London can’t grow and London won’t work, unless we reduce the demand for travel and switch people to cycling and walking. This means that Transport for London (TfL) must not only find ways of persuading people to leave their cars at home, but also occasionally to stay there with them. This involves a revolution in thinking, far more radical than the congestion charge and road pricing. We need one of the biggest public transport authorities in the world to divert its customers off its peak time bus, tube and train services and onto walking, cycling, tele-working or flexi-time.
Sixty billion pounds is not enough
In order to support the almost 1 million new jobs and 450,000 new dwellings expected in Greater London over the next twenty years, the capacity of the public transport network will need to be increased considerably.
But the massive transport investment programme planned between now and 2025 won’t be enough to get rid of over-crowding and congestion. London will spend £30bn upgrading the tube; £13bn on Crossrail; and £7bn increasing capacity on the railways. While all of these are essential, none of them is sufficient.
This year’s publication of TfL’s big strategy document 2025 was significant for the fact that it recognised the gap between future demand and its own ability to meet it.
The reality has dawned on TfL, and more slowly on the Mayor’s office, that there are essentially two ways of bridging this gap between the likely demand for travel from 900,000 additional Londoners in 2025 and the increase in the supply of transport which can come from an investment programme of over sixty billion pounds. We can either increase the supply of transport by adding further projects and further billions, or we reduce the demand.
Talking people out of their cars
Spending just a little money on Travel Demand Management (TDM) has had remarkable success. The number of car journeys to and from school has been cut by an average of 7% in schools adopting a school travel plan. This is remarkable because TDM schemes could have just as big an impact as the congestion charge, or road pricing, if they are done on a large enough scale.
London is over half way towards its goal of every school having a travel plan by 2009, a year ahead of the Government’s national target. It is still early days, but this tiny £13m annual budget is significantly reducing school run congestion in the morning peak.
One of the key lessons of recent years is that we need to give travel plans and personalised marketing the same preparation time as we allow for minor infrastructure projects. If a school or workplace decides to adopt a travel plan then it will take three or four years to develop and implement. The travel plan also needs to be backed up with money for relatively small-scale - investments covering everything from cycle parking, to pelican crossings and tele-conferencing facilities. I’m not expecting TfL to provide money for showers, but I do expect them to make the economic case to companies about the benefits of their staff walking and cycling more.
Achieving a significant cultural shift in the travel and lifestyle habits of Londoners requires far more than a large marketing budget. We have to provide alternatives which go with the flow of modern lives. Car clubs are one of the best examples of this with a 60% growth in membership during the last year. Much of this growth is commercial, as a good idea takes off, but the fact that TfL are now investing nearly half a million pounds a year on helping car clubs does help explain why 70% of all the car club members are now in London.
When I was elected seven years ago as a Green Party member of the London Assembly, I didn’t expect to be using my leverage over the Mayor’s annual budget to make car clubs an every day choice for Londoners. Yet, all the research supports the argument that car club members generally take the environmental option when they are given a straight choice between the cost of a car journey versus the cost of using public transport, cycling and walking.
Research from Switzerland showed a 72% decrease in mileage from motorists who switched to a car club and surveys in this country show car club drivers being eight times more likely to use public transport than average drivers. But the price of fares has to be kept down to give a financial incentive to make the environmental choice.
Since 1997, the Government has allowed the cost of public transport to go up faster than the cost of motoring. Since 2000 car use has gone up by over 5% in the rest of the country, whilst staying level in London.
A new series of signs encourages commuters to take a short walk rather than squeeze onto the tube. Directions from Victoria Station to Millbank or Trafalgar Square for example might encourage several thousand people to take a stroll rather than the bus. The TfL project called ‘Legible London’ will provide a coherent set of pedestrian signs throughout London in the next few years to promote walking. Legible London could divert some of the estimated 19,000 trips a day on the tube which are actually quicker to walk.
The TfL approach to Travel Demand Management (TDM) is cost effective, but it has to be done on a large enough scale to make an impact across the whole of London. The full implications of this long - term investment need to be spelt out, as it is easily equivalent to the hoped - for gain from additional investment in buses, trams and trains.
The same rule applies to walking and cycling investment, only more so. The best way of achieving an increase in capacity on London’s roads is through a large - scale shift away from cars and towards more sustainable forms of transport, especially walking and cycling. Achieving the high levels of walking and cycling found in many European cities will not only make London a healthier, less polluted city, it will also free up capacity on the trains, buses and trams.
If TfL are serious about cycling being 5% of all journeys by 2025, then we will need to invest over £100m a year, rather than the thirty something million I have managed to gain for cycling during last three years of budget agreements. Incidentally, £30 million is more than Cycle England are likely to get out of this Government for spending on cycling in the whole of the rest of England - showing Labour’s completely inadequate approach to cycling. If we genuinely expect as many Londoners to get on their bikes as get into trains in London, then why are we happy to spend £7bn increasing capacity on rail, but question spending a fraction of that on cycling?
Most important of all, 21% of all journeys in London are on foot. Despite this, spending on walking in London is hardly mentioned by TfL. Funding for walking is shockingly inadequate, especially when compared to spending on transport in general. Journey for journey, if Transport for London’s spending on walking reflected spending on the Underground, London’s walking budget would be over a billion pounds. This is almost 50 times the £22.3m actually spent on walking in the capital in 2006/07.
The Mayor’s 100 public spaces programme has made a start with high profile changes to Trafalgar Square, but if we expect Londoners to walk more, then we have to make the experience as worthwhile as possible. TfL has to realize that it is creating places that people live, chat and hang around in, not just high capacity engineering projects. The public spaces programme is a bit by bit transformation which adds up to a huge investment in recreating London as a people friendly space.
For TDM and the promotion of walking and cycling to achieve a long - term cultural shift in travel behaviour, they need to be implemented in conjunction with planning policies which reduce the need to travel and end the built - in reliance on the car.
Being a bit dense
The arrival of the London Mayor has dramatically changed the way we are building in the capital. The number of dwellings per hectare for new developments has risen from 48 in 2001 to 104 in 2005. A compact city should mean an accessible city, with communities of shops, workplaces and services, all within easy reach and on a human scale.
Despite this fundamental change I feel that planning is still the big area where the Mayor is falling short and as a result TfL is having to pick up the pieces for the mistakes he is making.
For example, we have far too many car parking places being approved. Why does a major transport interchange like the Stratford City Development need 10,000 new car parking spaces? Or Kings Cross, in an area which is already in breach of European air quality legislation, need over a thousand car parking spaces? The madness continues with the Olympic media centre, with its 1,300 parking spaces. These are appalling decisions, which show how the Mayor has failed to understand the environmental agenda. The more car parking you approve, the more you ingrain car dependency. You are then asking TfL to spend millions trying encouraging people to break free of the very dependency you have helped create!
Perhaps the best example of the Mayor simply not being a green is his support for the Thames Gateway Bridge despite the results of a recent public enquiry. This would be a six lane bridge in east London. The local community and environmentalists have successfully resisted it for the last twenty five years on the grounds that it will generate traffic and pollution. The Mayor supports the new road because he says it will bring jobs. It is an old - fashioned and discredited assumption that new transport infrastructure automatically equals regeneration and despite the Mayor’s failure to justify his job creation claims to the inquiry inspector, it is a fallacy to which the Mayor is clinging.
The future
The London Mayor has adopted this country’s most radical and detailed set of plans for creating sustainable transport. With a little pushing from the Greens on the London Assembly all kinds of wonderful projects are now getting off the ground. If all this work is followed through, then many of these initiatives will be seen as just as big and as important as the introduction of congestion charging. If we manage it well, there will be a real symbiosis between the emerging Travel Demand Management agenda and the multi-billion pound infrastructure budgets. This combination of new capacity, TDM and using existing capacity fully, will enable us to bridge the gap between supply and demand in our growing city.
But the main obstacle for now is that for all the new investment and take - up of TDM, this may still be insufficient to cope with the mistakes of the Mayor’s planning policies.
