What Does “Integration” Mean? - Part One
A Two-Part Blog Post on the Challenges and Opportunities of Transport Integration
(And I won’t mention Switzerland once)
The challenges of Integration
Who’d be Danny Williams right now?
As I wrote last week in my review of Yes Minister, this country has been failing to do integrated transport for all of my lifetime and long before.
Danny’s the civil servant whose job it is to change that through the publication of the Integrated National Transport Strategy (INTS).
The one good thing about the unenviable position he’s found himself in is that abject failure will be seen as the expectation and anything better than abject failure will be, in the context of all previous attempts, a triumph.
In fact, when you put it like that, Danny’s got the dream job…
Anyway, today I intend to focus on the first word of the INTS, “Integrated”.
After all, even if it’s obvious that we need a national transport strategy (even if we’ve never previously had one), what does “integrated” actually mean, and why does it matter?
The purpose of transport
To think about transport integration, we first need to think about the purpose of transport.
There are many different ways of thinking about this, but I like the version popularised by Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit (you can hear my conversation with Jarrett on my podcast here).
He describes the core mission of transport as being access: i.e. to enable people to get somewhere.
So far, so obvious, you might say.
But it’s not how we’ve traditionally prioritised investments.
Our normal behaviour has been to focus on journey time or capacity on existing routes: basically, making journeys already being done easier.
Access is about maximising the number of useful places a person can reach.
The measure that Jarrett developed looks at each household and calculates how many centres of education, employment, retail and leisure they can reach within a 45-minute window. Other measures are available, including this new nationwide “Connectivity” model from the DfT, which does something very similar. The Welsh Government do the same thing, but call it Opportunity. It’s sometimes 45 minutes and sometimes an hour.
While the metric varies, the purpose of transport is to enable as many people to get to as many places as possible.
My favourite transport authority at the moment, Ruter of Oslo, summarises this as “Sustainable freedom of movement.”
I like this definition of transport because it’s not prescriptive. We often try to tie transport into very narrow economic objectives. In reality, humanity is a complex system and it’s not for us to determine whether ‘good’ is going to work or doing business deals or going to a restaurant or visiting a friend or shagging your secret lover: transport access makes all of these possible.
You might say that the economy is all that matters but all of the activities I describe above add to the economy (assuming your secret lover wants gifts, that is), so you still don’t really need an economic model.
You just need humans - with access.
So that’s the starting point: transport is about giving people access to other places.
Modes of transport
Modes of transport matter because different physical form factors suit different purposes.
Buses are best suited to serving residential areas and corridors with low demand.
Trains are best suited to routes with high volume and a need for high capacity or high speed.
Trams and Light Rail are best suited to high volumes over short distances.
Cable cars are best suited to vanity projects by showoff Mayors (and very densely populated hills).
Metros are best suited to very high capacity amidst very high density.
Because modes suit different purposes, maximising access will involve journeys across multiple modes.
That means it needs to be easy, simple and intuitive to connect between modes.
When you write it down like this, it sounds obvious.
But our policy for the last century has been to manage them separately, and connecting between modes is generally not easy, simple or intuitive.
Proximity
The most basic requirement of integration is physical proximity.
Richmond is unusual in London for having a bus station on the opposite side of the town centre to the tube station. In general, they are co-located. That’s because transport in London has been integrated for a century.
By contrast, throughout the rest of the country, bus stations are normally not co-located with train stations.
That means that passengers are less likely to connect between them, and the access benefits are lost.
Times
The second most basic requirement is the timetable. Remember that our purpose of transport was to get as many people to as many places as possible, within a defined timescale.
If a train ride takes 20 minutes and a connecting bus ride takes 20 minutes but there’s a 40-minute wait between them, then the journey is not viable. (It’s possible: but not viable. In practice, most people won’t spend 160 minutes of their day doing a short local journey).
If the service is unviable, potential access has been sacrificed. A restaurant you might have visited, a job you might have taken, a deal you might have done or a lover you might have shagged: all become unviable even though the transport was available - just not at times you could meaningfully use.
Price
Pricing is also a crucial element of integration.
Separate pricing structures make integration difficult.
Something that is underappreciated is that London has a transport network with high levels of proximity and timetable integration but comparatively little price integration.
There is an integrated rail pricing structure (the cost of interchange between Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR and tube is zero, while the cost of interchange between those modes and National Rail is low) and a fully-integrated bus + tram pricing structure (the cost of interchange between buses or between buses and trams is zero), but there is no integration between these modes until you reach an overall price cap.
This creates a strong disincentive to connect between bus and rail modes, as you have to pay two fares.
That makes a big difference, especially in suburbs. From where I live, in Walthamstow, the best way to reach Canary Wharf is to get a bus then the tube. But that means I have to pay two completely separate fares.
That means an arbitrary selection of journeys are much less affordable than others because they best be undertaken with a connection between bus and rail.
This is a constraint on access.
Ease
The reason why London’s lack of price integration is less well known is that it’s buried under a very thick duvet of ease and convenience, and this is a huge part of the integration story - and the one most difficult to put hard measures around.
You can change between all modes in London (other than cycle hire) using the same Oyster or contactless card. The same apps give information. The same roundel identifies the stops. It feels easy. At big bus stations like Hammersmith or Canning Town, you don’t even need to leave the tube station to catch the bus.
Creating that sense of ease of interchange is a hugely important part of integration. If human beings don’t feel like interchange is possible, it’s no good telling them that it is - they won’t do it, and the access benefit of transport has been sacrificed.
Trade-offs
Integration is hard because the things above require trade-offs.
Integrating times makes the individual routes less efficient. The cheapest way to run a service is simply to run it back and forth end-to-end. If you’ve got to make it arrive and depart at a time that suits another mode, it’ll probably have to wait somewhere for a while. That adds to cost.
Very possibly, the additional passengers interchanging will cover that cost. But that’s uncertain and takes time to materialise as awareness of the opportunity builds, but the costs are immediate.
Price brings with it even more trade-offs. An integrated pricing structure makes creating a P&L account for each mode more challenging, as each ticket sale must be attributed across multiple modes.
Moreover, integration only works well if access is the number one objective of all transport modes.
The lack of integration in London emerges from the fact that the bus network is being asked to do a different job, unrelated to access: it’s also being asked to reduce people’s living costs. The Mayor of London was explicit in his manifesto that bus fares would be held down. That doesn’t make pricing integration impossible but it makes it more complicated, as the modes end up with very different prices.
Personally, I’m not a fan of using public transport to hold down living costs. It increases subsidy need, makes transport look artificially expensive to the Treasury, and is inefficient as a way of helping the poor (affluent people like me also use the bus, while many poor people never do).
But it’s a perfectly reasonable political decision by the Mayor.
The only alternative to the car
In Silicon Valley, there’ll be tech bros pointing out that we don’t need an access metric: we already have unlimited access. It’s called the car.
And, of course, in Silicon Valley, the car works (reasonably!!) well for access.
But that’s because they have almost unlimited space.
The Bay Area urban area is 2,470 square miles, with a smaller population than London. You could fit the whole of Greater London just into the space the Bay Area devotes to roads and parking.
If you’ve got the almost unlimited space of the American West, you can (just about) make a city work with cars.
But - as the famous British Rail advert showed - it would be literally unviable in the UK. Cars can only deliver access to a minority, with public transport essential for everyone else.
When public transport fails, access fails for everyone.
There’s no demand for a bridge, no-one crosses the river
One thing I’ve heard frequently is that “integration isn’t a priority in this region as most journeys are single-mode.”
Well, of course they are! If it’s almost impossible to change between modes, then every journey will be single-mode.
The question is how many journeys aren’t happening by public transport because they can’t be made using a single mode.
It’s very similar to the famous transport planning joke that there’s no demand for a bridge because no-one’s crossing the river.
What’s measured is managed
The famous quote "What gets measured gets managed" is generally attributed to management guru Peter Drucker, though there’s little evidence he ever said it.
But the point is right: measurements drive behaviour. As most of our metrics are modal, so we think in modes.
If you run a bus company, you’re measured based on delivering your revenue and cost budgets, and running your buses on time. The train company in the same town is measured on the same thing. Even though customers of both could get a better service from an integrated offer from both of them, that’s not how the managers are incentivised.
If we’re going to achieve an integrated transport network, we first need to start with integrated management.
We’ll discuss what we do (and don’t) mean by that next week.
