Shouldn’t we be looking at Transport through a different lens?

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, I took part in LTT’s annual Local Transport Summit , this time held in Bedford. This 24-hour residential event is rather unique - it is conducted under ‘Chatham House Rules’ and brings together senior minds from across the transport world to convene and freely exchange insight. There is much to discuss – and the programme is highly enjoyable, but also intense- with a lot of immediate political issues to address. This year we reflected on the delivery of a potentially upcoming Integrated Transport Strategy ,and whether this requires a new approach to transport planning.

I came away thinking that we might not have dug deep enough into the wider context in which transports sits, and the full range of inputs and consequences that ought to be considered in setting an agenda robust enough to cope with all the major and fundamental challenges we are likely to be facing as a society in the next Quarter Century.

Meeting net zero targets by 2050 means planning for a society that will be radically different. It seems that, finally, we are making progress. We are seeking to plan for a world where significant aspects of society are going to be fundamentally altered, from energy consumption, to housing, fashion, diet, travel, ways of work, in fact almost everything will be different. So why is our approach to transport so slow to catch up with this paradigm shift?

We are very good at appraising transport patterns and demand, identifying problems and mending them, keeping the flow moving across the old modes and into the new ones. But always with the same mindset: what journeys will be made, by who, when and how? What can we do to shorten the time between A and B? But achieving a carbon-neutral future will require something else from us, something more. We have to learn to ask why we make the trips that we do and to the places we go to?

It is not a simple question. Motivations for making a journey of any kind can be complex and dynamic, responding to rapidly changing circumstances. But without asking it, we are stuck trying to solve problems with tools that are not up to the task of resolving the current and future issues we face. Improving a junction for better traffic flow, building the infrastructure to enable EVs to use that junction, designing bike racks and cycle paths to integrate efficiently and pleasantly with the car journey, these are all good and useful measures, but they don’t get to the roots of the problem: too many journeys, too many vehicles, too many people travelling too far and too often. Net zero in transport cannot be achieved merely through reducing the carbon costs of existing and future journeys, no matter how well we do that. Nor is it enough to encourage, in a general sort of way, more active travel and less commuting. It will require fundamental changes in behaviour managed by deep changes to the social fabric. And to do that, we need a detailed understanding of why people choose to travel the way they do and, therefore, what we can do to help them change.

As things stand, when we survey a population and ask why a journey is being made, we might record it as, for example, ‘work commute’. Well, work’s work, so it might appear as if there is not much a transport plan can do about that. But if we dig deeper other motivations become apparent. A particular commuter may be travelling to work that could be easily done remotely, for example, but has found themselves feeling lonely and alienated at home- or distracted by family activities going on around them. What are their alternatives? What constrains their options? Who is really making the decisions? When we have that kind of insight we can consider other means of removing the carbon cost of their journey from the budget, rather than just making it smoother, quicker and propelled by more sustainable fuel. Maybe. For example, access to shared workspaces within walking or cycling distance from their home could be a compromise between office and home working that might allow them to eliminate the main commute altogether? Might it be possible for other trip-generating activities – medical practices, childcare, personal services or parcel pickups for example - to be co-located at such hubs?

If we really understand people’s reasons for travel, we can surely look for new solutions. But we can only enact those solutions if transport planning is not an end in itself but deeply embedded within other planning functions, right from the start and through to the finish. Education, health, housing and transport policy are parts of a single whole, but we do not generally think of them that way at the point of design. It is hard to do, of course. It is complex and technically challenging, and requires us to look at things across a wider horizon, and with a broader set of perspectives. But the push towards decarbonisation has taught us, surely, that we live in co-dependent ecosystems, not just a series of individual systems that lie across or contiguous to each other. The causes of the current climate crisis lie in the unbalancing of natural systems that were deeply interdependent, far more than we had really understood. Our social ecosystems are similarly deeply intertwined, but we keep trying to design and build them as if they are not. That must change.

Land use modelling and planning will be central to such a change if we can make it. New builds are where we are best placed to demonstrate the power that more integrated policy thinking could unleash, although the prospects at the moment are not especially promising. Where do we need housing, healthcare, industry, energy supply, EV power-charging infrastructure and so on? What are the principles of determining their detailed locations? That should be dictated by the needs of the people who will inhabit those places and not simply the habitual and rule-based decisions of policy makers, and the various motivations of landowners, developers and service suppliers. If a development is properly designed with full integration of all policy considerations, the transport system can be fully responsive to the needs of the population – needs that are currently often obscure to us – and it will be that which finally makes a zero-carbon transport network a realistic prospect.

So, you might say, all we need to do is: integrate policy; reform land use and spatial modelling and planning; and re-think the social meaning and function of transport? And predict correctly the needs, desires and expectations of generations after ours. Isn’t that just a little bit utopian? But didn’t the idea of a fully green energy grid look like sheer utopianism not very long ago? Revolutions in social and economic thinking can happen and the Government’s plans for an integrated national transport strategy, with its people-first focus, is a really positive sign that we might have a policy framework that supports this more integrated approach- hopefully with a dash of vision and ambition about the future too (and not just with eyes enthralled by technology). The prize is huge: a future world that will transform for the better the lives of the people who live in it, one that is fully designed for their needs, ambitions and desires. Carbon is not just a cost: in this case it may also be a catalyst.