Transport policy for an unproductive country.
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Manchester and Sheffield are the largest neighbouring pair of cities in Europe without a motorway connecting them. Leeds is the largest city in Europe or North America with neither a tram nor a metro.
Europe’s largest city with no electric trains? Tirana, the capital of Albania. It has no trains at all. But Sheffield is second.
Investment in transport within and between England’s big cities has long been too low. And because construction costs are so high, we’ve got too little from that money.
Our transport options are dominated by cars stuck in traffic and small slow buses that need high subsidies to run. In Lille, an autonomous metro on top of a tram network means that the public transport system carries 30% more passengers with half the number of drivers and vehicles.
And British policy has been poor beyond low investment. The Transport Act in 1985 removed local control of buses from Great Britain’s large cities. Basic innovations such as two doors on buses and universal smartcard ticketing across modes have since failed to arrive. Patronage has halved.
Productivity in the UK transport sector is very low. And in Birmingham, by tracking every bus, we showed that poor transport leads to smaller labour markets and thus lower productivity across the whole economy. British cities with a population of over a million people are among the rich world’s least productive.
There is one exception.
London is the only large British city with a world-leading economy. It also uniquely enjoys a world-leading transport system. HS1 connects London to Europe. The Elizabeth Line and Thameslink are among the most advanced digital railways in the world. And the benefits of local control (London was excepted from The Transport Act in 1985) are obvious. Innovations such as smartcards, daily fare capping, and congestion charging have seen bus use double.
After decades of pressure, the UK government overturned the worst of the Transport Act in 2017. This will not fix decades of underinvestment. Indeed recent cancellations of major investments such as most of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail will deepen that pattern. But England’s large cities can now change direction. Greater Manchester will regulate its buses again by 2025. Other cities are following.
What next?
Much British policy thinking focuses on the national and the pioneering. We imagine an independent commission making strategic plans and freeing us from short-termist governments. We suggest the national expansion of Oyster cards or the extension of national free bus passes to everyone. Both would create the largest such systems in the world.
These pioneering suggestions show that we are learning the wrong lessons from our recent past.
Most of the UK is well behind the productivity frontier. We don’t need to be pioneering. We can focus on what has worked here and in the rest of the world. What works are local projects, funded by local governments, chosen by local democracy, focused on cities.
London developed the Oyster card outside of both the UK’s national smartcard system and its bus deregulation laws. Other cities should emulate it. The UK as a whole should not.
New investment in trams, metros, and bus lanes happens in French cities because they can raise local taxes to fund investment instead of relying on national government. We should do the same.
Stepping back from national schemes and strategies will be hard for Britain. Ending free bus passes would be controversial. But it should be the choice of cities themselves whether they subsidise buses and give out free travel passes or whether they choose to do other things with that money. Cities as different as London and Dunkerque make such choices and keep free travel for many people.
Most of Britain’s interested national institutions will oppose, in action if not in words, a reduced role for national policy in Britain’s transport system. If we are to break out of our productivity problem we must do it anyway.