Urban transport

18th September 1970, Page 256

18th September 1970

Page 256

Page 257

Page 258

Page 263

Page 256, 18th September 1970 — Urban transport

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by L. H. Smith, TD, DL, MinstT

The theme of this Conference is "Decision-making for a decade"—the Seventies. I would have been happier if we had had a conference with the same title 10 years ago. It is my opinion that we are just about 10 years late in our urban transportation policies.

Since the last war, the country has been short of capital and the national investment programme has had to have priorities. From the end of the '40s to well into the '50s the priority lay with Power, in the form of modernization of the coal mines, and an extensive building programme of power stations to increase the capacity for electrical power, including the very expensive nuclear power stations. Then, belatedly, came transport: first in the form of modernization of the railways. docks and harbours, then the modernization of the road system, starting with the motorway programme which has improved travel for people and goods between towns and cities. The traffic problems generated within those towns and cities cast doubts on the town planning concepts of the late '40s and their solutions, which were proving inadequate to deal with the vast increase in vehicular traffic that had not been accurately foreseen—and certainly not the rapid rate of growth. Running parallel was the massive investment id education, health and welfare.

The first comprehensive study of the problem of congestion in towns and cities was Professor Buchanan's Traffic in Towns in 1963. My colleague, Mr Konrad Smigielski, Leicester's planning officer, published his Leicester Traffic Plan in 1964; this was the first to be produced based on the new thinking. In 1969, some five years later, the Leicester City Council approved a Traffic and Transport Policy based on the findings of the Leicester Traffic Plan and this was the first comprehensive transportation plan to be submitted to the Ministry of Transport. This report recognized that a solution to the problem created by increased traffic depends on a balanced interplay of three elements, viz: road network, public transport and parking policy against the background of the commercial and social viability of the city. There are many of these studies now going on, either conducted by city engineers and town planners or by consultants. I think it is common ground that the solution in any town or city must be on a balanced interplay; the problem is in getting the balance right.

The value of meeting together

I believe the reason why Leicester was first with its Policy was a decision in 1958 to form a standing committee of the City Council, designated the traffic committee. This committee is served by the chairmen and vice-chairmen of the highways committee, town planning committee, the old watch committee now called the public control committee and the transport committee, and by the chief officers of the respective committees. Looking back over the years, the value of this inter-departmental partnership has resulted in a growing understanding of each other's professional disciplines and constraints to our mutual advantage and it is very rare that any scheme for improving traffic circulation, planning, transport, etc. is not agreed unanimously.

On the very rare occasion when there is not complete agreement by the officers, the point of disagreement is isolated for a political decision. This also has the advantage of preventing the elected representatives from playing one chief officer off against another and thus intentionally or unintentionally delaying decision-taking. There is a great gap between the knowledge and the logical and rational decisions which form policy and the implementation of that policy. No politician, local or national, will object to studies, reports, traffic plans—in fact, the larger and more profusely illustrated the better—but getting them to take decisions to implement such plans with the consequential financial commitment, whether national or local, is not so easy. I suggest it is time we faced up to the policy makers and made it clear that we in our many professional skills may not know the perfect answer to the traffic problems 30 years on but we know enough now to plan on a far more realistic basis than has been done in the past, and they must implement some of the short-term policies so that we have time to complete the exercise.

Spell out the consequences

If we wish to prevent our urban communities from being overwhelmed by traffic, there will have to be a massive investment in urban roads out of all proportion to present expenditure in towns and cities. Urban road costs are estimated at film /£5m per mile and there is a growing feeling in the transport industry that public transport is no longer financially viable and will have to be increasingly underpinned by subsidies. There is only a certain amount of money available for national investment and there has been a serious under-investment in transportation in its widest meaning over the past decade because of the rapid and unforeseen growth in the volume of traffic. There has been a high investment in the social services, principally education and health, and now welfare. These have been expanding at something between 10 per cent and 15 per cent per year in financial terms. These social services are highly emotive, they are well established political sacred cows and I personally think that transport will not be a welcome newcomer to these rather exclusive political pastures, particularly as it will be a rather starved and emaciated animal and will of necessity take an increasing amount from the others. The first step along this road, I would suggest, is a massive public relations exercise to inform people what the appalling effects on urban life will be unless more money is devoted to transportation.

The main problem is how to maintain a civilized existence in our towns and cities and prevent them from being overwhelmed by the rising tide of vehicles. The time will come—and no one can put a year to it; it must be as a result of actual traffic pressure in each town or city—when the freedom to own a motorcar will be unrestricted but the freedom to use it as and when the individual wishes will certainly have to be controlled. The degree to which restraints are practical can only be dictated in terms of social acceptability. I visited America last year and the picture there is frightening and the quality of life in their urban areas is still declining. In many areas outside the large towns and cities public transport is virtually non-existent and the under-privileged are prevented from moving freely around. This is put forward there as one of the many reasons for their social disorders. In the United Kingdom where we are much more densely populated than in America both by people and vehicles, it is even more important, indeed vital, that we get the right answers. Fortunately, we shall be prevented from making the worst mistakes that America has made in trying to find a formula to live with the motorcar, for two reasons: first, we have not the land to spare and, secondly, we shall never have the finance to build urban roads on the American scale.

The growing deficits

Having outlined the problem as I see it, I shall now confine the rest of my comments to public transport's part in urban transportation. It is unfortunate that public transport which over the past 50/60 years has been self-financing has begun to run into deficits. There are more municipal undertakings each year becoming rate aided. The reason for this has been the rapid growth in personal transport and the consequential traffic congestion which this has produced in towns and cities. Not only have passengers been lost to personal transport but the effect on the bus services of this personal transport competing for road space has made the bus services less reliable, therefore driving even more passengers away. It is a vicious circle. This has not been good for morale and the continual struggle to make ends meet has meant that insufficient money is being spent on development and improvement of the vehicles and on modern sophisticated

systems to control the services. This, together with the present situation in the bus manufacturing industry, which after 12 years has still not solved the mechanical problems of moving the engine from the front to the rear, has left the bus industry in poor shape to take its rightful position within urban transportation plans. This is particularly unfortunate as the transport industry has nothing to be ashamed of over its long life; there is a much greater use of urban transport in the United Kingdom than in any other country in Europe or North America. It is cheaper and has paid its way over the years.

I regard myself as fortunate to be manager of the Leicester undertaking which is one of the few that are still financially viable. We are debt-free and have a modern fleet of vehicles. There is no bus in the fleet more than 12 years old and the average age is 5 years. We are using the latest technological aids to control our services and we have quite substantial financial reserves. The main reason for this rather unusual situation is the very high usage of public transport in Leicester in spite of it being a prosperous city with a high motorcar ownership per head of population. In the last completed year to March 31 1970, we carried 701 million passengers and operated 6-!. million miles, giving a passenger utilization figure of 10.9 passengers per mile operated, which I believe to be the highest in the United Kingdom. The average passenger loss per year for the past 10 years is 2.03 per cent, the lowest in the country, This high usage enables us to have la fares system which is one of the lowest in the country: Lines of development Because of our financial position we have been able to experiment and the following are the main areas over the past five years:—

1. To modernize the fleet with two main objects in view:—

(a) to give the passengers a more comfortable vehicle to ride on; (b) to reduce the amount of maintenance and the number of skilled craftsmen, who are increasingly difficult to recruit.

To achieve these objectives we have used most of our operating surpluses over the past five years and we Are now reaping the benefit. It has never seemed sensible to me from a business point of view to accept the high cost in skilled labour and money involved in overhauling a bus at 13 years life when at the best you finish up with an obsolescent vehicle. I admit it spoke well for basic engineering skills but we are in business to sell comfortable bus journeys, Our objective was achieved on March 31 this year, at a time when maintenance is a growing problem in everyone's fleet and we hear of the fleet maintenance vehicle reserve moving from the old 10 per cent towards 20 per cent. We in Leicester are still operating on a 10 per cent maintenance reserve and our repairs and maintenance costs per mile compare more than favourably with any others have seen in the M PTA returns.

2. Closed circuit television, and radio-telephones in buses. This started in 1965 with the object of trying to find a better form of control of the services so that we could cushion the public, to some degree, from the wide gaps in services particularly at peak hours. This has been most successful. The system has been built up and we now have eight cameras sited up to a mile and a quarter away from the control centre, and with a 10 x 1 zoom lens capability on the cameras we are identifying buses a mile and a half away from the city centre. This gives us time to substitute radio-control buses in the worst gaps in the service and re-route the delayed buses on the other routes which are late. Now a quarter of the fleet is fitted wiith radio-telephones and I have just placed an order for another 50 sets which will give us 50 per cent fleet coverage. The latest sets have four channels, the first in the United Kingdom. These have been developed in co—operation with Pye Telecommunications Ltd, following some three-channel sets made by Philips which I saw in Hamburg and Berlin. Their capability is as follows: (a) controller to driver; (b) driver to passengers in the bus by public address; (c) driver to passengers awaiting to board the bus by a speaker in the side of the bus; (d) controller to the passengers in or awaiting to board the bus.

This is a P.R.O. link whereby the chief controller can speak direct to passengers and explain the reasons why they have had to wait if we have had a particularly bad evening peak service. The lack of communication with the passenger is a weakness in public transport, rail travel included. We have added to the control system a video tape recorder and we can now tape traffic situations as they are happening and play them back afterwards at a "TEWT" to improve the quality of control. We have bought a free-standing television camera and are now making our own training tapes, bringing a visual content to the training of drivers and conductors. This has proved to be of great assistance in improving the quality of training.

3. We pioneered a Park 'n Ride service way back in 1966 from a car park a mile from the city centre where people could park free. The bus went into the car park on a regular headway and we charged the bus fare into town. This has proved very successful during the three weeks running up to Christmas each year when we get as many as 11,500 motorists using the Park 'n Ride service. This gives a freer movement for our regular services in the city centre during the pre-Christmas shopping period. It would be idle to pretend that it has been a financial success during the remainder of the year. Motorists will still penetrate as far as they are allowed into the city centre, but it does have its regular users and our experience is such that we are now planning the first multi-storey car park /bus interchange. We shall receive a 50 per cent infrastructure grant under the 1 968 Transport Act. The whole of the ground floor will be for the use of buses and the interchange facilities; the remainder of the floors will be for the parking of motorcars. It is still in the planning stage and we are thinking of such things as restaurants, coffee bars, newspaper kiosks, waiting rooms, etc. where passengers after parking their cars can be out of the weather with something better to occupy their time than standing at exposed bus stops. These interchange facilities were foreshadowed in the Leicester Traffic Plan by Konrad Srnigielski and are, of course, a common feature on the continent of Europe and in America.

4. Modern buses that narrow the gap between the comfort of a motorcar and the bus. We are behind the more progressive countries in Europe with the design of our buses. They have already had in service for some years a new generation of vehicle with integral construction together with air suspension which reduces the level of the floor of the bus, thus making for easy loading and off-loading, fully automatic gearboxes, powered steering, double glazing, etc. The new NBC-British Leyland factory at present being built in Cumberland will be producing a vehicle of this type in the next year or so but again I feel we are rather late in the field. As many of you know. I have on order 18 Metro-Scania buses which have all these features and if you visit the Commercial Motor Show at Earls Court you can see one in Leicester's colours on the MCW stand. All 18 will be in service within the next six months. Some of my colleagues may not agree with my views on the importance of modern vehicles, and I agree that this is a matter of opinion, but I feel that the thinking behind the 25 per cent capital grant in the Transport Act 1968 was the necessity to have a much-improved type of public service vehicle which would cost more money. The increase in the rebate on the fuel tax reduces the impact on costs. The financial position of some undertakings is such that they would rather go on ordering what I will call the "old fashioned type of bus" and take a profit on the grant. If you are going to have a new-generation type of vehicle for the public to travel on, if it is going to incorporate the sort of features that I think are desirable, it is going to add to the weight, its fully automatic transmission is going to cover fewer miles per gallon but I am convinced that it will pay off—and the increase in the fuel rebate offsets lower mpg. I know some of my engineering colleagues still worship at the altar of miles per gallon, and I would be the last to suggest that any item of cost is unimportant, but if you look at the total operating costs and compare them with this particular item, one passenger per journey will cover the reduction in the miles per gallon. I believe a modern type of vehicle with the improved standard of comfort would being more than one passenger per journey back.

5. We must look after our passengers -en route", and therefore it is important to introduce very many more passenger shelters along our routes. Our ratio, wherr reviewed this, was one shelter to every nine stops. My committee has adopted a policy of increasing this to one shelter to every three stops and at the moment we have 350 shelters being erected in Leicester.

Regroup now

What is the future role of public transport in this coming decade? As I have said previously, it must play an essential role within urban transportation policies. This will only be possible if the present boundaries of operation between municipal undertakings and the companies, now (with one or two exceptions) part of the National Bus Company are reshaped. This was the original thinking in the White Papers which preceded the Act and was the reason for setting up the four PTAs, as the transportation problems in these areas could not wait for the revision of local government. We cannot wait for the implementation of the Maud Report. Voluntary regroupings between municipal operators and the National Bus Company should be actively encouraged now. If we allow the present situation to continue much longer we shall simply drive more passengers away from public transport. The industry is faced with a very difficult situation at present. The rapid increase in wage costs with their consequential effect on total operating expenses is being passed on to the passenger by higher fares and this is being reflected by less use of public transport and a contraction of services. The National Bus Company is required by the Ministry of Transport to produce a surplus on the capital employed and in order to achieve this has adopted a policy of "use it or lose it". This policy judged solely from a business point of view is sensible but the effect it is having on the contribution public transport must make within a balanced urban transportation policy is disastrous. The present operating areas which have resulted from the 1930 Road Traffic Act are quite unsuitable to deal with the overspill which has taken place around all the large towns and cities. The car traffic generated in these overspill areas is the main source of the excessive traffic built-up in the town and city centres. Public transport from these areas, from a passenger's point of view, is generally below an acceptable level because of the policy of co-ordination instead of integration. Mr J. H. Locke,

Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Transport, in presating a paper "New Policies for Public Transport" to the M PTA Annual Conference at Eastbourne in 1967 said:—

"A major defect in certain areas (not by any means in all) is the fragmentation of actual operation of bus services.The different operators, naturally, have individual financial interests which they have to protect which usually conflict. Moreover, the financial and social objectives of the different operators are by no means identical. The complication caused by the attempt to reconcile the different interests of a number of separate operators in the large 'conurbation' is responsible for a lot of trouble. If we are honest, we must admit that the so called 'co-ordination" agreements are in many cases more like market sharing arrangements than a real attempt to produce the most satisfactory pattern of services from the rioint of view of the passengers in the area.

"Indeed, my personal view is that the present relations between municipal undertakings, nationally owned bus undertakings and privately owned bus undertakings tend to lead to further confusion in an already confused situation. The present pattern has grown up by a series of historical 'accidents' and does not correspond to differences, i.e. the needs of passengers or the services provided. What it does do is produce frictions in terms of fare scales, financial and social objectives and even labour relations."

Priority schemes

This was a very shrewd observation from an outsider who had quickly seized on the basic weakness in the bus industry. These remarks are just as valid today as when they were made. The National Bus Company has started to rationalize its company structure and we know of the various reorganizations that are taking place within companies. They have also seen fit to purchase the Luton and Exeter municipal undertakings where there were as good co-ordination arrangements as you could wish for.

What then of the future? There is a very welcome indication of an entirely new thinking about the part buses can play within urban transportation plans. Led by the Ministry of Transport, there has been a switch of emphasis from vehicles per hour to people per hour. The report of the Working Group on Bus Demonstration Projects which was chaired by Mr T. L. Beagley and of which I was privileged to be a member, is a very sensible, practical report, which outlines different projects in various towns and cities which are aimed at giving some form of preferential treatment for buses. These projects are sponsored by the Ministry and are being evaluated by the Road Research Laboratory. We are conducting one of these in Leicester known as the "Black box experimentwhereby the bus on approaching the traffic signals can retard the "reds" or advance the "greens" automatically. The expenment has now been running for some two months and we are waiting for the detailed evaluation but from the operator's point of view we believe it is proving helpful.

Not open-ended

In spite of all these efforts to recognize in a practical way the importance of buses in a co-ordinated policy, public transport will increasingly require financial support but this should not take the form of open-ended subsidies. They are entirely unsatisfactory from every point of view. They can lead to inefficiency as they remove any normal form of commercial discipline, and a measurement of efficiency for management. I would suggest that services which cannot be considered justifiable on a cost basis, from a transport manager's point of view, but are an essential part of any general transportation policy, should be hived off and costed and the difference between the passenger receipts and operating costs made up in the form of a subsidy, leaving the remainder of the services to be operated under commercial discipline. The ultimate criteria must be social benefit versus total cost.