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End of term report on Green Paper
Page 57
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A for effort; C for attainment
by John Darker
WHEN Dr Norman Lee, a Manchester University lecturer in economics, reviewed the Government's consultation document on transport policy last week he summed up in the fashion of a schoolmaster giving an end-of-term report. He thought the well-written document deserved an "A" for effort, but he would only mark it "C" for attainment.
Dr Lee, speaking at a oneday conference to consider transport policy, at Manchester University, insisted that transport objectives must have "operation content" to be meaningful. Objectives must be precise enough to allow policies to be built upon them. Vagueness—such as the famous objective of the British Transport Commission in 1947 to run "economic and adequate" services—could be very damaging if there was no agreement on the meaning of terms used.
As an example of vagueness in the discussion document, Dr Lee said until the meaning of "a reasonable level of mobility" was reconciled with precise financial constraints, it was devoid of content.
Cross-subsidisation of buses had been a feature of the industry for some years and it was still going on, said Dr Lee. Now groups of services were being costed so there was some hope of movement in the direction of the policy document.
If a general principle was defined it seemed reasonable that it should be capable of application, consistently, across the board. If it was accepted that some types of heavy lorries did not pay sufficient taxes to meet the social costs resulting from their operations, then, he asked, should there not be a corresponding call for the bus industry to meet the social cost of bus lanes ?
Discussing the section on organisation strUettire and co ordination, Dr Lee considered whether there should be a National Transport Authority —akin to the old British Transport Commission—with power to co-ordinate independently from government. He thought the National Transport Council idea, the preferred alternative of the Government, was right. He wanted to see much more co-ordination of policies by the different departments at DoE's Marsham Street complex.
A glaring omission of the document, in Dr Lee's view, was vagueness in defining the relationship of central and local government. In particular, there should have been a chapter on TPPs—Transport Policies and Programmes. Not much was said about the coordination of transport and land-use planning. While public participation was well advanced for structure planning it had not progressed far with transport planning.
In blinkers
Speaking on "Transport Policy for the Metropolitan Counties" Mr A. M. Munro, director of planning, Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive, endorsed Dr Lee's view that the experts writing the report should have got together. They were like racehorses in blinkers.
Mr Munro suggesed that the old toll roads gave us the slums—people did not want to pay to enter towns. Most shopping centres had developed at junctions of tram routes; conurbations reflected transport through the ages.
Because the average occupation of a house was seven years this made more sense as a planning time-span, said Mr Munro. In Greater Manchester, school buses lost E2m a year; in old historical cities, with central schools, children could get to school using ordinary municipal buses. There were cities needing 40 to 50 buses for school use twice daily.
A serious criticism was the failure of the document to spell out what was the best form of transport in particular contexts, such as rural areas. Maybe it would make sense to subsidise the use of cars in country districts since buses seldom operated without a deficit. And the document was vague whether the criteria was financial or economic.
Another critic of the document was Prof J. Parry Lewis, director of Manchester University's Centre for Urban and Regional Research. The gloss put on policies and arguments to make the discussion document readable led to oversimplications by the economist authors.
Prof Lewis thought many of the detailed arguments suspect. What was the evidence that car owners were only moderately sensitive to fuel price increases? There could be a considerable time-lag before car owners decided to move nearer to their jobs. It was quite possible that in the long term there would be a reaction, with major effects on other modes of transport.
The professor argued the expertise was frequently not available to quantify the effects of tinkering with transport costs and urban structures and institutions. Transport was an essential factor in the productive efficiency of the country and he wanted more government university co-operation to improve transport and communications.
Since the war towns had been developed on the basis of certain assumptions about the use of public and private transport. " If policies are suddenly changed the impact on settlements (of people) could be very severe indeed."
He reminded his audience— largely of planners and bus operators—that workmen's fares were introduced a century ago on Government in structions. Railway lines were authorised only on condition that such fares were provided. It required private transport operators of public services to subsidise "poor" workers.
"I imagine that a quarter of car owners give up using their cars," said Prof Lewis. " Consider the impact on house prices, availability of labour, local transport services, etc."
The discussion period was notable for some trenchant comments by Mr Richard Hope, editor of our associate journal Railways Gazette International. Earlier he had briefly spoken on the costly labour utilisation of British Rail in an era when crew-less trains were possible. Organisational changes comparable with that now underway in France and the Netherlands could save BR some £400m a year.
High costs
Replying to a question about Freightliners, Mr Hope said it was not surprising that the company was losing business with its unnecessarily high costs of moving the train. Archaic labour practices pre vailed—f o u r Freightliner crews on the short journey from Hull to Liverpool—because there used to be four separate railways companies on this route. No wonder, said Mr Hope, that when Transport Minister Dr John Gilbert opened a section of M62 he was able to say there was no parallel railway!
Mr Hope suggested that BR was "a national soup-kitchen"; 17 per cent of BR staff had the rank of station master or above. This compared with 10 per cent in European railways.
Asked for his succinct comment on what to do with BR, Mr Hope said: "BR's scope for technical development should be recognised and suitable investment would enable the railway to help at the margin of freight. It will be necessary to be tough with management and the rail unions."