Are We There Yet?

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Hooray! Hooray! We’re on our way! Our summer vacation starts today!

  • The Bears’ Vacation, Stan and Jan Berenstain, 1968

One hot day Lucy and Tom and their mum and dad thought they would go to the seaside.

  • Lucy and Tom at the Seaside, Shirley Hughes, 1976

It’s that time of year. School’s out. Time to go the beach, the countryside, camping, climbing, canoeing, barbecuing, being outdoors. Hopefully, the sky and the forecast both promise sun and heat.

Two families, living thousands of miles apart, are packing for a summer’s day out.

Mom, Pop, Billy and Emily Johnson, off Main Street, USA, each have a backpack with their bathing suits, towels and baseball caps.

Mum, Dad, Will and Emma Jones, near the High Street, UK, each have a rucksack with their swimming costumes, towels and sun hats.

The Johnson family pack their picnic. Fruit punch and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, watermelon and cookies.

The Jones family pack their picnic. Squash and cheese and pickle sandwiches, grapes and biscuits.

Both families bring sunscreen and some beach toys, but the Johnson family also pack their folding garden chairs into the back of their family hatchback. “Have we got everything?” asks Mom Johnson. “If there’s anything else, throw it in the car now,” says Pop Johnson, “I don’t want to have to turn back when we’re almost there and stuck in the beach traffic.”

With these words, Pop turns the key in the ignition.

The Jones’ family will sit on their towels. Or perhaps rent the public beach chairs available. “We have to pack light, because we’re taking the train,” says Mum Jones. “And I know I’ll end up carrying everything!” adds Dad Jones.

With these words, the Jones family set out on the first leg of their journey – walking to the station.

***

These two stories have many little differences. It’s fun to highlight the contrasts between the country where I grew up and the one I now call home. The biggest difference here is how the two families travel to their respective days out, which is also reflected in the two summer holiday children’s stories in my daughter’s library, quoted above. Car versus public transport.

Naturally, this is a generalisation. There are places in the United States where people use public transport to get to the beach, and there are plenty of days out in the UK that are only accessible by car. People choose which way to go based on where they live, where they’re going, who’s going with them and what they need to take. Culture and expectation are minor factors compared to practicalities.

Indeed, my family now often drives for a day out if we’re not going into London or another urban centre. We’re more likely to leave the car at home for every day journeys than occasional ones. However, we have the choice to go by public transport, or even mixed transport like Park and Ride, despite not living in a large urban area.

If we were in the States our situation would be much less common. I grew up in an American town of 75,000 people without a train station. Decent bus services to Boston, the nearest large city, didn’t exist in my childhood. Yet my home town was only an hour’s drive from the seaside, spring-fed lakes, climbable mountains of over 3000 feet, virgin forests and Boston too. So drive we did.

My younger self would have assumed that any story about a train ride to the seaside must have taken place at least two generations earlier or in a different country. Or both. My present self realises that such trips may be foreign to many Americans, but they aren’t that odd.

And it turns out that no matter the form of transport, the country or the destination for that summer’s day out, the kids are still asking the same question with the same frequency designed to annoy parents the world over:

“Are we there yet?”

No News?

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In these post-election months, I was looking forward to writing a blog about the new Government’s plans for transport. The problem is, there isn’t much to write about.

A few weeks ago, there was the less-than-surprising revelation that Network Rail wasn’t meeting its targets for the £38billion plan of network improvements. So new leadership has been appointed and that big programme announced before the election will be reviewed and scaled back. This is all well and good, but it’s more of an un-news story than a news story in terms of transport planning.

Then there was the announcement by the Airports’ Commission of its recommendation for a third runway at Heathrow. This didn’t receive the level of attention I expected. Knowing the likely political fall-out, Downing Street refused to make ‘a snap judgement’ and the BBC reported that a formal government response was unlikely to be forthcoming until the Autumn. Which meant even the NO campaign only bothered grumbling briefly.

(For my response to a key NO tenet: https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/flying-for-family/.)

So that is why I was looking forward to this week’s budget. The first of the new Government. And what do I get? Not much.

The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport @ciltuk managed a mere seven bullet points.

Three of these were to do with investing in England’s northern cities. The reinforced Government commitment to a form of devolution to cities and, on closer inspection of the budget document itself, potentially to counties too is welcome. I’ve expressed my support of devolved powers before in https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/municipal-independence-referendum/ and I admire @CentreforCities research and advocacy.

However, the new rival to Transport for London, Transport for the North includes not only the band of cities from Liverpool to Hull, and even Hull could be geographically questionable, but also Newcastle. What a challenge to create a cohesive transport system that works for central Manchester or Leeds and also bridges the wide rural expanses between city regions? And with only £30 million of additional funding over 3 years. I’m not sure what it’s in addition to, but that doesn’t compare well with the £10 billion of transport investment promised to London during this Parliament. Perhaps that’s why the key measure for TfN to deliver is apparently ‘seamless oyster style ticketing across the system’. Meanwhile, London keeps one step ahead, moving from Oyster Card to bank card, with other Southeast cities like Reading soon to follow suit.

Otherwise, investment in local transport infrastructure includes a few extra, named pinch point projects, a few more new rail stations promised, and funding for road maintenance. Walking, cycling, active transport, public realm; none of these are mentioned at all. There’s the vehicle excise duty changes, frozen fuel duty, capped rail fares. Old news at best. But nothing about addressing the imbalance between continued support for concessionary bus fares for the disabled and elderly whilst the bus services they use are slashed or shrinking.

I hope locally-run transport in mayorally-responsible authorities will be a bit more ambitious and a bit more innovative than the Budget suggests. There are plenty of examples to follow – see https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/some-things-new-ish/ or https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/can-creativity-beat-cuts/ for some ideas.

But that’s assuming sufficient funding, appropriate responsibility, the removal of obstructive business interests, and the mayors themselves are all in place. Which looks to be a slow process. In the meantime, again, there is little for a transport planner to get excited about.

I hear Osborne has more to say next week. Housing and planning look to be big news, but how about transport?

Finding the Phasing

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Will future phases of my public bicycle hire scheme be built? That is the question, but let’s take a step back before we answer it.

Phasing is a funny word, particularly when it comes to its use in the lexicon of transport planners.

Sometimes it refers to stages in a continuous cycle, such as those programmed into traffic signals. Sometimes it is the timing of construction processes required to build one element of infrastructure, such as a bridge. Sometimes it describes the steps, such as design, appraisal and implementation, required to achieve a single, large project, say, a new interchange.

All these examples, though diverse, fit the dictionary definition of ‘phasing’:

The action of dividing a large task or process into phases.

The relationship between the timing of two or more events.

-www.oxforddictionaries.com

Yet there is another common use of the word phasing in my profession: to express the hope that a project or programme will be expanded, extended or otherwise continued beyond whatever might have originally been funded, procured and completed.

And it is this usage of phasing that commonly applies to the development of a city’s bicycle hire. Bicycle hire is a relatively new form of public transport, a 21st century development with only a few exceptions. Potential demand is incredibly difficult to predict, as it is a NEW service and its provision is as likely to generate new trips as to attract riders from other forms of public or private transport. This means that its installation is often approached with a measure of caution; cities and towns do not want to overstretch themselves in case nobody likes or uses the things and it is a total flop. Thus the tendency to plan for future ‘phases’ which have no allocated funding, designated programme or detailed plans to bring them to fruition, other than a vague intention if the ‘first’ phase is successful.

Success, of course, is an even more subjective term than this odd use of ‘phasing’. Is success based on popularity and ridership or income and revenue? Some cities choose to run ‘pilot’ schemes, which provide ample evidence for the opposite sentiment to ‘too big to fail’. But even where a reasonably large network of bicycle docking stations are implemented, with sufficient locking points and bicycles to encourage use, the business of bicycle hire remains a fragile model. See https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/the-business-of-bike-hire/ for some ideas why.

And so we come to my other 2014 baby (i.e. not my almost year-old son): the 29-station, 200-bicycle public hire scheme in Reading, UK. Having spent the best part of two years guiding it through the political and procurement processes and pushing lawyers, land-owners, civil engineering contractors and local media to all come together to launch a (nearly) complete ‘phase one’ on 10 June last year, I am thrilled that it has been well-received.

So is it time to do the groundwork for phase two? Considering the lead-in time for anything of a similar size or even half the size of phase one, you might say yes. But without a confirmed funding source in a time of cuts, you might say no. I say let’s stop using the term phasing in such an inaccurate way. The large task of launching ReadyBike happened a year ago. Anything that happens now is an expansion or an alteration or perhaps even a renewal.

Whilst a major expansion could happen if a funding source becomes available, it is more likely at the moment that, with modest encouragement, the network will shift and grow gradually, organically, in the way that other transport networks usually develop. Hindsight may be able to call different portions of the network ‘phases’, but by talking about phases now, expectations are raised and options may be too narrowly defined. Therefore, what I affectionately think of as ‘my’ public bicycle hire scheme can thrive and grow, even if the pre-conceived ‘phases’ are never built.

Softly Does It

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‘If you tell them, they will believe it.’

So once said a local government officer at a best practice sharing session. He didn’t say it from the front of the conference room with a PowerPoint slide on the screen behind him. He said it over a plate of sandwiches of questionable edibility in a tone that slipped under the hum of people networking around the room. He said it about cycling, about building a reputation for his Authority as cycle-friendly, about increasing cycling without spending much money. And he had the survey numbers to back him up.

It’s an opposing sentiment to the old, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ And the comparable value of the two approaches are the source of much debate among transport planning professionals. There is a large school and a larger lobby that insists that to significantly increase cycling as a mode share, miles of segregated cycle lanes or tracks, ranks of secure cycle parking stands, hundreds of signs and many buckets of paint are necessary. Otherwise cycling will not be considered a safe and attractive option. You must spend the money, even if on a currently tiny proportion of your public, in order to increase that proportion.

I don’t completely disagree. See more about justifying walking and cycling spend: https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/justifying-cycling-spend/ in a previous blog.

But there are those who say that ‘soft’ measures can increase the number and share of cyclists in your population without new infrastructure. Then you will have the better business case to make more budget available in future years. Soft measures refer to promotion, marketing, competitions and events. The largest of those, National Bike Week, is fast approaching. Every year, people are encouraged through Bikers’ Breakfasts, free bike maintenance sessions, led rides, camaraderie, prizes and hopefully good weather to take to two wheels, or at least get the thing out of the garage and clean it off. The idea is that raising the profile of cycling will make more people feel it is a normal activity that anyone, specifically them, can do, even without a cycle path outside their house.

That’s not to say that all the organisers and participants in Bike Week don’t want better infrastructure. They do. It’s a chicken/egg kind of deal: raise the profile, get more people riding, and the funding will be allocated and infrastructure built. Building infrastructure can of course raise the profile itself and encourage cycling, as it is, by its nature, something physically present that people see and might want to use. But should building come first? Is campaigning for more building even likely to be successful in these times of government cuts, when providing for cyclists with government money means providing for just 2-5% of the population requiring services?

Thus we are back to increasing cycling, or at least the perception that there are a lot of people cycling in order to attract the money. Soft measure do work to increase cycling. And as for the perception, well, the officer I spoke with said that if you want people to think that cycling is a normal, safe thing that lots of people are doing, just tell them that’s the case, hammer the message home regularly, make it a taken-for-granted fact, and people will believe it. And once they believe it, it might become true.

Can Creativity Beat Cuts?

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A Conservative Majority Government is in power after their big message blitz on budget responsibility and debt reduction. But throughout the campaign, they refused to say precisely where cuts will be made and what they will mean for service delivery.

In the last 5 years, the Department for Communities and Local Government has faced some of the deepest cuts of any in Whitehall, perhaps because the majority of the cuts aren’t actually in Whitehall? Town and city halls, especially in the country’s most deprived urban areas, have had to make year on year savings amounting to significant proportions of their budgets. Spend per head has fallen by up to £220 since 2010 (http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/cost-cuts-impact-local-government-and-poorer-communities). Libraries have closed, subsidised bus services have been cancelled, and care for the most vulnerable minimised.

And everyone knows that there are more, and potentially deeper cuts to come. How can Councils save more money? Administrative efficiencies, joint services, outsourcing, redundancies; they’ve all already happened. Local Government and its partners in the private and charitable sectors need to think ever more creatively.

The transport sector has faced many cuts itself, but could it save other services? Yes! Is transport only about getting people and goods from one place to another? No! A street can be so much more than a corridor for movement. It can be a marketplace, a meeting place, a café, a playground. Walking not only transports us, it improves our physical and mental well-being, allows us to be aware of our environment and to socialise with friends and family.

So what services can transport deliver beyond the obvious? Here are some examples:

In Massachusetts, the Boston Public Library founded Bibliocycle, a mobile library service on a bicycle. It helps those who cannot go to a library to access free books. Bibliocycle makes its rounds at community events, farmers’ markets and arts festivals. People can sign up for library cards, get a demonstration of digital resources and ask for help with reference questions as well as check out books. We’d all like our local library branch to stay open, but retaining a mobile service is better than nothing. And if it’s pedal-powered, it can go where a van cannot and is environmentally friendly.

In Liverpool, taxis are aiming to compete with buses by travelling along bus routes to the airport and picking up people from bus stops. Does this suggest a solution to cuts in government-subsidised bus services which are, by definition, unable to make ends meet? Such buses serve areas where passenger numbers are too low to cover costs, yet people without access to a car are otherwise isolated from jobs, education and health services. Dial-a-ride services cannot pick up the slack as they are usually charity/grant-funded and aimed at those with disabilities who cannot use normal buses. A taxi using bus stops could be commercially viable where a bus is not, offering a middle way between a dial-a-ride or door-to-door taxi service and a 45-90 passenger bus. Even if they could accept bus passes and were reimbursed like bus operators under the statutory scheme, this would surely still represent a saving to subsidising entire bus services?

In Reading, UK, one result of local government working more closely with the NHS since public health became a local government responsibility has been a creative approach to delivering health services to vulnerable groups: A double decker bus is providing ‘First aid, Information, Refuge, Safety, and Treatment’ in the town centre on Friday and Saturday nights and in hard-to-reach communities on weekdays. It offers savings to police and A&E services, whilst also functioning as a health outreach and educational facility. Considering the budgetary challenges facing social services and charities undertaking outreach, FIRST Stop is a bus service that has arrived right on time.

Let’s think. What other buses may pull up to the ‘other-services-delivered-here’ stop in a Local Authority near you?

Benefits of Bustling?

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Happy National Walking Month!

I’m a big advocate of walking. Walking to work if you can, or to the bus stop or train station if you can’t. Walking to the shops. Walking your kids to school. Walking around your neighbourhood. Walking in the park.

As a mother of young children, I walk constantly, although my leisure walking ambitions are reduced to accommodate little legs.

As a transport planner, I am well aware of the plethora of benefits of taking the ten-toe express. Instead of detailing them here, however, may I direct you to the Living Streets website: http://www.livingstreets.org.uk/. The charity organise National Walking Month and may inspire you to take part in Walk to Work or Walk to School Weeks.

As a blogger, I want to explore a nagging question. The fact that walking is beneficial to your health is undisputed, but how much is needed to gain those benefits is less clear. Do you have to ‘walk briskly’ for at least ten minutes in one go for it to count towards your 150 minutes of recommended exercise a week? Or does every step count?

One frequently bandied about suggestion is to walk 10,000 steps a day. That’s about 5 miles.

I have a Fitbit and I easily clock my 10,000 steps on days when I walk my daughter to and from pre-school and maybe have a pop to the park or shops as well. But even then, each period of continuous walking is often less than 10 minutes. And what about the couple thousand steps or more taken bustling around the house?

Let me give you an example of a typical mealtime:

I walk two or three steps across the kitchen from the refrigerator to the food cupboards. A couple steps to the sink, then a few more to the microwave or toaster or hob if something needs heating. Back and forth, back and forth… lunch is almost ready.

Then my daughter calls that her baby brother is about to pull on a wire or tear her library books, so a quick run to the living room to remove the temptation or him to another part of the room. Back to the kitchen to put the last bits on plates, but then the little one is climbing my leg. I pick him up, but now I need to take twice as many trips between kitchen counter and table because I only have one hand free. If I put him in his high chair before lunch is ready to be put in his mouth, he is likely to scream.

During lunch, I need to grab a cloth to wipe up a spill or pour another cup of water or I’ve forgotten something or there’s a Skype ring on the computer as my mother calls to say hello. I’m up and down.

As we finish, I race to put things in the dishwasher. It’s safer to have the machine closed before my son’s roaming free on the floor.

Then the kids are back in the living room, but I stay in the kitchen to finish tidying up. I hear a crash when my son crawls into the downstairs loo and knocks over the mop. I stand it back up, remove the child from the room and close the door.

I sniff and run my son upstairs for a nappy change. My daughter wants the loo and the door is stuck. I run down, open the door for her, run up, change the nappy, wash my hands, run back downstairs, put the baby down and make sure the big girl has wiped properly and washes her hands.

After a quick check that the tidying up is finished, we go back into the living room or up to my daughter’s room to play.

I have taken at least 500 steps in less than an hour. I have been far from sedentary. My heart rate has even gone up – although perhaps more from rushing to remove the toilet brush from my son’s grasp before he puts it in his mouth. Okay, I’d probably take 500 steps in 5 minutes if I was ‘walking briskly’, but does that mean there are no health benefits from bustling? Can I not make a case for celebrating National Walking Month even on rainy weekend days when I do not leave my home? After all, I’m still walking!

How to Vote?

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After over a dozen years living in the United Kingdom, I took the sober decision to become a British subject (a photograph of the queen witnessed the concluding ceremony of the process) as well as an American citizen.

My main motivation was the hope that dual citizenship will give me the right to continue to live in either country in the future with my now-extensive network of friends and family both sides of the Atlantic, no matter the vagaries of international relations or how immigration law might change.

Yet another important outcome of my decision is that I now have the right to vote for those who govern the society where I live, work and am raising my children. In just two weeks, I will vote for the first time this side of the pond. (Actually the second time, but few would look at the decidedly minimalist European elections last May as significant, so I’ll count that as merely a practice round.)

So here’s my question, how do I vote?

I don’t mean the mechanics of it. Surely it’s simpler than in America, where there were weeks of debate about hanging chads in 2000, when no one knew what a chad was in the first place. (As opposed to Chad, which I do know is a country in Africa.)

Nor do I mean simply who do I vote for. Rather, how do I know I am voting for the governance I want when my individual vote, even if successful, i.e. whoever I decide to vote for is actually elected, seems to have such an indirect relationship to what happens in Government.

I wrote a blog back in October that highlighted how surprised I was to discover over time the true extent of centralised tax and spend powers in the UK compared to how such things operate in the USA: https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/municipal-independence-referendum/. I find myself similarly baffled by the electoral system here, that is both parliamentary and first-past-the-post.

There is plenty of party politics in the States, but when I vote, I vote for people, not party. The variation within parties can be vast, making any expectations of ‘towing the party line’ much less certain. Therefore, I have sometimes voted for candidates from two different political parties on the same ballot but running for different offices, because they are more compromising than an extreme candidate from either party who may be the only other choice. I have also at times voted tactically for people representing different political parties because I wanted different parts or influences of Government to balance (or cancel) each other out. Sometimes it simply makes the most sense to vote for someone with the most ability and desire to represent the more particular interests of their local constituency, no matter their party allegiance. All these choices about how to vote are possible because the link between your vote and the politician elected (or not) is a direct one.

Yet in Britain, the connections are, if not more tenuous, then certainly more circuitous. Here, each returned MP is not only an elected representative in themselves, but also an indirect vote for their leader to become prime minister. Here, I’m supposed to align my views with manifestos, no matter what I think of the candidate I’m offered or whether they are likely to be good for the local constituency. (In fact, some MPs represent places where they have never lived previously.) Meanwhile, as a coalition or a minority administration is likely this time around, I know I won’t actually get the manifesto I vote for no matter which party wins the most seats. And yet, neither is there any proportional representation, so a protest vote for a smaller party might well be a vote wasted.

I know what my views on various policies are and I know I live in a safe Tory seat, so what are my tactics? How do I vote? Well, I don’t actually have an answer to that yet. Maybe I’ll take the lead from my nearest and dearest and wait until I’m at the polls to decide. Don’t they explain ‘how to vote’ on little signs when you get there?

A Transport Take on the Exodus Part II

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It’s that time of year again. The Jewish holiday of Passover is upon us. Jews around the world retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt and forgo bread to eat matzah for a week. Here in the UK, it helps that it is also the Easter holidays. So time to recline, relax and write the next instalment of A Transport Take on the Exodus.

We left the Hebrew chariot chauffeurs, cart train drivers, Nile ferry men and sedan chair carriers escaping across the Sea of Reeds: https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/a-transport-take-on-the-exodus-2/

Moses soon led them to the foot of Mount Sinai, but the Hebrew Transport Workers’ Union were puzzled. It was a barren mountainside. There were no customers here. There weren’t even any decent roads, never mind a river or body of water into which the heavily-burdened cart trains could unload the little ferries. Moses had told them of a promised land, where customers were courteous and tipped well.

“This is the Lord’s mountain, where the Eternal will give me a map by which to lead you to your destination,” Moses reassured the Hebrews. “However, God will also give you The Ten Transport Services Commandments.”

“What are they?” the Hebrews cried, but Moses had disappeared up the mountain. He came back carrying three tablets of stone.

On the back of one, they could see the beginning of two words: Go- and Ma-. That was clearly the map, as God provides the best mapping service and directions to everywhere. Moses read the inscriptions on the other two tablets aloud:

  1. Thou shalt help people or their goods get where they want to go.
  2. Thou shalt make thy services easily available and affordable.
  3. Thou shalt respect the customer’s choice of which service to use.
  4. Thou shalt integrate thy services to create a seamless journey for the customer.
  5. Thou shalt serve all customers to the best of thy ability, regardless of tribe, need or weight.
  6. Thou shalt avoid conflicts with other travellers and their vehicles.
  7. Thou shalt not discomfort a customer or judge their choice of destination.
  8. Thou shalt not attract customers by false promises.
  9. Thou shalt not carry customers in thy vehicles if those vehicles are not safely maintained.
  10. Thou shalt not overturn or undermine the ability of thy neighbours to also transport people and goods.

“What is this?” cried the Hebrews. “Are we being told to do or not do that which only a short time ago enabled us to visit the Ten Transport Plagues on the Egyptians, as instructed by Moses and God in order to free ourselves from the Pharaoh’s exploitative employment practices?”

“With freedom comes responsibility,” said Moses. “You must make transport a respectable and professional occupation or you are sullying the reputation of He who freed you. You must cooperate with each other and win the trust of the customer.”

It was too much. There was an episode of mass road rage and the tablets upon which the Commandments were written were broken. Unfortunately, so was the map. The Hebrews now had to find their way to the promised land without an accurate journey planner, as Moses refused to act as guide. Deserts are notoriously deserted places with few landmarks, so it would not be easy. Forty years might have been a bit much, but it was fall to a future generation to follow the Commandments as a guiding light to offering a reliable transport service unto the nations of the world.

An Agenda Item for Paris

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Had you heard of Vanuatu before Cyclone Pam recently brought the tiny archipelago nation to the world’s attention? Most people would say no. But I would say yes. Not because I’m a bit of a geography buff, although I am, but because it was mentioned in something I read about small island nations and their concerns about the impact of climate change and their susceptibility to sea level rise and natural disasters and the commitment they want to make in reducing carbon emissions.

In the same imaginary file in my brain are the commitments of city mayors around the world to reduce emissions. These commitments are often far more ambitious than those of the nations in which these cities reside. There is plenty of city-to-city networking going on too, again independent of national governments.

But then the major impacts on the cities, like the impacts on small islands happen at the ‘small’ level. Small in terms of land area, ratio of coastline to area, local identities. Not necessarily small in terms of population or cost.

Remember Hurricane Sandy?

I wrote a seminar paper for a professor studying the impacts of climate change on urban infrastructure that predicted the flooding of the subway tunnels. That was in the last millennium. The concerns about the compound effects of sea level rise and the increasing numbers of violent storms are not new.

There is a somewhat new urgency about negotiations, however, leading up to the Paris summit. It’s as if we are running out of time to make those serious commitments at a national level. We must look to Vanuatu and other frontrunners like Costa Rica for inspiration on how to change our ways or at least the amount of our carbon emissions. And fast.

Did you know that Costa Rica has generated all of its electricity from renewable sources for the first 75 days of 2015 so far?

But that was electricity, not energy. Which brings us to what this blog has to do with transport. Campaigning, as the Guardian currently is to eliminate dependence on dirty power plants is all very well and good, but that only includes energy used as electricity. What about transport? Or heating?

Ignoring the latter as outside my field of expertise, let’s focus on transport. I know that electric cars have come a long way, electric trains are spreading across the UK and there are a number of low emission and no emission bus fleets out there. There are also many good reasons for people to travel sustainably even if they don’t believe in climate change; it was the subject of one of my first blog posts: https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/compelling-climate-sceptics/. Yet how far can technology and changing travel behaviours take us? They don’t remove the fact that people want to move around, that not just lifestyles, but livelihoods demand it and that can use a lot of energy.

Especially if they want to move long distances. And there is the elephant in the room. The airplane. I’m a big user myself, as I describe in my blog post https://hdbudnitz.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/flying-for-family/ about how my entire family lives three thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. So I’m thrilled that the first solar-powered airplane is up and flying. But I’m still not convinced that technology or personal choices will make enough impact with enough speed.

This is an international issue. From Vanuatu to Costa Rica, or New York to New Delhi. Perhaps not only London and the southeast of England need an Airports Commission, but the world as a whole. Carbon taxes added to ticket prices by individual countries or paired countries could make the situation worse, making it cheaper, for example for people to purchase indirect flights that take them hundreds of miles and tanks of fuel in the wrong direction only to fly back on themselves.

So if we want to keep flying, the only way to improve efficiencies and manage demand is to review it at the highest level possible. I hope the issue of international air travel is on the agenda for Paris anyway. If not, well, then, may I suggest it?

Questions for more than Petrol-heads

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I am not a petrol-head.

Some people choose to drive as their leisure activity. I am a ‘couple of times a week’ car user for practicality and convenience. Some people have a special relationship with their vehicle, its provenance, performance and powers. My criteria for choosing our family car was its capacity to fit two child car seats in the back with my petite mother in between. That and its fuel efficiency and reliability and I left the details to my husband. I am not a petrol-head.

Some people know cars like a second language. Makes, models, features, they read them effortlessly in passing. They would be able to respond to a police bulletin on a car without even thinking twice. I note the colour, size and maybe whether a car is a saloon or estate. And that’s if I’m concentrating. I am not a petrol-head.

Why do I say this? Because, despite not being a petrol-head, I like to watch Top Gear. It is entertaining, and, I believe, actually does make some interesting and potentially useful points. Even for a non-petrol-head with no interest in the relative speeds of million-pound super-cars around a track. Even for a professional transport planner.

Some people think there is a ‘war on the motorist’. Jeremy Clarkson appears to be one of those people. Cyclists, parking [wardens], speed cameras, politicians and especially transport planners have taken up arms and enjoined to make life difficult for the car driver. But I am a transport planner, and I disagree. My job is to plan for people who choose to drive as well as people who choose to walk, cycle or use public transport.

Petrol-heads may take exception, but parking restrictions, for example, are often designed for the car user’s benefit: Double yellow lines are preferable to long tailbacks on narrow High Streets where someone can pull over anywhere. And surely it is better for a local economy to manage and enforce limited parking spaces so they are used by more vehicles, rather than monopolised by one.

Furthermore, I know there are times when the car is the only choice or the best choice. And identifying whether it is the best choice (and perhaps some reasons why) is the sort of useful question Top Gear often raises. Their ‘research’ to answer these questions is often comical and sometimes incoherent, but it does not undermine the value of the questions the show raises.

Here are a few examples:

  1. What mode is best for speed and convenience in a major city? This season’s race across St Petersburg and 2007’s race across London asked this question. The final result wasn’t scientific and there was plenty of silliness that affected it (such as the Stig finding odd distractions on public transport), but staging a race is a means transport planners could use to test the users’ perspective of how modes compare. Moreover, the races also highlighted the hassles and obstacles that some users of each mode may face, but even more potential users may expect to encounter.
  2. How can a consumer judge how fuel efficient a car is and what is fuel-efficient or fuel-profligate driving? The challenge of eco-driving from Basel to Blackpool in 2008 or the trip through Ukraine last season with the aim to waste enough fuel to avoid Chernobyl were two episodes that explored this theme. Again, various perceptive points and common misperceptions were uncovered, although again, the use of just a few cars and the same three drivers is far from scientific. Still, the programmes suggest that adding distance wastes more fuel than using air conditioning, frequent aggressive acceleration and deceleration use more fuel than travelling consistently fast, and fuel gauges can underestimate the remaining fuel in a tank.
  3. Are the vehicles used for specified purposes fit for those purposes? From the recent assessment of ambulances to previous challenges between creatively modified Top Gear models or international comparators of taxis, buses, caravans, mobility scooters, goods vehicles and more, this sort of question is often the focus of the show’s feature section. (If you include super-cars, it is always a feature!) Again, both the tests (e.g. drag races) and the results (when points are awarded for what is actually the presenter’s competency or idiocy rather than the vehicle’s) are designed to entertain rather than answer, but the questions are still worthy. Popular vehicle choices for essential functions are as often the product of history as of due process. And few of these choices are reviewed regularly.

These are just a few questions that Top Gear raises, not just for petrol-heads to consider, but for transport planners.