Towards a truly sustainable transport policy:
A discussion paper
Bob Jeffery
12/07/09
The way people inhabit and move around the landscape has changed vastly over the last couple of hundred years. Over the course of the last century in particular, with the rise of the motor car as the preferred mode of transportation the landscape has been reshaped to accommodate this system of movement. In this report, I want to argue that these issues have important implications for how people organise their lives, their health, and their social wellbeing. This in turn affects most those in our society who already face challenges: the elderly, the disabled, our children, those with caring responsibilities, and those living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
I want to start by outlining the case against the continued expansion of private car ownership in this country, touching on environmental and social sustainability.
I will then discuss how transport policy over the last century has favoured the continued expansion of car ownership.
This will be followed by a discussion on the decline of public transport in this country, before we examine the case for Free Public Transport, examining evidence from those places where it has been tried both in the past and presently.
Firstly, as many authors have been arguing for a long time now, organising cities around the private automobile is unsustainable when trying to create vibrant, safe and equitable societies.
This is because the ‘car-system’ (Urry, 2007) requires so much space to be given over to roads and car parks.
As this happens cities become more spread-out, people are seen walking the streets less, and fear of crime increases due to less ‘eyes on the street’ (Jacobs, 1961).
At the same time, busy roads represent dangers to citizens and may in some cases form an effective barrier in terms of accessing facilities and services on the other side.
The impact of these issues can maker certain areas inhospitable places to live.
As an area becomes more inhospitable, so those with a choice are more likely to use their cars, and the cycle goes on.
Secondly, in terms of the environmental issues, the government report entitled: ‘Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transport’ shows that 62.8 million tonnes of CO2 were being produced by private household vehicles per year in 2002 (ONS, 2004).
There is also growing evidence on the impact of roads on health, even on a local level (see Rayfield et al, 1998 for the evidence on Greater Manchester).
Data from the Commission for Integrated Transport confirms that private transportation in the form of cars (excluding vans and lorries) makes up the vast majority of transport related CO2.
More than double the amount produced by international aviation (in the UK).
At the same time emissions from public transport make up only a fraction of those produced by HGVs, never mind cars (see Commission for Integrated Transport, 2007).
There are other arguments to be made against organising a society’s transport around the private car, and we will touch on others as we progress.
For the moment I now want to move on to the recent history of transport policy in this country.
To begin with, from as early as the 1920s, private car ownership has been subsidised in a way that public transportation has not (Glaister et al, 2006: 9).
As Reynolds points out: ‘in most instances the real cost of automobile travel is not borne by users and a transit subsidy is needed to “level the playing field” and encourage use’ (2008: 19).
This of course reached its peak during the peak of motorway construction in the mid to late twentieth century.
A key problem regarding the expansion of car ownership and road construction was the predominance of so-called ‘predict and provide’ models, whereby rising real incomes were believed to be the driving force behind increasing levels of vehicle ownership.
All the government did (whatever its persuasion) was to build roads to cater for the predicted demand.
The damage that would be done to towns and cities in the wake of rampant road and car-park growth was unforeseen, as were the environmental issues.
Deregulation and privatisation in the 1980s worsened the already declining public transport situation in the United Kingdom, and can be seen as nothing short of a disaster. The main effects have been discussed by van Goeverden et al:
- First of all they note that the wages of bus drivers fell substantially. ‘In 1998 the wage fall amounted to 30% relative to the average wage rate’.
- Secondly they note that directly following deregulation fares rose by 20-25% and ‘in the years after they continued to increase at a higher rate than they did before 1985’.
- Thirdly, time-table co-ordination between bus companies stopped and bus integration with rail was converted into competition. So instead of different modes of transport working together, they now compete in a wasteful manner, while the cost of that waste is passed onto the passenger.
- Fourthly, the impact on public transport demand is negative, and this is where the Dutch study is most damming: ‘In the metropolitan areas the reduction in bus patronage was 16% three years after deregulation, 25% five years after, 38% ten years after and 45% 16 years after’. (2006: 23)
With public transport in a poor shape at the end of the Thatcher period, the ‘predict and provide’ model that had provide the basis for transport policy for much of the 20th century also came into crisis in the early 1990s, when planners finally realised what many had been saying for years, ‘build more roads and more people will find it convenient to use a car’.
Arguably, the more roads you build the more someone has to use a car, because activities and facilities become more spread out.
With ever greater numbers of cars on the road (34 million currently, source: DVLA), this cycle could not continue indefinitely.
The Tories finally realised this after 1989, when it became clear that they would never be able to meet predicted ‘demand’ through their ‘Roads to Prosperity’ programme (see Goodwin, 1999).
The dead-end of car expansion was confirmed when ‘[…] the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA, 1994) published evidence that new roads intended to alleviate congestion may themselves be responsible for generating significant volumes of extra traffic’. (Glaister et al, 2006: 30).
So the realisation that something has to change in transport policy has been around for almost two decades, yet next to nothing has been achieved in that time. A key problem here is in managing the expectations of motor vehicle users.
Clearly, people don’t perceive that the problems associated with the car-system are ‘their fault’, and they resent moves to restrict their car usage.
New Labour made the mistake of appearing that they were ‘anti-car’ during the 2000 fuel protests when for the first time since they were elected they fell behind the Tories in the polls.
This led Gordon Brown abandoning the automatic higher-than-inflation increases in fuel tax that had been around since Major’s time. These had been designed to stop further traffic growth and help Britain make its green targets.
As Glaister et al note: ‘The measure had done more than anything to restrict traffic growth, and its abandonment, contributing to increases in traffic, congestion and associated carbon dioxide emissions, raises serious questions about the depth of New Labour’s commitment to sustainable transport policies’ (2006: 34-35).
Does this mean that the Conservative party has a strong record on transport? Not in the slightest, the disregard for public transport and its associated businesses reached its peak under the Tories during the 1980s.
They netted £500million in the years 1982-84, and another £4billion in the years 1987-88 through the privatisation of transport related companies including: National Freight, British Rail Hotels, Sealink, Associated British Ports, Jaguar, British Airways, Rolls-Royce aero engines, British Airports and the National Bus Company (Glaister et al, 2006: 21).
Returning to peoples attitudes towards politicians who appear ‘anti-car’, it is abundantly clear that the people of Greater Manchester resented the attempt to impose a congestion charge on them, and people are right to reject these kind of flat road taxes that will end up punishing those who can least afford it, while those who are better off barely notice the extra cost.
I argue that instead of hitting the British motorist with charges and penalties, it would be much more effective to offer them a huge carrot in the form of a massively expanded public transport system (one that gets you where you want to go quickly and reliably) free at the point of use. In Greater Manchester, as part of the Transport Innovation Fund bid, people were told that public transport improvements would be in place before the charge came along. Anecdotal evidence, from my research in a community within the conurbation, suggests that they simply were not believed. In the next section I want to use current trends in bus services to highlight the stagnation of a sustainable public transport policy in the rest of the UK as compared to the only properly regulated market in the UK, London.
For buses, the high point in Britain was in about 1950, when thee were an estimated 16.7 billion bus journeys made per year, equivalent to an average of seven trips per week per head of population.’ (Goodwin, 1993: 22) In 2007 there were barely 5 billion bus trips per year (White, 2006: 4).
As of 2007, there were almost 2 billion public transport journeys made in London, an increase from around 1.2 billion in 1996. At the same time bus use decreased in the six Passenger Transport Executive areas, from around 1.35 billion in 1996 to just over 1.1 billion in 2007. Also during this period, the number of bus-kilometres ran (this is used to estimate service levels in different areas) increased in London from 353 million to 465 million. The number of kilometres ran in the PTEs decreased from 695 million in 1996 to 584 million in 2007. While the ‘rest of England’, Scotland, and Wales all made increases in this period (White, 2008: 4-5), the change was very low, certainly not enough to encourage huge numbers to abandon their car.
When we turn to ‘real fare levels’ , we can see that they increased by only 5% in London over the years 1996 - 2006, while Great Britain as whole saw increases of almost 20% (and in the major metropolitan areas covered by the Passenger Transport Executives this was well over 20%). If we look at revenue per trip, this actually decreased in London 48p per passenger in 1999/2000 to 43.7p in 2005/2006. Again, the rest if Great Britain compares poorly with this, from 55.9p per passenger in 1996/1997, increasing to 63.4p in 1999/2000, and finally ending up at 66.4p per passenger. Clearly, London is doing much better than the rest of the country, and this speaks of the importance of the much tighter regulation that democratic authorities have over transport in London, and the much higher levels of financial support that public transport receives (White, 2006: 6-7). While the Transport Act 2008 promised some move towards tighter regulation outside London, considering the damage being done to both our natural and social environments, and the social exclusion faced by those with poor access to transport, this is too little too late.
Yet I would also argue that in many ways London transport does not go far enough. All politicians are talking about the need for a ‘step change’ in terms of transport, yet are unwilling to provide car users with necessary incentives. New Labour would rather impose congestion charges through conditional funding programmes like the Transport Innovation Fund. It is telling that of the growth in bus ridership in the capital, of the changes not explained by the traditional core factors of ‘service levels’ and ‘real fares’, only 5% of the increase can be explained by the introduction of the congestion charge, while another 5% is explained by the introduction of an all low-floor fleet, and 3% is down to population change (White, 2006: 8). Congestion charges penalise the poor and deliver very small improvements, certainly not enough to really help the UK reach its greenhouse gas emissions targets. Furthermore, there is always a divided interest when it comes to congestion-charging, if the scheme is too successful, then there will be less income from the levy than predicted (Reynolds, 2008: 10) and this is particularly pertinent when we consider that the government plans public transport expansion through billion pound loans (as with Greater Manchester’s TIF bid).
There have been a few studies over the years of the interaction between the levels of service provided by bus companies and levels of car ownership (what economists call ‘elasticities’). While there have been very many studies of how much change can be expected, Goodwin has reviewed eleven previous studies to arrived at the following figures: an increase of 1 bus kilometre run per person per year was associated with an average reduction of 0.0021 cars per person; and an increases of 10 public transport trips per person per year was associated with a decrease of 0.0077 cars per person (1993: 23). What is self-evident from these figures is that people are not easily turned away from their cars. What this suggests is that positive changes in public transport will have to big, very big, in order to induce people away from their cars. This is confirmed by evidence available on the interaction in other countries, such as the United States of America (see Deka, 2002: 295).
Looking at the evidence from Sheffield, which had as close as the UK has ever had to a zero-fare policy in the late 1970s and early 80s, Goodwin concludes that there was a significant impact upon the levels of car ownership: ‘fares were held at their nominal level during a period of considerable inflation, using a steadily increasing subsidy in effect to cut fares and maintain service levels’ (1993: 25-26). What is interesting here is that bus ridership levels continued to decline among older age groups (35 and above), but increased hugely amongst younger age groups (by almost 100% amongst the 5-14 age group). This is can be explained by fact that the older age groups, while also having access to almost zero cost fares, grew up during a time when public transport was declining and had too great an experience of increasing fares and reducing services, much like the young people who are growing up in Britain today. This shows that transport attitudes are ingrained and it will need a big push to bring about big changes. On the other hand, the good news is that our young are the quickest to change, and if you provide them with zero or very low fare transport they will start to see a reasonable choice between car ownership and public transport use. Goodwin also tells us that during the last years of low fares in Sheffield the number of people living without a car actually increased (1993: 28), an almost unheard of occurrence.
Unfortunately, when the low fares in Sheffield came to an end, car ownership levels resumed their rapid increases. This chimes with experience from America. Salt Lake City trialled zero fares (during off-peak periods) for a month in a bid to boost ridership (see Train, 1981). Predictably, while levels increased during the promotion period, they decreased the moment real fares were reintroduced, and to below their pre-promotional levels (Reynolds, 2008: 9). Whatever changes we make to our public transport system have to be enduring if we are to see a move away from our over-reliance on cars. And, if the system is to be free, why should it be in private ownership, with executives and shareholders taking a slice of public subsidy?
As it stands, public transport in this country is still subsidised and public funding for urban bus routes is vitally important. A Dutch study by van Goeverden et al (2006) showed that the cost recovery (the percentage of costs recovered through fare-income) ratio of bus transport was 30%, implying a heavy reliance upon public subsidy. It is difficult to know by how much British buses are subsidised, as the number of different companies competing in an urban area such as Greater Manchester means that many accounts would have to be examined in detail. That said, the total expenditure for the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive (GMPTE) was predicted to be around £231 million in 2007/2008, with almost all of this going on propping up private companies (see GMPTA, 2007). This is only one PTE in one part of the United Kingdom. Clearly there is need to work out exactly what percentage of the cost of a bus trip is already paid for by national government. Older data, from 2001, displayed below in Table 1, shows that at the turn of the millennium Great Britain had the most poorly funded public transport in Western Europe, far below the levels enjoyed in France and Germany, countries we rightly associate with extensive transport networks at more affordable prices than those found in the UK.
Table 1. Level of Subsidy and Fares for European Urban Bus Services
Region Cost Recovery Ratio Mean Fare (ECU/Km)
|
Region |
Cost-recovery ratio |
Mean Fare (ECU/Km) |
|
Benelux |
0.28 |
0.05 |
|
France |
0.25 |
0.15 |
|
Austria and Germany |
0.33 |
0.08 |
|
Greece & Italy |
0.30 |
0.04 |
|
Portugal |
0.61 |
0.06 |
|
Nordic |
0.67 |
0.15 |
|
Spain |
0.83 |
0.04 |
|
British Isles |
0.85 |
0.08 |
|
Average |
0.51 |
0.08 |
Source: Bristow et al, 2002: 79
Nevertheless, the indicators are that the state already pays the lion’s share of the cost of public transport (when the railways and aviation subsidies are considered), why not increase the proportion to the full amount and reap the rewards? On top of all the other positives discussed above and below this would also eliminate wasteful competition that often brings gridlock to our streets, as happens frequently in Manchester city-centre.
Continuing, the authors of the Dutch study have pointed out the following other benefits to free public transport:
The costs of the cashing and administration of payment disappears because no fare is required.
This also enhances the safety of drivers and conductors who will not be carrying cash.
Finally, it means that passengers can get on and off much more quickly - so improving journey times.
The attractiveness of the city to tourists will massively increase and free public transport could provide a unique pitch not just to tourists but all sorts of investors
Motorists will begin to switch to public transport use.
Even if these are few in number to begin with, less road-space will be required and so bus systems will run more efficiently, so further increasing their attractiveness to new users.
Further evidence of the positive effects of free public transport can be gleaned from the Belgian city of Hasselt. Not only did use of Hasselt’s bus system explode once zero fare were introduced (from 331,551 in the old situation to an astonishing 3.2 million - and this for a city of only 70,000 people), with all the obvious benefits this shift suggests, but also, some rather unexpected advantages were produced as well. For example, following the introduction of zero fares, the number of visits to patients in the city’s hospitals was reported to have “increased enormously” (van Goeverden, 2006: 7). This suggests that individuals and families will take more of a role in terms of caring responsibilities if they can actually access the people who need to be cared for, and this could represent incredible indirect savings for the state in terms of social and health care budgets. Indeed, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has demonstrated statistically that people who socialise and participate in social activities are on average happier and healthier (2000:326-335). Of course you can only do this if you can get around, an evidence from a wide range of sources indicate that many people cannot ‘get around’ (see Church et al, 2000; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Hine and Mitchell, 2003; Knolwes, 2006 New Economics Foundation, 2003; Pooley et al, 2005; Raje, 2007; Reisig and Hobbiss, 2000; Shaw, 2006; Social Exclusion Unit, 2002 and 2003; Urry, 2007).
Taken together, the fact that we already heavily subsidise the public transport industry (money that ends up in the hands of private companies), the efficiency savings from not administering fares, the boost to leisure and tourism, the reduced costs of dealing with social problems that arise because people are isolated from their friends and family, and in the longer term, reductions in investment in the road network and road maintenance, reductions in health problems associated with harmful emissions, the cost of dealing with road traffic accidents, and the cost of dealing with climate change, combine to suggest a compelling argument for further analysis of the full implications of free public transport. In June of this year Zagreb, Croatia, an urban area of almost 1.3 million inhabitants brought in public transport that is free at the point of use. Given the lamentable record of the UK in terms of its urban public transport provision (when compared to other European cities - White, 2006: 15-16), this is the kind of bold step that is now required.
Ironically, there is actually free public transport already in Manchester; the ‘Metroshuttle’ buses that serve three circuits in the city-centre. But as Reynolds argues, these kind of ‘central-circuit buses’ can actually be bad thing by encouraging people who would have walked across town to use motor transport, increasing congestion (2008, p. 9). At the same time, this ‘socialist experiment’ is not available to the more disadvantaged who do not come into the city-centre. We need to be smart, encouraging walking and cycling where it is appropriate (and funding schemes to promote them), while making sure than any car journey of more than half a mile has a plausible public transport alternative, and that the needs of those with mobility-related impairments are taken care of. Some Green groups have said they do not want people to travel more, and are afraid that free public transport might encourage this. We would say to them that already many millions who used to use public transport no longer do so, and it is this that must be addressed.
We need to be clear, as a group, the Campaign for Free Public Transport are not simply ‘anti-car’ or ‘anti-personal-freedom’. We realise that the complexity of modern living often requires the flexibility provided by a car, especially when people have caring commitments, or need access to shops, health services, education, employment, and leisure activities. There may be some who because of mobility-related impairments may never be able to access public transport, whatever new developments are made in terms of design. Yet at the same time we recognise that a lot of the complexity of modern living is precisely down to the explosion of car ownership over the 20th century, we also realise that the fossil-fuelled car is environmentally unsustainable in the long run, and that people would make the change to public transport were they given the necessary incentives to overcome the car-dependency that they have grown up with.
On this note, as Reynolds is correct to point out (2008: 3), because car drivers spread many of the costs of their vehicle over long periods (tax, insurance, maintenance), once you own a car, you perceive the cost of using it for extra trips (what economists call ‘marginal costs’) to be almost zero. Deka has explained that the motor car is often the fastest mode of transport and that it ‘also provides a level of comfort and convenience unparalleled by other modes of urban transportation’ (2002: 288). These points are quite true, and this represents the scale of the problem to be addressed. Great challenges demand great solutions. At a time when untold billions have been expended creating a ‘consequence-free’ environment for the banks, money could be better spent investing in the future of our towns and cities, of our ability to participate fully in society, of our landscape and of the air we breathe. We believe that “an expanded public transport system that is fully integrated, publicly owned and free at the point of use” will deliver on a more equitable and more environmentally sustainable Britain. The evidence I have presented in this report suggests we have good grounds for believing this.
To end this argument, research (White, 2006: 16) has shown that while the major metropolitan areas of England (the PTEs) have very low bus patronage, one of the highest rates is enjoyed by Lothian buses in Edinburgh under public ownership. From this we can see that public ownership can work, in the same way that we see that tighter regulation, expanded services and greater investment in London works. It is also in the same way that we can see from Hasselt, Salt-Lake City and Sheffield, that the only way to deliver great change is through the system being free at the point of use.
