Transport Crucible

Buses, cars, vans and trucks have been stuck in a chaotic mess in London during the last two days. At surface level this seems to be due to an inch or so of snow and temperatures dropping just below freezing for a few hours – and a failure by our traffic managers to cope with that happening. But, why does a well predicted episode of regular climate change, in one of the most advanced cities on the planet, turn a relatively small weather event from a little drama into a big crisis? Many beleaguered travelers are asking Who Is To Blame? But finding the real answers may be harder than they realise. And, in addition to most children there are some lucky folk who are able to see these events through rose tinted goggles as ‘brilliant’. One lady features in a news video for the Guardian and goes so far as saying that “everyone’s having a good time”. She goes on to rave. “All the schools are shut. Brilliant! No-one’s at work. Brilliant! No cars on the street. Brilliant!” I kid you not, but suggest that there are a significant number of us for whom the snow and traffic chaos fell a little short of being brilliant. For me, snow is fine but treacherous road conditions and hellish essential journeys are not – and the key reasons for this ridiculous state of affairs are not in my view practical.

The real driving force in Britain generally and London in particular, is the obsession our traffic managers and transport planners have with prevailing theories about the ideal ways to move people and goods. But as most of us realise we do not live in an ideal world, and better distinctions need making between worthy attempts deliver real improvements and action that is guided by dogma fuelled dreams…

Over the years I have noticed variations in public attitudes and transport authority’s responses to episodes of snowfall in UK towns and cities. Generally, the extent of disruption to essential travel or ‘traffic chaos’ caused by a well predicted fall of an inch or two of snow has less and less impact on daily urban life, the further north you are from London.

It can be argued that this is because it snows more up north and so the people and their local authorities have more pressing and frequent needs to be properly equipped and prepared to minimise the impact that snow and freezing temperatures has on essential travel. It can also be argued that the pots of money from which all road management must be funded are if anything shrinking in size – and this inevitably leads to decreased capacity for local councils to meet demand for such rudimentary action as gritting roads before it snows and freezes.

But in my view there is a far more critical reason why a well predicted inch of snow on a Monday in December can turn road transport in London into a slithering shambles of misery and massive waste of that most precious of all resources on earth, time.

The key to the problem is this. Wherever you look at those who are responsible for urban traffic management there is an all pervading orthodoxy that paves the way for chaos raining as soon as it snows. The fact is that the main thrust of efforts by a generation of highway planners and traffic managers is directed by an obsessive quest for a transport holy grail. And the grail is called ‘modal shift’ or ‘behaviour change’. And what it is about is the business of ‘discouraging’ people from using privately owned motor vehicles. Over the last two decades enthusiasm for this mission has reached levels of religious fervour and devotion among and increasingly widespread range of people and town planners. The ‘motorists’ or truck driver is vilified as a selfish, environment and planet destroyer and so anything that makes the use of cars vans and trucks more difficult has become a jolly good thing.

So although this is rarely mentioned in polite circles, the incentives to really optimise the flow of traffic, especially in London, is as close to zero as makes no difference. And this applies to council traffic controllers, and hoards of highly paid transport planning professionals in TfL or various wings of central government’s bureaucratic machine. At either end of the UK transport pros spectrum the big prizes only go to those who come up with measures that will, in theory at least, ‘get people out of cars and vans’. This invariably involves making life more difficult for drivers, and failing to grit roads is one thing that does that for sure. Or, fail to grit the side roads that are where people live and need to drive, and that overloads the main roads till they get gridlocked.

The real problem for all of us is not the occasional outbreak of snow, that most city controllers in the rest of the developed world wouldn’t dare allow to bring life to a crawl. The real problem is that the unfortunate quest that drives our traffic managers really is for a non-existent holy grail. The modal shift grail being passionate pursued for two decades has not happened, despite the well spun stats that seem to show it has. And, in reality there is no plausible evidence to show that modal shift can occur to any truly significant extent in Britain. This is for the simple reason that the alternatives of walking, cycling and public transport cannot meet the vast majority of needs we have for the transport of people and goods on which the nations’ health depends.

But there is an even bigger elephant in the room that our traffic management gurus and there disciples fail to see. Even in London, which has the greatest abundance of ‘public’ transport in the form of buses on it’s urban road network than anywhere else in Britain, it is important to recognise what these vehicles really are.

A bus is actually a big privately owned and heavily subsidised truck for carrying heavily subsidised people. And when these vehicles are not running close to empty which many are, the occupants during peak times are transported in conditions that would cause outcry if they were cattle. The much loved and hated ‘Bendy-bus’ is in fact an absurdly long, junction blocking and occasionally deadly articulated lorry.

Now, if you mix the collection of vehicles that are in reality needed to keep life in our cities going, shroud the management of traffic in a cloak of wishful thinking and then sprinkle the whole caboodle with an inch of snow, you get we what we usually get. Good old TRAFFIC CHAOS!