I had a bit of a lightbulb moment during Landor LINKS Ltd‘s LocalTransportSummit earlier this week. So I thought I’d share it, in case it proves useful.
It came during a roundtable session where we were discussing transport appraisal – i.e. how to decide which transport schemes represent good value-for-money, and which ones don’t.
As part of the Government’s promised ‘Vision-led’ Integrated National Transport Strategy (INTS), former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh promised to reform the transport appraisal process.
It is a well-established critique of the current process that it gives undue weight to small time-savings. If a road scheme will save every driver a few minutes off billions of journeys over the next (say) 60 years, then the value of those time-savings justifies spending £-billions on building it.
So major roads get built – and behold, motor traffic increases to fill the space available. We still end up with a horribly congested road network, not to mention increased pollution, road danger, ill-health and CO2 emissions. But hey, those drivers are all (supposedly) saving time compared with what would have happened without those road schemes!
But this nonsense is magnified by another problem. The Government’s National Road Traffic Projections (NRTP, see https://lnkd.in/eqiw4Utq) assume that motor traffic in England and Wales will grow by 8-54% between now and 2060. When you then incorporate this assumption into the appraisal of specific road schemes, it means there will be more drivers to benefit from the notional ‘time savings’ they provide. So the value of road schemes goes up.
Meanwhile it has the opposite effect on sustainable transport schemes. More motor traffic implies less use of buses or cycling. So the value of bus priority or cycling schemes comes down, as there will be fewer people to benefit from them. In fact, they will merely delay those 54% of extra drivers on the roads in 2060!
The NRTP has no scenario in which motor traffic starts coming down – despite all the evidence that it needs to fall by at least 20% by 2030 for transport to play its part in meeting the UK’s legally-binding climate targets (see https://lnkd.in/eAGUYwiU).
The assumption of inevitable growth in motor traffic is horribly self-fulfilling. It is planning to fail.
If instead we want to halt and reverse motor traffic growth, our transport appraisal process needs to assume we will succeed in doing so. That would immediately increase the value-for-money of public transport and active travel schemes – making them more likely to get built.
So my ‘lightbulb’ was that we need to align the transport appraisal process with the future we want, rather than trying to mitigate the dreadful future that DfT’s NRTP computer says we’re currently heading for.
If the Government’s ‘Vision’ is a future where people can readily choose more sustainable transport options, then reforming the transport appraisal process is vital for helping that vision to come true.
