Tram questions

Tom Forth, .

A couple of weeks ago the third modern iteration of a Leeds tram was delayed by at least three years. If all goes well, a process that started in 2021 may deliver a running tram by the late 2030s. My piece in The Guardian sums up my frustrations.

The UK government and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority were both surprised that this story became a big thing. It was, they thought, a local story for local people in a place very few national thinkers care about. But because it tapped into a wider national mood that Britain can’t build things any more I got a lot more responses.

Most of those responses were positive. There was some abuse, but nothing serious.

From an older, less economically active, and more conservative crowd I got very similar responses to what I got from more progressive minded people a few weeks earlier when I’d written that driverless cars are a great opportunity for cities like Leeds. The conservatives were upset about how I choose to drive cars (I rent on-demand rather than own or lease) in a very similar way to how progressives were upset about how I choose to use a bicycle (I own an electric bicycle and don’t think that cycling to work or walking an hour each way to work is a good choice for most people).

You can’t please everyone.

I got some good questions and listened to some bold claims. Instead of answering and responding to them over and over on social media I thought I’d answer them here.

1. “Better transport won’t make us richer”.

Correlation is not causation, but it can be a hint. And the correlation between English big cities (except London) having unusually poor transport (worse roads than US cities and worse transit than European cities) and unusually weak economies is a really big hint. Anna Stansbury’s paper on this is a good summary of the lost potential agglomeration benefits in English big cities. With even better data the argument would be even stronger, though it’s already more than strong enough.

There is strong economic data and logic that it is in city centres that we expect to achieve the largest agglomeration benefits. And we know from good data in Greater Manchester that the vast majority of people entering big city centres for work do so using public transport, not cars.

Most people entering Greater Manchester's city centre at peak time use public transport. TfGM City Centre Transport Strategy to 2040.

This makes sense because the congestion on unpriced and narrow British roads combined with the high free-market cost of parking in constrained city centres is prohibitive to cars.

Cars are also a minority mode in Leeds for transport into the city centre at peak times though the data is less good and less well-shared than in Greater Manchester.

Our cities are poor because our city centres are too hard to get to at peak time for work. We can either fix this with huge roads and car parks as in the USA (though their cities also build trams) or with better transit systems as in Europe. If we continue to do neither, I expect us to continue to have weak city economies. I think that British economists who cling to the idea that the economic underperformance of English big cities is more a skills issue than a transport issue are making a big error and I have not yet been convinced by any other explanation.

2. Okay fine, maybe we need better transport. Why not build lots of roads?

Car-focused transport systems can create large agglomeration benefits. American cities like Atlanta and Houston prove it — both also have trams — and we could emulate that in Leeds. We tried in the 1970s, demolishing much of the city centre to become the UK’s first “Motorway City”. But we didn’t go far enough for this path of development to succeed.

To succeed we would have needed a huge sprawl of Leeds outward in all directions, but this was banned by the UK government’s greenbelt regulations. The new concept of “greybelt” has weakened this constraint slightly, but it remains very strong.

City centre clearances were easier in the 1970s, but they would be much harder today, especially given much of conservative thought’s revived interest in aesthetics. More regulation now prohibits the clearance of historic buildings that would be needed to build the new tolled motorways and multi-story car parks we would need to truly become a motorway city.

I respect those who think that Leeds should become a city like Houston, Texas, where I lived for two years as a child. I am less respectful if they claim to think it’s ever likely to happen and I always have a suspicion that advocates for this position are using their impossible perfect as the enemy of a more likely good. It is the bionic duckweed method of arguing for economic stagnation while appearing not to.

3. Okay fine, maybe we need better transit. Why not buses?

Greater Manchester started running franchised buses this year. West Yorkshire will start running them in 2027. I have long argued for the UK government to allow this and I played a tiny role in them undoing their ban in 2017. I think that franchised buses in big cities will be successful, increase public transport use substantially, and achieve small economic benefits. But I think those benefits will be small.

We know from work that I’ve done tracking every bus in Birmingham, and since then every bus in Great Britain except London, that timetable-based analysis of bus accessibility massively underestimates the cost of congestion on agglomeration in our cities. At peak times, buses are just too slow, with journey times that are too unreliable, to create agglomeration in big cities.

While in theory a properly segregated system could overcome this limitation, we have never achieved a single successful example of such a system in five decades of trying in Britain. Some argue that Leeds came closest with its guided busway system of the 1990s, but it is a measure of the ultimate failure of that scheme that it was used at the time to refuse funding for a tram, that the Eastern route will be ripped up next year and replaced with a normal bus lane, and that the remaining Northern section is used by a smaller and smaller percentage of buses that run along it.

The gold standard and often celebrated bus alternative to trams or trains is the Leigh Guided Busway in Greater Manchester. But the data is clear that this offers very limited advantages over traditional buses with barely improved journey times and journey time reliability at peak times.

Because they are slow, stuck in traffic, and quite low capacity, buses are also expensive to run. In London running the buses absorbs nearly all of the £1bn operating surplus from the tube. In Dublin, a city more similar in size to English big cities, the buses yet again operate at a substantial deficit while the tram operates at a surplus.

So buses alone are not the answer for big cities.

4. Okay fine, not buses, but wouldn’t a metro be better?

I would prefer a metro to a tram system in Leeds. Our twin city of Lille has one as do peer cities right across Europe. One will not be built any time soon in Leeds. The UK government will not fund it. The UK government will not allow high enough local taxes to be raised to build one using local money. Privately funding such a system in competition with free roads and within the current UK planning system is not realistic.

Bristol is working on a metro system. It will face the same challenges.

Greater Manchester’s stated ambition to build a metro system will supplement its existing tram system. This is the way to go and it means we’re back to arguing for building a tram system.

I would prefer something to nothing, and trams are the best mix of likely to happen and likely to improve accessibility of the city centre, especially at peak times. Modern trams are proven to work in — among many places — Bordeaux and Dublin, cities of a similar size and density to Leeds but with stronger economies which many locals thank trams for playing a part in enabling. Dublin’s data on the operating surplus and deficits of its franchised bus system (loss making) and tram system (surplus generating) are a further argument in favour of trams.

Metro systems without the underlying freedom of cities to control local public transport and to raise taxes locally to fund investment in such systems — which is what I have most consistently argued for, not trams specifically — will not happen in Leeds.

5. Okay fine, not buses, not a metro, but what about trains?

Rail has been the biggest success in West Yorkshire’s public transport policy in recent decades with over twenty stations reopened or built and large increase in passenger use. Leeds is tied with Manchester Piccadilly as the second most used railway station outside of London and it is a key driver of Leeds’ comparative economic success.

The electrification of the railway from Leeds to Skipton, Ilkley, and Bradford Forster Square in the mid-1990s has allowed stations to be reopened in places like Saltaire and new stations to be built in places like Crossflats, Kirkstall Forge, and Apperley Bridge. Because the trains are electric, they are faster, more reliable, cheaper to run, cheaper to buy, and cheaper to maintain. These services may even come close to covering their costs.

Other lines into Leeds are mostly not electrified. New station openings have been successful and trains have improved but they remain too small to accommodate demand and require high subsidies to run.

We should keep improving trains into Leeds, but we must also be realistic about the problems we have.

These limitation of rail are part of why the UK government has in recent decades promised “transformational” investment, both HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail, which would free up existing railways for much improved local services. Both investments have since been cancelled, though a downgraded NPR limps on.

These cancellations have left us in a very bad situation. The promised transformational investments, combined with a UK government preference for “joined up” investment, meant that Leeds hung much of its investment plans on schemes that are now cancelled.

I think that we in the North did a bad job of making the case for these large transformational investments as necessary to deliver local transport improvements. We never managed to really convince even as open-minded a think tank as Centre for Cities that big inter-city connections (HS2 and NPR, which they were sceptical of) were essential to delivering the improved rail services that they supported.

Rail investment has been a big win for Leeds and West Yorkshire in recent decades and should continue, but we should be realistic about how limited its further impacted can be.

6. Okay fine, trams, but why not a better route?

For four decades, Leeds has known that it must connect its heavily populated suburbs in the South (Hunslet, Beeston, Belle Isle, and Middleton), East (Harehills, Seacroft, Gipton, Whinmoor), and North (Weetwood, Chapel Allerton, Alwoodley, Roundhay, Oakwood) to key centres of employment and leisure in the city centre and venues such as Leeds Arena, both major Leeds Hospitals, the central Universities, Headingley stadiums, and Elland Road.

The Leeds Supertram route cancelled in 2005 did as much of this as it could, while leaving capacity to do the rest later. It remains an excellent route, so why isn’t the city proposing it?

There are two big reasons,

First, the Leeds supertram route and a similar proposed route for a trolleybus system were both rejected by the UK government. The reasons ranged from them offering poor value for money (though much lower value for money investments were made elsewhere, particularly in London) to them being too focussed on economic growth and too little on social inclusion (amazingly, this was a decision made under a Conservative government). The UK government, and especially the Treasury, is loathe to ever admit that it has made a mistake and since little has changed with the geography of Leeds, it is very unlikely that they would approve very similar schemes submitted again. I find that as frustrating as you probably do, but it is reality.

Second, the money for West Yorkshire Mass Transit comes from the UK government as a consolation prize for two long-promised investments in West Yorkshire being cancelled. The 2021 “Integrated Rail Plan for the North and Midlands” announcement which cancelled a new railway line via Bradford, and HS2 directly to Leeds, and the 2023 “Network North: transforming British transport” announcement which cancelled HS2 indirectly to Leeds.

In the 2023 report it is made clear that the £2.5bn of potential funding is “for a new West Yorkshire mass transit system, improving connections between Leeds and Bradford, Huddersfield and Halifax”. The funding, in an effort to prove that Leeds wasn’t being treated specially, and echoing long-time moans from Conservatives in the rest of West Yorkshire that a Leeds tram would do nothing for them (another example of conservatives tending to favour inclusion over prosperity in the North), was de facto made conditional on its connecting Leeds with other cities and towns and not Leeds with itself. The two nearest cities to Leeds are Bradford and Wakefield and these are the directions in which the proposed routes go.

Both Leeds and Bradford and Leeds and Wakefield are already connected by two railways each, one electrified and one diesel. They offer fast journeys and on the electrified lines there is spare capacity. There is even a promise, though it seems like such a bad idea that it was unlikely to have ever been seriously made and even more unlikely to be kept that “we will also upgrade and electrify the line between Leeds and Bradford [via New Pudsey] giving a non-stop journey time which could be as low as 12 minutes”.

The proposed route of West Yorkshire Mass Transit is clearly not the best route possible. But crucially it is the best route that will be allowed by the UK government and thus the best route allowed. Again, I know that this suboptimal political reality frustrates many people, but it is reality and those of us who live and work here do not have the luxury or rejecting it.

7. Who’s to blame for all of this?

There is plenty of blame to go round.

People like me have failed to make the case consistently and clearly enough on how big national transformational investments like HS2 and NPR are mostly about delivering enormously increased local capacity for transport. I think we’ve done better at making and winning the case that transport is a big part of the economic underperformance of English big cities, that buses won’t fix much of that problem, and that skills is less important than many economists have suggested. And we played our small but important part in winning back the right for local government to control local buses.

West Yorkshire Combined Authority and its predecessor Passenger Transport Executive has clearly done a good job on rail and is currently doing a good job on bringing buses back under local control, including making money available to fund them via a new devolved tourist levy which the UK government recently permitted. But the work that’s been done on the tram has been frustratingly slow and has clearly not met the expected quality of central government and its expert bodies such as NISTA. While I suspect that much of the problem is that the central government’s processes are awful, WYCA and the Mayor have not, to my estimation, been nearly forceful enough in making that case and demanding freedom from overly restrictive central impositions. We are certainly not making a strong enough case for local tax powers to fund investment ourselves.

Leeds City Council is doing a good job looking into raising funds through a workplace parking levy to fund transport improvements itself and has done a good job of transforming the city into a pro-growth place despite the huge challenges around transport that we face. I think they were too generous to the UK government in planning around promised national investments, but I would have made the same mistake.

Which leaves the UK government and Britain’s national institutions. I think they deserve the vast majority of the blame for where we are today. They have centralised all power and money in the UK into a central blob that cannot build things and which is desperately and inescapably biased towards London and South East England, where it overwhelmingly lives and works. Our laws around environment protection and consultation are insanely complicated and onerous and the Treasury Green Book and the associated guidance for appraising transport investment is an overcomplicated failure. All together they make building far more expensive and far slower than in our European neighbours. We achieve far worse outcomes with our centralised and complicated system and yet seem to have no other response to failure than to increase the centralisation and complexity of the system. Conveniently for the central blob that recommends this extra complexity, its new tests can only be met by the largest bureaucracies and thus results in ever greater centralisation of power to those people making the suggestions.

By spreading accountability so widely, even within the centralised system, we remove the power of democracy to hold governments to account. I am sure that WYCA’s tram proposals could be better. I would happily criticise my Mayor and her staff on that issue. But the insane process that they are required to work in by UK law means I cannot even begin to understand or meaningful criticise their work. This is insane.

8. This all so moany, why don’t you just get on and do this yourself instead of asking for handouts constantly!

Leeds has a long and proud history of getting on and doing things ourselves and we have a long history of that being frustrated or punished by the UK government.

Leeds may be moany, but I’ve never heard anyone with a better alternative.

9. How do we fix it?

I have written this in more detail and at length elsewhere. Quite simply we must be more like France, and more like Scotland in the interim. We must throw out most of our hugely complicated law, processes, and customs on environmental protections, consultations, and appraisal and replace it with much simpler and more locally controlled alternatives.

Since we should avoid funding without accountability we must rapidly move towards allowing much more local tax raising power, as in French cities. When it a Mayor’s money to spend, raised locally, it will be their responsibility, democratically to spend it well, and the role of the UK central government’s experts to advise, but never block.

 

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