Our bus industry insider casts his experienced eyes over the Local Government Association’s latest report entitled ‘A country in a jam; Tackling congestion in our towns and cities’
It is interesting to see how the thorny subject of congestion and its associated ills of pollution and damage to the economy have burst in on the public stage recently.
The bus industry of course is weary with sounding alarm bells for a long time and that has generally been met with local authority shrugging of the shoulders, or lack of comprehension or, at best, a flicker of recognition by bodies like the Commons Select Committee for Transport.
I understand that the bus industry also wrote a joint letter to central government a month or so ago detailing how the bus was key to addressing issues of pollution and air quality. If there has been a reply, I am not aware of it yet and of course I have been wondering for a while just how much longer it will go on seemingly ignoring the analysis in the reports by the Greener Journeys organisation on the subject. [wlm_nonmember][…]
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The National Assembly for Wales’ Economy, Infrastructure and Skills new report ‘Taming the traffic: The Impact of Congestion on Bus Services’ was fully reported in CBW August 8, 2017. Its emphasis on partnerships, cross boundary issues and the need for a national awareness raising campaign was most welcome. I did think when reading it that all that was now needed was some definitive resultant action to go with it now that the penny seemed to have dropped.
Now the Local Government Association (LGA), a body which the government regrettably listens to more than our industry, has stepped in and produced its own 24-page report this month entitled ‘A country in a jam; Tackling congestion in our towns and cities’.
This report has a slightly different feel about it suggesting through the use of a few best practice examples that much is already being done when in fact that is not manifestly the case and indeed there are many instances of the reverse due to politicians running scared of the car owning lobby which are of course not mentioned. The Welsh report had signalled clearly that political will and courage were key to future success.
Lest you have not seen or had time to read the LGA report, it notes that ‘”Councils have a statutory duty to manage their networks with the aim of ‘securing the expeditious movement of traffic’ and are already leading the way with innovative approaches to tackling congestion and curbing the predicted levels of traffic growth.”
It then details some of the good practice measures implemented across the country such as the Nottingham Work Place Levy, Bus Promotion with bus priority measures in Reading and Brighton, Total Mobility in the West Midlands, Bristol’s investment in cycling (!), TfGM’s secured funding of £3billion for locally targeted measures, Oxfordshire’s use of data to crowd-source traffic patterns and help people to tailor their routes when problems occur, Staffordshire’s collaboration with utilities to make the carrying out of roadworks more efficient and Northamptonshire’s total transport analysis which has proved that 99% of one million journeys made for public service could be combined.
The LGA opines that local authorities (LAs) must use existing measures to the best of their ability and “how local circumstances dictate” but claims that they are constrained by lack of resources and powers to act.
One has to ask why they were not more proactive in some of this work when they did have more resources and we are of course back to the situation of lack of political will often stifling officer initiative. It is also sad that there are now so many pieces of research being done in a fragmented way when the problem is universally the same in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but that is the devolution that some love.
In a statement of the blindingly obvious, and indeed what I had always thought Central Government policy was for decades, irrespective of how poorly implemented, the LGA concludes “Our goal should be the shift of journeys to other means, such as on to public transport or off the roads entirely.”
The report then shows a greater value in detailing a wish list of basic structural changes.
One of the most important of these to me, and has been for more than a decade, is the immediate and full implementation of Part 6 of Traffic Management Act 2004 allowing civil enforcement of Moving Traffic Offences. I wish I had a pound for every time that had been used as an excuse for a negative response or inertia!
Other potentially positive changes sought are:
- Long term funding certainty for LAs in the same way as for Highways England and Network Rail;
- More flexibility from Highways England at the interface between national and local schemes;
- Powers for Clean Air Zones and the right to charge diesel vehicles a 50% surcharge;
- The ability to implement the Work Place Levy without the whole weight of the Secretary of State’s approval process; and
- The ability to introduce lane rental powers for works as currently used in parts of Kent
Quite unacceptable changes being sought are the full implementation of the Bus Services Act with BSOG payments passing to LAs and not the operators and the abandonment of the requirement for LAs to bid competitively for their funding.
The LGA conveniently forgets that BSOG is there to keep fares as low as possible for the passengers and not to be potentially frittered away on consultants’ fees whilst the operators and passengers wait to see whatever the benefits that may accrue on the ground are years later. If the source of income is withdrawn from the operators then the passengers inevitably get the shortfall in income passed back to them.
Whilst I have some sympathy for the lack of certainty and continuity for councils in the competitive bidding for funds, I would not wish to see guarantees of funding for some of the most undynamic LAs with a political disinterest in public transport and the bus in particular.
There are already sufficient examples of LAs watering down public transport aspects of Major Scheme bids as it is with one of the latest examples being the deletion of the Park and Ride site at Elmbridge Court in Gloucester and associated elements from the Elmbridge Transport Major Scheme, despite proven added public transport value, making Gloucestershire County Council’s residual project merely another highway improvement in a period when they had already caved in to nimbyism from some Cheltenham residents about the construction of a key bus lane on the same corridor (CBW, November 22, 2016).
Likewise, there does not seem to be a level playing field for buses in Oxfordshire either when the Council sees fit to spend money on its data sharing alliance mentioned in the good practice and also introducing Ofo bikes in the city, desirable though these may be, when they have also withdrawn all tendered bus services and voted to remove buses from Queen Street in the city centre.
In the Council meeting to discuss this draconian measure, around a dozen representations were heard all of which saw some reason to retain bus access. With the technical case won for the operators (and passengers), the chairman of the meeting merely closed the item by asking the Members if they had any reason not to support the motion which was to exclude buses from Queen Street and they all duly voted to take them out. Autocracy at its worst and certainly not democracy. What better way could there be to get people to the future new Westgate Shopping Centre than direct bus access?
Public perception of the problem of congestion has risen from 39% to 55% in the last five years. The case for the bus in reducing congestion, pollution, health problems and social isolation and other transport costs financed by local government and the NHS has been made many times.
Traffic jams generate four times higher emissions that free flowing traffic and the Greener Journeys organisation research shows that a 10% decrease in bus speeds yields at least a 10% reduction in bus patronage.
All this is undisputed in the LGA report as well as a comment about the Nottingham Work Place Levy revenue having been reinvested in public transport sufficiently successfully making it the only core city to succeed in the target of reducing journeys per vehicle mile on A roads in the morning peak with no negative economic effects on the city noted either.
I have said before and will say it again: that the bus industry needs a powerful and popular figurehead to spearhead a campaign to raise its profile nationally.
Our customers will not nationally or locally make the necessary noise to command the attention of politicians unprompted and frankly operators need to think about starting to generate petitions for passengers to sign to say that the continuing destructive effects of unbridled congestion on their bus services are unacceptable. It will also demonstrate more forcibly that they vote as well as car owners and rail passengers.
The LGA report has one other worrying comment about the potential for connected and autonomous vehicles to possibly be able to optimise road capacity to the point where more travel is undertaken on the network as it becomes cheaper raising the spectre of the viability of public transport being further undermined.
We must not allow this to happen even by default.[/wlm_ismember]