Steve Chambers

Now is the smart time to act

Right now, transport authorities are focussed on restricting the number of people travelling on mass transit networks, to protect the public from COVID-19. But one day we will need to increase patronage to the levels we saw before the crisis, to make our rail networks and bus services viable again. Other countries have national smartcards for rail, even extending to the bus networks in some places. Can we dare imagine a future with that convenience?

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Ticketing systems, distinct from fares, are one of the ways operators can increase patronage. Passenger numbers vary depending on several factors. If you make it more convenient to travel, more people will. Innovations such as the Oyster card and Transport for London contactless payments increase ridership. But we haven’t seen this happen consistently outside London.

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The UK rail network has well over twenty rail smartcards with low adoption rates, inconsistent feature availability and a lack of interoperability between operators. You can’t use a smartcard of one operator on the services of another and you can’t start journeys on one train operating company line and end on another using the same smartcard. The full range of fares are not available on each smartcard. On some you can’t buy daily tickets, on others you can’t pay as you go. Railcards discounts sometimes work and sometimes they don’t. It’s a mess.

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This creates an inequitable ticketing system manifested in various problems. On most smartcard schemes there is lack of good value season ticket products for part time workers, disproportionately affecting women. There is a lack of a national ticketing product for the underbanked. As new and exclusive technology like smartphone apps have been adopted, people without bank accounts are left with more expensive and less convenient paper ticketing. But most significantly rail journeys are generally made less attractive than they could be, in particular to less frequent passengers who find accessing best value electronic ticketing difficult and confusing.

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Most frustratingly of all, these seemingly incompatible cards all use ITSO, the same underlying technology. So how did this happen? It is largely down to a failure of governance. Each train operating company was made responsible for smartcards on their route and the only way to impose central direction was via new franchise agreements which are only periodically agreed. Which brings us to the opportunity created by COVID-19.

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The reforming of railway governance, that is now inevitable after rail franchises have been suspended, is an opportunity to fix this error of the franchising era. This will be combined with the imperative to grow patronage through more attractive ticketing and targeted concessions, that a national smartcard will allow. Now is the smart time to act.

Why would anyone want to dig them up again?

The newly formed Greater London Council (GLC) reported its transport decisions in 1967. New primary urban motorways in London formed part of plans that also included significant changes to the bus network, reduced spending on public transport, and the development of the secondary road network. Yet this project came to nothing, except for a few useless stumps of motorway and an abandoned investigation into tunnelling underground.

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The GLC declared “a decision by the Greater London Council which it is quite safe to say exceeds in the immensity of its scale and the importance of its repercussions any decision ever previously made by a local authority in this country”.

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This quote could quite easily have come from Homes Before Roads, the political party formed to oppose these plans, or any other campaign group speaking of the environmental and social costs of the scheme. Instead it is the Greater London Council itself, proudly setting out its programme for new road building in 1967.

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The GLC made some assumptions about what would happen in London between 1967 and 1981. They included an area larger than Greater London in their research which meant they predicted the population would increase. Had they included only Greater London they could not have ignored the population trends. Greater London population had been falling and continued to fall, eventually reaching a nadir in 1991. They predicted car ownership would more than double to 2.5 million in 1981. Cars per household was predicted to rise to 0.79 by 1981. This is higher than current levels.

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The GLC made some predictions about how travel patterns would change. Twice as many families would own cars, car journeys to central London for work would increase by 150%, car journeys to central London for non-work purposes would increase by 200%. Rail journeys to central London would decline, bus journeys to work would decline by up to 50% and non-work bus journeys would decline by up to 50%. This expected decline in public transport seems to be the reason the report casually mentions no budget had been prepared for new public transport expenditure.

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The technical details of the plans are covered incredibly well elsewhere. The new road building consisted of elevated highways that would encircle London, also providing radial routes into the centre. The plan makes clear that compulsory purchase and demolition of homes was necessary and claims this was worth the goal to “enable people to get about”. The costs were estimated in 1967 to be £860 million.

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Londoners respond: Homes Before Roads

Homes Before Roads was formed as a political party to fight the 1970 Greater London Council election, on a platform of no new urban roads. They had candidates for 85 of the 100 available seats. They received 81,215 votes and were fourth overall in the elections, after the Liberals.

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The political party was formed by London Motorway Action Group (LMAG). They were made up four civic societies, eight residents associations, thirteen action groups, two ratepayers associations and a property owners association. Taken as a whole, they were a predominantly middle class and pan-London organisation.

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Although they didn’t win any seats, they were successful in their objectives, breaking the political consensus that had developed that London needed new roads.

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The urban motorway plan they objected to was cancelled on the first day of the new Labour GLC administration, elected in 1973. Fragments of the network had been constructed. 40 miles were built out of 350 that were planned. But these serve no purpose, terminating arbitrarily and go nowhere.

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The campaign was mirrored in other cities such as Bristol and Carlisle that were successful in preventing new urban motorways. The plans resurfaced in London in the 1980s and were defeated again. This time by the weight of public opinion that had been shifted, and direct action was no longer required.

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Plan B: Build roads in tunnel

Homes Before Roads successfully moved public opinion and political will against new urban motorways in London. By 1972 the Conservative administration of GLC, was starting to look for alternatives. On 30 October 1972 they commissioned a report about roads in tunnels by civil engineers Halcrow and Mott, Hay & Anderson. The report was published in December 1973. However, earlier that year the GLC had become Labour controlled and new roads were off the agenda. 40 years later and building new urban motorways in tunnels is seriously being considered again. So what does the 1973 report tells us?

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It claimed tunnelling roads under London had become a viable option. The report claims three factors had made tunnelling viable. Firstly, the cost of land on the surface has become too high; secondly the technology for tunnelling had improved; and finally, the environmental costs of roads could be avoided.

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The first two points are fair enough, but the third isn’t true. A new road is a new road however it is constructed. It will increase demand and cause pollution. The pollution does not remain in the tunnel. The tunnels and their traffic also must exit somewhere, bringing increased congestion and pollution where they do.

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Central London is off limits because of the existing network of transport and service tunnels. Any tunnelling there would have to be very deep in order to avoid obstructions. Outside of the central area there is a network of main sewers, but these do not cause such a problem and can easily be avoided.

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The technology is sufficiently advanced by 1973 that tunnelling is possible in any kind of geology. Dual tunnels of three lanes each are possible. Ventilation systems are required for tunnels over 400 metres. Three different systems are available for ventilation, with differing costs for construction, operation and management. Complex underground road junctions are possible.

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The costs are broken down into tunnelling, internal construction and ventilation. In 1972 prices, an example is given for building two tunnels from Camberwell to Lewisham with a Peckham interchange on the surface. It had an estimated cost of £132.6M, with the equivalent surface highway for comparison estimated to be £70.1M. Almost double the cost. The report notes that tunnelling costs have gone down in the previous 15 years and predicts they will decline further. It is heavily implied in the report that tunnel costs will reach parity with roads built on the surface.

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Thankfully because Homes Before Roads stepped in the GLC plans were prevented from being completed. Public opinion was successfully turned against the programme that favoured urban motorways over public transport. By 1972 the GLC were looking into continuing these plans by tunnelling underground but the resulting report was buried. Many of the assumptions and predictions were later proved wrong. Public transport use in London has increased at the expense of the car. Which makes it hard to understand why anyone would want to resurrect the new road plans decades later.

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This piece is adapted from a series of blog posts originally published in 2014.

It is time they were replaced with something that better reflects what London needs

The zonal fares system for London Underground and National Rail journeys in London should be reformed. It is no longer the best way to achieve the objectives of speeding up ticket purchase, making similar journeys equitably priced and rationing services where demand is greater than capacity. They are not permanent fixtures. We once used the zones for the buses, but we stopped doing that twenty years ago and nobody even seems to have noticed.

Grouping stations into zones back in the early 1980s was done to simplify London Underground tickets and speed up purchase. The central zone 1 is priced higher than the others, because back in 1983 that was where jobs were focussed, and the tube was busiest. But things have changed.

Jobs, journeys and overcrowded trains have spread out across the network. For example, Canary Wharf is a significant trip generator with capacity issues at peak, yet pricing does not reflect this. The role of the fares system should be to deter unnecessary journeys when and where there is excess demand and encourage them when and where there is not.

The next mayor should use the potential of Oyster and contactless technology to replace the zonal fares system that was carried over from paper tickets. This would mean eliminating zones and replacing them with areas of the network in which fares are charged at a higher rate when they are at capacity. This in practice would probably mean most of zone 1 retained, perhaps expanded in some places and a few islands like Canary Wharf added.

For the rest of the network, and for most of the time, London should adopt a low flat fare. This will encourage additional trips. This is particularly important for Outer London where the mayor seeks to convert car journeys to public transport. This will only work if fares are seen to be cheap and convenient.

That’s the easy part and clearly within the mayor’s powers. The next thing the mayor must do is deal with the inequity of South London rail passengers paying more than North Londoners. There are fascinating historic reasons for this that I won’t go into, but let’s blame privatisation for convenience.

There are several potential solutions for this problem. The mayor could wait until they gain control of suburban rail lines in London, but this might take some time. Or they could come to an agreement with London rail operators on pricing. There is precedent for this. The current rail fare settlement for pay as you go fares was agreed by Boris Johnson in 2009 and implemented in 2010. This deal should be revisited.

Getting back to buses, the network has an important role in providing an alternative to the Underground. It is usually slower and cheaper. But if you switch from a tube journey to the bus you pay twice. The next mayor should adapt pricing to reflect journeys taken rather than modes used. The Hopper fare shows the potential of a time limited journey. If the principle was applied to bus and tube we could see, for example, a bus journey included in the price of a preceding or subsequent tube journey. This encourages use where there is capacity and offers fairer pricing for people who must mix modes to complete their journey.

One of the advantages of the Oyster and contactless system is the ability to change the fares system overnight. But we’ve squandered that opportunity and ended up with a complex and inequitable fares regime that does not support the transport strategy of the mayor. Now is the time to be radical and do things differently.

So where’s the money coming from?

Boris Johnson will have to do some work to improve buses. Quite a bit, if we are going to see the “London-style” services outside of the capital that he promises.

The money is there: £5 billion, less a bit for cycling and fair bit more that will go straight into the procurement of new low-emission vehicles. But before England becomes a bus utopia, some things need to happen. Boring things. Detail things.

What are “London-style” buses? We don’t know. But we have some clues, because in 2017 the Bus Services Act made it possible to operate buses in England in much the same way as they are in London. Features available in this legislation include allowing elected councils or mayors to decide how services are run, plan the routes, choose the specification of the vehicles, their livery and branding and fares, and integrate bus ticketing with other transport modes.

Unfortunately, no local council or mayor has used these powers, and only one is exploring it seriously, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority led by Labour mayor Andy Burnham. Liverpool City Region, also Labour run, recently indicated that it is getting more serious about going down the required route of statutory consultations and secondary legislation, but all this is time consuming. Is Johnson going to speed this process up?

And there is a political problem, potentially, for Boris Johnson. Many of the places in England that have lots of people who could be using the bus are run by Labour mayors. Johnson might be helping the mayors back into office by giving them a success story. Conversely, he might be able to steal the credit for what could have been Andy Burnham’s greatest achievement, sorting out the Manchester buses.

Johnson might be wise to start in the West Midlands, a region with lots of people, buses that need sorting out and a Conservative mayor – although one, admittedly, who has not been as enthusiastic about buses as the northern mayors. The issue this highlights for Johnson is that his bus offer must be attractive to local politicians for them to be compliant. It will need to be locally-led, and possibly difficult for him to control.

The likes of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands are not in fact the worst affected areas for the huge cuts in bus services that have happened under austerity budgets since 2010. Those have been the more rural areas where running a bus service is hard anyway, because of low density and dispersed settlement patterns. Boris Johnson might find that these areas are hard to help. The answer is either sustained annual funding, which seems unlikely; or a technological solution like demand responsive travel service. Either way, it is very unlikely all of the 3,000+ routes cut will be restored.

One aspect of London buses that cannot be replicated elsewhere is funding. With no operational grants from central government, the capital’s bus fares are subsidised by the profits from London Underground. No such cash cow exists in other cities. So, what does Boris Johnson have up his sleeve?

Serving new housing developments could also prove difficult. We’ve been building more homes, but they are often at low density and remote from amenities, jobs and established centres of population. Merely extending existing routes creates lengthy services that are unattractive to passengers along the whole route and are vulnerable to delays caused by congestion.

And congestion will need to be fixed to make buses an attractive option to passengers. Available ways to deal with congestion and generate sustainable revenue for buses include congestion charging, charging clean air zones and the workplace parking levy. Two of these are “London-style” and one of them works in Nottingham. Is this all a bit much for Boris Johnson, or will he leave it up to local leaders to do the politically hard part of charging motorists? On the plus side, that procurement of low emission buses would ensure operators were exempt from clean air zone charging.

If you want to know where all this money is going and what exactly “London-style” buses turn out to be then keep an eye out for the upcoming National Bus Strategy. It should give us all the required details – unless of course it is delayed.

This piece originally appeared in CityMetric.

You probably didn’t notice the biggest change to the capital’s bus routes in years

One of the biggest changes to London’s buses happened on Sunday 16 June – although Londoners won’t have realised the full implications until the following morning, when they tried to go about their morning commutes. Then, they might have been surprised and angered with how inconvenient the service has become.

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Transport for London has a strategic plan to cut the total length of routes it operates every year to 2022, and then to start increasing them again. The idea is that, by 2024, services in inner London will have fallen, and services in outer London will go up.

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The Central London bus changes are part of the Inner London cuts part of the plan. Transport for London says bus use is dropping, and the changes reflect demand. But if you take a closer look at the changes, they don’t make sense when you consider what people use Central London buses for.

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The basic difference between inner and outer London routes is that the inner routes, as well as interchanging with tube and train for the last part of the commute, are able to get people from home to work in Central London; whereas the outer routes complete local journeys and connect to transport hubs.

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There are historic reasons for this. Many inner London buses are the successors to trams and trolleybuses. Their purpose was to get people from the early suburbs to the centre of town. Because of their high frequency and competitive fares, they were so successful that they killed off a number of railway stations close to the terminals. If you look back at old tram route maps, you can still see the clear lineage to current routes.

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Bus routes in London have experienced only a couple of major changes in their history. Perhaps the most significant is the Bus Reshaping Plan of 1966, which responded to traffic congestion in the centre by splitting up routes that crossed the capital into overlapping services. These were complemented by new bus routes that operated around suburban hubs that would not the vulnerable to central congestion. All this ended the ability to get from outer suburbs to central London in a single trip.

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The last significant change came in 2003 when money from the new congestion charge was used to enhance bus services which crossed into the central charge zone. This was intended to encourage more journeys by bus: the improved service carrot to the stick of charging. These reforms saw an increase in bus passengers because the enhanced services could make use of the less congested streets.

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The latest changes achieve the strategic plan operation cuts objectives by lopping off sections of routes near the centre. Without wanting to get stuck into too many examples, this means that many inner routes barely enter central London at all. The 134 from Finchley, for example, gets curtailed at the Euston Road instead of going along the length of Tottenham Court Road. The 45 from Clapham Park now turns back at the Elephant and Castle. There are numerous examples where the change makes no sense at all; Transport for London says the hopper fare will mean that you can changes buses to complete your journey at no extra charge.

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People do not just use the bus because it is cheap. They do so because it is convenient, even if slower. Having to change repeatedly makes the journey longer and less convenient. Buses are subsidised by London Underground fares, and it is a good job they are: if everyone that needed to get from Finchley to Tottenham Court Road did so on the Northern Line and not the 134 the system would be in trouble.

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The real losers will be anyone who finds it difficult to get on or off the bus or doesn’t want to wait around at night on their own. The rerouting of the number 40 completely away from Fenchurch Street exemplifies how the changes remove convenient and safe interchange. The station is already the only station with no direct tube interchange: now it has no direct bus link either, necessity a long walk to the nearest options.

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A final thought on the changes: they have been communicated terribly by Transport for London. A few announcements on buses that people tend to ignore anyway, and not much else, unless you like to regularly trawl their website for information. Operators who make a lot of big changes all in one go have not been very popular since the May 2018 rail timetable change. Londoners might not be willing to put up with another transport planning fail.

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One of the biggest changes to London’s buses happened on Sunday 16 June – although Londoners won’t have realised the full implications until the following morning, when they tried to go about their morning commutes. Then, they might have been surprised and angered with how inconvenient the service has become.

---

Transport for London has a strategic plan to cut the total length of routes it operates every year to 2022, and then to start increasing them again. The idea is that, by 2024, services in inner London will have fallen, and services in outer London will go up.

---

The Central London bus changes are part of the Inner London cuts part of the plan. Transport for London says bus use is dropping, and the changes reflect demand. But if you take a closer look at the changes, they don’t make sense when you consider what people use Central London buses for.

---

The basic difference between inner and outer London routes is that the inner routes, as well as interchanging with tube and train for the last part of the commute, are able to get people from home to work in Central London; whereas the outer routes complete local journeys and connect to transport hubs.

---

There are historic reasons for this. Many inner London buses are the successors to trams and trolleybuses. Their purpose was to get people from the early suburbs to the centre of town. Because of their high frequency and competitive fares, they were so successful that they killed off a number of railway stations close to the terminals. If you look back at old tram route maps, you can still see the clear lineage to current routes.

---

Bus routes in London have experienced only a couple of major changes in their history. Perhaps the most significant is the Bus Reshaping Plan of 1966, which responded to traffic congestion in the centre by splitting up routes that crossed the capital into overlapping services. These were complemented by new bus routes that operated around suburban hubs that would not the vulnerable to central congestion. All this ended the ability to get from outer suburbs to central London in a single trip.

---

The last significant change came in 2003 when money from the new congestion charge was used to enhance bus services which crossed into the central charge zone. This was intended to encourage more journeys by bus: the improved service carrot to the stick of charging. These reforms saw an increase in bus passengers because the enhanced services could make use of the less congested streets.

---

The latest changes achieve the strategic plan operation cuts objectives by lopping off sections of routes near the centre. Without wanting to get stuck into too many examples, this means that many inner routes barely enter central London at all. The 134 from Finchley, for example, gets curtailed at the Euston Road instead of going along the length of Tottenham Court Road. The 45 from Clapham Park now turns back at the Elephant and Castle. There are numerous examples where the change makes no sense at all; Transport for London says the hopper fare will mean that you can changes buses to complete your journey at no extra charge.

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People do not just use the bus because it is cheap. They do so because it is convenient, even if slower. Having to change repeatedly makes the journey longer and less convenient. Buses are subsidised by London Underground fares, and it is a good job they are: if everyone that needed to get from Finchley to Tottenham Court Road did so on the Northern Line and not the 134 the system would be in trouble.

---

The real losers will be anyone who finds it difficult to get on or off the bus or doesn’t want to wait around at night on their own. The rerouting of the number 40 completely away from Fenchurch Street exemplifies how the changes remove convenient and safe interchange. The station is already the only station with no direct tube interchange: now it has no direct bus link either, necessity a long walk to the nearest options.

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A final thought on the changes: they have been communicated terribly by Transport for London. A few announcements on buses that people tend to ignore anyway, and not much else, unless you like to regularly trawl their website for information. Operators who make a lot of big changes all in one go have not been very popular since the May 2018 rail timetable change. Londoners might not be willing to put up with another transport planning fail.

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This piece originally appeared in CityMetric.

We will get what we build for

If we make cities easier to walk in, then more people will walk. We can induce demand for walking in much the same way we induce vehicle traffic on to our streets if they are given over to cars.

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Pedestrianising Oxford Street is an opportunity to create a first-class place all Londoners will want to visit, including those arriving on public transport and those who live close by.

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Oxford Street is formerly the northern limit of the old city of Westminster and the southern boundary of Marylebone. Today the neighbourhoods of Fitzrovia, Marylebone, Mayfair and Soho continue to see Oxford Street as a hard boundary. But it should be a valued asset, somewhere to shop, stop and even play for people from both near and far.

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All major candidates to be mayor of London in 2016 promised to pedestrianise Oxford Street. Despite forming a world-famous retail destination, it is one of the most dangerous roads in London in terms of deaths and serious injuries, as well as one of the most polluted streets in the country.

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Were now seeing plans set out to make the pedestrianisation happen. And the bold decision to remove vehicles 24 hours a day is fundamental to encouraging safe walking at all times.

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The nightmare scenario of 300 buses an hour pushed onto adjacent roads has proved to be false, with comprehensive central London bus remodelling to avoid this. Similar claims about private vehicles are being used to argue that this project to dramatically increase levels of walking in the city should not go ahead.

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If were serious about reducing levels of congestion and air pollution we must provide alternatives. Supporting plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street will create a place for all Londoners to enjoy, but more importantly it will say to the world this is a walking city.

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This piece originally appeared in CityMetric.

So long as they’re properly regulated

New technology has the potential to improve public transport and increase mobility – but we won’t reap the benefits without the right intervention by government. If new technologies are not implemented properly they will potentially worsen health outcomes, reduce safety, increase congestion and make it harder for the government to achieve their objectives.

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Electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) are intrinsically linked issues that will develop together to provide an on-demand autonomous vehicle service (“Uber without drivers”) alongside other public and private transport modes. This will sit alongside the private ownership of electric and autonomous vehicles which continues the conventional model.

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We are already seeing journey planning apps evolve from merely providing travel information to linking through to transport service provision. This will evolve to a full MaaS model, where various public and private transport options are presented alongside each other, with ordering and payment for any services used handled by the app. This will include on-demand autonomous vehicle rides.

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MaaS has potential to help achieve the health, wellbeing, air pollution and congestion objectives of government, but only through good user interface design where active and sustainable transport are included and prioritised. But if not planned properly, active travel options, which cannot currently earn revenue for the app providers, could be deprioritised in the app user interface (that is, shown with less prominence, not ‘front-and-centre’).

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Citymapper, for example, shows Uber alongside other modes and allows booking from within the app. Government will therefore need to influence third party app design to prioritise walking and public transport use in order to achieve their sustainable transport aims. This could be achieved by restrictions on the supply of transit data – for example, requiring journeys that can be completed on foot in under 20 minutes to have walking as the first or most prominent option. It could also be achieved by purchasing prominence in the user interface in much the same way advertising is purchased.

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Autonomous vehicles, arranged on a shared basis, could allow more people to stop owning cars. In a positive scenario walking, cycling and public transport would remain the main public transport modes with autonomous vehicles used on rare occasions for specific reasons, such as visiting places with poor public transport or collecting large items.

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However, if the pricing of autonomous vehicle rides is set too close to that of public transport fares there is potential for mode shift away from sustainable transport to autonomous vehicles. If the autonomous vehicle ride cost is too low relative to public transport fares this will also encourage low occupancy levels. This negative scenario would cause increased congestion and have worse health outcomes as active travel stages of journeys decrease.

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Electric and autonomous electric vehicles are not zero emission: air pollution is generated in their production and when the electricity for their operation is generated. More significantly, they are responsible for roadside particulate matter (PM) pollution from braking systems and tire wear. Therefore, the introduction of electric vehicles and autonomous electric vehicles should not be permitted to facilitate an increase in private or private hire vehicle trips.

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Autonomous vehicles are presented as being safer and requiring less road space because they can drive closer together. However, to achieve these benefits all vehicles on the road will need to be autonomous and coordinated. Complete adoption of autonomous vehicles is unlikely any time soon, without an intervention such as banning conventional vehicles.

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The benefits of autonomous vehicles will not appear automatically. As with any technology, we need to ensure it is regulated properly – and we don’t lose sight of the healthier society we were hoping to achieve.

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This piece originally appeared in CityMetric.

Being able to walking to work really could make you happy

I was recently led down to the basement at the Department for Transport to learn about the results of the Commuting and Wellbeing Study: a report which used existing data to understand the relationship between commuting time, travel mode and wellbeing.

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The headline result of the study is that every extra minute of commute time reduces job satisfaction, reduces leisure time satisfaction, increases strain and reduces mental health. On average, 10 extra minutes of commute time has the same negative effect on life satisfaction as a £490/month loss in income. Every 10 extra minutes of commute time are also responsible for a reduction in job satisfaction equivalent to a 19 per cent reduction in gross personal income.

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Walking or cycling to work, working from home and shorter commute times all increase job satisfaction, and make it more likely that an employee will want to stay with their job. So all an employer needs to do is encourage some mode shift to get happy workers, right?

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Within the study, commuter mode changes were common, with 18 per cent of study participants changing mode in the past year. However, this was much less likely among car drivers. This strikes me as a problem for policy makers – as this are the group we most desperately need to change to more sustainable transport modes.

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Interestingly shorter rail commutes are found to be ‘more strenuous’ than longer ones, which might reflect the relative discomfort of inner urban rail. Perhaps this group would be easier to help towards active travel?

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People with longer commutes even rearrange their whole week around it: less sleep on weeknights, more sleep at weekends. It can take up to a year for the negative effects of a longer commute to manifest.

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The study methodology ensured relationships between commuting and wellbeing are separated from other factors, such as wealth. Millennials, who we’re encouraged to think have ruined everything and don’t know how to suffer, are more resilient to a longer commutes and it does not reduce their job satisfaction as much.

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Employers potentially have the most to gain from this study. Acting on it can increase job satisfaction and even leisure time satisfaction in their workers. But how can they help to shorten commutes and encourage mode shift to walking and cycling?

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For larger employers, they can think about where their workplaces are located in respect of their employees. Higher business rents in certain locations might be worth the value of employee retention. For smaller employers, simple things like providing changing and showering facilities could increase active travel.  

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To get the societal benefits of this study we need to see workplaces, business improvement districts and local authorities working together to ensure as many journeys as possible can be completed using walking and cycling. This means revisiting some of the assumptions that underpinned city, suburban and business park design.

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This piece originally appeared in CityMetric.

Air pollution, traffic, no space for cycling

London is drifting towards becoming a road city, a kind of Birmingham of the south. Boris Johnson, the departing mayor, has set in motion “irreversible” projects to build new urban motorways crossing the River Thames in east and south-east London; a new subterranean ring road is also on the cards. In parallel with this, London is facing an air pollution public health crisis, with a Supreme Court ruling that the government and mayor must act upon.

The capital is a walking and cycling city. Rates of car ownership are falling. Public transport is bursting at the seams. So why are we committed to building new roads? Because of population growth, because there is a gap in the road network, claim Transport for London (TfL). It is true the population of London is growing, and more people have to travel further to their work – but there is no evidence all those extra journeys need to happen by car.

TfL has perhaps got to grips with the theory of induced demand whereby if you build a new road, more drivers will appear to use it – so many people, in fact, that the new road ends up with more congestion that you started with. Instead of one congested and polluting road, you now have two. Money well spent.

But instead of learning the lesson that roads equal pollution and congestion, TfL hope that an even bigger splurge on road building – “package”, in their language – will allow them to do what no new road building scheme has ever managed to do. It is TfL’s belief that by building three new roads, then traffic congestion will be cut.

So what are we getting for our £2.25bn of tax-payer money?

The most advanced scheme is a proposed new tunnel next the existing Blackwall Tunnel. This has been given NSIP status – a nationally significant infrastructure project – that ensures a fast track route through the planning system.  The scheme is supposed to provide economic benefit, but does nothing to connect the 10,000 new homes planned for the Greenwich Peninsula with jobs in Canary Wharf. A pedestrian and cycle bridge would be a more sustainable solution here, and would help people cross the river without getting in a car.

The brilliant No to Silvertown Tunnel campaign have been very good at pointing out the flaws of the scheme, including the terrible air pollution levels that already exist in the area: these reach as high as twice the legal limit in some places. There is a story spread by some who fancy the idea of new roads, that if we build more urban motorways the pollution will vanish as traffic becomes more “free flowing”.  But the evidence, which has been building since 1925, tells us that new roads equal more car journeys and increased congestion.

Surely the other schemes can’t be quite so bad?

Further east two new bridges are proposed. One of them, the Gallions Crossing, we’ve seen before as the Thames Gateway Bridge between Beckton and Thamesmead. It was a scheme so terrible that, in 2007, the planning inspector found that it would cause increased congestion, that it would be unsuitable for pedestrians and cyclists, that it would make air and noise pollution worse. He also found there is no evidence that regeneration and economic improvement would result from it. It failed on all the things it was supposed to do.

The third crossing is planned to connect Rainham with Belvedere, half way between Gallions Reach and the existing Dartford mega-crossing of two tunnels and a bridge. Transport for London in their own technical report have found it would cause the local road network to become congested with new traffic, that traffic pollution and noise would increase, and there could be a negative impact on the Crossness Nature Reserve and Rainham Marsh sites. Sounds great, yes?

Another argument for these crossings is that they plug gaps in the road network. But especially in outer London, the gaps in public transport crossings are just as wide. There is just one public transport proposal that Transport for London are taking seriously to plug one of these gaps: this is the London Overground extension from Barking to Thamesmead. But the current plan is this would be built after all the road crossings, in 2025.

Did I mention London is in a public health crisis over air pollution?

As Birmingham is removing some of its urban motorways, we need more sustainable public transport plans in the capital, and not a package of expensive and polluting roads that will change the city for the worse. London is a walking and cycling city, not a motorway city of the south. Let’s keep it that way.

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This piece originally appeared in CityMetric.

One Sunday in July I stood in a small park in a Central London and asked people to pin cards to a tree, telling me what they loved about the community around them. Not to exclude digital natives I also selected a hashtag and invited responses through social media. The fantastic responses I got were an incredibly useful start to developing a neighbourhood plan.

Neighbourhood planning requires wide engagement and an evidence basis to meet the statutory requirements of the Localism Act. Although having a public meeting and setting up a WordPress blog, Twitter account and such are undoubtedly useful, following the maxim “go where the people are” is also essential in order to create a plan that has legitimacy.

In helping to kick off the development of a neighbourhood plan for Soho, London I went to the village fete, the biggest event on the annual calendar. I asked “What do you love about Soho?” and encouraged residents, visitors and business owners to pin responses on cards to a tree. Digital natives were given the option to tweet or Instagram if they preferred with a hashtag. Without being prompted to talk specifically about urban planning, people gave some very useful responses.

Expressed in a variety of ways, they advocated a mixed community in terms of development and people. These are both things that are currently under threat, with retail and office space being lost in favour of entertainment uses and luxury housing.

The positive wording of the question was deliberately used to try to elicit what people wanted more of, not what they were against. Again without being prompted, some people also gave some feedback about small changes that would make them love their neighbourhood even more. This was also a great opportunity for me to tell them about the possibilities of neighbourhood planning and ask if they would like to get involved.

On a more personal level some of the responses were quite touching as people told me how they lived in the neighbourhood for several decades and in some cases several generations. Many expressed an emotional connection to both the place and the people. Unexpectedly to me, people also really loved reading the cards. Often once they had they became keen to contribute.

None of my ideas about how to do this are original. I’ve borrowed them all from other practitioners. That is one of the wonderful things about neighbourhood planning. So many groups are sharing and learning from each other. Thousands of communities that might be different in their own ways are all going through exactly the same process. The pragmatic amongst them realise there is no need to reinvent the wheel in each location.

This piece originally appeared in Sustain Magazine