20th Century Transport Planning Failed. It’s Time To Do Something Different
20th century transport planning has taken us to a bad place.
Not a terrible place. But, equally, not a good one.
Where we started
If we go back to the end of the Second World War, Britain had the densest railway network in the world, trams in virtually every town and city (and often in between) and a comprehensive bus service.
Since then, much of the railway, all of the trams and some of the bus service has been closed down.
The M8 in Glasgow, one of many motorways ploughed through Britain’s inner cities
A country that previously travelled by public transport shifted to primarily going by car. Many of our cities, especially outside London, are scarred by inner city motorways and the countryside is now rarely tranquil.
These trends happened globally, and Britain suffered less than many. But 193 wrongs don’t make a right.
What is interesting is that London is something of an outlier.
While the trams have gone, the rail network continued to expand and no motorways were built in Central London (and very few anywhere in Greater London). Unlike elsewhere in the UK, 63% of journeys in London are made by public transport.
It’s not a coincidence that London is also the only part of the country that has retained its comparative prosperity with peer group cities in the rest of the world.
London being different to the norm can help us figure out what to do next.
What went wrong?
The painful truth is that, in many respects, the problem is with… transport itself.
Transport planning retreated into itself to focus primarily on the planning of transport.
The primary objective of rail and road networks became simply to expand capacity in response to demand, with an occasional side hustle in getting people there faster.
As you could only ever increase capacity or improve journey times where there were already connections, this meant that the transport network became more and more focused on certain corridors.
This was true in London too.
The Elizabeth line is never this empty
The busiest tube line in London, the Victoria line, was built to relieve congestion on the Piccadilly line. The busiest rail line in London, the Elizabeth line, was built to relieve congestion on the Central line. Between them, these two mega projects delivered just one new station: Pimlico.
But, in general, public transport in London expanded: most dramatically with the DLR, which added dozens of new high-capacity, high-frequency stations.
By contrast, the national rail network has become more concentrated, as the focus became adding more capacity on the most popular routes. This has been a huge success: two-thirds of the 1940s network went on to carry more passengers than ever before (Covid aside). Intercity routes are almost all hourly, and many are even more frequent than that.
But the focus on the core has corresponded with a retreat from the places where people actually live.
As a result, outside London, a small minority of people travel by public transport, while almost everyone who lives in a home built since the war lives somewhere in which public transport was neither meaningfully considered nor provided.
In the 1950s, estates were designed around cars because they were the future. Now they’re designed around cars by default.
Yet this is a reality that isn’t working for anyone. There are two big issues
Issue 1 - too much focus on existing routes
The focus on capacity and journey time means that places not already served will never get served.
The old transport planning joke goes “There’s no demand for a bridge: no-one crosses the river.”
Except that it’s not a joke: it’s literal policy.
Again, London shows the truth - and why the exceptions to it are so valuable.
Excluding HS1 (which doesn’t serve the local area), when I was born, there were five locations with Thames crossings East of Tower Bridge:
Rotherhithe,
Greenwich,
Woolwich,
Blackwall and
Dartford.
Since then, a further ten river crossings have been built.
Eight of the ten are at one of the five existing locations.
Wouldn’t people want to cross in some other place?
We don’t know: there’s no bridge, so no data. With no demand data, we’ll never build a bridge.
But the other two are the busiest.
They are are the Jubilee line, criss-crossing the Thames.
Why is the Jubilee line so important?
Becuase it was an unusual project - explicitly designed around placemaking Canary Wharf, not capacity.
The fact that the Jubilee line is now so crowded suggests adding new connections is just as important as adding new capacity.
Issue 2 - Not being part of places
Transport schemes are designed in isolation from their wider environment.
I didn’t count HS1 as one of those eight new river crossings, because it doesn’t actually connect the north and south banks of the river, even though it crosses the river.
The nearest stations are at Ebbsfleet, where it serves a giant car park, and at Stratford, where it misses the largest rail interchange in East London.
Transport schemes are designed by transport people for transport objectives (typically capacity or journey times) as opposed to for human objectives.
We invest about £20 to 30 billion each year in new transport schemes.
If you asked people in their local areas what they would like, they’ll tell you they want their kids to be able to play out, to be able to walk to the local shops and to be able to get back from the pub without having to get a lift.
But our schemes to increase capacity have simply enabled more of us to go faster on existing routes.
If we’d invested £1 trillion (roughly how much we’ve spent in my lifetime, in today’s money) on meeting peoples’ actual needs, we’d have ended up with very different environments.
Which means - Road by Default
The result of the two issues described above is that you get the transport system we have today: world-leading public transport on high-capacity corridors while most people live car-dependent lives that they’d rather not have been forced into.
That happens because, when new homes are built, in the absence of anything else, they are connected to the world by a shiny new road and nothing else.
Of course they are: if the focus for investment is capacity, then a place that doesn’t yet exist is at the bottom of the pecking order.
That means the cheapest transport solution imaginable, which is a strip of tarmac.
Even if that doesn’t actually deliver any of the things people want (kids able to play out, walk from the pub, etc).
Reasons to be Cheerful
It’s not all been bleak since the war. For a start, the capacity-focused schemes have still delivered some genuinely good outcomes. The frequency of rail services in the UK are some of the highest in the world; frequency on the Victoria line is a modern miracle.
And some exciting new projects have been delivered that don’t meet the description above: the Tyne & Wear Metro, Manchester Metrolink, the Nottingham trams, the DLR.
But it’s unfortunately the case that most of the good stuff has happened in London. Here’s a video of a talk I did on the London story:
There are two reasons why London’s done so well out of the post-war system.
The first is that the a focus on capacity benefits London, as it’s got the highest usage already.
That’s why every virtually river crossing in East London has been duplicated and why the Elizabeth line was built between existing stations. Newcastle would love a new river crossing and Manchester keeps asking for an underground railway. But the demand was only obvious in places where it was obvious.
This then became something of a vicious circle: the appraisal systems used by the Government prioritised schemes that would have most economic benefit. Previous investments made London the most productive region of the UK so investments in London would add economic benefit. That meant it got transport projects that increased its economic productivity and so made it even more attractive for investment.
Something needed to be done to break that vicious cycle.
Luckily, London has also adopted examples of the place-based approaches that are key to doing just that.
The DLR is a great example of a place-based project. It was built not to relieve existing congestion but to catalyse new development. So was the Jubilee line.
When the DLR opened, much of the Isle of Dogs was literally derelict. There was no existing demand, but there was the potential for future demand.
This was derelict wasteland when I was a kid
These are the circumstances that our conventional transport planning systems struggle with. And, back in the 1980s, they struggled again. The DLR only just got approved.
It made it over the line only because it was delivered at an almost unviably low spec. But it was approved, making the regeneration of the Docklands possible.
It was rapidly followed by the Jubilee line, doing the same job but on a reasonable scale. Imagine now if we’d attempted to regenerate the Docklands without public transport.
Well, you don’t need to imagine because the country’s full of abandoned industrial land that’s not been provided with its equivalent of the DLR.
And it’s not just with the Docklands regeneration that London shows the way.
London has a clearly defined spatial plan, which defines the objectives for each part of London.
That then cascades into the Mayor’s Transport Strategy, which defines the objectives for TfL to deliver against that plan.
Both are statutory documents: the Mayor is compelled by law to write them. As I wrote in this blog post, imagine a world in which the Government was forced to write a Britain Plan.
Well, that’s not happening anytime soon, but what is happening is a dramatic change to how we do plans locally. And this has big implications for transport people.
Next week, we’ll talk about what needs to change for transport people to deliver Vision-Led plans
