Abstract
UK Travel Then and Now
Some of you will have watched Michael Portillo’s televised series of rail journeys around the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe. No doubt that is what inspired one of my Christmas presents – Bradshaw’s UK railway timetable and handbook for 1863. It makes very interesting reading. In the years following the opening of the Stockport and Darlington (1825) and the Liverpool and Manchester (1830) railways – the latter with the famous Rocket locomotive preserved in the Science Museum – the spread of the national rail network was astonishingly rapid. Planning processes as we know them today did not exist. The new form of transport offered speedy and reliable connections between centres of population previously connected only by roads that were narrow and mostly poorly surfaced – virtually the only vehicles that used them were drawn by horses. Some freight was moved by river and canal.
The expansion of the railways was driven by engineers and private investors and continued unabated up to the end of the 19th century when there were around 23,000 miles of track. That was the heyday of the coal-fired external combustion steam engine. The railway companies opened magnificent hotels, some at places where long journeys could begin, end or be broken and others in remote locations that had become generally accessible only after the arrival of the railway. The now restored St Pancras in London is a fine example of a terminus hotel. Timetables changed very infrequently, and owning a ‘Bradshaw’ opened the door to travel to the remotest parts of the British Isles.
But then, storm clouds began to gather for the railways. The 20th century saw the coming of age of the internal combustion engine. The combination of a light and compact engine with a high-energy-density fuel, petroleum, opened up the possibility of small and efficient self-propelled vehicles. The first half of the century saw a tussle for business between cars, buses and railways. Looking at old Shell advertising posters for the 1930s is quite illuminating. Some carried quite strong negative messages about dirty coal, while others emphasised the new freedom to reach remote places by car on a much improved road network. As more and more people owned private cars, the railways lost business.
The end of the Second World War and lack of investment during the war years found the still privately owned railways in pretty poor shape. But for nationalisation in 1947, a number of companies would have failed. At the Government’s request, one Dr Beeching carried out a review of the railway system, and in 1965, he reported that around half the track carried just 5% of the traffic. He proposed that many stations and hundreds of miles of loss-making track should be closed. Virtually, all his recommendations were accepted, and the railways shrank to around 11,000 miles of track as the era of motorways dawned. The M1 was completed in 1968. From that time on until the turn of the century, motor traffic increased and journeys by rail declined.
But around 2000, the trends reversed. Today more and more people use the railways, and the number of car journeys is falling. Many people need to live a long way from where they work, and at peak times, roads are very congested. And in parallel short haul, air travel now competes with both road and rail. But our major airports are congested as well, and our population continues to grow. We face major transport problems. The question is whether we need a new approach. I shall continue this discussion in my next piece.
In my previous essay, I sketched the history of our present transport infrastructure. Its most striking feature is that the three elements, road, rail and air, have evolved largely separately. The questions are whether this should continue and how should we plan for an infrastructure that will take us into the second half of this century? The environment we find ourselves in today is fundamentally different from that of the past. The population continues to grow, and as land use becomes more intense, it is progressively more difficult and more expensive to find space for new roads, airports or rail track. We have ponderous and expensive planning processes. There is tension between infrastructural expansion and the environment.
From the 1950s onwards, Government, national and local, has paid the bills for surface transport infrastructure. But rail and road seem to have been treated as competitive rather than complementary services. However, in an almost unique example of proactive thinking, in 1946, the Government published a plan for a national system of motorways. This has been progressively implemented as finances allowed. Although in private ownership since 1993, the shape of the rail network remains very much what was left after the pruning of the 1960s, although there have been major upgrades. Railways are a strongly regulated industry that depends to a significant extent on public subsidy for both operation and infrastructure. A major policy question today is to what extent general taxation should meet road and rail costs and how much should be paid by users in fares and fuel taxes.
Although ground transport infrastructure has been very much under government control, this is not true of the air. Short haul air travel has grown substantially and has been driven almost entirely by commercial opportunity. Nevertheless, it is now a significant part of UK transport infrastructure and on some routes competes strongly with road and air on both cost and journey time. Island ferries are important in some parts of the country and are largely private.
It seems to me that there is general agreement that our transport system is creaking. Clearly, there is public demand for more capacity, and often, we do not see the convenient connections between different modes that we take for granted in many other countries. We see an essentially piecemeal approach with separate politicised debates about high-speed rail and airport expansion – and no consideration of their bearing on the roads!
We have to try to foresee requirements and technological developments decades ahead. Because infrastructure developments are of their nature slow to implement – few projects take less than 20 years from conception to implementation – the problems are fiendishly complicated. However, this is not a reason for muddling through with no strategic vision of transport as a whole. Such a vision may exist in the depths of the Department for Transport, but it is not evident in any of the government’s pronouncements on transport.
We must have a strategic vision that takes into account a range of ‘soft’ social and environmental considerations, but it must also be supported by realistic quantitative analyses and estimates such as have been fostered by our Institute and other engineering institutions – single issue devotees of particular projects should not be free to conjure supporting numbers from the air unchallenged.
Shortage of space and capital mean that the time has come for a system approach in which we consider transport infrastructure as a whole and take advantage of the different benefits that each element has to offer rather than narrowly regarding them as entirely independent entities. Such an approach would attract investment and give us the transport system we need for the next 50 years.