Transport as infrastructure

There are towns in northern England where the electricity goes off at nine in the evening. In the cities the supply is patchy. It is unregulated, so a household wanting full coverage has to buy from three companies at once. The network cannot handle peak demand, and people lose hours every week waiting to start ordinary tasks. Those who can raise the money buy their own generator. It costs thousands a year to own, stands idle most of the day, and vents its exhaust into the street.

Obviously we’re describing public transport, not electricity.

Transport is the second largest item in the British household budget. £96.40 a week, fourteen per cent of everything a household spends, behind only housing. Most of it goes on the generator: buying the car, insuring it, fuelling it, fixing it.¹

For a low-paid worker that is a trap. A job three miles away is only worth taking if you can reach it. Reaching it means running a car, and running a car eats the wage the job pays. Every deprived area in Britain holds a large pool of part-time shop assistants and dinner ladies, and few of them can get to better work a few miles up the road.

Transport for the North found that 3.3 million people in the North of England – 21.3 per cent – live in areas at high risk of social exclusion because of the transport system. In the North East it is 31.5 per cent. The main driver is car dependency.² Meanwhile the alternatives thin out. The bus is where this shows up most clearly, because it is the mode most people depend on and the one we measure best: commercial bus mileage in England outside London now runs at 78 per cent of its pre-pandemic level.³ Only a handful of British cities have a tram or metro at all. Most towns have one railway station, or none.

The physics does not work either. To move one person weighing 75 kilograms, we move 1,500 kilograms of steel with them, on high-friction rubber tyres, down a road shared with every other 1,500 kilograms of steel. A 3.5-metre wide lane of mixed traffic carries about 1,500 people an hour. Give the same strip of tarmac to buses and it carries 9,000. A dedicated cycle lane carries 12,000, a walkway 15,000.⁴ Lay a tram or a railway along the same corridor and it carries more again. Land is the one thing nobody is making more of. We use ours to store and move empty seats.

Electric cars change the exhaust. They change none of the above.                                                                                                                              

So what should we build instead?

A network, not a series of purchases. Complete coverage of a city region and the countryside around it, with each mode doing the job it is good at. Heavy rail between towns and cities. Tram and light rail along the busy urban spines. Buses filling in the grid between them, on dedicated road space so they run to time. On-demand minibuses booked to the door in villages and the rural fringe. Bike hire, e-bikes and car clubs for the first and last mile. One account for all of it. Tap in with a phone or a bank card. No zones to work out, no operator to choose between, no ticket that works on the bus but not on the train that finishes the journey.

Cycle to the tram stop, tram into town, train across the region, minibus the last four miles home. Four modes, one journey, one fare, one account.

Transport then stops being something you buy and becomes something that is there. Like water. Like the phone network, where every connection added raises the value of all the others, and where we stopped charging by the minute a long time ago.

That is the transformation. Not a cheaper fare. A different category of thing.

The consequences run well past the fare box. A system an eight-year-old and an eighty-year-old both feel safe using is a system that gets a teenager to college, a carer to a shift, and an older person out of the house. Clear the roads and the plumber with a van of tools and the district nurse on call spend their hours working rather than queuing. The second car stops making sense, and the thousands a year it costs stay in the household. Quieter streets, cleaner air, and a lower health bill follow.

This is a freedom argument, not a sacrifice one. Nobody is banned from anything. Motoring becomes a choice instead of a requirement. Most of us already accept that sharing an aeroplane with strangers beats chartering one.

The money is largely being spent already. It is going on 34.5 million private generators.[115] Off-market finance builds the network instead. The twenty-year pipeline gives bus and tram builders, rolling stock plants, signal engineers and track teams the certainty needed to train a workforce. And as with energy, the service is priced at what it costs to run rather than at what a franchise can extract. Delivery belongs to the city regions rather than Whitehall, a point we return to in Chapter 29.

“Britain does not have a transport problem. It has a transport system built to move vehicles rather than people, and bought one journey at a time instead of being built once.”