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:
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.
