A better way to assess the true value of transport policies

CHANGE is the watchword of the new government. At the recent Labour conference in Liverpool, the words “change begins” were ubiquitous on posters everywhere, although what that entailed was mostly left unexplained. Ministers invited to fringe meetings often did not turn up, either reluctant to set out the details of policies or prevented from doing so by the fierce ‘keepers of the message’, who in this new administration make Tony Blair’s capo di capi Alastair Campbell seem like a pussycat.

In terms of transport, the key message has been about the ‘renationalisation’ of the railways, which is presented as a radical policy. While I am supportive of the basic idea of bringing train and track closer together, and of scrapping the franchising structure (whose purpose, other than union busting, has never been clear), this is ultimately a relatively minor change. It is a welcome development, but it will not, of itself, be a gamechanger.

Real change requires something more revolutionary - a new approach to transport to break the hold of the conventional wisdom which has dominated thinking on the issue for decades. Simply put, the prominence and priority given to car transport needs to be challenged. But even that is not sufficient to describe the very fundamental nature of what needs to change.

This is where we get into the obscure world generally only inhabited by us transport obsessives. I apologise for the nerdiness, but for real change to take place, the methodology that determines transport investment decisions has to be completely overhauled. This is the only way that real change on transport policy will be delivered.

As regular readers will know, I have often been very sceptical of the way that proposed transport schemes are assessed. In particular, the methodology - known as WebTag, and available (if you want a sound night’s sleep) in astonishing and laborious detail in numerous documents on the Department for Transport website.

Essentially, the main benefit for most schemes is made up of time savings by users of new transport infrastructure. There are other considerations, but the big numbers are obtained by adding up millions of small time savings made by travellers, and then multiplying them by a figure which is varied according to whether they are business or leisure travellers. If you value your sanity, do not spend a couple of hours (as I have just done) trying to find good examples. There are countless explanations online of how the methodology should be undertaken. And reading them brings one to the only possible conclusion: the entire notion of WebTag is utterly insane, creating jobs for consultants and suggesting a degree of precision for the value of schemes which is entirely spurious.

It might have some use in comparing different transport schemes, but the absolute value it ascribes to them is just plain nonsense - you know, those headlines that say “widening the M4 worth £22 billion by 2060”. Not worth the data bytes they use up. This way of determining transport policy makes no sense, either in micro (small scale) or macro (large scale) terms. This is well illustrated by the fact that the rationale to build HS2 as a 400kph (225mph) railway was based entirely on the fact that it offered greater time savings than the alternatives.

Of course it did. Faster trains, greater time savings.

But it is so obvious that this makes no sense in a world where people can work on trains on their various devices - let alone that there were numerous assumptions about usage and transfer from other modes in those calculations.

Moreover, there is the question of whether leisure travellers really care if they get to their destination ten minutes quicker. Does that time really have an economic value? Therefore, adding up a bunch of meaningless values merely creates another one which is just much bigger.

At the moment, every proposed transport scheme - ranging from the installation of a traffic island and a couple of keep left signs to the construction of a major new rail line - has to be tested through the Webtag process. This process has become a barrier to doing anything.

It has just been revealed that the submission of the planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing (a scheme I hope will be scrapped) has cost nearly £300 million for a £9bn project and involves 350,000 pages. You can bet the WebTag process has contributed a significant part of that cost.

So, here’s the most important decision that Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has to make: scrap this whole insane process. And help is already at hand from Wales, which in terms of enlightened transport policies is a decade ahead of the rest of the UK.

For the past decade, Wales has embarked on a radically different transport policy from the rest of the UK, through bringing in a ‘wellbeing’ policy that ensures all new government legislation has to consider its effect on people. In a brilliant recent blog post, Lee Waters (just Google his name to find it), a former transport minister in the Welsh government, explains how transport schemes must fulfil a completely different set of five criteria before they are given the go-ahead. The first two are crucial. Firstly, is there a strategic fit: does the project meet the priorities in the Wales Transport Strategy?

Secondly, well-being: does the programme or project deliver well-being benefits set out in the Wales Transport Strategy, including targets on modal shift? Considering those issues completely changes the way schemes are assessed. No longer are they subject to ridiculous assessments of the value of time savings. The other criteria are affordability, deliverability, and (crucially) management - are the risks properly managed? There are signs that the government generally, and Louise Haigh in particular, is beginning to understand this. In a remarkable interview with Laura Laker, a cycling journalist, Haigh seemed to understand the wider implications of supporting sustainable transport.

A network of safe cycle routes, for example, “could cut GP appointments by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, per year”, she said. The same applies to public transport. People who walk to and from the bus stop or station are likely to be healthier than those who jump in their cars parked outside their home.

Therefore, encouraging public transport is also part of a wider solution, and the cost of schemes should be considered in that light. Hearing a minister talking this language is definitely a gamechanger. But that has to translate into action, not just words, and tackling the fundamentals of transport policy such as WebTag must be the starting point.

But will anyone in HM Treasury listen? At the party conference, I asked Chris Boardman, the Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist turned transport advocate as head of Active Travel England, what he thought of the chances of this radical reform going beyond words into action.

He was cautiously optimistic, but he wanted to see the money flow as fast as the words. He saw this as a great opportunity for those advocating a different approach to transport to see their ideas enacted, but he warned: “It is up to us to make sure this is done and done well. The ball is in our court, and we mustn’t mess it up.” Wise words, but a rallying call for those in the transport industry to put forward schemes, backed by coherent arguments, that help this once-in-a-lifetime chance come true.