We have knowledge but not power. We need a toolkit for our times to help translate our insight into useful practice

MY WORD, how time flies. Unbelievably, this is my 200th consecutive piece for Local Transport Today since I first started writing these columns in 2005.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve been giving some thought as to whether I should mark the occasion in some special way and, if so, what that way might be. In the end, I decided simply to pick up where I left off last time (LTT879), in exploring the state of transport policy in the UK today, but then see if I could finish with something of value to my fellow professionals by drawing on the accumulation of general appeals for common sense with which I often bring these pieces to their conclusion. As I was writing, that closing peroration began turning itself into something of a manifesto (or perhaps a toolkit) acknowledging the lessons learned these past couple of decades for how we might refocus our efforts so that sustainable transport can become much more of an everyday reality, and less just a well-evidenced policy priority. Let’s see what you think of it when you get there.

But, first let me remind you of the appeal that closed my last article, addressed to transport planners at large:

It’s time we started being less technocratic and more empathetic.

This epigram – the first of a number I’m including in this piece - was partly prompted by what someone else said at October’s Local Transport Summit in Sheffield:

We need to avoid the Transport Planning profession being like the Remain campaign – probably right, but ultimately losers.

As you may anticipate, this 200th edition of my column is likely to be something of a ‘greatest hits’ of similar pithy sayings that have helped provoke and inform my thoughts over the 18 years since I first started writing these things. In picking up from the two above, my next quote may seem somewhat off beam, but bear with me.

Money is a good servant, but a bad master.

As so often, it doesn’t seem possible to be absolutely sure who first said this. However, it seems generally attributed to a Francis Bacon and I’ll settle for that. After all, the source is less important, in my view, than the meaning. Concerning which, I cite this particular line purely in order to modify it. Bacon lived at around the same time as Shakespeare and, that being the case, he never got the chance to craft the following application of his thinking. So I will.

Cars are good servants but bad masters.

Cars can indeed be great servants, and were invented to be just that. Despite being inanimate, however, they have managed to turn the tables on us. In doing so, they’re just like the character played by Dirk Bogarde in the 1963 film The Servant. He starts out as someone hired to look after the needs of the upper class toff character played by James Fox, but ends up very much in charge. One of the promotional taglines for the film was “Subtly, fascinatingly... corruption by corruption... the servant becomes master...”

This idea made me think again of the following words, which I have used in these pages several times before. They first appeared in the foreword to Traffic in Towns – the landmark ‘Buchanan Report’ – which was published 60 years ago this year. The Servant was also a child of 1963, but I think that’s just a coincidence. This is how Buchanan put it:

We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great potential destructiveness. And yet we love him dearly. Regarded in its collective aspect as ‘the traffic problem’, the motor car is clearly a menace which can spoil our civilisation. But translated into terms of the particular vehicle that stands in our garage (or more often nowadays, is parked outside our door, or someone else’s door), we regard it as one of our most treasured possessions or dearest ambitions, an immense convenience, an expander of the dimensions of life, an instrument of emancipation, a symbol of the modern age.

Dirk Bogarde (‘The Servant’) and James Fox (theoretically the master) in the 1963 film

The far-sighted work of Sir Colin Buchanan nailed our problems with cars

I’ve often pondered on the wisdom, prescience and melancholy that are combined within this short passage. Fewer than 100 words, but managing to capture the sad truth that the motor car, intended – and initially experienced – as ‘an instrument of emancipation’, would turn out to be a menace; a monster even. One that we would choose to nourish, rather than to guard ourselves against.

The author of the Buchanan Report, subsequently Sir Colin of that name, an engineer, and of little doubt a man of real vision, had expressed his personal views on the matter in similar terms five years previously, in his 1958 book entitled ‘Mixed Blessing’. The jacket of the book (shown here) featured a cartoon of a giant car seeming almost to devour the town beneath it. A monster indeed! The book also contained the following lines:

The day the first motor car was unloaded marked the point at which many of our social and economic arrangements were diverted, gently at first, onto a new course; and time was to show that we had pulled in a Trojan horse more brutally destructive in some of its consequences than any that emerged from the original Wooden Horse upon an unsuspecting population… the motor vehicle has come to affect the lives of every single person, and is presenting us with a tougher series of adjustment problems than perhaps any single invention has done in the course of history.

I use these quotes to underscore the essential truth of the title I’ve given this piece. When it comes to the effect that cars, and motor vehicles in general, have had on our society, the fact that a fair number of transport planners, decades ago, knew that it would not go well for society at large did not give them – or anyone – the power to prevent those ‘brutally destructive consequences’ from coming to pass.

Thirty years before even ‘Mixed Blessing’ this 1927 Punch cartoon satirised the sacrifices we would make in deference to ‘Motocracy’. In common with almost all satire, it made a point with biting humour, but failed to change anything.

Let me at once make clear that, in saying the advent of the motor car would eventually not go well for society at large– and has indeed not gone well – l’m not suggesting that cars have not brought any benefits. Untold millions of people in this country and worldwide – including a large proportion who do not and never will own a car – would laugh in my face were I to claim otherwise. However, it is precisely the actual and perceived benefits of the car at a personal level that has piled up the problems for society as a whole.

I’ve had cause to reflect previously (and recently) on how our use of cars represents a classic case of ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Cars incentivise individuals to act self-interestedly in ways that are ultimately harmful to everyone. As this comparatively modern maxim has well put it:

You’re not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic!

The same thing applies in relation to road danger, air pollution and carbon emissions, of course. We think our own driving behaviour has such tiny effects that they’re not even worth considering. But, nevertheless, transport is the UK’s single biggest greenhouse gas-emitting sector with 26% of all emissions, and road transport is by far the biggest contributor to that (see chart above). And also, meanwhile, five people a day are killed in crashes on the highway.

A large part of the problem here is that we love the monster so dearly – because of the real, hoped-for, and imaginary freedoms it confers – that we are in denial about its rapacity. Or, just blind to it. In this, our feelings are heavily influenced by those who sell cars, and advertise them. And the way they spin the real story of motoring and society, certainly modern society, and the Climate challenge.

All those who have driven or been driven in cars have experienced the frustrations of queuing when they want to be moving. Indeed, getting stuck in the traffic we’ve help create is our number one complaint about the experience of using cars. Yet that congestion is invariably absent from car adverts (is it not?) because they sell lifestyles we aspire to, not the reality we know of.

So why don’t we wake up and smell the petrol fumes? Perhaps the reason is encapsulated in this short letter, penned by the author of Slaughterhouse-Five and many other imaginative books, Kurt Vonnegut. He suggests we haven’t so much sniffed the petrol, figuratively, as consumed it.

How advertisers like us to think we can use our cars (above). It’s not the way Kurt Vonnegut (right/below) saw it.

Dear future generations. Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Vonnegut’s neat turn of phrase stands as a summary of the many reasons we look the other way whenever asked to confront the consequences of our car use. We fail even to see the unarguable truth of the following words, attributed to Herman Daly, the only ‘ecological economist’ I’ve ever come across:

The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

If we were to take even a moment to reflect honestly on this, we’d acknowledge that Herman was correct. However, this truth – that knowledge – has not had the power to change the course of politics, of business, and of our lives, much as we might hope that it would.

A similar truth that has proved similarly impotent since it was first written in the New Yorker in 1955 by sociologist Lewis Mumford is this:

Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity.

These aren’t Mumford’s actual words, but they are a perfectly fair precis of what he did write. They’re also quite a reasonable summary of what, to me, is perhaps the pick of the graphics contained in the 2022 National Road Traffic Projections (see below).

This graphic reveals, not for the first time, that anything approaching ‘transport as usual’ simply continues to take us along a trajectory of ever-increasing congestion. It also shows that – shock of shocks to our politicians – technology alone will not save us.

Notwithstanding the massive road-building programme that the present Government keeps telling us it is pursuing - and which all transport planners whose livelihoods do not depend on road-building keep telling the Government is madness- can anyone who has looked at the evidence still seriously contend that we can or should increase highway capacity in order to solve the congestion problem? That being the case, why isn’t everyone with the power to do so putting all the effort they can into promoting and enabling a massive and rapid transfer of car trips to other modes of transport, or into just reducing the level to which we depend (or think we depend) on using our cars?

‘Road Race’, a cartoon of Harold Watkinson, Minister of Transport in the late 1950s, being pursued by ravening cars as he rolls out yet more tarmac. “There are votes in roads”, he once said, but even then there was a clear sense of cars being monsters that needed feeding.

To help answer this question, I turn to another of my favourite axioms, which is from Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous 16th century volume ‘The Prince’.

He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.

Niccolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince would have doubtless had a valuable insight about what was going on

In other words, “Stop bleating about how you wish things would be; it’ll get you nowhere. Instead, roll your sleeves up and deal with the realpolitik of everyday life”. The fact is that, as things stand, most people – influential or otherwise – think cars are and will remain an inescapably dominant fact of life; and this is partly because the problems with cars are hidden in plain sight. We’re just so used to car dominance that imagining a different world simply doesn’t occur to us; and if the idea of dealing with it does raise its head, we respond like we would to a suggestion that we should cut down on breathing.

I was again reminded of this fact when listening the other night to an old friend and transport planner. During a discussion, he reflected honestly and ruefully that, much as he believed in the sustainable transport agenda, he had to confess that his own travel habits hadn’t changed as much as he thought they should have done. In his case, it wasn’t a matter of intentional resistance, but something much more passive: inertia perhaps, or simply the failure of knowledge to translate into action. A very well-intentioned man, but still capable of finding insufficient motivation to do what he knows to be better.

Who knew? Transport planners are ordinary people, too!

I now turn towards my conclusion(s) by citing the current Chair of the Transport Planning Society, Ben Plowden. I don’t have his precise words before me but, in closing a very interesting evening of discussions on last month’s Transport Planning Day, he commended those present on their knowledge and insight concerning what needs to be done, transport-wise, to make this world a better place. The questions of why this knowledge hasn’t led to the necessary change, and how it might do so, were touched on, but largely unanswered.

Having since had a little time to consider my own answers to that conundrum, I have come up with the following series of ‘needs’ statements; constituting that ‘manifesto’ or ‘toolkit’ that I referred to at the outset. If, as transport planners, we want to be more effective in making this world a better place. I’m convinced we need to work beyond the usual boundaries of our professional thinking and practice; and I hope the following suggestions, drawn of both observation and experience, might help us do that.

So that’s my manifesto for how my profession might avoid the eventuality of ultimately being proved right, but too late for our knowledge to have had the effect it could and should have.

Challenge the detail if you wish – I will enjoy the discussion – but do let’s agree that we need a set of principles that might transform the real-world outcomes of the work we do.

Because, if what we know needs to happen doesn’t happen, won’t we have wasted our time?

It’s a question that I, for one, always come back to.

Why we do what we do, and how effective we are in doing it, has been a recurring theme since I began these columns 18 years ago. My answers have changed over that time, of course, and will doubtless continue to do so.

We all need to keep learning, adapting and checking our progress so that we keep heading in the right direction.