TPS Chair's Message June 2022

It's been a busy few weeks for connoisseurs of travel demand.

First up we had a controversial decision by the Treasury to cut fuel duty by 5p/litre. This was estimated to cost the treasury some £2.4bn. Many pointed out the difficulty in this sort of policy, just at the time when we were needing to demonstrate real progress on COP26 pledges, and how much more effective that resource envelope could have been used to promote sustainable travel. (By comparison, Active Travel England’s entire budget for the next five years is £2bn.)

Even before getting into the negative externalities, the Economist makes the case (Cutting fuel taxes is a bad idea) that this is bad policy on economic grounds:

"Petrol taxes, like all levies on transactions, affect both buyers and sellers. When taxes fall, buyers pay a lower total price. As a result they demand more fuel, which encourages sellers to push pre-tax prices higher. The exact division of the benefits between consumers and producers is debated, but one study of a petrol-tax holiday in Illinois and Indiana in 2000 found that consumers enjoyed only 70% of the upside. That means today’s fuel-tax cuts are wasteful. Governments could spend the same amount of money on other policies to help households without suffering a 30% leakage."

It is notable however, that other countries have also acted in this space, notably Germany with a massive 30p cut, so the government was not wholly out of line against international comparisons here, and there is no doubt of the huge political pressure on the government to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

Of course, wholesale prices have surged since that cut, and the figures at the pump remain historically high. As I write this, fuel protests are again occurring on various motorways across the UK. Media reports (e.g. Bus journeys and cycling surge as UK drivers try to cut fuel use) abound with stories of surging cycling and bus rates (fares having helpfully largely stayed static, or even cut in Northern Ireland) as a consequence. There has also apparently been a burst of interest in car sharing (more people expected to car share).

There is no doubt that fuel prices are a highly effective way of managing demand for private vehicles, supporting a shift to sustainable modes of transport and therefore help achieve the objectives of the Transport Decarbonisation Plan (and National Bus Strategy, and Gear Change etc).   

However they are also undeniably highly regressive - pricing low-income drivers off the road must surely be avoided if we are to secure a fair and just transition to low carbon mobility?

As we have seen in other locations, notably Manchester’s decision early on in the year to abandon their clean air zone largely on equity grounds, the perception of fairness is critical here. As Steve Melia notes in his excellent book on Transport Policy “Roads, Runway and Resistance”, there is a particular antipathy amongst the public to transport policies that carry a direct cost:

“As a method of achieving social or environmental aims, monetary measures suffer from two serious problems…the most obvious is unfairness… (but) measures involving money also invoke unhelpful psychological responses.  Experiments have shown that even a brief mention of money makes people act in a selfish way… they make people feel less social less willing to make sacrifices for a public good.” 

This is currently a live debate in London, given the proposed expansion to the Ultra Low Emission Zone, in place already in central and inner London, to cover the whole of the capital. The information released by TfL as part of the consultation makes clear that the lowest income Londoners typically do not have access to a car, and that they are also disproportionately impacted by poor air quality caused in large part by private vehicle use. On this basis, the case for action appears clear.

However there is surprisingly very little information about the current extent of car ownership and use by low income households, particularly disaggregated across areas with varying levels of public transport accessibility - and the impact curbing that access may have on their wellbeing.

As the Government Office for Science noted in their ‘Future of Mobility” paper exploring inequality in the UK Transport system back in 2019, which in part sought to update the seminal work in this field by the Social Exclusion Unit in 2003, published academic and policy evidence around inequality in transport access is still “quite sparse”. 

In his work for the RAC Trust back in 2008, David Bayliss found that car ownership was clearly linked to income, but that many low-income households did still own a car:

“The rate of ownership (in the lowest quintile of income) has increased from less than 5% in 1960 to 49% in 2008 – a near ten -fold increase. For the second lowest income quintile, the increase has been from under 10% to 54% - a more than fivefold increase. The increase in car ownership amongst lower income households has been much faster than in households as a whole”.

In his 2016 paper ‘Cars and socio-economics’, Guy Lansley also makes this point:

“In the past, car ownership itself has been frequently considered as a census proxy variable for affluence. However, this is an increasingly dated interpretation as ownership has become more widespread across society and the value of cars varies considerably.”

Access to a car radically changes accessibility options. Bayliss again found:

“A person in a household with a car makes a third more journeys than someone in a car-less household. The distance travelled increases even more markedly – more than doubling. As a consequence more time is spent travelling – but only a fifth, thus average travel speeds rise from 15½ kph to 29 kph with the transition to car ownership. As a consequence of this access difficulties are reduced.”

In some cases this can lead to significant wellbeing improvements. The Government Office for Science for example found evidence that access to a private car provides an advantage for low-income people and immigrants seeking work… and that lack of access to a car can provide a barrier to taking up education and training opportunities for young people.

It’s also worth noting that access to a car is not the same as ownership. The Government for Office for science notes that “the British National Travel Survey shows that there is also a significant number of carless people who depend on cars to reach jobs and services, and therefore often rely on car lifts and taxis for their travel needs.”  These are likely to be low income themselves, meaning that if this access to a lift is curbed as a consequence of the driver being priced off the road, there may be wider knock on impacts of this on vulnerable communities.

Returning to London, TfL predict that around 82% of cars are currently compliant with ULEZ in the capital, albeit surveys by some authorities on edge of London suggest that may be an overestimate.  Who owns those 18% of vehicles, the impact the charge would have on them and the availability of alternatives is critical to understanding whether the proposal will disproportionately impact on poorer households, and indeed on those groups with other protected characteristics.  However this insight is lacking.

When determining the cost of a transport scheme we spend a lot of time thinking about materials, labour, constructability, maintainability and risk. We may think about compensation in some limited circumstances, e.g. compulsory purchase if we need some private land.  But this example made me wonder if we always think adequately enough about the mitigation that may be necessary to avoid disproportionate impact (immediate and ongoing) on groups with protected characteristics, and build this sufficiently into the budgets for schemes? 

To be clear, I’m not advocating that we take no steps to curb private vehicle use because of possible unintended consequences on one group of users – but more that we need to be more aware of the impacts this may have on those most vulnerable, and willing to tackle those impacts robustly and in a targeted way if we are to avoid iniquitous outcomes on vulnerable individuals. 

There may also be win-wins for individuals and society in this space, particularly if we can imaginatively link appropriate mitigation with achieving wider goals.  For the ULEZ, a proposed (but by no means guaranteed) scrappage scheme could help support some people swap their 2005 fiesta for a 2006 model and avoid the charge, but is that really the best use of £2000 of public money? Could we use this moment of reflection on travel behaviour to support a change in mode through a higher award of mobility credits, providing people with an incentive to choose public transport, car clubs or micromobility for example?

The Government Office for Science also report that improved job accessibility by bus has a big impact on employment outcomes of job seekers - a 10% decrease in bus travel times to jobs across England resulted in a predicted 0.2% increase in employment, which would amount to more than 50,000 extra jobs. Appropriate mitigation could therefore be a significant improvement in bus provision in areas of poorest transport accessibility and also deprivation, potentially coupled with targeted subsidised fares etc.

As the IPPR found in their recent report from their Environmental Justice Commission (Fairness and Opportunity): “Through our citizens’ juries we heard that people want it to be possible to live a good life, wherever you are, without needing to own a car.” Low income families don’t necessarily want to own a car, they simply want access to the same opportunities as those who do, and delivering this should be a key policy goal of all practitioners. The IPPR's call for free public transport is a way of supporting this aim, alongside achieving wider environmental objectives. Recent renewed focus on integration of land use and proximity in the form of 15 minute neighbourhoods may also offer a reason for optimism in this space. It seems likely that direct interventions into the mobility system to protect poorer people from any adverse impact of policies to respond to the climate emergency will be increasingly necessary.

It may not wholly be the job of transport planners to try and solve all these wider social issues within one policy (can we assume that the benefits systems mitigates some of these impacts for example?), but clearly a policy that might inadvertently disproportionately target old bangers owned by poor people feels like a very difficult one to square when looking at it with a social equity lens, without some very serious mitigation being put into play.

As the census data starts to filter out in coming months (however skewed that may be) it will be interesting to renew research interest in this field, which would be a fitting twenty-year on tribute to that ground-breaking work of the Social Exclusion Unit from the turn of millennium.

TPS Activity

As you’ll have seen in this bulletin, TPS has been busy in recent months.  I really enjoyed the TPM conference, congrats to Yasmin Fox as winner of our best paper by a young professional and of course Jillian Anable as the new Transport Planner of the Year!

I'm very excited about our upcoming dinner on 14 July, and am looking forward to meeting members and their guests, catching up with old friends and making new connections (which must be a key goal of any ‘society’?!) Also excited about TP day live in person again on 14 November – still opportunities for sponsorship, particularly appropriate if you are an organisation that feels they have something to say about how best to future proof our transport network.

It was great to launch our bursary scheme last month – this time it’s all about buses! After the excitement of last year's National Bus strategy, and a herculean effort by local authorities to develop ambitious Bus Service Improvement Plans to a ludicrous timetable, I think it's fair to say that the overall settlement for the sector in the comprehensive spending review was somewhat underwhelming... however we all know the potential is huge - calling on the next generation of transport planners to work out how we can best deliver on that promise!

Fabulous also to see the return of the TPS quiz, this time an international version! Read more here.

We also have some excellent webinars in the pipeline to keep an eye out for!

As always, we welcome feedback on our activities and events, and suggestions for other areas of interest to members that we can cover and shine a light on. Email info@tps.org.uk to get in touch!