environment magazine

A Beginner’s Guide To Sustainable Transport And How To Get It Right

By Professor John Whitelegg, Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York (UK)

First of all a challenge and a suggestion. If you have ever wondered what is meant by “sustainable transport”   then please ignore the hundreds of documents written on the subject and go and see it.  All you have to do is spend a week in Freiburg in Southern Germany (population 240,000) and experience the joy of a highly connected city with best-in-class walking, cycling, bus, rail and tram options and a dense network of services that is enough to make the choice of a car for routine trips a relatively rare event.

In Freiburg you can wallow in a high quality world.  You can learn everything you need to know about sustainable transport by experiencing it. Freiburg has 27% of every journey every day by bike.  In Manchester it is 0.9% and even in London with its huge effort on cycling it does not hit 5%. Freiburg’s public transport is seamless, efficient, reliable and connects things that its citizens need to get to. It runs 7 days a week, it runs from early morning until late at night, it gives users a choice of buses, trams and local trains, it is clean and it is safe. Walking around Freiburg (24% of all trips every day) is a delight and even though Germans really do like cars there is no need to use them very much and lots of citizens do not use them for journeys to work, school, health and personal business trips.

The UK scores highly on some things. We have some of the most congested roads and highest public transport fares in Europe.   We operate a privatised, fragmented and unconnected rail and bus system that looks like it was designed to provide the opposite of a user-friendly alterative to the car and we allow public transport costs to rise much faster in real terms than the cost of motoring.

Things need not be like this and for the average commuter in Frankfurt, Freiburg, Berlin, Basle, Copenhagen or Rotterdam there are dense networks of high quality public transport and a seamless web of interconnectivity. This means that one ticket purchased for less than £3 in Berlin or Frankfurt can take the commuter on trains, buses and trams in any combination and in any direction. The public transport fleets are clean, well policed, safe, secure, new and attractive and the journey possibilities are far greater than a UK city which inevitably produces “accessibility deserts”.

In Frankfurt the “ jobticket” provides far more labour mobility and maximum accessibility to employers and employees with very real benefits to both the urban economy and to local companies. The jobticket is a fine example of co-operation between employee, employer, city and state government and gives commuters a bargain at 50 Euros per month for a commute that is up to 50kms in length.

Schemes like the jobticket benefit the employee who has access to world-best public transport at very low cost and also benefits the employer who has access to a huge potential workforce over a large area and does not have to suffer the car parking traumas that many UK employers and employees have to cope with. 

UK governmental awareness of the importance of high quality public transport, walking and cycling facilities is still under-developed and is one of the reasons why UK cities lag far behind their European competitor cities. A recent report from the Local Government Association has identified this critical structural weakness of UK cities:

“We have a great global city in London. But the other places in Britain, once world-beaters, have fallen behind.  Of the largest English cities apart from the capital, Bristol is the best performing in the European league table- but only in 34th place. Most of our great cities- a century ago the economic powerhouses of the industrialised world- now languish at the bottom of the table. Indeed Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle have only half the GDP per head of major European cities”

Sorting out workplace transport is one of those highly attractive “no brainers” that UK PLC is currently failing to deliver. A highly effective transport system giving employees an excellent commuter experience and widening accessibility to jobs also reduces the costs of parking for employers and reduces the costs associated with high rates of staff turnover.  It also delivers significant reductions in greenhouse gases and avoids the worst consequences of climate change.

It is no accident that some of the richest cities in Europe e.g. Vienna, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Zurich and Basle have the best public transport systems in Europe. There is a clear link between wealthy cities and high quality public transport.

One of many sustainable transport sticking points in the UK is the level of public expenditure devoted to the support of public transport services. This predates the current round of public sector cuts being implemented by the coalition government to reduce budget deficits.  In 2009-10 the total public expenditure devoted to public transport services per capita per annum was £286 in Denmark, £269 in Germany and £112 in England. There is  no doubt whatsoever that Germany and Denmark have much better public transport services than England and this is the case in big cities like Frankfurt and Copenhagen as well as in relatively small rural settlements with bus services 7 days a week connecting hamlets and villages to railway stations.

The reluctance to fund high quality public transport in the UK flies in the face of  total economics or system wide thinking about how to deal with obesity, illness from poor air quality and the high costs of trying to keep up with road building and motorway widening. Public health experts are predicting a £50 billion annual bill related to obesity and high quality walking and cycling facilities in places like Freiburg have a role to play in tackling obesity. Sustainable transport debates in the UK tend to be compartmentalised into a kind of environmental “goody goody” box as far as policy is concerned whereas the reality is that it is a no brainer. High quality walking, cycling and public transport facilities that get millions of trips out of the car and into these alternatives is an economic boon of enormous value to bottom line numbers in UK PLC.

Transport debates in the UK are often characterised by a low level of intelligence. Why should a new bypass round Lancaster in northern England at a cost of £129 million for 4 miles of road be regarded as a “good thing” when sums of money much less than that can be spent to improve alternatives to the car and deliver all the predicted gains claimed for the bypass?  A non-bypass solution would cost much less, involve no loss of countryside and farmland,  would reduce carbon emissions rather than add 20,000 extra tonnes pa and would improve air quality. The whole bypass saga in Lancaster has been characterised by a deeply flawed process of logic and evaluation. The problem to be solved has been redefined several times. Sometimes it is about relieving congestion. This frequently morphs into job creation, time savings for lorries travelling to the Port of Heysham and encouraging new nuclear build adjacent to the existing Heysham nuclear power stations. The options that are available to solve each problem or objective have never been clearly listed and evaluated one against another.  The “winning” option (build an  expensive bypass) has not emerged from a rigorous evaluation of value for money, impact on carbon emissions and impact on future traffic generation. The reality of most road building activity in the UK is that the starting point is a clear objective to build a road and then various bits of evidence are retro-fitted to support the case for a new road.  Sustainable transport cannot thrive in such a poor quality decision-making environment and radical reform is needed.

Peak Oil and Resilience

Poor quality thinking and decision making is exacerbated by the inability of the UK transport planning and political process to engage with the peak oil debate. The peak oil debate is about recognising that oil supplies will be increasingly difficult to access because of a combination of growth in demand from India and China and because new oil fields are not coming on line as fast as old ones are being depleted. Peak oil thinking is about reducing oil dependency and adopting technologies and methods of working that will insulate us from oil; crises from whatever sources and create resilient societies insulated from major disruption linked to oil shortages.

In recent years both the Australian government and the Swedish government have produced reports recognizing the dangers of oil dependency and the urgent need to move in the direction of so-called low carbon futures.  There is still no forward thinking in the UK about how to reduce oil dependency and restructure transport thinking and funding to deliver a low carbon future.

Work carried out by the global science policy think tank, the Stockholm Environment Institute, has shown that the UK transport system can reduce its carbon emissions by 76% by 2050. The report spells out exactly how this can be done and its multiple benefits in terms of the widest possible social, economic and environmental gains.  It would also deal with peak oil and increase the resilience of the UK as it faces external shocks related to oil supply in the next 2-3 decades Currently this kind of thinking and policy making is absent in national UK policy making.

Conclusion

Sustainable transport has a great deal to offer to bring about a huge increase in quality of life of all UK citizens. Performance to date is very poor indeed and a comparison between Freiburg and any other UK city demonstrates all too clearly just how badly we are doing. The bad news about this neglect of sustainable transport is that it stores up very large costs for the future. A recent cabinet office report revealed that the cumulative costs of congestion, physical inactivity, CO2 emissions, pollution, noise and accidents in the UK are approximately £56 billion pa. Sustainable transport initiatives can eliminate the majority of these avoidable costs. The good news is that none of this is rocket science. We can have world beating sustainable transport initiatives any time we want. We can make the transport systems of Manchester and Liverpool just like Freiburg, and Birmingham and Leeds just like Munich, or Stuttgart and Newcastle just like Copenhagen. This will mean reforming our deeply flawed decision making practice that currently determine what does and does not get transport money. It will mean giving city regions bigger budgets and linking those budgets to eliminating carbon emissions, and air pollution from transport and it will mean abandoning the love affair with privatisation and deregulation so that we can manage transport systems in the same way that this is done around a Germanys city or in Stockholm or Copenhagen. These changes will produce a huge increase in quality of life, reduced public expenditure in the future, delivery of climate change objectives and improved health. The missing ingredient in UK policy making and budgeting is the vision and political will to make things better. Until these ingredients are put into play we will continue to experience a lower quality of life than most mainland European citizens enjoy and be far more vulnerable to external shocks and higher costs than need be the case.