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Transport, Traffic and Travel
In this essay I attack London's apparent resignation to its transport snarl up. I
am excited to declare that there is a solution - but it lies way beyond a
congestion charge or longer buses. The latter are tinkering cosmetic
solutions. In this essay I discuss:
• The root causes of London's overcrowded transport system
• The difference between fundamental solutions and cosmetic tinkering
• The leadership needed to tackle transport, traffic and travel in London.
The root causes of London's overcrowded transport system
Demand for travel and transport is a function of a buoyant economy. If trains,
buses, the Underground and roads are full it is because the economy is
strong, which has to be good for everybody, doesn't it?
This has been the argument proffered during each of the economic up-cycles
over the last 20 years. In other words, those responsible for London transport
and travel have more or less said: "When opportunity knocks, don't complain
about the noise!" This argument annoys me every time I hear it.
Clearly, the historical legacy affects the future of anything. I fully appreciate
that we have a system that has evolved into a sprawling mess. In hindsight, it
is probably a great pity that Isambard Kingdom Brunel did not get his seven
feet and a quarter inch gauge railway track adopted nationally, rather than the
current four feet eight and half inches. The capacity of trains would have
been significantly greater.
Also, in hindsight, it is tragic that Sir Christopher Wren's proposed forerunner
of a Haussmann-style street layout was not adopted for London after the
Great Fire. While Paris required wide streets, to prevent unruly elements
erecting barricades, and straight streets, to enable canon to be fired down
them to disperse the mob, there was no need for such a politically motivated
design in London as its population was considered placid. Thanks, anyway,
for small mercies.
It is therefore because of the enlightened behaviour of the British population
that London reverted to the original medieval street system after the Fire. And
without any obvious symmetry to its layout, subsequent innovations like the
trains and Underground had to adopt medieval characteristics of their own
to fit in.
Because of factors like these, London government's attitude seems to be
summed up in: "I could tell you the way to Amarillo - but, if I were you, I
wouldn't be starting from here!" Of course we have to start from where we
are. But that excuse is not credible for people who had responsibility for
"starting" six - let alone 20 - years ago. In that time significant improvements
could easily have been made - not least in terms of leading London's thinking
on the scale of the remedy that is really needed.
The difference between fundamental solutions and cosmetic tinkering
With demand for anything, there is a counter-part of the equation: Supply - in
this case being the provision of trains, buses, Underground trains and roads.
Delivering these is a function of three professional techniques:
1) Foresight
2) Planning
3) Management
If there is too much demand for travel and transport then a number of people
involved in these three techniques have not earned their salary.
1) Foresight
Anytime within the last 20 years - at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall -
there has been nothing systematic to threaten the fundamental stability and
growth of the world economy. London, in particular, was an open commercial
centre with a conducive political, financial and fiscal climate. And it was
proactively looking for business: Canary Wharf was facilitating the muchneeded
expansion of the Capital's office space and significant tenants were
moving in.
How did no-one see this as the creation of extra demand for everything in
London - from employment to housing, food provision, consumption,
education, waste disposal and, yes, transport?
If the state, or branches of it, is so desperate to retain the power to restrict its
citizens' freedom to build and develop their own land and assets, then these
branches of the state have the sole responsibility for accommodating the
consequences of the decisions they take. How did the people involved in
these authorities have so little competence in designing and running models
to predict the effects such expansion was going to have on the Capital?
If we as Londoners are expected to rely in the future on the competence of the
same authorities who have been doing the forecasting for the last 20 years,
then I as Mayor of London will precipitate change. London must have a
greater understanding of the future economic demand on the capital -
everything from land use right through to waste disposal - and be able to
predict the demand for all these things with far more accuracy.
Only with significant improvements in forecasting will London be able to
debate and plan constructively the nature of the changes needed to its
transport infrastructure.
Key to this is an appreciation of technological trends. Technology may well
alter business working practices so much - with remote working and mobile
phone-based communication possible anywhere on the planet - that the office
as the traditional hub of a business may wane. Virtual meetings and teams
may become adopted as standard practice, so reducing demand on the
physical infrastructure and therefore transport in the Capital. Only by a total
dismantling of all received wisdom and completely unfettered thinking will
such matters be properly considered.
As will be obvious as the DNA running through all my proposals, I plan to
engage the best minds in the world to deliberate on all the key challenges
facing London. Paramount among these is enhancing London's ability to
predict its future transport needs.
2) Planning
ONLY on the back of accurate forecasting of demand on the Capital will it be
possible to plan for the future: an accurate "map" of demand for transport
across the Capital and Home Counties is crucial. Ideas can then be devised
on how to increase the capacity for London citizens to move about.
This has clearly not happened at times in the past. We never want a repeat of
the fiasco when Canary Wharf first opened. The ability for a workforce to get
in and out to work is a crucial part of a company's decision to relocate.
However, with such limits on space, how can we seriously talk about further
growth in the business community and the corresponding expansion in the
transport infrastructure? How can we squeeze anything more in?
This loaded question is precisely the disservice that commentators and
politicians have done Londoners over the last 20 years. It is as if they have
resigned themselves to there being no solutions that will ever make a
difference. This is palpable defeatist, unimaginative baloney.
Of course there are solutions. Human ingenuity, if untrammelled, would never
be so defeatist. They may just have to be radical solutions, that's all. As
Mayor of London I will set up, as discussed before, a collection of the world's
best engineering, transport and traffic-flow brains to dismantle all received
wisdom and think, completely unfettered, about how any ideas - however far
fetched - could be applied. For instance, people in other cities have tackled
their transport challenges in very different ways by:
• Building major road networks in tunnels
• Building elevated railways above their roads
• Carving up their roads into a grid system based on one-way streets
• Clearing arterial roads of all traffic to let buses travel at 60 mph from
one end of town to the other
• Creating much needed space by building multi-storey car parks over
rivers and dead ground.
All of these ideas and many more could be possible in London if they were
proven to make a significant difference. Of course there will be some who
say: "Oh no, not in London". But let's look at why they might be automatically
resistant to any such solutions.
Their objection could be aesthetic, financial or NIMBY (Not in my back yard).
Of course London is a beautiful city - how could we deface it with airborne
railways, unsightly car parks, or buses hurtling past, etc? These, of course,
are valid objections; but because some people hold these views it does not
mean that London's transport problems are unsolvable. It means that we
have identified other priorities that happen to block possible solutions.
The key issue for debate, therefore, is do we want to protect London's past -
or protect its future? Both come with a cost but have we ever considered the
Transport, Traffic and Travel issue in these terms before?
A valid objection might be financial: any transport solution is expensive and,
therefore, a significant block to a radical solution. But we are talking about
activities in and around the most sophisticated financial centre on earth: there
is no shortage of world-class expertise in London that advises the rest of the
world on the most challenging financial planning and structuring of this kind
every day of the year. Without pre-conceived ideas about what will or will not
work; who will or will not pay; the sourcing of capital resources; or specific
approaches to revenue, a solution could perfectly easily be engineered into a
workable form.
Another valid objection, although you would probably shy away from being so
candid, is NIMBYism. This is an invalid reason why transport cannot be
solved in London. It is a moot point whether NIMBYism has actually become
BANANAism in some quarters (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near
Anyone). Of course there has to be sensitivity to encroachments in other
people's space. But should a solution be sufficiently compelling, and of
benefit to all citizens, then the real hurdle is to explain, engage and negotiate
an equitable agreement for the implementation of these solutions.
I am most certainly not advocating an imposition like the Three Gorges Dam
project; but if, for the sake of securing an efficient transport infrastructure for
the next 20 years, compensation needs to be paid to encourage people's cooperation, then I would see this as an integral and necessary part of the
budget. If, in a free market economy, everything has its price, then there is a
price to facilitate change. It's just that the bigger the change the bigger the
price, that's all. This will then just have to be sold against the strategic
benefits to be gained in order for the solution to gain acceptance.
In all three of these objections - the aesthetic, the financial or the NIMBY -
what matters is that solutions are not rejected on grounds of unimaginative
inertia, parochialism, narrow ideology or dogma. In a grown-up democracy
within a grown-up economy equitable agreements are reached every day,
irrespective of the size of the transaction. Ultimately, a transaction succeeds
on the strength of its merit and the visibility of its benefits.
3) Management
The final of the three professional techniques involved in providing an
effective transport system is Management. I have no doubt, having worked in
the country's largest state-owned organization, the National Health Service,
that the provision of transport in London is similarly dogged by all manner of
management and bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Management needs to be improved in the current operation of the
infrastructure; who knows how many gains could be achieved if these were
pursued. But the real management failure in London - as evidenced by the
over-crowding on all public transport - is the pitifully limited expansion of
capacity within the existing system.
Sure, some of the track was laid in Victorian times. But we have seen
massive improvements around the world in command & control, signalling and
information processing technology. The running of the Underground and the
London train network could surely be improved by such developments. If we
can keep thousands of aeroplanes safely aloft in the air space over Britain
with reliable systems and technology, it cannot be impossible to reduce the
over-crowding on the tube by significantly increasing the number of trains
running on the Underground.
The key management area of the transport system, though, is not the
signalling system and the number of trains on the track. The key one is the
handling of revenues, costs and capital development programmes. The
London Underground breaks even at the operational level but its capital
expenditure has to come from external sources, such as the Exchequer.
Resources for capital expenditure should always be tight from central
government and so the money for capital programmes of things like the
Underground is always going to fall short. Does this matter, or will such an
inherent shortfall in capital ultimately impair performance catastrophically?
My belief is that the current set up is unsustainable and a radical rethink of
revenues and sources of capital is needed. If only to shine some perspective
on the issue, were HYPOTHETICALLY Underground fares to be doubled,
revenues would be enough not only to cover operating costs, as now, but
would also cover most of the capital expenditure as well. In other words,
London Underground would be able to generate all the resources it needed to
operate optimally from its own revenues - and mean it would be financially
self-sufficient: it would no longer be at the mercy of an external funding
source.
Shock horror! Abomination! The end of civilization! Relax, I'm not
recommending such a fare hike. My illustration is simply this: for the amount
they are currently paying, Londoners are treated like oiled sardines in a tin;
would the prospects of a seat and a more efficient service be worth more or
less to them than an extra £3 or £4 a ride? I am simply using this question as
a way of putting the scale of the Underground's funding issues into
perspective. Emotional resistance so often prevents the manageability of a
problem.
The nub of the issue with public transport is that we expect it to be subsidized.
Why? There are very strong cases for key aspects of life in Britain to receive
the assistance of the tax payer - health and education - but why transport?
Why not food? Why not shoes? Why not hairstyling?
If state ownership or control is seen as important, then there are certain
limitations that have to be taken as unavoidable: efficiency, cost and flexibility.
Iniquitously, these attributes are demanded remorselessly by the employers of
most of the passengers who travel to work by Underground and the buses
and yet passengers are not allowed to demand the same of their transport
system.
The leadership needed to tackle transport, traffic and travel in London
I do not believe that London's transport issues will be dealt with by tinkering:
longer buses and the congestion charge are nothing more than tinkering at
the edges. Only by thinking first about solutions rather than about existing
limitations - aesthetic, financial or parochial - will we even begin to make a
difference. And that means leadership.
As Mayor of London I relish the opportunity to gather the best brains the world
has to offer and to task them to think without limit. Should they reach a set of
practical - or even radical - recommendations, I will then pledge myself to
engaging Londoners to explain the benefits and the opportunities such
solutions might create.
If you are looking for calming words of reassurance on managed
improvements of the status quo, with simply a couple of well-intentioned
worthy initiatives to try, I am afraid I am going to disappoint you. London
means too much to me to come out with suggestions of simply more pathetic
tinkering.
I am looking for a strategic answer to London's transport, traffic and travel
problems that will set Londoners up for the next 20 years: That's the
leadership I am offering.
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