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matters by John Darker, AMBIM
Evaluating transport policies
Since local councils must review traffic problems for submission to the DoE hauliers and own-account operators have only themselves to blame if they do not make their voices heard
ROAD transport operators from now on will have only themselves to blame if they do not play an active part in the public discussion of transport — and urban renewal — plans. All local authorities must undertake a comprehensive review of traffic problems in their areas for submission to the DoE by January 1977. The Government has accepted the case for the greatest possible degree of public participation at the formative stages of major planning schemes. The Skeffington report, a few years back, was the precursor of present DoE thinking.
The complexity of the traffic planning process was repeatedly stressed at the recent PTRC summer conference at Sussex University. Major schemes take several years to prepare and the three or four "favourite" proposals of the planners, given the honour of the full treatment using cost /benefit analysis, are a mere fraction of the schemes which may be suggested at the outset.
One lecturer at the conference admitted that in his planning area some 30 different schemes were considered initially. "We stuck them on a wall and various people examined them and favourite choices emerged. There was a bit of public comment at that stage but not many specific answers were available."
Public disgust The experience of a number of authorities, whose planning has been assisted by expert consultants with international experience, is that after spending years preparing elaborate and costly plans the public may turn away in disgust on publication. It must be very disillusioning to expert planning teams to learn that major proposals on which countless man and woman hours have been expended, and which may have cost half a million pounds, fail to win public support — or even sympathy — as being the best of a bad bunch of proposals.
How explain the fact that after consultations with environmental or neighbourhood groups, often to the extent that major modifications are made to published proposals, these seldom lead to public
endorsement? With consultations spread over a period of years, councillors may change their minds in line with new public attitudes; intelligent critics whose views have been influential in a locality may change their job and move away. So any transport operator who works with council planning committees in an effort to see that his professional interests are taken seriously may find at the end of the road that his initial views have changed. It is the nature of the planning process that it is hugely affected by public attitudes.
A century ago it was possible to lay waste huge swathes of London or Paris to build the "show" streets and vistas which we take for granted today. Countless dwellings of artisans were ruthlessly swept away by the 19th century equivalent of bulldozers — thousands of navvies — to make the railways into central London Manchester, and Glasgow.
The 1973 road builders — civil engineering consortia — have the same instincts as their forebears; if a road is necessary, build it and be damned! This explains why a road builder thinks nothing of suggesting double-decked eightor 16or 32-lane motorways into the heart of London or New York.
When some of the traffic plans now ready were begun, five or more years ago, it was thought that any car restraint was politically unacceptable. It is now recognized by the planners that the unrestricted use of cars in towns is simply not possible whether this is politically acceptable or not. In the Sixties, in Birmingham, members of a steering committee, a technical committee and a study group all accepted that car restraint was a political hot potato. Busmen and railway officers agreed.
The only constraint the planners allowed themselves was over parking spaces, but in the event traffic loads on the new roads were great enough to provide a built-in constraint in terms of travelling speeds, even of buses. It is extraordinary to learn that despite all the money spent on central Birmingham roads since 1964 there are now fewer trips into the centre by car than before. Some Birmingham road research studies have been useful, preventing the construction of several planned dualcarriageway roads which — if built — would have been used by a mere dozen vehicles per hour. Alas, in the same city, there is the absurdity of a 10ft-wide road used by thousands of vehicles.
The need for overall plans encompassing land use is now generally accepted but the implications may not have been thought out. What should 1973 planners do about new houses at Solihull with four-car garages? The number of Solihulls rapidly multiplies with general affluence but the planners' dilemma is that without political backing they dare not propose physical controls on the use of cars or — in places like Solihull — a limitation on the family ownership of cars.
Mr M. J. Foyster, of Freeman Fox and Partners, told delegates of his experience as a consultant on Edinburgh's transport planning study where his firm worked jointly with Colin Buchanan and Partners. Mr Foyster agreed that the choice of alternatives for testing by cost /benefit analysis was the least scientific part of the transport planning process, more akin to an art than a science.
Bus y rail Both teams of consultants at Edinburgh had agreed that buses had the edge on light railways because the average "trip" length was three miles. The planners were disconcerted by public support for light railways when the plan was published. I asked Mr Foyster: "If you'd realized the political pressure that would emerge for an urban transport scheme based on light railways would you have favoured this in your original choice of plan?" He said he would certainly have wished to have compared the rail versus bus approach in more detail and the total plan would have involved less road building.
This seems like a candid admission that road traffic planners desperately want to be loved! At least they want their ultimate plans to be acceptable to the public — not just to the pressure groups among road users but to the large sections of the population — schoolchildren, mothers of young children, the elderly and infirm, etc.
To please everyone may involve planning techniques yet to be developed: when a rocket is fired at the moon it has to be aimed at where the moon will be in, say, three days' time. To contrive a road traffic planning technique which can take account of variable traffic flows and fickle changes of public opinion is a challenging task of the 70s. When the Dykes Act begins to bite, all previous data on urban traffic problems will be suspect.
Some current long-term research places an impossible burden on the forecasters, though not all of them shrink from the crystal ball. There seems little sense in an attempt to forecast noise levels on roads in AD 2000 when there may be no petrol-engined vehicles around then.
Predictions of the numbers of lorries of various sizes needed in Britain or Europe at the turn of the century may also be a complete waste of time though, in theory, someone has to attempt the calculation in order that the road system of 1980 can evolve into one for AD 1990 and 2000.
'Chaos for years'
The road haulage or bus operator who participates in transport planning inquiries will start from his present experience and no one can blame him if he speaks frankly of his practical problems today. Mr J.
C. Collier, a DoE spokesman, said that public transport operators were now asking for earlier involvement in planning; the time was now ripe for the people concerned to get together. But he offered no hope at all that wider participation would quickly offer a tidy solution to current problems.
"It will be complete chaos for a few years," said Mr Collier. "County councils must appoint well-qualified people for transportation planning. Very few know anything about public transport so they should not complain at lack of co-operation by transport operators."
Who's to blame?
Should traffic planners blame themselves for the public criticism their schemes have invited recently? Mr Paul Truelove, of Aston University, reminded delegates that if, in 1968, there was no machinery for public participation, this was a pretty poor defence. "It could well be argued," he said "that planners simply lacked the guts or vision to insist on machinery being set up which would provide for public reaction to plans. It doesn't take long to organize a few public meetings."
Transport planners in 1973 know that they must tangle with the public — including road haulage and bus operators — in the formative stages of major plans. The professional planners will find it easier to talk to practical transport men if they abandon their tedious jargon about simultaneous linear regression models, matrices for structure plans, empirical methods for judging the efficacy of mathematical models for transportation models, parameter allocation models, etc.