Homage to Greta and some views on road investment

This is a mashup article.

Greta!

The image and opener is about paying homage to Greta. She is a hero of mine and this week on Wednesday I got to sit outside the Swedish Parliament Building - the place where she began her school strike for climate.

Road investment and climate change

Then after a long train journey (including my first experience of a sleeper train (between Stockholm and Hamburg) I returned to the UK just in time to attend the Transport Action Network conference in London today. I'd been asked to be on a panel to share some reflections from the Wales Roads Review. But with the emergence of the revised National Networks National Policy Statement this month it would have been rude not to have something to say on that too. Below is the script I used for my introductory remarks.

Roads man and boy?

In the 1980s I worked as a student civil engineer on design of by-pass schemes and helped construct one. Fast forward nearly 40 years and I was a member of the Wales Roads Review Panel and subsequently chaired the Road Investment Scrutiny Panel, both of which reported around a year ago. I seem to keep finding myself getting involved with roads!

The revised National Networks National Policy Statement is out

I responded last year to two Select Committee Inquiries and to the DfT’s consultation on the NNNPS – which I’ll now just call the NPS. The revised NPS was published this month, along with the Government’s response to what the public and the Select Committee had to say on the prior draft.

?The UK Government is now clear … I think….. on the following for nationally significant road infrastructure projects:

1. It is not continuing with predict and provide.
2. While Scotland and Wales have targets to reduce car kms travelled, it has no such intentions.
3. There is no legal obligation for an individual road scheme not to increase carbon emissions.

?Let’s briefly go through each of these.

?Predict and provide

?In the Select Committee’s report on the NPS I was quoted as saying the revised draft NPS was “tantamount to a perpetuation of the predict and provide paradigm of transport planning which was already living on borrowed time. Its authors appear to have constructed a narrative intent on underlining an inevitability of road traffic growth that in turn lends weight to justification of capacity enhancement schemes.”

?The DfT has subsequently said:

?“The government is clear that the draft NNNPS is not based on a predict and provide model - it has not identified a specific level of traffic growth nor has it identified a volume of development necessary to meet that growth”.

It went on to explain “This NPS does not identify a level of capacity to be provided and does not anticipate that new capacity will match forecasted demand growth under any of the scenarios modelled in the National Road Traffic Projections and instead is focused on addressing the worst constraints on the network.”

?But the document still maintains that “continued absolute traffic growth is likely under all scenarios, and therefore enhancements on the national road network will be necessary in order to ensure the national road network operates effectively in the face of growing demand”.

So, a sort of ‘project and provide a bit’ instead of ‘predict and provide’ then?

Whether or not to reduce car kms

This is in the context of the Climate Change Committee giving the Government a poor school report less than a year ago, including saying it “has made no progress on our recommendations on clarifying the role for car demand reduction”.

In the Government’s response to the public consultation it offers the clarification. “It is not the policy of government to reduce demand for travel. People should enjoy fair access to jobs, education, health, shopping, recreation, friends and family and government wants to facilitate that, not restrict it.”?

No legal obligation at the level of road schemes to address decarbonisation

This is what the NPS now has to say “The Secretary of State … regularly assesses whether the UK has sufficient policies and proposals overall to meet the UK carbon budgets… It would not be feasible or sensible for such an assessment to be done at the time of taking individual development decisions, and there is no legal requirement to do so.”

Will the same logic apply when it gets round to the Airports NPS? I assume so. One starts to wonder where exactly the Net Zero economy and compliance with interim carbon budgets is going to come from.

To Wales

What a breath of fresh air that Wales has charted a rather different course and now has four road investment tests including that future road investment should reduce carbon emissions and support a shift to public transport, walking and cycling.

Yet charting such a course has required political bravery and drawn heavily on political capital. As Lee Waters passes on the baton after an incredible effort, we are reminded that the future of transport remains highly political.

Triple Access Planning anyone?

The UK Government says it believes in fair access. Well, we all live in a triple access system where we reach what we need or desire through a combination of physical mobility, spatial proximity and digital connectivity. It’s not all about motorised road traffic.

I’m pleased to say that a few days ago we launched a new practitioner’s Handbook for moving from transport planning in the paradigm of predict and provide to Triple Access Planning in the paradigm of decide and provide.

The future of planning and investment should be about being vision-led, access-focused and accommodating rather than concealing uncertainty. This is very compatible with an Avoid-Shift-Improve approach to transport which is needed – offering scope for more emphasis on avoid and shift whereas the current UK national position, unlike Scotland and Wales, majors on improve.

The nature of road investment can change

We need to get better, more creative and bolder at option generation and assessment. And we need more politicians like Lee Waters who really do make ‘long term decisions for a brighter future’.

In his penultimate day in office, Lee shared news of a bypass scheme that had gone back to the drawing board after the Wales Roads Review. A new proposed solution has come forwards that has half the emissions, has saved destruction of ancient woodland, would divert heavy traffic from a community and also includes provision for active travel and public transport. We can think differently and still invest in roads.