There’s an interesting piece in this week’s Economist, confirming that we are moving around less: http://www.economist.com/node/21554203  It does seem odd given there are record numbers on the rails and on the Tube, and certainly travelling around the country, one rarely sees an open clear road, but the trend downwards in car travel has now lasted much of the decade and there is no doubting statistics

Yet, overall we are making fewer trips than a decade ago. Instinctively, the statistics feel wrong. Of course the economic situation has reduced demand for travel, as have high fuel prices, but the downward trend started before the economy bombed and the cost of fuel soared. The Economist struggles  somewhat to find a coherent explanation behind the figures. Internet shopping, the fact that people multitask when they go out in their cars – doing a bit of shopping while visiting friends, or buying things in several stores at retail parks or town centres – and rising costs are all part of the explanation.

But as the article points out, the experience of travelling has mostly improved. Cars are far more comfortable, and so are trains and even bikes require less energy to pedal. There are counter trends,too – more centralisation of medical facilities, the closure of local shops – which make people travel further when they do make a trip.

The statistics suggest that there is a reluctance for people to increase the amount of time they spend travel.This has implications for transport planners and politicians. Do we really need the infrastructure they are so keen on providing for us? Are we really moving to a world where people see less travel as a good thing? Simply extrapolating previous rising trends may well prove to be an expensive mistake.

John Griffin the Tory donating boss of Addison Lee (presumably a distant relation of Nick?)  is clearly on the crazy end of the motoring lobby spectrum. His comments in hisfirm’s house magazine border on incitement to kill cyclists. I reproduce them in full here:

The creation of a mayor for London was supposed to stimulate a new type of politician who would offer brave new ideas for the city. Unfortunately, the paucity of thinking on transport in the manifestos from the two main contenders suggests the experiment has failed.

Ken Livingstone went early on his Big Idea, reducing fares by seven per cent and not increasing them in 2013. His manifesto elaborates on this, promising to save average fare-payers £1,000 over the four-year term. There’s a rag-bag of other ideas, with a section on helping motorists and a promise to safeguard the Freedom Pass – also a Tory promise – but very little of substance.

As for Boris Johnson, his key manifesto pledges on transport are equally shallow: cutting Tube delays and extending the bike hire scheme. The first is not really in his power, as it greatly depends on the vagaries of a system whose 150^th birthday is celebrated next year. As for bike hire, it’s a great scheme but only a minority of Londoners will use it. There is, too, the usual guff about improving river travel, a promise which I have seen numerous times over two decades but which will always be defeated by the sheer impracticalities of a river with more curves than an Alpine pass.

What both these hackneyed politicians lack is any vision of how radically to improve the environment of central London by using transport as the catalyst. This would involve a courageous decision to recognise that the individual motor car is an inappropriate mode of transport in a city like ours and so its use should be discouraged. Livingstone, to be fair, did seem to understand that in his first term, with his daring move to push through the congestion charge and later to extend it westwards. But his efforts ran out of steam; now, cravenly, he will not even reinstate the western zone and has given up his plan to impose a tax on “gas guzzlers”.

Boris, for his part, wants it all ways. He supports cycling, but refuses to accept that to do so in any coherent way requires both slowing down the traffic and reallocating road space. The result, tragically, has been two deaths on the Cycle Superhighway he created in east London.

Where’s the beef? Cities such as, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Munich and even Paris have grasped the nettle, creating extensive facilities for cyclists and putting them at the heart of urban planning. They have strived to make their cities liveable as well as accessible. In the process they have sometimes had to make short- term unpopular decisions to bring about a long-term improvement. In London, it seems we have a pair of conservatives who cannot think beyond getting re-elected.

So, for the next four years, we will continue to have an Oxford Street that is a bus depot rather than an elegant pedestrianised boulevard, a Soho whose narrow streets are still clogged with cars, a Parliament Square where the central green cannot be reached safely by pedestrians and a majority of roads that remain a deterrent for many would-be cyclists. Unless the successors to the Boris-and-Ken show are braver , London will miss out on the transport-driven benefits that are now transforming Europe’s cities.

Having been rapped on the knuckles in my one ever (short) conversation with Justine Greening, I take some pleasure from the fact that she has had the same treatment meted out to her by the normally supine ATOC. My verbal bashing as I have reported before, came at the press conference to launch the government’s long awaited Command Paper.

I had the temerity to suggest that Paper did not seem to demonstrate how the £2.5-£3.5bn which was supposed to be saved annually would be found. ‘Well’, she snapped back ‘it’s fortunate you did not write it because I can’ .Ouch but explanation there came none.  Now however, ATOC has come out on my side in relation to another unfulfilled promse in the Command Paper, the failure to include anything about franchise reform.

Tom Smith, the usually mild-mannered chairman of ATOC, is clearly at the end of his tether when it comes to expecting change over franchising. In his speech today to the Institution of Civil Engineers he says that despite two years of promises,the government has failed to come up with a plan for franchise reform. Given there are so many franchises coming up soon, he reckons there is a ‘narrow window of opportunity to implement genuine reform’. He suggests: ‘We need a new spirit in the relationship between the Government and the companies enfranchised to run train services and a new form of contract. Without reform, we will continue with inflexible, overly prescribed franchises that do not unlock the full potential of the industry to achieve growth and efficiency.’

He then goes on to make a direct criticism of the government, a rarity from ATOC: ‘Over the two year period since the coalition government came to power we have heard a lot about their commitment to reforming franchises along these lines – to be longer, less prescriptive, more output based and giving incentives to train companies to be innovative to grow their businesses in ways that meet the needs of their customers. Sadly that commitment has barely begun to be turned into reality, and we need tangible evidence that it will be.’ There you are Ms Greening, that’s how it feels like. Can I hear the ‘ouch’ in Marsham Street?

This week has seen the Mayor once again pushing one of his big ideas for re-election: driverless Tubes, bringing with them not just a more high-tech underground but an almighty confrontation with the Tube unions. In the midst of endless wrangles with the unions over Olympic bonuses, Boris Johnson might imagine that’s a popular gesture with voters. Yet he is both dead right and completely wrong about “driverless” trains.

Driverless is a misnomer. Such trains would be operated by a central computer, overseen by human controllers.  There are already dozens of metro systems around the world which use such trains. In Copenhagen, for example, the computer controls everything centrally from the running of the trains to the opening of the doors, with just a handful of operators in the control centre – but nevertheless, with stewards on every train.

In London we already have two versions of “driverless” trains. On the Victoria, Jubilee and Central Lines, under the Automatic Train Operation system (ATO), the driver operates only the doors at stations – and can also drive the train or stop it in an emergency.

Meanwhile on the Docklands Light Railway, there is no “driver” but a “train captain” able to take over the operation if there is a problem. The DLR can work like that because it operates at lower speed than the Underground, and its one major tunnel section has a walkway alongside for easy evacuation.

Such centrally controlled trains have several advantages. Computers are normally better in terms of fuel efficiency. And the gap between trains can be shorter, using a more sophisticated system of signalling.

That’s why Johnson is right to want to have modern trains, controlled centrally.

Yet he has also strenuously sought to portray driverless trains as a solution to the Underground’s perennial industrial relations problems. And that’s where he’s got it quite wrong.

For a start, given risks ranging from terrorism to derailments, many Londoners would baulk at the idea of completely unstaffed trains. It might be acceptable in, say, Hong Kong, where the tunnels have walkways and there is far easier access to the surface, but not in London’s century-old, deep-level Tube tunnels, where stations are often a mile apart.

Mike Brown, the managing director of London Underground, has said that new trains for the Piccadilly and Bakerloo, due to be ordered during the next mayoral term, might not have conventional cabs at the front. But that does not mean they could be run without any staff on board.

In any case, changing the technology will take a long time and cost a lot: we will be seeing “drivers” at the front of Tubes for at least the next 30 years. The rolling stock on the sub surface lines – the Metropolitan, District and Circle – is currently being replaced with fabulous new air-conditioned trains and the signalling is being upgraded. However, ATO will not be fitted on these lines 2018, and even afer that there will still be a person in the cab at the front able to take over control if need be.  If these people go on strike, clearly the trains would not run.

Driverless trains work – but they won’t work as a solution to Tube strikes. No end of Boris bluster will blow away London’s Tube drivers just yet.

The revival of interest in government circles on a third runway at Heathrow is fraught with difficulties for the Coalition. The notion that the Big Idea for transport would be High Speed Two which would obviate the need for a third runway was always nonsensical. I’m not for a moment suggesting that I believe the case for a third runway, but merely arguing that HS2 is a completely separate matter from demand for aviation.

Any serious move towards a third runway would create widespread dissent within the Tory party and immediately result in having to find another transport secretary. Indeed, the decision to appoint Justine Greening – whose constituency is under the flightpath and who has lobbied against the third runway – always seemed a bit odd given that already doubts about the decision to rule out Heathrow excpansion was being queried in Tory circles. Moreover, this is coming at a bad time for the mayoral election. Boris Johnson is already fulminating about it, and for once his ire is genuine, rather than a tactical manoeuvre to distance himself from an unpopular government.

Another local MP, Zac Goldsmith, has threatened to resign over the issue and there would be no shortage of other diseenters. Moreover, any decision to go ahead with the third runway would undermine the case for HS2 since it is supposed to – though it will not – reduce demand for flights from Heathrow. Airport capacity and expansion are always politically contentious, but the muddle of Tory policy has exacerbated the situation. My view is that ultimately there are plenty of runways and capacity in and around London which is blessed with five airports – six if Southend is included. If market forces were allowed to prevail, then slots at Heathrow could be sold to ensure that it was all those profitable flights to obscure Chinese provincial towns that filled the airport, rather than those to similar European towns.

We have been here before. Lots of times. The idea of trying to turn the roads into some form of cash cow for the government, ostensibly as a way of attracting private investment, has been the subject of government announcements and ‘leaks’ with almost the same regularity that traffic jams form on the M25.

I remember in 1993 going on a special press trip in a little 20 seater plane with the then Transport Secretary, John (now Lord) Macgregor to look at road charging systems in Norway and Sweden and being briefed that such as a scheme would be introduced in the UK within five years. Indeed, the five year time frame became something of a joke amongst us transport commentators as this commitment was repeated time and again by successive governments. Five years, the cynics amongst us noted, was of course always going to fall within the term of the next  Parliament.

So this latest ‘plan for toll roads’ splashed across the Monday papers on the day before the Budget has to be viewed in the context of the succession of similar initiatives which have come to naught. This time, though, it is even more difficult to see how anything can come of it because the Tories have boxed themselves in by ruling out road pricing in their manifesto.

That would, of course, have been the most obvious way of funding a major road construction programme but politicians have been terrified of suggesting it ever since the infamous Downing Street petition against road tolling which attracted 1.7m signatories. The fact that this was a highly dishonest poll was based on the completely fallacious suggestion that drivers would have to pay £1 34 per mile has long been forgotten and the perception remains, especially given the results of the congestion charging ballots in both Edinburgh and Manchester, that this is a no-go area for any government that wants to stay ahead in the polls..

Therefore in announcing government plans, David Cameron was limited to suggesting that private capital could be used to finance investment in roads and ruled out any tolls on existing roads. Elaborating on the Today Programme on Radio 4, Matthew Hancock MP, a former adviser to George Osborne explained that a proportion of Vehicle Excise Duty could be syphoned off – hypothecated – to provide an income stream to private investors in the road network. He suggested, for example, that improvements to the A11 which have long been in the roads programme, could be brought forward through this scheme.

This idea, though, is fraught with difficulties. Clearly, the notion of stopping motorists at a toll booth in the middle of the busy A11 is not feasible as no one is suggesting a return to pre-Victorian turnpikes. Nevertheless, some way of collecting the money from everyone driving on the new section would have to be devised and occasional users would not want the hassle of signing up electronically, especially as they might be totally unaware that they were crossing a tolled section. Inevitably, local residents will quite rightly complain about the fact that they have to pay to get direct access to London, while their counterparts on the other side of London do not.

Moreover, as John Humphrys pointed out, VED revenue goes into the general tax fund, and therefore is used to fund everything from aircraft carriers to primary schools, and therefore its hypothecation to roads implies an overall reduction in spending or collecting taxes elsewhere.

‘Private capital’ is not a free lunch and needs to be serviced. The money will undoubtedly cost more than government lending and therefore overall spending will rise. Moreover, there seems to be a hint that some risk, such as numbers using a section of road (incidentally road traffic and consequently congestion has reduced in recent years, despite the complaints from the motoring lobby about increasing delays) will be transferred to the private sector. Any attempt to offset such risk inevitably comes at a price, and therefore will raise the cost further.

Even if practical and financial difficulties can be overcome, the political ones seem insuperable. The general mistrust of politicians is demonstrated by the online Daily Telegraph poll which suggested that a vast majority of drivers would be opposed to the idea of the private sector being brought in to run roads as they were concerned that this would lead to a much wider charging regime, despite government promises to the contrary. Given that Cameron’s advisers must have known that this idea would be as attractive to drivers as being stuck behind a caravan on a windy two lane road, I suspect that is another bout of political kite flying that will quietly suffer the same fate as John Macgregor’s road pricing promise. Announced with a fanfare, it will disappear with a whimper.

I had expected better. Justine Greening, the transport secretary, is clearly a sharp cookie and has picked up her brief assiduously and rapidly. However, in publishing the long-awaited Command Paper, Putting the customer first, she has clearly allowed the civil servants free rein to produce a document as anodyne as a MacDonald’s hamburger without relish. Any hard decisions have been postponed until later in the year when we hear what amounts of money will be available for the railways in the 2014-19 Network Rail Control Period (CP5).

It was rather foolish of Ms Greening to try to pretend that the issue fares could be neutralised by putting a headline on the covering press release which said: ‘Ending inflation-busting rail fare rises’. The cynical national newspaper correspondents sitting next to me at the press conference were starting to write the ‘fares could rise’ story before she had even left the room to appear in Parliament.

The nonsensical nature of this promise was quickly exposed by her failure to answer the question by Peter Woodman, the veteran Press Association transport correspondent, about when the fares rises would end. She was vague and merely suggested it might be after the results of the consultation process on fares and ticketing launched at the same time, or might even not happen until after the £3.5bn ‘savings’ which the industry needs to make by the end of the decade.

Indeed, the government is in some difficulty on fares which are now seen as just as unpopular as fuel tax rises. Clearly, the government did not want to be saying that fares will rise even faster than before and therefore any change to the system is supposed to be revenue neutral. The idea, though, is to follow the McNulty report’s suggestion that there should be higher fares for those travelling at peak times. Most of those people, however, are season ticket holders, and hitting them in the pocket is not electorally sensible to the Tories – look how Boris Johnson is now struggling in the mayoral election because of his above inflation fares rises. Therefore the idea was honed down to raising fares for those travelling at the peak peak, as it were.  This might make sense to someone like Sir Roy McNulty who has not understood the operational considerations of running a railway, but the practical difficulties of such as scheme would be immense.

Ms Greening also mentioned the idea of having season tickets which were tailored to part time workers who only used the trains two or three times per week. All these ideas lead to the notion of ‘smart ticketing’ one of the other suggestions highlighted in the Command Paper. Clearly smart ticketing would enable such flexible arrangements, and Ms Greening highlighted the need for extending ‘Oyster-style smartcard payment options’ even if the contradictions over extending Oyster, mentioned in my last column, mean that there are likely to be delays while the government sorts out its own scheme. There were, too, some rather daft suggestions, like selling tickets in libraries (if there are any left, one might jest), given that the complexity of the ticketing arrangements make even the Dewey classification system seem simple.

This brings us to the wider contradiction at the core of the whole initiative which was originally stimulated by the desire to move away from the ‘micromanagement’ of the railways by Marsham Street. These suggestions pouring out of government are precisely the type of initiative that in a conventional business would be generated by the companies themselves rather than government. Decisions over closing ticket offices or even selling them in libraries, would in any other business be made by the retailers – the train operators – rather than government.  That demonstrates, yet again, the special nature of the railways which are a public service, something that is often misunderstood.

The intractable nature of the rail industry is why, too, the franchise reform got lost in the Command Paper. Remember this was a major initiative announced soon after the Coalition took office and involved an extensive consultation exercise with franchisees and other stakeholders. Remember,  there was to be a new way of letting franchises, according to Theresa Villiers, the No2 in the Department, at the time of the launch: ‘We want to see a stronger focus on the quality of outcomes for passengers, giving more flexibility to the professionals who run our railways to apply innovation and enterprise in working out the best way to deliver those outcomes.’

All this has now come to naught. When I asked the civil servants about franchise reform, they said that the idea had been dropped and rather than a blueprint, any changes would be reflected in the Invitations to Tender for franchises. In other words, it will be horses for courses. Effectively, that suggests a failure to answer the Wolmar question on the purpose of the whole franchising process which drives up costs for little benefit. Clearly, ministers were unable to come up with a coherent answer to the question, so saved themselves the embarrassment of publishing a franchising document.

The core of the Paper – there were two other papers on fares and decentralisation which will, I hope, be considered in future columns if there is space – is the aim to cut £3.5bn out of the rail industry’s total spending of around £11bn by the end of the decade. Already, just over half of that is earmarked to come from Network Rail, and there may be suggestions, coming out soon, from the Office of Rail Regulation, that even more could be squeezed from that source. Assuming that it can’t, the rest would have to come from operations, rolling stock leasing, staff and other bits and bobs. Let’s spell this out categorically: it can’t be done. Far too much of the excess spending is entrenched in the industry – wages are high because of fears of strikes and the result of competition for drivers, restrictive practices such as guards on the SWT network have not been challenged, Network Rail spends around £1bn on debt servicing annually, costly procedures in developing schemes are difficult to change, the fragmentation of the industry leads to compensation payments, widespread use of consultants is expensive and so on. Nowhere in the McNulty report is there any clear detailed roadmap of how to make savings; nor is there in the Command Paper. The big options such as cutting services, closing stations or allowing track conditions to deteriorate are simply ruled out because they would be too unpopular. The spectre of Beeching hangs over the railway and any politician daft enough to posit the notion of cutbacks

When I suggested that it was unclear where the savings were coming from, I was roundly slapped down by La Greening.  We were allowed one question each in the press briefing on the Command Paper and I had asked her where the £3.5 bn annual savings would come from in the rail industry as it seemed an incredibly high proportion of the overall costs and I had not found any details in the McNulty report on the industry’s finances published last year. ‘Well’ she said, staring hard at me, ‘I’m glad you didn’t write the paper as it is clear that these saving can be made’. In fact, the paper clearly does not set these out. It is still of vague commitments and a strong emphasis on the Rail Delivery Group (which I wrote about in Rail 689).  Here again, there is a clear contradiction. Savings are dependent on the operators cutting costs. But none of them will bid on the basis, say, of cutting wages or making unrealistic assumptions and in any case, these savings can only be made on future franchises.

There is an irony in all this. The coalition government has actually been very supportive of the railways, continuing the massive investment programme under Labour. You only have to see the number of completely revamped stations in London along with Reading and Birmingham, as well as the commitment to HS2 and the Intercity Express Programme (the new trains), to see that the railways have had a good deal under the Coalition. Sure, the rolling stock programme has stalled and there are concerns about fares, but the investment programme is impressive, even if I doubt the claim that is the biggest since Victorian times can be substantiated, given the massive modernisation programme of the 1950s (launched, interestingly, by a Tory government). The risk, however, is that in the crazy and undoubtedly impossible search for these massive savings, support for a successful industry is lost.

Keep it simple, save money

While on the theme of money saving, Here’s a neat idea from a reader, Gerard Eastick, who lives alongside the East Coast main line and says ‘I see trains in blue, trains in silver and trains that look as if they have borrowed the Tesco Value corporate identity.’ He asks, quite pertinently, ‘is there any chance that someone somewhere might start a campaign to standardise rail livery across the UK?’

Not only would that save money but it would improve the look of the railways. We have been here before. There was a period in the more extreme deregulating period of the 1980s when the Tories allowed London buses to be any colour. We got ghastly blue liveries and even a bus company called Grey-Green, until Steve Norris, the junior transport minister, put a stop to it by mandating that all buses should be red, one of London’s emblematic characteristics.  Already, London Overground trains have a livery that does not publicise their operator (originally MTR Laing) and is the better for it. Think how much money would be saved in not having to relivery trains with temporary brands. And we would be saved garish colour schemes – remember One? Or conversely, think how much it will cost if, as many expect, Virgin loses its West Coast franchise. So here’s one idea not in the McNulty report that could definitely save money. As Mr Eastick says, ‘The essence of rail travel is going from A to B. Nobody cares who is running it.’

It’s bad enough having armed cops in Parliament, airports and outside embassies (and the US ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park which I cycle past frequently. Now they are at London railway stations. The logic of this escapes me. I will expound on this further in a forthcoming Rail column, but the occasions on which they would be able – or need – to shoot seem rare indeed, and the risk to the public from a stray bullet extremely high.

The explanation given by the security lobby is that they are a deterrent. But to what sort of terrorist. IRA style (now largely defunct) is to leave suitcases or parcels, suicide bombers don’t give a damn and can detonate themselves wherever they want and those intent on a Mumbai-style assault with all kinds of weaponry would hardly be deterred by the odd aageing copper armed with a gun he has never fired in anger.

There is a big downside, too. These guns make us feel scared, intimidated, at risk – they are like the daft announcements about ‘take a minute to read the safety instructions’ on trains where the risk of being involved in an accident is in the order of 100 million to one, and even then the sfety instructions, if remembered, are likely to be irrelevant. Every time the security services make a decision in the intersts of ‘making us safer’, they take away a bit of the pleasure of living in a modern western democracy. Gun totting policeman are, in fact, quite the opposite. They make us feel more at risk and, crucially, they serve no purpose.