A reply to a Reply
Dear Omer,
Thank you for your reply [link] to my blog post asserting that 20th-century transport planning failed.
I am delighted to continue the conversation.
Did 20th-century transport planning really fail?
You are, of course, right that it would be fiendishly difficult to prove it failed without a counterfactual of the last eighty years.
But just because we can’t prove something doesn’t mean it’s not true.
If a jury fails to convict a murderer, it doesn’t mean they’re not a murderer, just that they got away with it.
In this case, it may not be possible to convict twentieth-century transport planning of grievous economic and social harm, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
A reminder of my core argument: that as a result of the dominant approaches in the twentieth century, public transport retreated from the places that people actually live and became more and more concentrated on a small number of high-volume corridors (which saw considerable capacity investment).
Today, 43% of Brits have to walk more than 30 mins to reach a railway, tube or light rail station. A fag packet calculation would estimate it was probably around 10% at the start of the century.
I suggest that this was harmful, not just ecologically and environmentally.
Here, m’lud, is my evidence:
London is the only place in the UK that continued to expand rail capacity post-war (Victoria line, Jubilee line, DLR, Elizabeth line) and the only place to have a defined standard to ensure public transport serves every residential community (all households within 400m ). London is also the only place in the UK to achieve productivity levels equivalent to their European benchmark (as evidenced by the Centre for Cities), and is - by a large margin - the most economically successful part of the UK
London’s economy and population have both grown rapidly since 1980. Prior to that, economic growth was anaemic and population was declining. There are multiple reasons but London gave up attempting to build new roads around that time (M11 link road excepted) and moved towards public transport, place-based growth. In this video, from 6:07, I talk about that moment of transition when the first attempt to connect Canary Wharf to the City by Highway was augmented (and ultimately dwarfed) by the DLR. Even if you can argue that London could have grown without this change in approach, it’s certainly proof that a road-based approach was unnecessary.
Many of the approaches used in the 20th century have been reversed. We no longer build inner-city motorways, which makes it unlikely that the M8, M602, A40(M), M41 (etc) were good investments.
The core purpose of transport is access to other places. Good quality public transport is not available to most residential communities outside London but the UK is too densely populated for good quality private transport to be viable outside rural areas. The result is that suburbs outside London have neither good quality public, nor private transport. These places tend to be economically deprived.
House prices are heavily correlated with public transport access. There is a consistent decay curve in every city. This suggests that public transport is economically beneficial, yet it was cut in the 20th century.
In summary, if it succeeded, then what we’ve got now is what was intended. Outside London, that seems implausible.
Anyway, I know that’s not core to your argument, but I thought it worth making the point, seeing as you gave me the opportunity.
The aims of postwar planning
In your response, you express scepticism towards vision-led planning. You suggest that postwar planners were motivated by economic growth and by a positive “Futuroma” vision.
I don’t think that’s right: I think they were motivated by traffic.
There had been a pre-war surge in car ownership and this looked likely to continue. It wasn’t unreasonable to extrapolate this forward and see that prewar road capacity would be overwhelmed. “Predict and provide” wasn’t a philosophy designed to deliver economic growth: it was a panicked reaction to save our cities.
Obviously, the creators of “Futurama” were motiviated by the Futurama vision, but I don’t think that’s what motivated the transport planning profession of the twentieth century.
Britain doesn’t “do” vision very well (something I’m keen to help it change!), whereas we do panicked muddling-through brilliantly. It’s a core skill!
Indeed, the lack of vision in Britain compared to France was one of the key learnings from the policymakers that I recently (along with colleagues from Create Streets and CBT) took to France. The French have a set-up that allows vision.
The Known Flaws
Before getting onto the crux of your argument, I was fascinated to read in your reply that the flaws in transport appraisal were known as soon as it was created.
The fact that appraising road schemes by journey times doens’t work as it ignores the demand generated, and it ignores what happens at the end of the road is well known now.
What I didn’t know is that it was well known then.
What a truly remarkable counterfactual hoves into sight (and, then, sadly recedes) if we imagine that this had been acted upon back in the 1950s!
Now let’s get onto where we disagree (and I think you’re right: we do).
Place-Based Planning
As you rightly say, our opinions then converge around the idea that it would make much more sense to do Place >> Plan >> Project, as opposed to Project >> Plan >> Place.
We also both agree that it is deeply countercultural for this sector, especially for the big infrastructure operators.
It’s going to be hard to get there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Ask the Spreadsheet
But our opinions diverge at the end.
You say:
I strongly believe that whatever we think is needed, we need to develop an objective system of appraisal to make decisions. We can't simply say "this is the vision" and test schemes based on whether they get us there or not.
I say that is precisely what we must do.
You agree with the proponents of numerical appraisal that there must be some empirical appraisal yardsticks, you just think that the current ones are flawed.
I, by contrast, argue that the concept is flawed, for two reasons.
1) It doesn’t avoid any of the risks you describe. You fear vision but the authors of the appraisal methodology are the authors of a vision. It is just a vision expressed in numbers. To remind readers that you suggested an appraisal that looks something like this:
Access.
Land values.
Health and environment.
Justice.
I think these are very sensible. But they are a societal vision. I suspect that there are some people who would value different things.
Therefore, we have to allow different places to define what it is that they want, and then appraise based on judging whether or not their schemes are likely to achieve those outcomes.
I’m afraid we need appraisal folk to become a bit more humble and accept that they are only there to mark the homework but not set the questions.
Appraisal should not be trying to tell us what we want. It should be testing whether what we say we want is plausibly delivered by what we propose to build.
At the moment, the appraisal system is the vision.
Worst case, it determines what gets built, to the detriment of what cities actually want.
Best case, people build what they want but reverse-engineer it so that they manage to also tick enough appraisal boxes.
Replacing time savings with justice doesn’t change the fact that it’s not an appraiser’s job to decide what a city should have.
I fear that your desire for objectivity is just as likely to bake in a world view as either “Futurama” or me, running workshops with Combined Authorities on their transport vision. I would just argue that we’re being more honest about it.
With all best regards,
Thomas
