ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE CONFEDERATION OF PASSENGER TRANSPORT (SCOTTISH SECTION) GLENEAGLES HOTEL, THURSDAY 26 MARCH

ALBUM CONFERENCE 1999

ISLE OF MAN, MAY 1999

The new deal for transport and buses - a local authority view

Dr George McL Hazel

Director of City Development, The City of Edinburgh Council

Introduction

Last year Edinburgh’s Transport Committee Chair, David Begg, said at this conference that the time for talking about radical change in UK transport policy was over and that the time for action had arrived. We can now see that action is indeed under way.

The government has produced the long-awaited Transport White Paper, followed by various ‘daughter documents’. The buses paper unveiled at the end of March, forms a vital piece in the jigsaw. Over the last year, too, we have seen the bus industry continuing to modernise and invest. The industry is beginning to treat bus passengers as customers, placing more emphasis on driver training and customer care.

However, the public relations and education task facing us should not be underestimated. We have yet to convince the public that public transport can be an acceptable alternative to the private car for many types of journey, and that our responsibilities to the environment and to society cannot continue to allow indiscriminate car use and increasing car dependency. Public transport operators themselves need to see their main competition as being first and foremost with the private car, and only secondly with other operators. There is a battle to be fought to change preconceptions.

What are the main issues in winning this battle?

When it comes to road building, predict and provide is now consigned to the history books. The 1989 roads programme; ‘The largest road building programme since the Romans’, would only have led to a quarter per cent increase in road capacity per annum against road traffic growth that was averaging 5 per cent per annum and sometimes climbing as high as 7 per cent. We cannot build our way out of this problem.
Research by Professor Phil Goodwin shows that reducing road space for cars and giving it over to buses and cyclists reduces traffic levels by 12%. It is crucial that this message is taken on board by policy-makers.
While improved public transport is a prerequisite for a more sustainable transport system, it is not enough on its own.
Most car journeys were never made by public transport. The car’s flexibility has encouraged additional journeys to be made. Households with one car make more than two and a half times as many journeys each week as those without a car. And households with two or more cars make three and a half times as many journeys.
It is not always the cities with the best public transport systems that have the lowest car use. If you exclude London, the city in Britain with the lowest car use for the journey to work is Edinburgh. Edinburgh has a tremendous planning/land use legacy; a high urban density with a large percentage of people living and working in the city centre. This makes it ideal territory for public transport, with large numbers of people living close to bus routes.
We can all produce nightmare stories of what happens to public transport use when businesses and retailing relocate to out of town developments. When the Headquarters of the Bank of Scotland were located in the centre of Edinburgh only 15% of their employees travelled to work by car. Now that they have moved to their out of town site at Edinburgh Park, 85% travel to work by car.

Integrated transport

What everyone says they want is an ‘integrated’ transport system. But what do we mean by integration? It is more than just integrating different modes of transport so that when the train arrives at a railway station, a bus is waiting for the passenger to give a seamless journey.

It is about integrating transport and the community. Instead of asking what type of transport system do we want, the starting question should be what type of society do we want to live in?

I believe that most people do not wish to live in a car-dependent society; or at least they do not, when they think about what such a society would actually be like. The onus is on politicians to spell out the consequences of car-dependency and show that there is an alternative. A society where people don’t think twice about walking, cycling or taking public transport. Where city centres are vibrant places. Where everyone can access work and leisure facilities. Where people stop to chat with neighbours in the street.

It is about integrating transport with health and the environment. Recent research has shown that as many as 24,000 people in Britain die prematurely every year because of poor air quality caused largely by too many cars on the road. As many as one out of every three children now suffer from asthma.

The White Paper is also about integrating transport with the Government’s social inclusion objective. Only one-fifth of households in the lowest income quartile have access to a car. Only 30% of retired households have access to a car. Increasing the tax on motoring and channelling the revenue into improved public transport is one of the most progressive fiscal policies that the Government can pursue. Increasing bus fares, by contrast, is socially regressive. The unemployed, the elderly, the young, women and those in social classes D and E all make above average use of buses. It has also been estimated that in our cities, lower income bus users outnumber low income car users by a factor of 4 to 1.

And the White Paper is about integrating transport with the Government’s welfare to work strategy. When people are contemplating coming off welfare and moving back into work, one of the key considerations is the cost of travel.

Fiscal measures are required to reduce car use, and to finance the radically enhanced transport system that we need. How and what governments tax sends clear signals about the economic activities they believe should be encouraged and discouraged, and the values they wish to entrench in society. Short of something going horribly wrong at a nuclear power station, nothing is more harmful to the air that we breathe than increased dependency on the car.

Gordon Brown has committed the Government to a 6% fuel tax escalator for the life-time of this Parliament. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1995) recommended a 10% increase per year. Increases in fuel duty have met stiff resistance from a number of quarters. If the Government is serious about reducing CO₂ emissions by 20% by 2010, but are not prepared to increase the fuel duty escalator above 6%, then they have to introduce new charges such as urban road pricing and PNR taxation. In introducing such schemes, I believe the following preconditions must be met:

the revenues raised must be retained locally for spending on improving alternatives to the car.
revenue raised must be additional and not merely a replacement for other existing funding sources.
significant improvements to public transport infrastructure must be introduced in advance of any new charges.

With these preconditions, I believe we can win popular support for road user charging, which of course is essential for any scheme to succeed. So with central and local government delivering increased taxes on running a car, higher parking charges, land use policies which promote sustainable transport, and hypothecation of new revenue streams with the proceeds going back into public transport, how does the bus industry adapt to the new situation?

The buses daughter paper

It is worth recapping the main points of the government’s strategy for improving bus services, as outlined in the bus services ‘daughter document’.

Councils will have to take a more strategic view of public transport in their area
Quality Partnerships between Councils and bus operators will get statutory backing
There will be measures to promote more stable timetables
And measures to tackle operators who fail to operate advertised services
Councils will have to ensure bus information is provided
The Government proposes to encourage joint ticketing, with powers to enforce local agreements. I am delighted that Lothian Region Transport and the other main operators in Edinburgh have got together to introduce the ‘Transfair’ scheme, which I hope will be extended and developed.
There will be guaranteed standards for concessionary fares
Councils will have powers to ‘buy in’ increased frequency on commercial services
There can be Quality Contracts for area-wide networks

The national travel information system will be in place next year, and all new buses will soon be accessible to disabled people, with the old stock phased out by 2017.

In Edinburgh we escaped the worst effects of deregulation. Nevertheless, I welcome the increased powers which Councils will have available to them, to ensure services meet local needs. We need to make sure that the needs of bus passengers are seen as at least as important as other road users.

In specific terms, how can the government’s proposals for buses be delivered? Underlying the whole approach is the need for local authorities and bus operators to work together. If the government’s objectives for a sustainable transport system that will support wider economic, environmental and social aims are to be met, a quantum leap in the quality of public transport is essential. The proposals in the daughter document should underpin an environment where the public transport market will grow, and where bus operators and others can have the confidence to invest. Some moderation of the competitive public transport environment may be necessary in order to avoid the counter-productive drift towards a ‘lowest common denominator’ of low cost and low quality.

A key mechanism for this will be the strengthening of Quality Partnerships; but there are also measures that local authorities and bus operators need to take outside formal partnership, but which contribute towards mutually beneficial objectives.

Quality Partnerships:

Quality partnerships have of course been in place in many areas for some time. However, the daughter paper proposes that they should be strengthened, and this has been reinforced by the more recent report of the Audit Commission suggesting that some of these partnerships are rather one-sided, with little benefit to the local authority participants.

Some of the Audit Commission criticisms are addressed in the daughter document, in particular the need to make Quality Partnerships enforceable on both sides is addressed by proposing statutory backing for them. If this is to happen, they will have to be meaningful, genuine partnerships, with clear contributions from both sides, and measurable targets and monitoring.

The nature of these Partnerships should also be flexible. Many schemes have been based around quality improvements - particularly new buses - by an operator in return for provision of bus priority and other infrastructure by a local authority. The Partnerships could go much further than this, including guarantees on service and fare levels, perhaps providing a restructured/rebranded network for a corridor in parallel with local authority investment on bus priority and other infrastructure in that corridor.

The CPT estimates that a good bus priority system can reduce operators’ costs from £1.60 to £1 a mile. On the demand side, policy measures taken by local government can grow the market for public transport, increasing turnover and profitability. The wider community expects to see a quality and price benefit in return for its investment in such schemes. The improved market position that bus operators will find themselves in must not be abused.

Quality Contracts will undoubtedly be a last resort in the urban situation. In Scotland, not only would the benefits of a Quality Contract have to be demonstrated, but the failure of the Quality Partnership approach would have to be shown. Given the development of a commercial public transport environment over the last 15 years, a return to a form of franchising will be very difficult to implement, with local authorities lacking both the expertise and the data to make rational decisions about the levels of service that should be provided. Extensive consultation and assessment exercises would be needed.

A move to Quality Contracts may be more appropriate in more rural areas, with a high proportion of supported services. In these cases contracts could be linked to infrastructure and information provision.

What local authorities are doing:

Local authorities are being required to produce Local Transport Plans (Strategies in Scotland) which will define a long term policy framework as well as capital investment programmes and revenue expenditure. These will be a key element in the implementation of government policy on transport integration outlined above, including matters such as air quality, climate change, traffic reduction (the Road Traffic Reduction Acts), and the introduction of road user charges. All this will create a climate throughout the country of reducing car dependency, further reinforced by land use planning policies aimed at new development being designed around public transport rather than car accessibility.

This clearer strategic view from local authorities as well as central government should give bus operators the confidence that the public transport market will grow. It should also allow a more planned approach to the implementation of Quality Partnerships, with a clear understanding about the joint targeting of investment.

How bus operators can help deliver better transport:

Operators must recognise that their main competitor is the car, not other bus operators. Every extra car on Britain’s roads leads to 350 fewer bus journeys a year. We need to attract the occasional user back to public transport through marketing and fares that make the bus an attractive and easy to use option. We must grow the market for the bus. Operators need to adopt a ‘can-do’ attitude to innovation, either on their own or in partnership with other bodies. Smart cards, family tickets, bus miles; the options are endless.

By taking advantage of the opportunities arising from local employers developing green commuter plans. In Edinburgh, LRT has introduced discounts for employers who have such plans. In this year’s budget, the Chancellor indicated that he was removing the tax anomalies which hindered the development of green commuter plans. What about green commuting plans for bus company employees? If it is not convenient or attractive enough for you to use your own product, ask the question why and then do something about it.

By tailoring services to meet passengers’ needs. For example, services need to be provided at the times when young people want to travel. Operators could tie up with companies and organisations that reflect youth values; night-clubs, clothes and record shops. If people don’t develop the public transport habit when they are young, it will be hard to attract them in later life.

By raising the profile and changing the image of the bus. First Group’s billboard advertising campaign is welcome. But why is it the only such initiative of its kind?

Operators need to remove the obstacles to bus use. Finding out information about bus times and fares needs to be easy; it is simply unacceptable for bus stops to be devoid of any information. I would commend the timetables that LRT has provided at stops in Edinburgh; they show that timetables can be user-friendly.

Conclusion

Transport policy and bus policy in particular, is at the crossroads. Expectations have been raised by the White Paper. The bus industry needs to take the opportunity and deliver the goods. If it does not, its credibility in the eyes of its potential users, and in the eyes of politicians who are looking for solutions to our transport problems, will be destroyed for a generation.

If it rises successfully to the challenge, its future will be secure; it will have earned a central place in the transport system of the next century.

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