

But the solution he proposes is simple: don’t estimate your project from scratch. Take the outside view. Look at a reference class - similar projects delivered elsewhere - and start from there.

This is exactly what we explored in the last blog post when we talked about “superforecasting.” Great forecasters start with the average of similar things, then make small, reasoned adjustments. They don’t build a complex cost model from the bottom up.

So when it comes to forecasting costs on major projects, the tools already exist. The problem is that we tend to start from scratch each time.

Benefits

If the cost side can be handled with data and discipline, the benefit side is much harder.

The truth is, we can’t know what the benefits of major infrastructure will be - not over decades. And when we pretend we can, we often end up misleading ourselves and others.

Take my two local tube lines. To my east is the Central line. In the 1930s, when it was extended into what was then Essex, no-one could have begun to forecast that its primary purpose would be to take financial services workers to Stratford to change onto the DLR (running over a repurposed freight line) into the London docks to work in banks and investment firms.

There’s no model in the world that could have predicted that. So had BCRs existed then, they’d have been a nonsense.

To my west is the Victoria line. It’s the second newest tube line at just over 50 years old. When it was planned, it was forecast to carry 50 million passengers per year. It has - so far - peaked at 302 million in 2019. Hmmm - a tad out.

It will eventually get rather crowded in here, Ma’am

And yet, in the modern business case world, we demand that someone, somewhere, assigns a Benefit-Cost Ratio to major projects. We ask for a single number to summarise fifty years of unknown, unpredictable social, economic and spatial change.

That’s not evidence-based planning. That’s darts.

If we want to make good decisions, we need to return to something that is strangely unfashionable in the modern public sector: well-argued, well-written words.

Describe the problem. Describe what success looks like. Explain the rationale. Make the case.

Because a nonsense number is less convincing than a paragraph of well-chosen prose. (You could argue I would say that on this, ahem, blog).

You don’t have to take my word for it.

When I interviewed Jonny Mood, Director at the National Audit Office, for my podcast, I asked him how we should think about value for money in major investments.

His answer was crystal clear:

“If you're entirely making your decision on a BCR, you're missing the bigger part of the picture.”

This is the UK’s public spending watchdog saying: don’t let the number do all the talking.

He’s right. Some things just can’t be boiled down into a spreadsheet. That doesn’t mean we abandon rigour - it means we apply it differently.

Use data to understand costs. Use words to articulate value. And stop pretending that false certainty is more credible than honest uncertainty.

If you still don’t believe me, then let me present to you the most data-driven company on earth: Amazon. This is a firm so successful in its investments than it has gone from not existing when I was a child to on-and-off the most valuable company on the planet.

They are rigorous that proposals in Amazon are made long-form on six page written documents, which are then read by everyone in the room in person, in silence. I have described this approach as part of my “top 20 ways organisations can move faster”. Investments in Amazon are made by argument. It works for them - it can work for us.

The Real Problem: Our System Doesn’t Want That

Here’s the deeper issue: even when a local authority or transport body does articulate a clear strategic rationale, it often doesn’t matter. Because by the time it gets to Treasury, it’s already been reduced to a number.

And the Treasury aren’t even looking at the number itself - they’re trying to guess what number the Office of Budget Responsibility will apply to the number.

I mean, seriously, this is mad.

But we don’t have to do it this way.

We treat this process as if it were some natural force of British life, like the weather or England batting collapses. But it isn’t. The Treasury is a human institution. It was created by people and it can be changed by people.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. (If you want a great conversation about how hard it is, have a listen to my podcast episode with my utterly brilliant Freewheeling Associate and former senior manager at the Treasury Katie-Lee English.)

But here’s why I’m slightly more optimistic than usual: the current Transport Secretary actually sounds serious about devolving power. More than any of her predecessors, she seems to understand what it means. She worked at TfL. She knows what local empowerment can unlock.

Now she needs to do it - and be backed politically to do it.

Why It Matters: Britain Is the Outlier

The UK is the most centralised large country in the OECD. 96% of taxes are raised by central government. Even where taxes are theoretically local, like council tax, caps and rules are still set in Whitehall.

Sam Freedman, in his excellent book Failed State, puts it perfectly:

“Concentrating power at the centre of government, and destroying state capacity outside of it, while at the same time massively increasing the scope of what government covers, is a core reason for our policy paralysis.”

He’s right.

We don’t just need to fix how we write business cases. We need to fix who gets to decide what’s in them.

Local communities should be empowered to define what is valuable to them.

How Do We Solve the All-over-Body Tattoo

Big projects are hard. The stakes are high. The tattoo is permanent.

But we can still make good decisions - if we start with realism, speak in plain English and trust the people closest to the impact.

Because the future’s still uncertain and will remain so. Accepting that is the most important point in any piece of planning.

But if you’re a developer of a major project:

• Use reference class forecasting to estimate costs.

• Use clear, strategic narrative to describe benefits.

• Stop demanding numerical precision where it’s impossible.

And if you’re the Government:

• Give local and regional governments the power - and funding - to plan their own futures.

• Trust them to define the outcomes that matter.

• Reform the system so that not everything has to pass through a single model in SW1.

If you’re the Treasury:

• Get out of the way

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I’ve previously described my experience of the new line from Oxford to London that I was closely involved with at Chiltern Railways. We delivered this on-time, on-budget, and it’s a great example of doing things right. Have a read.

Jonny Mood on Value for Money

“It's fine when you're swinging big to have a few misses in a controlled environment” - 𝗝𝗼𝗻𝗻𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝗼𝗱, 𝗗𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝘂𝗱𝗶𝘁 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲 making it very clear that it’s fine for public sector organisations to try things and fail.

In today’s episode, I talk to Jonny about what value for money really means, why BCR is often misused and how the NAO supports innovation in the public sector.

The conversation about BCRs is also fascinating: highlighting that value-for-money rules don’t require complex decisions to be boiled down to a single number.

Do take a listen to this one!

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

Anjali Devadasan on Growing A Green Startup

My guest this week is Anjali Devadasan, 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘃𝗮, a startup generating energy from passing vehicles and trains. Her turbines harness airflow to power local infrastructure like lighting and EV chargers.

We talked about the technology, the challenges of scaling, and her personal drive to tackle climate change, inspired by her family’s personal experience of climate-change induced flash floods.

Anjali also shared great advice for founders around protecting time for strategy, running real world experiments and building around purpose.

A truly inspirational conversation with someone who’s achieved incredible things very early in her career.

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

Elke Van Den Brandt on Transforming Brussels

Elke Van den Brandt has transformed Brussels' streets – and taken a political battering for doing so.

As the city’s mobility minister, she’s championed slower speeds, safer roads and public spaces that feel more like “living rooms than corridors”.

We talk about her 30km/h city-wide limit, the backlash it sparked, the silent majority that supports it and the power of empathy, small projects and showing up in person.

It was a superb insight into how political bravery, behavioural science and empathy (backed up by strong leadership) can work together to reshape cities for the better.

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

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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BSIPs show how the Government can Save 15% of Civil Service Costs

Did you see that Rachel Reeves has announced that she will cut the cost of the civil service by 15%?

It was one of a spate of cost-control projects that were miraculously quantified just days before the Office for Budget Responsibility had to score their latest update to the budget.

As someone whose first job included writing National Express’s annual strategic plan, I’ve had similar late nights in the run-up to the Group financial review. It’s amazing how inventive one can be with numbers when they keep refusing to add up.

One of the National Express strategic plans I worked on. Every number 102% robust.

The problem, of course, is that having got through the Group / OBR review, the numbers actually have to be delivered.

So how is Rachel Reeves actually going to cut the cost of the Civil Service?

Well, I have an idea - and it is inspired by Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIPs).

I’ll get onto the solution to Rachel’s problems at the end, but first let’s talk about BSIPs (I know you want to).

Happy Birthday, National Bus Strategy!

Back in March 2021, the National Bus Strategy was a bold attempt to reimagine local bus services. Officially a Department for Transport publication, it was widely rumoured to have been sexed up by Andrew Gilligan, Boris Johnson’s Number 10-based transport advisor. As well as rewriting the document overnight, Andrew Gilligan attended all the major meetings, including down to local authority level. I suspect he’d treat an accusation of micromanagement as a compliment, but I’ve personally spoken to junior officers at local authorities who - literally - found themselves on the phone to 10 Downing Street.

Once published, the National Bus Strategy dramatically reversed previous Government policy towards buses. In place of the austerity and fragmentation of the 2010s, local authorities and bus operators were to form close, integrated partnerships. The strategy was over-the-top; determining everything from how timetables should be presented to the principles of network design.

To bring all this to fruition, Local Transport Authorities (LTAs) were challenged to dream big, submitting Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIPs) accompanied by funding bids, with the promise of transforming bus travel into a more attractive, sustainable option.

The original BSIP guidance was nothing short of breathtaking in its ambition. LTAs were compelled to craft visionary plans featuring higher frequencies, integrated ticketing, and community-centred improvements. The document repeatedly asserted the importance of scale and ambition. For example:

In Bus Service Improvement Plans, we expect to see plans for bus lanes on any roads where there is a frequent bus service, congestion, and physical space to install one. Bus lanes should be full-time and as continuous as possible.

The problem was that there was never any real indication of whether money would be available, or how much. The National Bus Strategy promised £3 billion of funding, but it didn’t seem to actually… well… exist. Moreover, for the scale of ambition, even £3 billion (vast though that would have been as a one-off bus investment), would not have been enough. Transport Authorities were all told to write breathtakingly ambitious plans and then some of them would be funded. Back at the time, I wrote on this blog:

One has that niggling worry that none of it will come to anything. A bit like if an estate agent knocked on your door and promised that your house would be worth £5 million if you just refurbished every room: if true, you’d totally be up for all the effort involved in doing the refurb job, but are you certain the £5 million will actually materialise if you put in the work?

Because the guidance covered literally every aspect of running a bus service, it felt like a lottery to local areas. Everyone had to describe transformational improvements in every area but no-one would be funded for all of it. There was no mechanism to enable prioritisation. As a result, a local authority that really wanted to trial demand-responsive buses might find that it was the bus station element of their bid that was funded, while someone who desperately needed a new bus station might find they got bus lanes. With dozens of local authorities submitting dozens of schemes each, the ‘matrix’ of schemes from which DfT had to choose was vast. From the perspective of a local area, the outcome felt somewhat random.

The Perils of Rushed Planning

Bent Flyvbjerg is an academic and author who specialises in why projects frequently go over budget. In How Big Things Get Done he tells us that waste in projects is often driven by insufficient time in the planning phase. This was a significant danger for BSIPs, as they required local authorities to spin on a dime and suddenly focus on ambitious growth after a decade dominated by cuts. Most LTAs did not have a shelf full of carefully worked-up expansion plans, as only a year earlier, no-one had been talking about expansion.

On this blog previously, I’ve described how Chiltern Railways’ Oxford-Bicester project (in which I was involved) was delivered on-time and on-budget. One of the reasons for this is that Chiltern Railways had known since 2002 that it had signed a franchise agreement with a significant capital investment commitment, and so had spent around a decade quietly optioneering. It hadn’t cost much money but different options had been worked up, tested, rejected and refined. By the time came to create a Transport and Works Act order, the plans were well thought through.

Contrast this with LTAs in 2021 who suddenly had to leap into big investments without the luxury of time or flexibility. The BSIP guidance required an immediate turnaround for highly complex plans. Those local authorities with clear visions could use the funds to implement those visions but many didn’t have clear visions (why would they?).

Inevitably, virtually all local authorities rushed to hire consultants to develop the plans. So it simply became a contest for who could hire the brightest consultant.

In some ways, it didn’t matter.

The BSIP guidance was ludicrously ambitious, describing exactly what Andrew Gilligan the Government wanted from an ideal bus service, right down to requiring that buses should have Wifi. With that level of prescription, the contest was simply who could write it up most neatly. My favourite bit of the guidance was that “letter suffix routes should be reduced”.

In some ways, it was the worst of all devolution worlds.

There are benefits to locally-owned plans, as they can be tailored and reactive to community needs. There are benefits to central plans, which can be efficient and rolled out consistently. This was an unhappy middle, in which the contest set by the Government was largely how to replay their own guidance back to them.

Managing to plans

The other problem was how to identify success. In the absence of a baseline, once a plan exists, then the only thing that the Government can do is monitor compliance with the plan. Are you doing what you said you’d do?

That’s always a dangerous place to be. One of my favourite quotes is from Dwight Eisenhower, who said: "Plans are useless but planning is essential".

What he means is that the process of creating plans is an essential thinking technique, but as soon as the plan exists, it is out-of-date. I recently met someone who used to be a manager at Avanti West Coast, and I asked him how Avanti had ended up in such a sticky place. Now, he's only one person, so he may be wrong, but he told me that the issue was that the new management team had arrived clutching the Franchise Agreement (which is, in effect, a plan) and had implemented that plan rigidly - long beyond the point when it should have been obvious that it was not right.

How to measure success

This problem was harder for BSIPs, as measuring success for the BSIPs is incredibly hard. In writing this post, I was rather hoping to be able to give you a report card on how BSIPs are doing. But I can’t.

A big problem for assessing the results of BSIPs was that this all happened in 2021, when the bus industry was in a state of Covidy crisis. The Government was providing short-term revenue support, but there was a widespread fear that this would dry up before passengers returned. This did, indeed, happen, so £1 billion of the promised BSIP funding was diverted from delivering transformational improvements to emergency funding for keeping existing services going, given the post-Covid funding cliff edge that was emerging. Even that wasn’t enough to protect networks in every area, however, so you had the slightly bonkers outcome that in some regions existing services were being scrapped (due to lack of funding) while new services were being created (thanks to ring-fenced funding).

This makes assessing the outcomes of BSIPs as a policy seriously tough. At the same time as BSIPs came from nowhere, we had:

• Covid recovery taking place

• Route restructures as operators adjust networks to post-Covid demand

• The inflation shock impacting consumer behaviour (and bus input costs)

• The £2 (now £3) price cap

Trying to isolate the impact of BSIPs in all of this is virtually impossible. It’s like trying to find the egg in a baked cake.

Indeed, given that BSIPs turned up right in the middle of the Covid pandemic there was, in effect, no baseline against which to measure success. The DfT’s evaluation document identifies four key metrics against which success will be measured:

1. Bus customer satisfaction

2. Journey time

3. Punctuality

4. Reliability

But every single one of these will have been mangled by the impact of the pandemic (customer satisfaction by the demographic changes to the customer base and the other three by changed commuting habits), making it virtually impossible to know whether any result is a good one or not.

As I’m sure you know, the gold standard for research is a randomised controlled trial. This is how medical firms assess the impact of drugs. The key principles are that they recruit patients in whom nothing else is expected to change. They then give one group the drug but not the other group. Then they compare the results in the two groups.

On this basis, a decent test for BSIPs would be to choose a time in which nothing else significant was happening in the bus industry, fund some local authorities to make certain interventions, not fund other similar authorities and compare the results.

In an ideal world, the period from 2010 would have seen a whole bunch of different interventions funded and tested so that, come the national roll out of BSIPs, an evidence base existed on what worked. It’s hard to emphasise the extent to which that is not what happened. As a result, evaluation becomes a fiendishly complex task.

One clear metric

I would also argue that this list of evaluation topics is overly complex anyway.

Journey times and customer satisfaction (etc) are all good, important things - but wouldn’t it be simpler just to focus on one clear metric? That metric could be usage. It’s surely hard to argue that a bus network which is growing isn’t succeeding. And that one that is shrinking isn’t one that is failing. Growth is the Government’s sole success metric for the economy: it’s good enough for a bus network.

It also creates the opportunity for local areas to experiment in different ways to reach that outcome. I’ll be honest: I can’t visualise how you get to growth without punctuality, reliability (etc) but maybe someone can? And if they can, don’t create metrics that invalidate their imagination.

But maybe there’s a reason why they didn’t use passenger numbers. Because when I tried, it was far harder than I had hoped it would be. For this post, I decided to use some case-studies, and asked the local authorities for their passenger journey stats. They were all completely different to the DfT-collected bus journey stats for the same counties. I tried to figure out why - and failed. I asked a couple of local authorities - but the answers didn’t really help. Is it the way cross-boundary journeys are treated? Who knows.

Here are some examples of the data from the regions I looked at. First, here’s Cornwall:

And here’s Derbyshire:

As you can see, just when we most need accurate data, the two sources wildly diverge. Why is it? Who knows? Is it to do with how cross-border journeys are counted? Either way, it means that we can’t use passenger volumes as an indicator of success.

The results On the ground

The National Bus Strategy promised £3 billion. As expected, that never materialised.

But big money did emerge.

DfT has awarded £1.35bn under the BSIP scheme (including BSIP+) (nominal). Given that the annual total net local bus funding pre-Covid was only £0.3bn (excluding London), this was a massive funding boost.

However, as expected, the scale of allocations varied significantly across areas, from just over £2 million to just under £165 million. These funds were officially allocated to enable local authorities to implement their transformational visions, but in a lot of areas the original allocation of funding was actually soaked up by the need to keep the existing network solvent, given the reduction in demand post-Covid (especially from concessionary pass-holders, who were a disproportionate share of the bus customer base. Given that this money would have come from the Government, in effect, the Government was providing Government money to replace Government money). Moreover, local authorities were told to carry on paying concessionary fare payments to local operators at pre-Covid levels, even though the passengers weren’t travelling. This was a bit of a cheat as the order came from Government but the cost was borne by councils. The areas with smaller allocations were forced to regard them as, in effect, an extension of the emergency Covid funding support.

So let’s have a look at some of the areas with larger allocations.

Norfolk

Norfolk was one of the big winners from the BSIP lottery, with an allocation of roughly £50 million (£30.9m for capital, £18.6m for revenue interventions). For a rural county, that means per capita funding of £54: massive in bus world.

Reading Norfolk’s 25,000 word Bus Service Improvement Plan, one of the things that immediately stands out is that they’ve got clear objectives. The plan is designed to achieve:

·       Enhanced Accessibility

·       Reliability and Punctuality

·       Integrated Transport Network

·       Environmental Sustainability

·       Community engagement and feedback

In some ways, this is a bit motherhood and apple pie, but - nevertheless - five objectives is a lot better than fifty, which is where this kind of plan can frequently end up. To assess against these, they’ve got 12 measurable targets.

There’s also a focus on growth as a metric of success. This is also helpful. However you define a ‘good’ bus service, if people don’t wish to use it, you’ve probably got it wrong.

Both in the document (and talking to various people), you get a sense that Norfolk’s plan is a genuine partnership: and that’s tough in an environment without a single dominant operator.

Because Norfolk’s plan runs from 2022 to 2025 and is majority anchored in capital investment, it’s hard to know how they’re doing in terms of results, as we’re still in the investment phase. It’s especially hard to know given that none of the numbers seem to add up. According to their own figures, they’re now at 102% of post-Covid demand, but according to the DfT county stats, they’re at 93%. That’s a big difference and despite staring at it for a disproportionately long time, I can’t figure out why.

One of the things I like most about the Norfolk plan is that it’s actually not too rigid and prescriptive. It describes outcomes, a partnership process for making decisions and a budget. It doesn’t micro-list individual projects. That suggests the partnership board have retained flexibility to respond.

Good.

Derbyshire

The comparatively lean 18,000 words of Derbyshire’s BSIP present a more mixed picture. With a £47 million allocation - approximately £58.50 per capita (wow!) - the county’s plan is a grab-bag of initiatives: £15m targeting network pinch points, £8m for serving key attractors, £5m for ticketing officers, £4m for additional bus services (including demand-responsive transport), and another £4m for transport hubs - plus dozens more. Less than 10% is new bus services, and. significant proportion of this is for demand-responsive services, which I’m pretty cynical about (you can see my thoughts on the MK Connect service here).

The document has 26 targets that it is looking to achieve.

While there are encouraging signs - such as patronage growth beyond what Covid recovery alone could explain and strong customer satisfaction ratings (83% satisfaction, ranking above the national average) - the lack of a cohesive, clearly defined strategy is worrying. The sheer variety of schemes raises the question: can a lump-sum investment in so many disparate areas really translate into a long-term improvement in bus services?

CORNWALL

Cornwall is the ultimate example of “pot culture”, the British Government’s tendency to fund endless micro initiatives as opposed to providing consistent, predictable long-term funding.

Cornwall Council have done an amazing job soaking up different pots but it speaks to the chaos of the previous regime that there were so many different pots emerging at different times.

More or less simultaneously, Cornwall won “Superbus” funding of £23.5 million (which was a low fares pilot funded for four years) and BSIP funding of £13.3 million. A year later, they received £1.3 million of ZEBRA 2 (Zero Emission Bus Regional Areas 2) funding. All these pots have cost Cornwall taxpayers £650,000 in consultants’ fees (and, for clarity, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have paid for the consultants: it was the right thing to do, given how many pots were available at the same time - but it’s far from ideal from a taxpayer perspective. I’m - fairly obviously - not against public bodies using consultants but winning funding pots is not a productive use).

One of the strength of Cornwall is that they did have a clear vision. They wanted to create a single Transport for Cornwall brand with a single Transport for Cornwall network. Indeed, they were already in progress with this before any of this money emerged. They had recently replaced all of their tendered services with a single mega-contract awarded to the Go-Ahead group (with independent operators subcontracted via Go Ahead), which operated half the network. In 2021, this was live - but facing significant teething troubles, which I wrote about on this blog. £37 million was always going to help fix some of the issues, and the Transport for Cornwall network is now a lot more integrated than it was.

But services that were initially puffed up as part of Superbus have started to thin out again as the fares rise, and it’s not obvious that - given Transport for Cornwall did have a clear strategy - £37 million couldn’t have been spent more effectively if they’d been able to spend it on what they wanted to spend it on, as opposed to attempting to engineer the prescribed pots into their own local priorities.

The national position

Overall, it’s hard to see that BSIPs have made a significant impact on ridership to date. The shape of decline and revival of bus patronage across the UK appears to be similar. There are local variations but the pattern seen in England outside London, Scotland and Wales (neither of which invested in BSIPs) are similar. There is not a pattern by which the locations that benefited from phase 1 BSIP funding stand out as now having significantly larger growth.

A Summary of BSIPs to date

The key conclusions from the BSIP experiment:

• An exceptionally large amount - by historical standards - was invested in the bus industry

• I can’t tell you if it has been well used

• I can’t tell you what it’s achieved

• But I can tell you that it was planned in a rush

• And involved a lot of work

BSIPs revealed that while the ambition of the National Bus Strategy was admirable, the execution was hampered by unrealistic expectations and the way the exercise was carried out. Specifically:

1. LA’s were not ready to produce plans at a moment’s notice (why would they be?), so they end up being rushed, and not produced by local people who understand the needs of the community (and for whom councils will have had to pay more for lower quality as a result of the sudden rush on demand for consultants)

2. Lack of a stable baseline for the ‘do nothing’ scenario made costing of plans and the identification of what might be needed impossible

3. A lack of reliable and consistent data makes it very hard to know what is actually being achieved in terms of outcomes

How to Save 15% of civil Service costs

So let’s go right back to the beginning, what’s this got to do with cutting civil service costs?

Well, I’ve just spent 3,000 words describing in detail all of the work involved in making BSIPs happen. Consultants hired, bids written, bids evaluated, bids monitored, more bids submitted, more bids evaluated, more bids monitored, evaluation criteria written, evaluations written: it’s been a big job involving civil servants, officials and consultants all round the country.

How about we just… didn’t do any of this.

For real transformation, we need a shift towards devolved, long-term funding. Local authorities and operators require ongoing, predictable funding that allows them to adapt and innovate over time: not just a one-off windfall that forces them into inflexible plans. I wrote recently about how this is done in other countries. As a reminder, in Switzerland, there’s a dedicated pot of taxes that goes into a dedicated transport infrastructure fund. It all… just… happens. Similarly, local transport in France is funded through a dedicated employer levy. Yes, it can vary a little bit as firms are set up and shut down but, largely, transport authorities can predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy what funding they’re going to get in ten years’ time.

And this isn’t just transport. The crazy, labour-intensive swirling mass of bids and pots is how it also works in education, health and other parts of the public sector (remember Rishi Sunak announcing a central Government pot for school chess boards?).

If key long-term public services had certainty of funding, leaders could plan, and unit costs would be lower. It would also avoid the situation we’ve had recently when a gradual famine of bus funding was suddenly replaced by an unexpected feast. Does this graph look like the route to better bus services to you?

So perhaps the real opportunity isn’t another round of bidding guidance or a new name for the next funding pot, it’s stepping off the funding merry-go-round altogether. If we replaced short-term competitive pots with long-term, devolved funding, we could deliver better services and shrink the bureaucracy required to manage them.

We’re seeing the start of this with the expansion of City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (CRSTSs) but it’s early and it’s still counter-cultural for the British state. But Rachel Reeves has now set a target, and this can be part of the answer. Scrap the cycles, trust local delivery and we might just hit that 15% saving without cutting a single frontline service - and allow public servants to focus on making things better in the long-run, not simply moving this year’s budget around.

Lars Strömgren on Creating a Cycling City

In this episode, I’m joined by Lars Strömgren, Vice Mayor for Transport and Urban Environment in Stockholm, and one of the people most responsible for Sweden’s cycling boom.

We explore how Stockholm went from a city with less than 1% cycling modal share in the 1980s to one of the most bike-friendly places in Europe. Lars reflects on how his childhood on his grandmother’s bike shaped his passion for urban planning, and why he sees infrastructure, narrative and community engagement as the holy trinity of sustainable mobility.

We talk about the normalisation of cycling (and how it shifted from working-class mode to middle-class badge of honour), the fight to introduce zero emission zones and how livable streets can go from controversial to loved.

Lars also shares why it’s hard to take a photo of clean air, but easy to show people enjoying a tree-lined street!

We also discuss some unexpected angles: how my local high street in Walthamstow inspired parts of Stockholm, what it means to use storytelling as a tool in planning and why building cities out of wood might be the next frontier in sustainability.

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

“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.

Are Trams the Secret of the Blue Banana?

Everywhere we’ve ever been

We have a corkboard map on the wall into which we put a pin for every place we visit as a family.

Which made me realise just how many of our holiday destinations are in the Blue Banana.

In recent years we’ve visited Antwerp, Ghent, Utrecht, Locarno, Venice, Rouen, Innsbruck and Genoa: all Blue Banana destinations.

And it got me thinking - what’s the secret of the Blue Banana?

The Blue Banana

The concept of the Blue Banana was developed in 1989 by RECLUS, a group of French geographers managed by Roger Brunet. They spotted a roughly banana-shaped zone across Western Europe from Manchester to Milan that contains a remarkable concentration of the world’s wealthiest regions.

They called it a blue banana because, well, alliteration, innit. If it had stayed yellow, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it today. (to be fair, you probably weren’t)

The Blue Banana runs from Manchester through Birmingham and London and across the North Sea to the Randstad (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and other urban centres on the western edge of the Netherlands), the Flemish Diamond (Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent) and the Ruhr Metropolis (Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne, etc.). Then it sweeps through Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Switzerland and ends in the Italian industrial cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa.

Small but perfectly formed

Despite containing less than 15% of Europe’s population, it dominates its economy. As its borders don’t coincide with any administrative boundaries, I cannot find the proportion of Europe’s GDP, but if it’s not more than 15% I will eat as many green or blackened bananas as you care to feed me.

(It’s not a perfect proxy, but I did spot that the members of the Air Quality of the Regions initiative, which is pretty similar to the Blue Banana, comprise 19% of the EU’s population but 23% of GDP)

It’s the Trams!

Why has the Blue Banana (in which most of my readers probably live) been so blessed?

Well, if you map all Europe’s tram networks, you start to notice that they centre on the Blue Banana. Here’s a simple map:

The story becomes clearer, though, if you turn it into a cluster map. It’s not a perfect banana, but there’s definitely a musaceous quality to the shape. (And, by the way, if you take nothing else from this blog, I hope you enjoy the word musaceous). The area of Europe with the highest density of trams is our old friend the Blue Banana, though this time extending a bit further into Italy and with a stem covering more of Germany:

Is it a coincidence that one of the most economically successful clusters on earth is also a hotbed of trams? Well, it’s obviously not the only reason, but I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence. Productivity is driven by transport.

It’s the Transport, Stupid

The success of the blue banana cannot be explained by shared political systems, history, language or religion. The banana zoe crosses multiple national and linguistic boundaries. What the regions of the Blue Banana do coincide with are extensive river systems, such as the Rhine and the Thames, that provided natural transport routes, facilitating trade and industrial growth. These rivers were navigable and gave easy access to open sea (unlike, for example, the Danube). This is unusual at a global scale, and was the origin of the Blue Banana’s success.

Transport before trains

These rivers were the catalyst for trade and industrialisation, which encouraged further early transport connections.

As the economy evolved, rivers were replaced by railways. Again, lack of blue-banana specific data is an issue, but my experience of travelling round the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and northern Italy tells me they all have very high densities of rail connections. Switzerland has the highest density of rail lines in Europe: the Netherlands the highest density of rail service.

What about the French?

By the way, I’m not 100% convinced by the Blue Banana’s shape. I think the inventors of the concept were enamoured of the idea of a huge Blue Banana lying across the continent of Europe.

Everything about the Blue Banana should also include Paris: a high density, high productivity, highly connected global hub, highly integrated with London, the Netherlands and the Rhine area of Germany.

The academics who coined the idea were French. Maybe they excluded France to make a point?

More likely, though, it was because it would lose its distinctive banana shape as the concave side on the left would be straight. It would be the Blue Polygon-that’s-almost-a-triangle-but-not-quite. And then they’d have lost the alliteration.

France is a Blue Banana region in all but name.

Is it actually trams?

No. Obviously not. It’s possible that the trams were funded from the proceeds of a rich economy. But as the economy has evolved towards a digital, knowledge-based economy, the importance of easy connectivity within urban areas has increased. The Blue Banana tram cluster means cities that work for people; which is why the Blue Banana has navigated the transition from heavy industry to knowledge-based better than maybe any other region on earth. If the Blue Banana was created by rivers and evolved by railways, it is today sustained by trams.

What’s that got to do with us in Britain?

Well, mainly this.

If one of the richest, most economically successful regions on Earth has a high density of trams, maybe we should do the same?

It’s impossible to prove now whether the trams caused the success, or the success funded the trams. My hunch is that the trams sustained the growth.

London, Birmingham and Manchester are all Blue Banana cities, and all have trams. But parts of the UK lag drastically behind. If we want to catch up, maybe we should adopt the mantra of the Wolf of Wall Street: “Act as if you're rich already, and then you'll surely become rich”.

For the Blue Banana, that means trams.

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.

Do you Tweet? Here’s one ready-made