Traffic jam

Ten years of 'sustainable' transport in the UK

Docherty, Iain, Shaw, Jon, Iain Docherty, Jon Shaw

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781847420732
• eBook ISBN: 9781447315407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This informed and lively book offers a timely analysis of the UK government's sustainable - or subsequently 'integrated' - transport policy 10 years after the publication of "A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone". Written by prominent transport experts and with a foreword by Christian Wolmar, the book identifies the modest successes and, sadly, the far more significant failures in government policy over the last decade. The authors also uncover why it has proved so difficult to adopt a more sustainable approach to transport and break Britain's love-affair with the car.

The book reviews the links between the idea of sustainability and transport policy, and provides an up-to-the-minute analysis of the political realities surrounding the delivery of a sustainable transport agenda in the UK. It picks up on the principal components of "A New Deal for Transport" and evaluates to what extent these have, or haven't, been delivered in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The contributors analyse why delivering sustainable transport policies seems to present particular difficulties to ministers across the UK, and considers the UK's experience in an international perspective. The book draws lessons from the last 10 years in order to better inform future policy development.

"Traffic Jam" is an indispensable analysis of the difficulties involved in turning policy ideals into practical reality, and as such will be of interest to scholars, students, planners, policy analysts and policy makers.

Part One
Policy and politics

ONE

New deal or no new deal? A decade of ‘sustainable’ transport in the UK

Jon Shaw and Iain Docherty

The Blair government’s New deal for transport (DETR, 1998a) was born in a wave of optimism in the 1990s. The New Deal moniker was in fact employed by New Labour across a range of policy areas to demonstrate the return of proactive state intervention and social conscience to politics after 17 years of neoliberal-inspired marketisation under the Conservatives (Giddens, 2000). It was not exactly Keynesian in character, however, emphasising the virtues of a ‘Third Way’ arguably closer to Milton Friedman than either Keynes or J. K. Galbraith, Friedman’s celebrated intellectual opponents. Indeed, although the New Deal programmes were – like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original in depression-era America – billed as a radical departure from previous practice, in reality much of this departure was rhetorical in that many of the market-based elements of previous Conservative Party policies were retained. One defining characteristic of the New Deal for Transport, though, was its overt emphasis on sustainability, in the broadest sense. Motorised transport has been the bearer of huge economic and social benefit. It has literally driven the generation of wealth and provided countless opportunities for people to improve their life chances. It has also long been known that there are drawbacks with the way in which transport systems have developed: people are injured and killed in road traffic accidents, the air along busy streets does not smell very nice, waiting in traffic jams can be rather tiresome, and so on. But it is only within the relatively recent past that the scale of transport’s real impacts has been anything like properly appreciated (and we are still learning); we now realise that the ways in which and how much we travel are capable of causing appreciable harm to entire populations. They can constrain economic development because congestion is not just irritating but also extremely expensive to businesses and individuals (Eddington, 2006); they can kill people not just by running them over but also by making them fat and unhealthy (Sloman, 2006); and they are not just bad for local air quality, they are also major contributors to global warming (Chapman, 2007).

The Stern Review (Stern, 2006) makes clear that the costs of global warming to the world economy could be catastrophic if nothing is done to arrest increasing carbon emissions, and perhaps its most significant contribution is laying to rest the idea that societies can only be ‘rich and dirty’ or ‘green and poor’. Interestingly, though, while calling for some speedy action on transport, especially with regard to pricing, the review notes that emissions from the other sectors of the economy and society – energy supply, housing, industry and services – might be better tackled first on the grounds that it is cheaper and easier to secure ‘quick wins’ this way. This may be true, but it is, to some extent at least, unfortunate. Transport is responsible for around a quarter to a third of carbon emissions in most developed economies and is often the only major sector whose share of emissions is increasing (see Anable and Shaw, 2007); moreover, while all transport sectors are experiencing growth, those witnessing the most growth tend to be the most polluting (Chapman, 2007).

The extent of transport’s impact on the environment, not to mention its negative side-effects on the economy and society, moved a small collection of policy wonks and opposition politicians to publish in 1996 a Consensus for change (Labour Party, 1996), which articulated a new direction for transport policy to make more sustainable the amount and manner in which we travel. Sadly, however, even after a landslide election victory in 1997, the envisaged shift towards what might reasonably be regarded as a more sustainable transport policy has never really taken place. Twelve years after Consensus for change (Labour Party, 1996) and a decade since A new deal for transport (DETR, 1998a), the ministerial successors to this visionary group will regard Stern’s remarks on transport – which, incidentally, are not without thoughtful caveats – as a welcome ‘get out of jail free’ card. The transport analyst Stephen Glaister suggested that, following Stern – who prices a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at £190 (as opposed to the Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra), which prices it at £4.80) – the CO2 element of the tax levied on a litre of petrol would need only to be 14 pence (David Hume Institute, 2007). At the time of writing, fuel duty is already around 50 pence (DfT, 2007a) – partly a result of a ‘Fuel Tax Escalator’ introduced in the 1990s by the Conservatives and abandoned by Labour in 2000 (Lyons and Chatterjee, 2002) – and VAT accounts for another 13 to 14 pence, so this leaves the government with plenty of wriggle room with regard to how it responds in relation to CO2 emissions. Certainly, it is unlikely that petrol tax as a proportion of the cost at the pump will increase much any time soon: Labour is experiencing its first consistent period of opinion poll deficit and the price of oil has reached a historic high, so sidestepping the issue of fuel tax increases absolves Gordon Brown’s administration of appearing meaner to motorists than it already does. How long this will be a tenable position is unclear, for, notwithstanding the cost of oil it may be that the question moves from one concerning the theoretical price of carbon across all sectors to one of how much the price of petrol and diesel needs manipulating to prevent carbon reduction targets being undermined by continuing increases in car use.1 Evidence shows that sustained price rises can reduce traffic growth (Goodwin et al, 2004; Graham and Glaister, 2004).

Looking back over the last decade, though, it is not as if Labour has been particularly disposed to doing all that much even when its opinion poll leads seemed unassailable and the Party sat on parliamentary majorities in excess of 150 (Docherty and Shaw, 2003). Aside from personal success in rescuing High Speed 1 (HS1), the UK’s first railway with a European standard line speed of 300 kilometres per hour, John Prescott, New Labour’s first Transport Secretary, must regard progress in what he had earmarked as Labour’s transport decade – Transport 2010: The 10-year plan (DETR, 2000a) followed A new deal for transport – as something of a disappointment, a litany of missed opportunities and political cowardice that has amounted in general terms to the managed decline of an already substandard transport system. The advent of devolution brought with it the hope of ‘local solutions to local problems’ (Tomaney, 2000; Adams and Schmuecker, 2005), but with the welcome exception of some modest rail schemes and a tramway in Scotland, it is debatable how much more the Labour-led administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff achieved than their counterpart in Westminster in the years to 2007.2 Only in London, also devolved but with far fewer powers than the Celtic nations, have circumstances coincided to produce real change of the kind that Prescott originally had in mind. Labour’s response was to try and distance itself from the Mayor’s most radical initiative of congestion charging (MacKinnon et al, 2008).

This book critically analyses transport developments in the UK in the 10 years following the publication of A new deal for transport (DETR, 1998a). After this general introduction and a discussion of how devolution has impacted on the formulation and implementation of UK transport policy, the chapters assess developments across each mode before switching tack to deal with some comparative issues, which bring the book to a conclusion. All have been written by experienced transport academics adhering to rigorous standards of evidence gathering, and the authors – as is to be expected – have been detailed and scholarly in arriving at the views they express. We asked the same of colleagues contributing to the precursor to this book (Docherty and Shaw, 2003), written after Labour’s first term in office from 1997-2001. In that volume the mood was one of optimistic critique, recognising the difficulty of mobilising quickly what was in transport terms a cutting-edge agenda. This time, however, there is discernable frustration in the tenor of the contributions; while there has been progress in some areas, after 10 years and several high-profile statements of intent the Westminster government should by now have achieved a considerable amount more than it has, given ministers’ initial optimism and strategic policy intentions. It is perhaps more difficult to judge the devolved administrations, as there is an extent to which they have been ‘finding their feet’ in a new political environment, although the first Mayor of London, albeit with the political experience of running the erstwhile Greater London Council and serving three terms as a Member of Parliament (MP), showed that it is possible to hit the ground running. By way of setting the scene for the discussions that follow, the remainder of this chapter sets out the relationship between transport and sustainability, and describes the general trajectory of Labour’s ‘sustainable’ transport policy over the past decade. We also consider reasons why ministers have not promoted in office the New Deal for Transport to which they were apparently committed in opposition.

Sustainable transport as a political issue in the UK

It is possible to critique the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development on a number of levels, not least for their vagueness and openness to interpretation according to context and vested interests (Redclift, 1987; Pezzoli, 1997; Williams and Millington, 2004). The frequently cited definition advanced by Our common future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p 8) – development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ – is undoubtedly well intentioned, but can be picked apart relatively straightforwardly. In relation to transport matters, for example, Black (1998, p 337) makes the point that ‘there is no limit placed on “future generations” and nothing is sustainable forever’. We would add that present needs for transport are unknown: we might well be aware as a society what it is that we consume, but this hardly equates with need (see also Turner, 1993; Farrington and Farrington, 2005). Despite such criticisms, so long as the terms of reference used in interpreting sustainability are clearly stated and the general limitations of such wide-ranging concepts are understood and accepted, we regard it as providing both a useful framework for analysing existing policies and a set of guiding principles for future development. For our purposes in this book, we subscribe to a conception of sustainability that emphasises the roughly equal significance of economic, social and environmental considerations. Rather like Stern, neither we nor our co-contributors take the line that economic development need be constrained to any significant degree by environmental policies and vice versa; nor do we think that ‘social’ policies need to be overlooked in the quest for economic or environmental benefit. In this context, then, promoting more sustainable transport is about crafting a suite of policies capable of influencing travel behaviour to appreciably reduce the environmental impact of transport systems, while still ensuring that they are capable of supporting economic growth and social inclusion.

Goodwin (1993) first advanced the notion of a ‘green–gold coalition’ to explore the assertion that transport policies introduced for environmental reasons could simultaneously benefit the economy. In the UK context, recent developments in London since the recreation of city-wide governance (Chapter Two) in 2000 offer support to hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Quote
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Notes on Contributors
• Part One: Policy and politics
• Part Two: Progress in policy implementation
• Part Three: Ten years since A new deal for transport – signposts to the UK’s transport future?