Contrary to what’s happening in the rest of the country, transport in London is getting greener and getting better. Against a national context of missed targets and shrinking ambitions, London has become a city-wide demonstration of what can be achieved with a combination of investment, innovation and political willpower. We’ve demonstrated that traffic growth is not inevitable. With the right support, cycling, walking and public transport use can be increased.
The phrase ‘sustainable transport’ has always been notoriously slippery. Eight years after the Deputy Prime Minister declared that he would have failed if he didn’t get more people out of their cars and onto public transport, car use in the UK has continued to rise; walking, cycling and bus usage have fallen, and carbon emissions from transport are growing quicker than any other sector.
Everywhere, that is, except in London. While road traffic in the UK has increased by 7% over the last five years, traffic levels in London have been completely static, baffling planners at the Department for Transport who had calculated large rises.
This is no statistical blip. It comes as a result of hard-fought green transport initiatives and is matched by the first ever modal shift from private to public transport in this country. Over the last five years, bus journeys in London increased by 30% (compared to a 6% fall in the rest of the country).
Against a backdrop of continued national decline in cycling, cycle journeys in London doubled in the last five years, meeting the Mayor’s targets five years early. Despite twice as many cyclists on the roads, fatal and serious injuries to cyclists in London fell by 42% compared to the 1994-1998 average. Casualties to pedestrians and other road users have fallen by similar amounts. Creating roads that are safe for people to walk, cycle or play is absolutely fundamental, not just for a sustainable transport policy but also for a decent quality of life.
Congestion charging has clearly been instrumental in both limiting traffic in Central London and generating revenue to support the bus service. Within the zone, congestion has fallen by 30%, particulate air pollution has been reduced by 12%, delays to buses are down by 60% and businesses in the area have continued to grow.
It’s time to consider extending congestion charging London-wide so that these benefits can be shared beyond the wealthy areas of Central and West London.
But congestion charging can only ever be one part of a sustainable transport policy. This is why, before agreeing to Mayor’s budget, the Greens on the London Assembly secured funding for further measures to reinforce greener travel choices, so that the switch to sustainable transport becomes permanent. This included £2m extra for Safe Routes to Schools, cycle parking in all London schools that want it, extra money for cycle training and the London Cycle Network, increased road safety spending, and resources for travel awareness and workplace travel plans.
Sadly, just when it was beginning to look as if a sustainable transport policy for London could be achieved, TfL dusted off a 27-year-old dinosaur of a road-building project that contradicts 'sustainable transport', whatever your definition. The Thames Gateway Bridge is being promoted in the name of ‘regeneration’, with the bizarre hope that traffic from a motorway-size road will somehow create jobs. The final sustainable transport measure that we insisted on in the Mayor’s budget was therefore £50,000 for the communities around the Thames Gateway Bridge to commission research demonstrating quite clearly that a six-lane superhighway is not a sustainable route to regeneration.
London 's expected growth and the Games in 2012 mean that development in the Thames Gateway and the Lea Valley must have the necessary infrastructure to support sustainable travel choices built in from the start. London has made an excellent start towards sustainability, but there's oh so far to go.
speaks on transport for the Greens in the London Assembly
When New Labour took office way back in 1997, the incoming administration promised to prioritise transport. With John Prescott at its head, a 'super-ministry' was set up to raise the political profile of transport and the environment. One of the super-ministry’s first moves was the Transport White Paper, ‘A New Deal For Transport’ (1997), remarkable not least in that it established the principle of 'reducing the need to travel' in the interests of sustainability. But five years passed before the Transport and Social Exclusion report came close to identifying how some such reductions could be made.
The report made it clear that the transport needs of the ‘socially excluded’ (people on low incomes, those with a disability, the unemployed etc) are justified – or, at least, justify public investment in transport – only when they are being conveyed to essential locations: to work, school, hospital …… and the Job Centre. So no excuses for failing to attend job seekers’ interviews: a marvellous bus service is provided.
Priority allocation of funds now goes to these routes, on grounds which indicate a wide-ranging modification of the role of planning, i.e. the socially excluded are not the only ones included in its effects. Henceforth transport planners need to know why you want to travel, not whether you want to travel. And if not sufficiently close to a recognised ‘need to travel’, your particular ‘why’ may be judged unsustainable.
With the Transport and Social Exclusion report, transport policy has also come into the information age. The position adopted in the report seems more oriented towards providing information about going places rather than actually taking you there. £3 million is being spent on improving travel information in Job Centres, not on physical means of transportation. Similarly, 'Action Teams for Jobs' receive £5 million to explore ‘transport solutions’; and a new breed of 'accessibility planners’ is responsible for ‘identifying accessibility problems and deciding how to tackle them'.
Instead of providing better transport infrastructure, this sort of policy is meant to help people come to terms with the fact that they'll have to walk, or counsel them to expect long journey times. Information about transport, or the lack of it, is more likely to be in line with sustainability targets than actually moving people from A to B.
Government departments and highway engineers no longer predict travel flows and provide infrastructure to cope; now they have a given area of roadway and they set about restricting its use. The road infrastructure is seen as a fixed resource as well as a rare one, and you have to have a pretty damn good reason for wanting to use it. Politicians and transport planners pose the question 'is your journey absolutely necessary?’ And then they set about answering it. The question, dear traveller, is obviously too important for you to decide.
The latest in a long line of policy documents on the undesirability of travel comes in the shape of a report on the unsustainable distances that our food travels to get from farm to plate. ‘The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development’ is part of the government’s wider Kyoto obligations to reduce CO2 emissions, but boils down to reducing transport of goods, and hence the choices available to consumers. Why have French fries when you could have a locally produced turnip?
The report offers the insight that 'organic food can halve negative environmental and social costs' without explaining what this could possibly mean. But, it adds, even this gain can be offset by long road transportation and all that terrible CO2. To be on the safe side, it recommends local organic crops.
‘Internet buying and home delivery can cut vehicle kilometres and reduce road congestion', says Sustainable Food and Farming Minister, Lord Bach. So we can look forward to a brave new world where we sit at our computers waiting for delivery of delicious non-chemically enhanced local produce. Anyone found attempting to get hold of imported produce will be sent for counselling. A second offence of driving with intent to consume a banana will result in naming and shaming.
I admit I am indulging in caricature. But the underlying logic is real enough. Once we accept that our desire to travel must be restricted according to ‘necessity’, however this is defined, the road is open to prohibition.
First they came for the motorists, and no one spoke out because we had bicycles. Then they came for our groceries, and we said nothing because we had the Shopping Channel; then they came for my cheap flight to Treviso, and there was no one left to complain.
writes for Architect’s Journal and is director of the Future Cities Project. Contact: austin.williams@emap.com or visit: www.futurecities.org.uk
© 2004·06
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Marshall McLuhan
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
Lewis Mumford
Can't find what you're looking for on this page?
Click here to start a search
This page has been archived.
For a general description of these pages and an explanation of how they should work with screenreading equipment please follow this link: Link to general description
For further information on this web site's accessibility features please follow this link: Link to accessibility information
The following message does not apply to screenreader users:
You will still be able to access all the essential content of this web site, but it will not look, or function, exactly as intended.
