more or less traffic in towns?*

8/8/2019 More or less traffic in towns?*

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/more-or-less-traffic-in-towns 1/15

Proceedings of the Institution of

Civil EngineersTransport 157February 2004 Issue TR1

Pages 27–41

Paper 13317

Received 21/03/2003

Accepted 13/11/2003

Keywords: traffic engineering/transport

planning/urban regeneration

Malcolm BuchananManaging Director, Colin

Buchanan and Partners;

Chairman, Transport Research

Institute, Napier University

More or less traffic in towns?*

M. Buchanan

This paper reviews some of the key assumptions and

analyses of Traffic in Towns (1963), and finds significant

new dimensions to the problems. In particular, towns

have changed substantially as a result of the motor

vehicle, opposition has undermined road programmes,

and threatening new dimensions have been added to the1963 diagnosis of environmental issues. Though there

have been numerous localised environmental

improvements, there has also been a steady erosion of

environmental standards on many roads and streets.

Restraints on the use of cars have been increasingly

applied, and road pricing is now available to local

authorities. Road user pricing will not, however, solve all

the problems. Moreover, willingness to apply restraints

on private vehicle use is likely to be limited to travel

markets for which public transport can provide a

reasonable alternative to the car. Trains, buses and

trams can deliver such alternatives only for long-distance

travel and for trips to town centres and other major trip

attractors. They could do this much better than is the

case today, and therefore further traffic reductions are

possible. However, for the bulk of the traffic on the UK’s

roads, origins and destinations are dispersed, and

therefore public transport and rail freight are not good

alternatives to the motor vehicle. New forms of

transport, capable of outperforming the fast vehicle on

the fast road, are therefore needed, and two of

particular interest are at advanced stages of

development. The major choice to be faced today is

concerned with the dispersed (intra-suburban) travel

markets. It lies between, on the one hand, improving the

road network to cater for the demands for which public

transport as we know it is not a realistic alternative and,

on the other hand, developing new forms of public and

freight transport.

1. INTRODUCTION

The Traffic in Towns report,1

written by a team in the Ministry

of Transport, led by Colin Buchanan, and published by HMSO

in 1963, was the first to look comprehensively at the problems

being created in different types of urban area by the increasing

use of motor vehicles. It exposed very clearly the policy

choices that would arise as vehicle ownership continued to rise.

It saw these as being between the extent to which it would be

possible to adapt and reconstruct towns to cater for more

traffic, the corresponding need to restrict car use, and the

urban environment that would result. It recognised that

restrictions on car use would need to be accompanied by ‘good,

cheap public transport’, and it emphasised the need for integrated land use and transport planning. It saw the choices

as political and as likely to vary between different types of

urban area, but it was nevertheless clear that the authors

expected a better urban environment to be high on the political

agenda.

In this paper I first look back at the towns and the traffic

problems diagnosed in 1963 and consider how both have

changed. I then review the choices put so persuasively in

Traffic in Towns, consider what choices we have actually made

in 40 years, and finally discuss the choices we face today.

2. WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE TOWNS?

2.1. The debate with the economists

It will be recalled that, in the aftermath of the publication of

Traffic in Towns, it was the economists who were the only real

critics, arguing that the capital costs of reconstructing towns to

accommodate even the more modest of the traffic growth

scenarios would be far beyond the resources of the Treasury.

Some went further and argued that towns would of their own

accord adapt to the car by spreading out to form a new

suburbia, which would be intrinsically easier to serve with the

car, without the need for all the reconstruction and painful

choices foreseen for existing urban areas by the Traffic in

Towns team. Yet others argued that road user charging would

relate the demand for vehicular travel to the supply of road

space and generate the funds necessary to provide more roads

and parking.

Buchanan had already to some extent answered these critics in

the report by arguing that the amount of money being invested

in roads and public transport was woefully inadequate and

bore no relation to what society was apparently prepared to

invest in the purchase and use of cars. He correctly anticipated

that road pricing would be at least 20 years in coming.

If it achieves little else, and there is worrying evidence to

suggest this will be the case, the 1998 Transport White Paper ,2

by getting road user charging and workplace parking levies*Paper based on a presentation to the Conference ‘Traffic in Tomorrow’s Towns’

at Imperial College, London, 20 November 2002.

Transport 157 Issue TR1 Buchanan 27More or less traffic in towns?



onto the statute book, has opened the way for a much more

realistic link to be established between what society is ready to

spend on the use of cars and what the public authorities need

to invest in transport. There is one proviso about this new

opportunity: this is that the public authorities must be obliged

to invest such monies where it will be most effective to do so.

The economists were clearly right in their second challenge.

Towns have spread and adapted as a result of the car, a good

example being Luton (Fig. 1). However, in this process they

have generally failed to solve their traffic problems in the way

the economists anticipated. Indeed there is now a commonly

held view that the spread of urbanisation has increased car

dependence and worsened traffic problems to the extent that

recent government advice has advocated closing this particular

stable door by a return to the centralisation of activities around

town centres at higher densities.

3. GROWTH OF TRAFFIC (AND CAPACITY?)

Figure 2 illustrates the trends in the amount of travel

undertaken per person per day by mode. The figure shows that

the overall trend is dominated by the increase in the use of

cars, with the average mileage per person per day rising from

less than half a mile in 1952 to about 18 miles in 2002. This

trend has been mostly at the expense of buses, the use of which

has declined from over 4.83 km per person per day to half that

figure, and cycling, which has declined from 1.2 km to about

0.32 km per day. Travel by rail, despite the cuts of Dr Beeching,

has stayed fairly constant at just over 1 mile per person per

day, an indication that the good doctor’s diagnosis (that poorly

used branch lines could be axed without too much loss of

business) was surprisingly accurate.

Shown on a logarithmic scale (Fig. 3), it is very clear that the

extent to which we travel has been driven up by the

availability of cars. The most significant new modes and the

ones to watch are air travel and taxis/minicabs. Fig. 4 further

illustrates the close links between the proportion of travel

undertaken by car and the rise in car ownership. It also

suggests that the change in mode share may be levelling off,

even if the change in the amount of travel is not.

Figure 5 shows a similar impact of the motor vehicle on the

transport of freight. From a position where it handled morethan half the tonne-kilometres of freight, rail has declined to a

current level of just over 10%.

Figure 6 suggests that a part of the reason why such a switch to

the use of roads has been possible is the steady and continuing

success of traffic engineers in squeezing more traffic along

motorways and roads. Notions of the amount of traffic that a

road can carry have been progressively revised upwards, in the

case of motorways from 1500 passenger car units/hour (pcu/h)

per lane in the 1960s to 2000 today. Already, in the United

States, continuous flows of 2800 pcu/h per lane are being

observed, and with closer headways becoming more widespread

and intelligent cruise control becoming available, it is not

impossible that lane capacities will eventually be revised

upwards towards 3000 pcu/h per lane.

But squeezing more traffic along existing roads is unlikely to

provide much more capacity compared with what can be

achieved by using alternative modes of transport. Fig. 7

illustrates the increases in passengers per hour that can be

achieved by devoting road lanes to the exclusive use of

minibuses, cycles, rigid buses or articulated buses. Under these

circumstances the passenger throughput of a lane or road can

be increased to more than 25 000 passengers per lane per hour.

Beyond this, heavy rail metro systems can and do achieve volumes of 80 000 passenger per track per hour.

4. NEW ENVIRONMENTAL IMPERATIVES

4.1. The Traffic in Towns view of the environmental

issues

Colin Buchanan was not a boastful man, rather the contrary,

but he used occasionally to say that the word ‘environment’

was not in common planning parlance until the publication of

Traffic in Towns with its concepts of environmental areas and

environmental capacities. The effects of traffic on the

environment were systematically spelt out in Traffic in Townsunder the headings of noise, pollution, visual intrusion and

severance. The arguments were compelling. Not only were the

environmental impacts of the use and parking of cars in cities

HOUGHTONREGIS

DUNSTABLE

LUTON

HOUGHTONREGIS

DUNSTABLE

LUTON

HOUGHTONREGIS

DUNSTABLE

LUTON

HOUGHTONREGIS

DUNSTABLE

LUTON

1920

1946

1963

1994

Fig. 1. Growth of development in Luton/Dunstable

Transport 157 Issue TR1 BuchananMore or less traffic in towns?



already totally unacceptable, but attempting to accommodate

the expected growth by more roads and parking would in

many towns also prove to have prohibitive environmental

costs, even if the financial costs of so doing could be afforded.

4.2. Global warming

What Buchanan did not foresee was that, within 40 years, a

new, quite different and far more sinister set of environmentalimpacts would arise, a significant part of the blame for which

would be attributed to the motor vehicle. No one who has read

the scientific facts, unemotively and dryly set out in the pages

of the Shanghai Memorandum of the International Committee

on Climate Change (2001),3

can be in any doubt as to the scale

of the climate change that is now upon us, nor of its potential

consequences.

The Shanghai Memorandum assembles far more scientific data

than has hitherto been available and confirms the clear

advance of global warming.

(a) The 1990s were the warmest decade since 1861.

(b) 1998 was the warmest year since 1861.

20·0

18·0

16·0

14·0

12·0

10·0

8·0

6·0

4·0

2·0

0

Buses and coaches

Motorcycles

Pedal cycles

Surface rail

Air

Cars, vans and taxis

All franchises awardedPrivatisation

Beeching

1952 1956 1960 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996

3·5

3·0

2·5

2·0

1·5

1·0

0·5

0

M i l e s p e r p e r s o n p e r d a y ( e x c l .

c a r s , v a n s a n d t a x i s )

M i l e s p e r p e r s o n p e r d a y ( c a

r s , v a n s a n d t a x i s )

Fig. 2. Transport trends in the UK, mobility by means of mode of transport: distance travelled per day per capita (distance for cars,vans and taxis plotted against right-hand scale) (1 mile = 1.609 km)

Buses and coaches

Cars, vans and taxis

Motorcycles

Pedal cycles

Surface rail

All modes

Air

100

10

1

0·1

0·01

0

M i l e s p e r d a y p e r c a p i t a ( l o g a r i t h m

i c s c a l e )

1952 1956 1960 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996

Fig. 3. Transport trends in the UK, mobility by mode of transport: distance travelled per day per capita (1 mile = 1 .609 km)




(c ) Temperatures are rising in the lowest 8 km of theatmosphere.

(d ) The snow and ice cover has decreased in the northern

hemisphere.

(e ) The average sea level rise in the twentieth century was

0.1– 0.2 m.

( f ) Rainfall is increasing by 0.5–1% per decade in the

northern hemisphere.

(g) There has been less change in the Antarctic.

The Shanghai draft, contrary to the hopes of President Bush,

confirms human activity as the most significant cause of this

global warming.

(a) CO2 has increased by 31% since 1750.

(b) The present concentration has probably not been exceeded

for 20 million years.

(c ) The current rate of increase of CO2 concentration is

unprecedented for 20 000 years.

(d ) Three quarters of the CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel

burning.

(e ) The remainder is due to land use change and deforestation.( f ) Similar rates of change are to be seen in the concentrations

of other greenhouse gases such as CH4 and NO2.

The next conclusion of the Shanghai draft is that the

forecasting models used by climatologists are getting better.

Their new understanding of the mechanisms at work in climate

change suggest that.

(a) CO2 from fossil fuels will dominate trends for the rest of

the century.

(b) The share of CO2 concentration that can be cancelled out

by forests and oceans will decline.(c ) By the end of this century CO2 concentrations will be

between 540 and 970 parts per million (ppm), figures that

would be reduced by only 40–70 ppm even if the whole

world were reforested.

(d ) Reductions in emissions are necessary to stabilise the rate

at which global warming is occurring (radiative forcing).

(e ) The temperature rise between 1990 and 2100 will be 1.4–

1.88C.

( f ) Sea level rise over the same period will be 0.09–0.88 m.

(g) These changes will occur and persist even if greenhouse

gas concentrations are stabilised.

As if these dire warnings were not enough, the Shanghai draft

contains interesting calculations as to the impacts of melting

ice sheets.

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

% H

o u s e h o l d s o w n

i n g 1 c

a r s

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

S h a r e o f d i s t a n c e t r a v e l l e d ( % m

i l e s p e r p e r s o n p e r d a y )

1 9 5 2

1 9 5 7

1 9 6 2

1 9 6 7

1 9 7 2

1 9 7 7

1 9 8 2

1 9 8 7

1 9 9 2

1 9 9 7

Car ownership

Rail

Bus/coaches

Private motorised

Fig. 4. Transport trends: share of distance travelled by bus,rail and cars compared with the trend in car ownership levels(1 mile = 1.609 km)

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

P e r c e n t a g e

Beginning of decline in bulk carryingof coal and iron

Competition from road transport beginningto bite into rail profits

1 9 5 3

1 9 5 7

1 9 6 5

1 9 6 9

1 9 7 3

1 9 7 7

1 9 8 1

1 9 8 5

1 9 8 9

1 9 9 3

1 9 9 7

1 9 6 1

Road

Rail

Fig. 5. Transport trends: share of freight hauled (km-tonnes)between rail and road

4-lane

6-lane

3500

30002500

2000

1500

1000

500

0 D e s i g n f l o w p e r l a n e : p c u / h

1966 1985–99 1999 2010

Year

Fig. 6. Changing estimates of road capacity: UK motorway(speed ¼ 50 mph)

Passenger/

hours

30000

25000

20000

15000

10000

5000

0Car Minibus Cycle Rigid bus Artic bus

Fig. 7. Passenger capacity of a 3 m road lane




(a) The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would lead to a sea

level rise of 7 m.

(b) The melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet would lead to a

rise of 3 m.

4.3. The contribution of transport to global

environmental problems

Global problems clearly demand global policies, and from Rio

to Kyoto to the Hague there has been commendable

determination first by the Tories and now by New Labour to

get in place a set of international policies that will at least

stabilise the rate of warming. This rate clearly needs to be

stabilised at as low a level as possible.

There is also an important political dimension to the problem.

Poorer, developing countries just beginning to savour the

prosperity that burning fossil fuels can bring are unlikely to be

persuaded that they should rein in their demand by

exhortations from wealthier countries whose per capita

consumption is already far greater. Each of the wealthier

countries has therefore to be seen to be setting its own house

in order.

4.4. Contribution of traffic

Within the UK the contribution of transport to total global

warming emissions has been estimated to be (figures courtesy

of Dr Phil Bly)

(a) CO2 26%

(b) CO 91%

(c ) NO2 61%

(d ) volatile organic compounds 42%

(e ) particulates 59%

(f

) proportion of all energy use 33%.

It may therefore be concluded that transport is a significant

cause of global warming. Yet despite the dire warnings many

politicians and transport planners still delude themselves that

global warming is something that can be eliminated or at least

brought under control in 10–20 years. The fact that we have

already switched on what I calculate to be the equivalent of a

net of heaters around the planet at a density of 1 kW every

10 m2, that we cannot switch these off, and that we are

annually adding further heaters still seems to elude people.

4.5. Greater fuel efficiency

Potentially offsetting some of these adverse effects is theachievement of greater fuel efficiency. Largely as a result of

European legislation, the car has become steadily cleaner over

the last two decades, and these developments seem set to

continue. The 3 litre VW Golf Lupo (Fig. 8) is already common

in Germany, the ‘3’ referring not to the size of the engine, but

to the number of litres of diesel required to drive 100 km

(equivalent to nearly 100 mpg). And last year the head of

Volkswagen, Herr Piech, drove the first 1 litre VW from

Hanover to Hamburg, at about 300 mpg. Huge savings in fuel

consumption and hence in the emission of greenhouse gases

are therefore possible. The problem in the UK seems to be to

persuade motorists to buy the fuel-efficient cars. Instead they have been switching to larger cars and four-wheel drives

(Fig. 9) at a rate that has cancelled out all the reductions in

greenhouse gas emissions achieved by cleaner engines. There is

clearly a simple, if politically delicate, solution to this problem,

one that does not need the paraphernalia of road user charging

and which could also send the right long-term messages to the

freight industry. It is to raise the duty on fuel.

5. THE CHOICES SEEN IN TRAFFIC IN TOWNS

5.1. All things to all men?

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the publication

of Traffic in Towns, I was asked to talk on the subject to the

Chester Civic Society. I made the point to them, though never

to my father, that to some extent the enduring popularity of

Traffic in Towns was due to the fact that it meant all things to

all men. Highway engineers saw it as heralding a new era of

road building, environmentalists saw it as bringing to an end

the dominance of cities by traffic, and public transport

advocates saw it as requiring new and better bus and rail

services.

Buchanan saw it as implying political choices, and he generally

cited these as being between the degree of restriction that

would need to be applied to car use, the scale and cost of the

Fig. 8. VW Lupo

Fig. 9. VW four-wheel drive




investment in roads and parking that would alternatively be

necessary to give increased car accessibility, and the quality of

the resulting urban environment, including the impacts of the

new roads themselves. He was well aware that the choices

regarding vehicle accessibility implied further choices about

public transport alternatives to the car.

5.2. Buchanan’s view of the choices

Regarding his three major choices, it is clear that Buchanan

believed that far more investment was required in transport as

a whole and in roads in particular. From his visits, made before

the war, to see the new German autobahns, and from his

enduring admiration for their design, it is also clear that he

believed that new roads could, at a cost, be designed to fit

harmoniously into both townscape and landscape. Towards the

end of his life, however, looking out from his window on Boars

Hill, he would indicate that he could both see and hear the

heavy traffic on the distant A34 trunk road, though I was never

sure whether this caused him irritation or interesting

reflections. It is also of interest that in his last book, I Told You

So,4

he still insists that in some circumstances roads couldpositively enhance the landscape, but repeatedly adds the

qualification ‘except for the traffic’.

On the other hand it is also clear that Buchanan did not believe

that people would tolerate too many restrictions on their

accessibility by car unless good public transport alternatives

were in place and that these would find it hard to match the

speed and convenience of the car. He was, however, more than

ready to contemplate restrictions on access; indeed he regarded

such restrictions as inevitable in many towns, emphasising the

importance of parking controls and backing the longer-term

possibility of road pricing.

But it was probably on the environmental issues that Buchanan

himself was least ready to compromise: too much had already

been sacrificed to the motor vehicle. Thus in many of CBP’s

early studies, notably in historic cities such as Bath, where the

environmental issues were not open to negotiation, he and his

teams soon found themselves confronted by much simpler and

starker choices: provide more roads and parking, or restrict car

access and find a public transport alternative. Moreover the

roads and parking had to be environmentally acceptable: the

new road to be in tunnel in Bath and the additional parking in

Oxford to be skilfully designed to blend in with its historic

setting.

Aware that these choices would often be difficult, Buchanan

put great faith in the power of the study and the Inquiry to

clarify the issues. Like everyone else at the time (and some of

us today) he placed reliance on the then new transportation

models and on the systematic analysis of environmental

impacts. He was clearly less comfortable when it came to

applying cost–benefit analysis to the models’ forecasts,

particularly if the conclusions went against his assessment of

the environmental issues. On these matters he always made up

his own mind, usually after long periods looking at things on

the ground—a habit probably acquired before the war duringhis early days with the Ministry of Transport in Exeter as one

of a group of engineers responsible for roads and accident

investigations in the Southwest.

6. THE CHOICES TODAY

6.1. Changing nature of the problems

Today, although the logic of the choices posed by Traffic in

Towns remains persuasive, the reality has moved on, at least

partly in the way foreseen by the economists. Large sectors of

town-centre economies have decamped to locations where they

have been able to create the environments they crave, with the

car accessibility their customers and/or staff want. Retail

activities in Sheffield have, for example, largely moved to

Meadowhall some 5 km east of the city centre, by the M1;

much of the banking and financial services sector of Edinburgh

has similarly forsaken the historic centre for the new

Edinburgh Park development on the city’s ring road. Similarly,

countless other retailers and businesses have also moved out to

shopping centres, retail and business parks. Hospitals, schools,

and warehousing have sought economies of scale by similarly

concentrating into larger units in out-of-town or edge-of-town

locations and preferably close to motorway interchanges.

Housing has also spread out at lower densities in estates, laid

out to accommodate the car, but all too often impenetrable to

public transport. Whole new cities, such as Milton Keynes,have been designed around the car, but with apparently little

thought for the effect this would have on other modes,

particularly cycling and buses.

Some of the problems that Buchanan foresaw so clearly have

thus become even more intractable and widespread. Today it is

additionally almost impossible to discuss the problems of

dealing with traffic in towns without at the same time

considering the traffic between them and their new and greatly

expanded, semi-urban hinterlands. And even beyond the urban

fringes, where Traffic in Towns confidently concluded that

‘enough is known. . .’, the problems of overloaded motorways

can be traced to the dispersal of homes and activities made

both possible and economic by the fast motor vehicle on the

fast road.

6.2. More complex choices

As the nature of the problems has changed, so the choices

Colin posed have become less and less simple. New roads,

because they enable people to travel further and thus ‘generate’

more traffic, have been painted as part of the problem rather

than as a solution.

Further choices, not discussed in Traffic in Towns, have also

emerged. One of these is that between the needs of publictransport and those of general traffic. Bus lanes and trams

operating on-street inevitably reduce the capacity available for

other road users and often encounter fierce opposition from

frontagers. It has thus become difficult to provide the ‘good,

cheap public transport’ that the Traffic in Towns team

cheerfully assumed would come to the rescue when car access

had to be restricted. And if providing good public transport

was difficult in towns as they were in 1963, it is far more so

today, when they have dispersed on such a huge scale and to

urban structures laid out neither for full use of the car nor for

service by public transport.

The debate over public transport alternatives to the car has also

exposed several ‘vicious circles’ of decline under which, on the

one hand, more road construction and, on the other hand,




worse congestion mean fewer public transport users, and hence

higher fares or reduced services for those remaining, and thus

further loss of passengers. And this in turn has raised issues of

social deprivation.

Comprehensive redevelopment, the opportunities for which

were already, in 1963, seen to be slipping away, rapidly came

to be vilified. This was partly on account of its disregard for

the conservation and rehabilitation of older housing and partly

because most of the results rapidly seemed themselves to look

outdated. Although today the work of development

corporations and urban regeneration project teams has shown

that a comprehensive approach can bear fruit, the opportunities

for comprehensive redevelopment, on the scale anticipated in

Traffic in Towns, have gone, taking with them much of the

potential to accommodate new roads in an environmentally

acceptable way.

Finally, in many streets, environmental standards have been

sacrificed to traffic and parking. What Buchanan regarded as

most sacrosanct, and a key objective and determinant of

policy, has often proved, of his three choices, to be that onwhich society has been most ready to compromise. Politicians

and society as a whole have not so much made these choices as

simply drifted into them, propelled both by niggardly budgets

and by the difficulties of achieving any consensus as to what

should be done next year, never mind in the next 20 years.

Valiant efforts by some, including the present government, to

get people to accept that choices have to be made have fallen

largely on deaf ears, and rational discussion has often been

hindered by the technical half-truths on which some transport

policies have been constructed. I do not intend to deal with

these here, but I include among them the view that because

new or widened roads ‘generate’ traffic it is better not to build

them. From this it is but a small step to the even more

erroneous view that road improvements can worsen traffic

congestion.

6.3. Positive achievements

Important exceptions to the catalogue of indecision have

included

(a) the widespread introduction and enforcement of parking

controls (the parking anarchy of the 1960s is now hard to

remember)

(b) the dogged attempts to insulate bus services from the worsteffects of traffic congestion through bus priority measures

(c ) cities such as Oxford, where the combination of providing

alternatives to the car and discouraging its use has led to a

major switch from car to public transport for travel to the

city centre

(d ) other cities—some historic, others less so—which like

Norwich, Stafford and Nottingham have significantly rolled

back the frontiers of the car by substantial city-centre

pedestrianisation schemes, often linked to edge-of-town

type malls built adjacent to the central area

(e ) cities such as Manchester, which in an imaginative way

have put to far better use (by the Metrolink in Manchester’scase) the extensive network of inherited and underused

railway lines

( f ) cities such as Chester and York, which have combined

widespread pedestrianisation with park and ride for those

wishing to access the city centre, but obliged to rely on

their cars at the home end of the journey.

6.4. The choices today

A common feature of most of these exceptions is that they

achieved acceptability for some restrictions on car use by

providing at least some form of public transport alternative, no

matter how rudimentary. A second common feature is that they relate mostly to city centres, among the few destinations for

which public transport in the various forms in which we know

it is able to provide a reasonable, even if usually slower and

often higher priced, alternative to the car. If we draw the

conclusion from this that the only travel demands for which

politicians will be willing to impose charges or restrictions on

the use of private transport are those for which some

reasonable alternative form of transport can be provided, then

four simple questions emerge.

(a) For what types of passenger demand or in what travel

markets can conventional public transport compete

effectively with the car?

(b) What forms of public transport could serve the more

dispersed travel demands that conventional systems (buses

and railways) cannot?

(c ) Would it be feasible to provide such systems?

(d ) Are there equivalent lessons to be drawn regarding the

distribution of freight?

The essential policy choices that then emerge are as follows.

(a) How can the policies already known to be effective in

reducing car use for travel to town centres be more widely

applied, and what effects will this have on general trafficlevels?

(b) To what other major traffic attractors (hospitals, airports,

etc.) can similar policies be applied, how can this be more

widely achieved, and to what extent will it reduce general

traffic?

(c ) If it is possible to conceive of new public transport systems

that would compete with the car, where conventional

systems cannot, how can such systems be introduced?

(d ) If such systems are not possible, what options exist other

than expanding the road network?

7. OUTPERFORMING THE MOTOR VEHICLE WITHPUBLIC TRANSPORT

7.1. Defining the markets for travel

In addressing the questions raised in section 6 it is helpful to

consider travel demand in terms of four ‘travel markets’ for

personal and freight movement:

(a) long-distance and inter-city travel

(b) trips to and from city or town centres

(c ) trips to and from other major trip attractors (from airports

to schools and hospitals)

(d ) trips between dispersed origins and destinations in andbetween suburban and rural areas.

Obviously each of these travel markets could be further




subdivided, for example by journey purpose, by time of day/

week, or by the size of the party travelling.

The significance of the travel markets in terms of the total

amount of traffic (vehicle-km) that each causes varies

according to the size of the urban area. In the extreme case of

Greater London car travel to/from the large central area

accounts for only about 12% of total car-km.5

This is partly

because 85% of trips to the central area are already made by

public transport and partly because there are far more person-

km and a far higher percentage by car in London’s suburban

and cross-boundary travel markets.

7.2. Competing with the car in the long-distance travel

markets

In the long-distance, inter-city travel markets (more than

300 km) both the plane and the train already comfortably beat

the car and are in fact locked in competition with each other,

with everything from pendolinos to high-speed airport links

being thrown into the battle. The significance of these travel

markets and the current role of rail compared with the car may

be judged from Fig. 10. This shows that, although rail accountsfor nearly 30% of all the person-km caused by trips longer

than 160 km, this travel market itself accounts for only 12% of

the traffic on the nation’s roads. Concentrating on this travel

market, which it can serve efficiently and well, will therefore

make commercial sense for the railways and help them to

compete with the airlines, but will not greatly reduce the

country’s traffic problems. Most of these are caused by shorter

trips.

7.3. Competing with the car for travel to city and town

centres

Section 6 argued that a number of the UK’s city centres have

already demonstrated that it is possible for public transport to

outperform the car in serving city centres. London is the

extreme case where the central area cannot function without

the rail network that serves it. Others are similarly dependent

on buses. The keys to this success are investing in good

conventional public transport, giving it the necessary priority,

and applying some disincentives to car use (e.g. strict control

of on-street parking space, a significant price for all parking,

and some access restrictions). The achieved shares by public

transport in the city-centre travel markets speak for themselves

(85% to central London and 42% to Oxford city centre with a

further 16% on bikes).

The adoption of such an approach is more acceptable if the

public transport alternative is available for all the potential

users from the suburbs and beyond (the latter contributing half

the city-centre car trips in the case of Oxford). In London this

is achieved by long-distance rail commuter lines, medium-

distance Underground lines, and short-distance bus services.

Station car parks ensure that the public transport system is

available to those who have to start their journeys by car. In

Oxford the public transport alternative involves city bus

services, operating at good frequencies, partly in their own bus

lanes, some good longer-distance bus services, and park and

ride services for those who have no alternative but to start

their journeys by car, but who may find the car to be anencumbrance or an expense in the city centre.

There is clearly a delicate balance to be struck between the

degree of restriction to be applied to the car and the frequency,

availability, speed and price of the public transport alternative

offered. A good public transport system means that tough

restrictions on car use will be acceptable and vice versa. Ken

Livingstone has recognised that the quality of London’s public

transport services to and within the central area is already such

that road user charging can be introduced as a further

disincentive to car use without much fear of a backlash and in

the knowledge that it will immediately speed up bus services

within the charged area, thus increasing their capacity, and

raise funds for further public transport improvements.

7.3. Competing with the car for travel to major

suburban trip attractors

These relatively straightforward ways of getting people to use

conventional public transport instead of cars (see Fig. 11) could

be far more widely and better applied to many town centres.

They could also be applied to other major trip attractors. Public

transport, in the forms in which we know it, is obviously

capable in principle of serving any destination that is

approached by significant numbers of people along common

corridors. This definition applies to a surprising number of tripattractors, from schools and hospitals to airports and out-of-

town business parks or shopping centres. For all these

destinations good conventional public transport—bus, tram or

park and ride—ought to be able to provide services that, if there

were a little more pressure on the car (higher prices or access

restrictions), would provide a competitive alternative to it.

Driving a friend or relative to the airport used to be an

interesting excursion, but is now a chore. Driving kids to

school is a worse one. So if such alternatives existed there is a

prima facie case for expecting that they would be used.

Moreover, if this is true then it must be traffic congestion or

the current legal and financial framework that is somehowpreventing such services from being provided.

If it is further true that such markets for conventional public

Rail passenger-milesCar driver-miles

0 – 1

1 – 2

2 – 5

5 – 1 0

1 0 – 2 5

2 5 – 5 0

5 0 – 1 0 0

1 0 0

Trip length category: miles

1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0

P e r s o n - m i l e s ( 0

0 0 )

Fig. 10. Why high-speed trains will do little to reduce traffic




transport exist, and that operators are somehow restrained from

serving them, then it follows that there will be exceptions, and

that somewhere it will be possible to see such services already

in action and fulfilling the needs identified. And sure enough

such services do exist. Take, for example, the Thornhill park and ride site, designed to intercept city-centre-bound traffic on

the A40 as it approaches Oxford from the direction of London.

A recent survey showed that over a third of the Thornhill

parking spaces were occupied not by cars whose owners had

gone into Oxford, but by those whose owners, often dragging

heavy suitcases, had risked their lives crossing a busy road,

waited on a dreary lay-by with no shelter, and caught the bus

in the opposite direction to Heathrow or central London (Fig.12). If such services can work despite the designs of planners,

how much better might they function with some proper

planning?

Fig. 11. Enough is known about controlling car use to town centres: (a) fast rail links to outer metropolitan areas; (b) tough parkingenforcement; (c) feeder services to metro stations; (d) bus priority; (e) adequate provision for cycling and mopeds; (f) integratedticketing




The answer to this question can be found in a CBP report6

prepared 15 years ago and designed to explore how public

transport’s share of the travel market to Manchester Airport

could be increased significantly above the 8% then being

achieved by the conventional bus and rail services to the newairport station. This study showed that up to 10 miles from the

airport its passengers and staff accounted for about 20% of the

traffic on the motorway network. Twenty miles away sufficient

of this traffic could be intercepted by park and ride and kiss

and ride to justify a minibus service operating every 15 min

direct to the terminal entrances (rather than to long-stay car

parks, where many would otherwise have had to drive to catch

a different bus) (Fig. 13).

The question that then arises is why, if there is a market for

them, such conventional services are seldom provided. The

answers to this question relate to conflicting responsibilities

and commercial interests. At the Manchester Airport Second

Runway Inquiry, for example, the idea of remote terminals was

opposed by the Regional Office of the Department of Transport,

which clearly saw it as undermining its attempts to extract

money for motorway widening from the Airport Company. The

company in turn saw park and ride as needing investment and

abstracting revenue from its profitable parking operations,

already in competition with private car parks outside the

airport perimeter. These revenues were, with the abolition of

duty free, soon to become one of its two remaining sources of

revenue.

Similar conflicts probably exist for public transport services

that might be provided for schools, hospitals etc., and all are

overlaid by undue reliance on market forces and an

unwillingness or inability to impose obligations on major trip

attractors to take such actions until they happen to need

planning permission for a new classroom or runway. I was

interested to learn during a recent study of bus regulation in

Europe that in Austria an obligation is placed jointly on the

schools and the bus operators to plan the school bus services atthe beginning of each academic year. In the UK this obligation

is imposed only for children living a certain distance away, and

only from state schools, when it is the private and

denominational schools that have both the larger catchment

areas and the wealthier parents, with higher car ownership

levels.

7.4.1. Getting the land use and transport mix right. Major

suburban/semi-urban trip attractors would be very much easier

to serve with conventional public transport if they could

themselves be arranged in corridors along which buses, trams

Fig. 12. Unplanned park and ride/kiss and ride (and fly) atThornhill, A40

BLACKPOOL

PRESTON70

WIGAN

BOLTON

MANCHESTER

AIRPORT

LIVERPOOL

50

WARRINGTON

50

CHESTER

WREXHAM

70

STOKE-ON-TRENT

M 6

A6

M1

CHESTERFIELD

35

A57SHEFFIELD

WAKEFIELD

HUDDERSFIELD

110

M 6 2

BRADFORD

LEEDS

FROM A1

Catchment area boundary

70 Satellite with average number of airport passengers driving past

the site each half hour (CAA 1992)

M62

Fig. 13. Potential for park and ride/kiss and ride to Manchester Airport




or rail could operate efficiently. CBP recently made such

proposals for the expansion of both Galway (the Ardaun

corridor, Fig. 14) and Limerick (the Ennis and Nenagh

corridors). In the Ardaun corridor the schools, shops and

employment centres were to be located on a busway and

interspersed with housing, all of which would be within 300 m

of a bus stop. It was estimated that such a layout would enable

the busway to support a 5 min service not only linking

together all the homes and trip attractors, but also connecting

the whole corridor to the city centre of Galway and thus

improving the inner city bus services.

Many bus services already serve such corridors, with housing

estates at either end, a town centre in the middle, and jobs,

schools and more housing between. But such services are often

made slow and unreliable by traffic congestion and slow

ticketing procedures, and are further undermined by parking

policies and by layouts for housing, business parks and

industrial estates, which are almost impossible to serve by bus.

Recent policy advice has tended to concentrate on issues of

density, when it is usually the layout that makes new

developments difficult to serve by public transport.

7.5. Competing with the car in the dispersed (intra-

suburban and semi-urban) travel markets

It is the sprawling suburbs and semi-urban fringes of UK cities

for which conventional public transport systems have the

greatest difficulty in providing a credible alternative to private

vehicles. In some towns bus services terminate in the centres,

and in some conurbations rail services terminate on the edge of

central areas. Cross-connecting and inter-working such services

is therefore a practical way of connecting at least some of the

suburbs and using the demand to the centre to provide far

better service levels than could be justified by the intra-

suburban markets alone.

This could be done in Manchester, where the bus services are

terminated in edge-of-centre bus stations but the Metrolink

tram has been carefully threaded through the city centre. It has

been done as Thameslink for rail in London, following the

1974 London Rail study, and that project’s success soon led to

proposals for a larger scheme, Thameslink 2000, now running

late. The far more ambitious London CrossRail scheme (Fig. 15)

will directly connect many suburbs with a service likely to be

very competitive with the car.

7.5.1. The importance of interchange. In connecting radial

public transport services to provide for intra-suburban travel

systems, the importance of convenient interchange is often

neglected. Despite the excellent examples of cross-platform

interchange in London and Hong Kong, it is surprising how

often the opportunities for such edge-of-centre interchanges

are missed in the planning of new rail or metro systems. And

at the equivalent of the cross-platform interchange on most

bus networks—the high street bus stop—there is commonly no

special provision for interchange, with passengers obliged to

cross busy roads, like round traffic management systems and

tolerate conditions that would never be imposed on metropassengers. Only one city in the world, Curitiba (Brazil), has

really delivered for buses what we take for granted on most

metro and tram systems, and it is not surprising that Curitiba

provides enclosed, ticketless interchange between its trunk and

feeder bus services. Imagine the London underground without

such interchange; yet we tolerate it on our buses (Fig. 16).

One further possibility seems worth consideration in enabling

existing rail networks to compete with the car in and beyond

the intra-suburban travel markets. This is a way of connecting

the key nodes on the separate radial suburban rail networks

faster than travelling via the city centre. In London one would

be referring to stations such as Clapham Junction, East

Ardaun resident

Adjacent development

Existing development

Business park

District centre

Park and ride

Primary school

Secondary school

Community use

Local shops

Proposed airport terminal

IE freight yard

IE passenger stop

Busway/bus stop

Busway extension

N18 future line

Pedestrian route

BP

DC

P1R

PS

SS

CU

LS

AT

FY

PI

Possible

reloactedrunwayRailway

N6 Dublin

Oranmore

N18Limerick

Oranmore Bay

N6

INDUSTRY

PARK SPORTS

P1R

PS

BP

PS

LSDC

SS

CU

PS

LS

FY

PI

AT

N18Claregalway/Tuam

Fig. 14. Density or layout? The CBP plan for the Ardaun corridor




Croydon or West Hampstead. In Stockholm such connections

are being provided by the new non-radial light rail Trarbanan

line. But this is relatively slow. The fast, non-stop HeathrowExpress rail link provides a vision of a possible alternative. A

high-frequency, high-speed, direct tunnelled link between some

of the key nodes on the different radial rail networks might be

worth consideration as an alternative to the awkward cross

central area connections or the expensive CrossRail schemes.

However, even if such schemes were to prove feasible and

justifiable, there would inevitably remain huge segments of the

intra-suburban and semi-urban travel markets for which

neither rail nor bus could compete with the car on the fast

road.

7.5.2. ULTra. Providing a form of public transport thatcompetes with the car in urban areas is in theory not too

difficult a problem, because the car itself generally offers door-

to-door journey speeds of less than 30 km/h. This is because of

junctions, traffic congestion, etc. Urban rail systems, with their

own rights of way, generally offer similar station-to-station

speeds. They do not have the congestion to contend with, but

instead they have to stop and pick up or set down passengers.

Urban buses have both the congestion and the picking up/

setting down to do, and therefore offer stop-to-stop travel

speeds that are generally less than 20 km/h, typically spending

30–40% of their journey times stationary at stops, traffic

signals or in congestion. Their consequent unreliability adds a

further disincentive to passengers, making buses very

unattractive compared with the car. Neither of these

conventional public transport systems therefore offers a

realistic alternative to the car, when door-to-door journey

speeds are considered, unless traffic congestion is very severe

and the bus has really effective priority over the car. Yet the

journey speed of the car remains quite slow, and therefore not

impossible to beat with public transport.

To beat the car with public transport, one has to eliminate the

congestion and junction delays and greatly reduce or eliminatethe dwell times at stations or stops. One system that does all

these things, and is due to be installed in Cardiff, is ULTra, a

development of the cabtrack system conceived at the then Road

Research Laboratory, at about the time of Traffic in Towns, but

never taken forward, because of its apparent intrusiveness in

the urban environment.

ULTra achieves non-stop journey speeds of about 40 km/h, by

operating on one-way loops and having all its stops/stations

off-line. Though its running speed is slow, its station-to-station

journey speed is likely to prove twice that of a bus, and

sufficiently fast to make it competitive with the car’s door-to-door journey speed for many intra-urban and intra-suburban

trips, especially when the delays and costs in finding parking

spaces are taken into account.

ToReading

Slough

Hayes

Heathrow

EalingBroadway

PaddingtonTottenhamCourt Road

LiverpoolStreet

BondStreet

WhitechapelFarringdon

Isle of Dogs

Charlton

Woolwich Arsenal

AbbeyWood

RoyalDocks

DartfordEbbsfleet

Shenfield

Stratford

Ilford

Romford

Harrowon the Hill

WembleyCentral Willesden

Junction

Wembly Park

Harrow &Wealdstone

WatfordJunction

Chesham

Amersham

Rickmansworth

To Aylesbury

Fig. 15. Serving the dispersed travel markets: CrossRail

Fig. 16. The tram-like-bus: a stop in Curitiba, Brazil




ULTra’s track has to be completely segregated (Fig. 17). This is

necessary in order to provide the non-stop travel, and because

it is driverless.

ULTra cannot operate on-street like a tram. Unlike its

precursor, cabtrack, however, the structures needed for ULTra

can now (thanks to Arups) be made slim and elegant—a result

partly of advances in structural engineering and partly of a

decision to reduce the size and hence the weight of the

vehicles. These carry four passengers and are powered by

batteries, which are recharged at stations. ULTra will not

compete with rail systems, but it will compete for many trips in

urban and suburban areas, with buses and with the car. Its

potential to contribute to urban traffic problems is therefore

worth further consideration.†

7.5.3. Neue Bahntechnik Paderborn. Complementing ULTra’s

potential to compete with the car in urban and suburban areas

is an extraordinarily bold and imaginative concept under

development in Germany. At the University of Paderborn a

research team, drawn from the automotive industry and from

the group behind Germany’s very high-speed, linear inductionmotor powered Maglev train, have patiently researched all the

ingredients for a completely new and fully automated rail

system, which could use existing tracks and deliver a service

an order of magnitude better than anything available today.

The NBP essentially replaces all the vestiges of nineteenth-

century rail technology that have been patiently and

systematically improved and perfected throughout the

twentieth century (Fig. 18), but which still deliver a service that

fails to compete with the car in the travel markets that generate

the bulk of the traffic on Britain’s crowded roads and

motorways.

Typical non-London station-to-station journey speeds by rail

are seldom better than 80 km/h (Table 1) and, if they are not

radial to London, they are even slower: 40–80 km/h (Table 2).

The NBP proposal is to provide non-stop travel between any

pair of stations or goods depots at 160 km/h.

Fig. 17. Visualisation of ULTra (an urban alternative to thecar) operating in Cardiff

†Since the paper was presented ULTra’s installation in Cardiff has been delayed by tendering problems. It has meanwhile been assessed in several other towns and some

airports, and has been found to be effective and affordable.

Fig. 18 Rail: a brilliant product of the first industrial revolution, so far largely untouched by the second

Journey Distance: overtrack miles

Running speed:mph (km/h)

Manchester– Nottingham 83 49 (78)Cambridge–Worcester 160 42 (67)Southampton–Bristol 77 48 (77)Oxford–Bristol 75 52 (83)Grantham–Hull 91 51 (82)

Table 1. Rail journey speeds non-London

Journey Time: min Speed: mph(km/h)

Canterbury–Brighton 170 32 (51)Milton Keynes –Basingstoke 140 26 (42)Oxford–Croydon 135 36 (58)Guildford–Luton 130 40 (64)Bedford–Southampton 165 49 (78)

Table 2. London region non-radial rail journey speeds




The essential features of the NBP rail technology (Fig. 19)

are

(a) linear induction motors

(b) modular shuttles

(c ) passive points

(d ) mixed passenger and freight ‘trains’

(e ) car technology suspension, including tilting

( f ) no signals or drivers

(g) 100 mph non-stop station-to-station journey speeds.

Perhaps unsurprisingly NBP has yet to receive any support

from the Deutsche Bundesbahn, and has failed to attract

interest in the UK from train operating companies, the

Department for Transport, or the Strategic Rail Authority (with

the notable exception of our chairman today). A development

that could transform rail travel into something that would be

preferred to the fast car on the fast road, and which could also

transform the delivery of freight, is difficult to conceive given

today’s relatively slow rail journey times and amidst today’s

regular fare of cancellations, unreliability and leaves on the

line. But that is what the NBP development could provide if itsdesigners are able to deliver what they claim, and if they are

given the necessary backing.

8. CONCLUSIONS

It is tempting to conclude that Colin Buchanan and the

Traffic in Towns team produced a seminal work, which

society in general and politicians in particular chose to

ignore; and that we are today reaping the consequences of a

deteriorating environment, gridlock on our roads, and the

prospect of draconian restrictions on our freedom to use cars

or much higher charges for the use of roads. But a

remarkable and politically astute feature of Traffic in Towns

was its view that the decisions required were essentially

political. Buchanan found himself at the centre of far more

controversy as soon as he became a consultant, trying to

help authorities from Bath to Kuwait to make those

decisions, than he did when Traffic in Towns exposed the

need for the choices to be made.

Nearly 40 years after the publication of Traffic in Towns the

problems it identified have become more intractable:

urbanisation has spread, car dependence has increased, and

new environmental imperatives have emerged. At the same

time the options available have become more restricted: the

opportunities for comprehensive redevelopment have retreated,

new roads have (often erroneously) been painted as part of the

problem, and the ‘good, cheap public transport alternatives’,

expected in Traffic in Towns to come to the rescue, have

proved hard to deliver.

There have, however, been some major achievements: the car

has been tamed and restricted in many town centres, huge

reductions in fuel consumption are available if we can curb our

taste for gas-guzzling four-wheel drives, and the powers are

now available to enable local authorities to introduce road user

charging or workplace parking levies.

However, government and local authorities will find it difficult

to restrict car use or road freight in the absence of better

alternatives, yet seem to have little concept of what ‘better

public transport’ needs to comprise and deliver. Conventional

public transport and rail freight can provide reasonable

alternatives to the fast motor vehicle on the fast road in only a

limited set of circumstances: long-distance travel, travel totown centres, and trips to other major trip attractors. For the

bulk of the traffic on Britain’s crowded roads, which is between

dispersed origins and destinations, there is thus no reasonable

alternative.

Although some road space may be released by the greater use

of alternatives to the motor vehicle in the three travel markets

identified, it is unlikely that this will be sufficient to cater for

the growth in the much larger, dispersed markets, and it is

equally unlikely that traffic restraint will be politically

acceptable in those markets.

Transport policy will therefore have to achieve a balance

between either improving the road system for the car and road

freight in these dispersed travel markets or developing new

forms of public transport and freight delivery that do provide

reasonable alternatives to the car and the goods vehicle.

In urban and suburban areas new public transport systems of

the ULTra type have the potential to compete with the car. For

the other, dispersed travel markets the NBP developments in

Germany have the potential to transform the UK’s extensive

rail network, most of which is lightly used for most of the time,

into a far more intensively used system, capable of competing

with the car and the goods vehicle. The transformation wouldbe from a nineteenth-century technology product of the first

industrial revolution into a twenty-first century product of the

second industrial revolution.

If, however, the policymakers see no alternative to the car

other than for travel to town centres, airports, schools etc. then

they should plan for it. One element of such a plan must be a

revamped charging system, focused on marginal use. Another

must be an improved, safer and environmentally acceptable

highway network.

REFERENCES1. MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT. Traffic in Towns: A Study of the

Long-Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas. HMSO,

London, 1963.

Fig. 19. Neue Bahntechnik Paderborn (automated rail shuttlesform trains only to reduce wind resistance)




2. DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT, TRANSPORT AND THE REGIONS.

A New Deal for Transport: The Government’s White Paper

on the Future of Transport . The Stationery Office, London,

1998, Cm 3950.

3. Shanghai Memorandum of the International Committee on

Climate Change, 2001.

4. BUCHANAN C. M. I Told You So.

5. GLTS, 1991.

Please email, fax or post your discussion contributions to the secretary by 1 August 2004: email: [email protected];

fax: þ44 (0)20 665 2294; or post to Emma Holder, Journals Department, Institution of Civil Engineers, 1–7 Great George Street,

London SW1P 3AA.


more or less traffic in towns?*

Documents