A new approach to transport

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1998 by George Wedd

George Wedd

In July 1998, the Labour Government produced, after fourteen months' gestation (the same period as for an elephant) a White Paper entitled A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone (the Stationery Office, London: ISBN 0-10-139502-7), setting out the New Labour approach to one of the most intractable issues of modern life: how, in a medium-sized island which contains one of the busiest, most advanced and most congested societies in the Western world, are the economic, social, physical and health problems raised by transport to be tackled?

The White Paper is a lavish, illustrated, glossy production, priced at [pounds]16.50. Twenty years ago, White Papers were close masses of small print on cheap paper, with no adornment but a coat of arms - such simple productions that even the Stationery Office could not charge a high price for them. The idea behind this was that any interested citizen ought to be able to find out, for a couple of pounds, what his rulers proposed to do to him. A price of [pounds]16.50 means that only the determinedly interested can discover what Government policy is. However, the Government bookshop in one provincial city sold out its first 400 copies in three days and its second delivery in a week, such is the level of public interest in this subject.

The White Paper has to be considered on three levels. First, what are the general attitudes underlying it? Second, what are the specific policy proposals stemming from those attitudes? Third, what are the detailed mechanisms by which the policies are to be brought into effect?

The general attitudes show a marked and refreshing turn towards realism. Old Labour attitudes - Very Old Labour attitudes, now - stemmed from a class prejudice. 'The Workers' travelled by bus, tram or workman's train, while 'The Middle Classes' sped by them in cars, an attitude neatly caught by John Betjeman's poem 'Beside the Seaside' (1948).

This attitude died slowly, under the impact of brute facts: any worker in regular employment could buy an old car of sorts for two or three weeks' wages - and had to, usually, if he were to get to his job. It has been replaced by a certain ambivalence, in which traffic is seen both as an economic necessity and a social liberation, on the one hand, and as a source of danger, noise, congestion and pollution on the other. Holding the scales in which these attitudes are weighed is, fortunately, the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Pooh-Bah himself!), the genial figure of Mr John Prescott, who makes no attempt to improve on his image as a working-class man who has got on in the world, and likes the furnishing and fittings of a middle-class life, including two large Jaguars. Clearly, he did not think of all the hundreds of ideas in this White Paper himself, but they have all passed under his scrutiny, and one is left to guess at the ones that went into his waste-paper basket.

The main underlying attitude is that we cannot go on as we are, buying more cars and using them more. Britain does not have the highest car-ownership level in Europe, but it has the highest frequency of use. Forecasts of future traffic range from increases of 20 per cent through 40 per cent to 60 per cent. Even the lowest of these figures would be unpleasant, and even the most dedicated road-builder would accept that the road network could not be expanded pro rata. The other attitude is that the best answer we have lies in agreement, planning and management, topped up by financial 'signals', i.e., taxation of various kinds. There is rather a lot of a strange kind of talk which I can only call 'bland-speak'; for example, there is a concept called 'sustainable transport'. Having read fourteen pages on this theme, I am still at a loss to explain its core meaning, although it is a list of good aims with which few could quarrel. The underlying message of much of the White Paper is: 'We can all agree on this - can't we?' Well, no, we can't; but the Government will find that out in due course. Consistency would help: for example, some five or six years ago, diesel engines were regarded as better than petrol engines, and were rewarded by lower rates of duty. Now, 'the duty on diesel should be higher than on petrol', and will be.

The most important basic attitude is the quest for 'an integrated transport policy'. The Government has adopted this as their own, although it has in fact been the Holy Grail - or the Snark - of policy for thirty or forty years. What does it mean? Many things, most of them quite small and sensible: for example, the railway station and the bus station in a town should be close together, which seems a simple and sensible thing. But, to choose two neighbouring examples, in Bath the bus station is across the road from the train station, whereas in Bristol it is a very tedious mile away. Clearly, one is better than the other. But to boil integrated transport down to its essentials, it means Park and Ride. This is an idea whose time has come. For thirty years, experiments in this direction were failures; but gradually urban sprawl and central congestion combined have made it, at long last, a realistic arrangement in any town over 100,000 population and in smaller towns faced with particular problems. Provided the fringe car parks are big enough to sustain a really frequent bus service - 500 car spaces seems to be the minimum - and the charges are competitively low, it works. It works so well in Bath, where the parking is, so far, free and the bus fare [pounds]1:10 return, that the council is ruefully contemplating a reduction of [pounds]350,000 in the annual income from its city-centre car parks; but one cannot have it both ways.