Everyone else has talked about it, so I thought it best write something about the National Planning Policy Framework. While everyone waxed lyrical about station policy, something that was sometimes an issue from my councillor days caught my eye. Enjoy it.

When I was a Town Councillor, I had the rather grandiose-sounding title of the Chair of the Planning Improvement Working Group. Set up with the aim of getting “better planning outcomes” for the town, you would think that this meant I led high-stakes negotiations with developers, called Town Hall meetings on applications, and made the extra effort to ensure that those who supported development had as much say as those who opposed it.

The reality was that much of the time of the group was spent responding to planning applications. Doing this makes you realise quite how many planning applications the system has to deal with, and the overwhelming majority of them are small. Each week, we usually had around twenty applications to look at. The majority were extensions to people’s homes. Some where change of use applications to yet another hairdressers or takeaway shop. We occasionally got Listed Building applications, or works on trees subject to Tree Preservation Orders.

Just occasionally, we got applications where someone wanted to build new homes on a small plot of land. A lot of people wanted to put a new home in their garden. A former church hall site was converted into a site for four dwellings. An office block wanted to build flats on its car park. Those are just the ones I remember, mainly because the neighbours kicked up a stink with us.

Every discussion we had on these sites focussed on two transport-related matters. Parking and traffic. I can remember each discussion, as it followed the same pattern. A councillor would raise concerns about the road being busy (even if it wasn’t) or how “parking is a nightmare around there.” Before I reminded them that the plans compiled with the Local Plan, meaning that we usually raised concerns rather than objections, which were usually ignored anyway. I now walk past many of these sites most days, and see parking bays full of cars, with some extra cars also parked on the streets.

The new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was announced to much fanfare. In transport terms, one policy took centre stage. Homes near well-connected stations would be fast-tracked. But I don’t want to write about that. I am going to write about another change that I feel is more consequential than we give it credit for. Yet, apart from the intelligence gathered by a few councils and the knowledge of local town and parish councillors, we do not collect the evidence on it.

Within the new framework are new and updated policies that make it simpler to build homes on smaller plots of land, such as in back gardens. And corner plots. And the sites of old church halls. And car parks. Not to mention on every other scrap of ‘unused’ land across England. In the end, releasing this land could add up to the same number of additional homes as a large town. But instead of being all in one place, and easy to define and monitor, they are spread across the streets of cities, towns, and villages across the country. So their impacts are spread, and silent.

There are three policies within the NPPF that collectively do the work of making this kind of development much easier. Policy S4 says that…

Development proposals within settlements should be approved unless the benefits of doing so would be substantially outweighed by any adverse effects, when assessed against the national decision-making policies in this Framework.

This is a much stronger position compared to the previous version of the NPPF, which focussed this support on brownfield land specifically.

Policy L2, meanwhile, does a lot of the heavy lifting. It states that…

Substantial weight should be given to the benefits where a development proposal would achieve one or more of the following.

What follows is a list of interventions not all of which I will list. But these include using the airspace above existing residential or commercial buildings, adding mansard roofs or filling gaps in existing roof lines, introducing taller buildings at suitable street corners, sensitively redeveloping underused plots, and creating additional units within residential curtilages.

That last one is critical. In normal speak, it means building new homes within gardens is a matter of national policy.

This is not a blanket permission on every new home in next door’s vegetable patch, by the way. The policy does establish some parameters such as maximum footprint extents. But the intent behind the policy is quite clear.

Policy S5 completes the trilogy, extending comparable support outside settlement boundaries for limited infilling within groups of houses, redevelopment of previously developed land, and building reuse.

In addition to the above, Local Plans must allocate at least ten percent of the housing requirement on sites of no more than one hectare, and a further ten percent on sites between one and two and a half hectares, unless there are strong reasons why this cannot be achieved. In addition to delivering against the government’s ambitions to deliver 1.5 million homes by the end of the Parliament, this also seeks to increase density.

Bear in mind that the NPPF is a material consideration in planning applications, and Local Plans that are non-compliant with the NPPF can be found unsound, this matters a lot. Especially where local policies resisting garden development, of the kind Richmond upon Thames has operated since 2009, now have to survive a consistency test they will likely fail.

Each new infill development adds more travel demands onto local networks. So it should be reasonable to assume that we can at least estimate how many new homes will be built, and their likely distribution, right? That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

While the stations policy gets the very good analysis by Lichfields, estimating infill development is remarkably hard. There is not even a common definition on what infill development is, so that numbers can be compared between authorities. Most authorities do not even collect data on infill development and the number of new homes that is provided by this. Some just go for a flat definition of single dwelling developments. And those that do publish data do so often due to political preferences as opposed to necessity.

But as President Kennedy once said, we don’t do things because they are easy, we do these things because they are hard. So I attempted to estimate this level of potential development resulting from this policy change. I need to stress that these calculations are back of the envelope at best, but they are intended to give a direction of travel of the plausible number of new homes resulting from this policy.

Let’s start with the known deficit of small sites nationally. Research by the Home Builders Federation with Quantum Development Finance found that just seventeen thousand homes were approved on sites of three to nine dwellings in 2024. This is half the historical average of thirty five thousand. The same work, incidentally, reported a collapse in small site developments over twenty years, with nearly twenty percent of total planning permissions granted on sites of one hundred and fifty units or fewer in 2008, where today that is between six and eight percent.

Assuming that Policies S4 and L2 do what they say they will, we can expect small site permissions to return to the historical average. That’s eighteen thousand additional dwellings permitted a year. Assuming that the market doesn’t have rocket fuel instantly injected into it by NPPF and there is a lag, we should apply a non-implementation and lapse discount of between twenty and twenty five percent. So that’s between thirteen thousand and fourteen and a half thousand new dwellings a year.

Looking at curtilage and upward extensions, from some local authority monitoring reports we can expect some significant gains. From some of the reports I have found, I think that between fifteen thousand and twenty five thousand new dwellings a year is a not an unreasonable range. Though this is a guesstimate based on a few authority reports. For instance, Leeds reported that 32 per cent of homes came through windfall delivery in 2023/24. Oadby and Wigston recorded 27 per cent of net completions on windfall sites in 2024/25. Lets work on the assumption that Policy L2 lifts this category by between a quarter and a half, so that is between four thousand and twelve thousand new dwellings per year.

A final element of this basic arithmetic is the allocation requirement. Ten percent of a 370,000 annual national target is thirty seven thousand dwellings a year on sites of a hectare or less. Though it should be noted that a good many authorities already exceed this. Preston’s local plan evidence, for instance, shows thirteen point three percent of supply from sites of one hectare or less. The marginal national effect is therefore smaller than the headline percentage suggests, and part of it is redirection from larger sites rather than net addition. Reflecting this, I would say between five thousand and ten thousand new dwellings a year would be generated thus.

In all, that’s between twenty two thousand and thirty six thousand additional dwellings a year. All kinds of matters affect that outside of my basic arithmetic, such as the pace of plan making, so lets take a central estimate of thirty thousand additional homes per year. Taking assumed number of people per dwelling averages of between two point three and two point five percent, thats roughly equivalent to a town the size of Harrogate (seventy five thousand people) per year. Over ten years, that’s a new city larger than Glasgow.

Again, I must stress, this is my basic arithmetic and assumptions. Matters such as the lag between permission and delivery, each of these areas overlapping each other, and a huge assumption that the policy will start working perfectly from the off need to be considered. But I think that this is still in the right ballpark.

Lets take this one stage further, and assume an equal split among all of the three hundred and seventy local planning authorities in England. That’s eighty-one additional dwellings for each authority - a new village in each planning authority in England. Not exactly a new town, but enough to be noticed.

So what does this mean in terms of the number of vehicle trips? Lets take TRICS’s privately owned housing development category as a reasonable worst case scenario. Across the country, this is between an extra 135,000 (at four point five vehicle trips per day per dwelling) and 195,000 vehicle trips per day (at six point five vehicle trips per day per dwelling). In 2019, just over twenty three thousand two-way vehicle movements went into and out of Manchester City Centre each working day.

While the nature of infill development means that this impact is more dispersed than every one of them trying to pile into a city centre, cumulatively this matters. Furthermore, these vehicles are catered for not on a new estate road, but in the existing street layout, on carriageways laid down potentially hundreds of years ago, for a time where the horse and cart were around.

We currently have no way of assessing this impact on the transport network, and without this assessment you cannot come up with a plan to encourage the people who move in to these places to not drive. These developments are below the Transport Assessment and Travel Plan thresholds. They won’t generate Section 106 contributions to fund new bus services, and they may be below the requirements to contribute to the Community Infrastructure Levy. The highway authority may not even be consulted at all in some cases.

I should stress now that simply putting a requirement on small developments like this to produce a Transport Assessment will solve nothing. It adds an unnecessary burden to small house builders. Even if a Transport Assessment was produced, it would be forgotten the moment the site is given permission. And even if we did, the core problem does not go away: as transport planners, we assess sites, and we have no way to assess accumulation of development.

Let’s say that you read this, and think something should be done about it. Here is the kicker. From my reading of the data, there is relatively little of it that allows for a robust assessment of this accumulation.

The most promising is the Land Use Change Statistics from the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, which classify new residential addresses by previous land use, including a residential gardens category. This is the only national source that could tell you where infill is happening. The problem is that new residential addresses and the hectarage releases stopped in 2021-22. Updates to both are “to be announced later.”

But added to this is that the definition has changed. The 2012 NPPF required windfall allowances to exclude residential gardens, which gave every local planning authority a regulatory reason to identify garden sites separately and count them. That is why the best data on garden development sits in windfall topic papers from that period. Rutland’s small sites windfall study reported twenty per cent of greenfield completions on land previously a residential garden. Tonbridge and Malling’s October 2025 windfall paper records that the revised Framework no longer refers to excluding residential gardens, and that its analysis will therefore consider all unanticipated development together. As much as I don’t tend to like central overreach, a common standard could do the world of good here.

The standout example is Richmond upon Thames, which has monitored garden development since April 2009 on a locally devised definition, counting net dwelling increases within an existing curtilage. Richmond’s local plan policy resisting the loss of back gardens is exactly the kind of provision that now has to survive a test against Policy L2.

When it comes to sustainable transport, we are in the world of inferences and assumptions. If we were thinking optimistically, infill development is usually within existing settlements. This in turn improves both densities and accessibility to key services by non-car modes of transport. That matters, because destination accessibility is the variable the evidence identifies as dominant. Ewing and Cervero’s meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Planning Association found that almost any development in a central location generates less car travel than the best-designed compact development in a remote one.

But let’s not pop the corks in celebration of the policy just yet. The same analysis found that the effect on vehicle miles travelled with respect to household or job density is small. A further analysis by Stevens in 2017 reanalysis, correcting for selective reporting bias, concluded that the effect of compact development on driving is marginal enough that planners should not rely on it as a sole strategy to encourage sustainable transport behaviour.

The Department for Transport’s own rapid evidence assessment on integrating land use and transport, published November 2025, is far more blunt. It concluded that most available studies are cross-sectional or model-based, which limits their ability to establish causality between densification and sustainable travel uptake. It concludes that densification alone is unlikely to drive modal shift, because the public transport needs to be there first.

What this policy on infill does is add households in a way that not only does not add supply, but it ensures supply is blind to the potential new demand for it. The additional dwelling inherits the existing accessibility of the street, which in a great many English suburbs means an hourly bus, no protected cycle provision and a walk to a shop that closed a decade ago.

There is also a self-selection problem running the wrong way for once. The buyer of a two-bedroom house squeezed into a suburban back garden is not obviously the same person who chooses a flat above a shop in a town centre. Suburban infill may be selecting for exactly the households least likely to change travel behaviour.

So, what would actually help? In my mind, four things, none of them that radical really.

First, restart the Land Use Change Statistics, annually, with the residential gardens category intact. The series exists, the method exists, and the cost of running it is trivial against the cost of finding out in 2035 that we lost track of the 300,000 homes.

Secondly introduce a national definition of garden and curtilage development and require authorities to monitor completions against it. Richmond has been doing this for seventeen years and from what I have seen, the definition is not an unsound one.

Third is the slightly more tricky bit, and that is develop a cumulative-impact monitoring approach at ward or lower layer super output area level. Not site-by-site transport assessment, which would be disproportionate and would kill the policy, but a periodic check on whether dwelling counts on particular street networks have changed, so that councils know where to look.

Finally, be honest in local plan transport evidence. Where an authority’s housing trajectory now depends on a significant infill and windfall component, the transport evidence base should state that the traffic consequences of that component are unquantified or there is an inherent assumption behind them.

Ultimately, building homes inside existing settlements is probably better in transport terms than building them next to a motorway junction with no bus service. We need these new homes quickly, and so the general direction of travel is positive.

My point is that we need to be able to understand the impacts of these new homes so that transport planners can keep up their end of the bargain in the NPPF - to encourage sustainable travel. Without that knowledge, we are flying blind as to the impacts of at least ten percent of the new homes that we are planning to build. What you do not know you cannot act against.

It is my feeling that we can piece together this puzzle. The datasets either exist and are not updated, or are stuck behind commercial agreements, or maybe just rely on someone far cleverer than I to piece together the different strands, and come to a clear picture. Maybe that evidence, however imperfect, sits in the heads of councillors on planning committees across the land who, whatever you might think of councillors and new developments, tend to know their patch well.

To date, we have chosen not to know this problem. The good thing about choices is that they are reversible, provided you are willing to notice the problem first.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

• Refining urban typologies: causal insights into urban form, car commuting, and related CO2 emissions

• What do residential lotteries show us about transportation choices?

• Travel and the Built Environment: A Meta-Analysis

• Does Compact Development Make People Drive Less?

• How living in a car-reduced neighbourhood decreases car ownership and increases multimodality: a case-control study from Germany

😀 Positive News

Your weekly dose of positivity in a world where bad news dominates. Enjoy.

• Course correction: How to densify British cities

• Strategies for densification in different types of neighbourhoods

• City Densification Fund allocations land in South Yorkshire

💻 Hard Work

Work itself was boring, but last week I got to celebrate my toughest and most rewarding job of all - being a husband. Its now been just over twenty two years since me and Karen got married, and we celebrated with our two lunatics at Wicksteed Park. Naturally, we had to ride the train while we were there (Belle was not a fan, despite having a daft grin in this photo).

🎶 Musical Finale

If the NPPF is delivered how it is anticipated, you might get a few more songs like Village Green from The Kinks, which laments the loss of traditional English village life.

🪧 Notices

A couple of things worth noting as you read this.

I use AI as a research assistant to find credible, well-cited academic evidence. I check every source, carry out my own research and, where time allows, consult domain experts or their published work. The writing itself is mine, spelling mistakes and all.

I am a transport planner, so my expertise lies in public policy, movement and its impacts. When writing outside that field, I may occasionally get things wrong despite researching carefully. That is on me, and I always encourage readers to do their own research.

✅ Sign Up

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Finally, after a summer where the default setting seems to have been to focus the sun through a magnifying glass across the entire South East of England, the weather seems to be behaving itself. It’s cooled down a lot and I have managed to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in about three months. Heatwaves - don’t recommend them, especially if its five that are almost back to back. Now, if someone can do a rain dance that would help a lot!

The Lancashire city of Preston - home to 147,000 people - is home to a good many things. In my own areas of interest, Preston is synonymous with the early days of football. Their local team, Preston North End, won the first two English Football League titles in 1888-89 and 1889-90 seasons, and have never won it again since. The club also claims that their home ground, Deepdale, is the oldest football ground in the world where football has been continuously played. One of their players, Tom Finney, is arguably one of the finest footballers England have ever produced.

This post is not about the transport-related exploits of Preston North End, however. Thankfully, in the world of transport, Preston is known for something else. Preston Bus Station.

If you have never seen Preston Bus Station before, let’s just say that you are missing out on quite a thing. The building was designed in the Brutalist architecture style of the 1960s by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of Building Design Partnership, working with E. H. Stazicker, the Borough Engineer and Surveyor, along with Ove Arup & Partners. John Laing actually constructed the building itself. Upon opening, it had capacity for up to eighty double-decker buses, and pedestrian access was by way of the subways. But without a doubt its most distinctive feature is the curve of the car park balconies. The curves came:

“after acceptable finishes to a vertical wall proved too expensive, contributing to the organic, sculptural nature of the building. The edges are functional, too, in that they protect car bumpers from crashing against a vertical wall. The cover balustrade protects passengers from the weather by allowing buses to penetrate beneath the lower parking floor.”

For many decades, the bus station was seen as an eyesore. A perfect example of 1960s Brutalism that must be torn down and never pollute the eyeline of the city again. In 2010, the local council leader Ken Hudson put it simply:

“The building is an eyesore and is simply not worthy of being listed.”

But listed it was. Much to the annoyance of the local council, who were trying to tear down the building as part of a local redevelopment scheme. In 2013, after two previous failed attempts, Preston Bus Station became Grade II Listed. The official entry lists the reasons for the listing, but the first reason is my particular favourite:

“the bus station and car park remains a little-altered and remarkably good example of integrated 1960s traffic planning that still functions as originally intended. As a 1960s ‘megastructure’ combining several functions it was designed to recreate a sense of the monumental within the British town scene.”

But take a look again. As there is an untold story here hiding in plain sight. The bus station was designed to handle eighty double-decker buses. In the 1971 Census, the County Borough of Preston was home to around 130,000 people. Much less than cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, both of which have smaller bus stations. Liverpool ONE bus station has ten bus stands, while Manchester’s Shudehill Interchange has eleven, though many local buses often terminate on local roads in both cases.

So what on earth went on in Preston that made their bus station so big? In transport planning for public transport, advocates usually adopt the phrase “build it and they will come.” Preston is the spectacular exception. They built it, and the people never came.

You are likely aware that, in the aftermath of World War II, the UK had a rapidly expanding population. With bomb-damaged and overcrowded cities, and where there wasn’t bomb damage there was often squalor, the British Government looked to the creation of new towns to handle the growth in population, combined with a strategy of densification within the cities themselves.

You can probably list the new towns by heart. Milton Keynes and Stevenage are within thirty minutes drive time of where I live. Basildon, Corby, Hemel Hempstead, Redditch, Skelmersdale, Warrington, Telford, Peterborough are but a few more. But the one that is often forgotten, one of the third generation of new towns, is the Central Lancashire New Town.

The original plans for the New Town were as, if not more, grand than those of any other of the New Towns put forward at the time. The plan centred on the existing places of Preston, Chorley, and Leyland. The intent behind the plan was not to create a unified city with a single central area, but to create a polycentric city. Fully articulating this vision was the Central Lancashire Development Corporation, who published its outline plan in 1974. While the other new towns set out their own grand visions, Central Lancashire was on another level.

Let’s start with the spatial framework. The plan was to create a city with a population of five hundred thousand. This made it, by some considerable distance, the largest of the new towns. Milton Keynes, the most successful new town, has a population of approaching three hundred thousand, and it was designed for a population of two hundred and fifty thousand.

The built form itself, based on polycentricity, is not the form of polycentricity that you find in the likes of Milton Keynes, but a linear urban region. Victoria Jolley, who wrote an academic thesis on the new town, describes this as so:

Arranged as a linear ladder-like complex the initial format comprised seven inter-connected townships connected by a three strand system of dual carriageways and public transport routes to promote evenly distributed free-flowing travel with minimal congestion. A framework of green belts and woodland defined each community’s individuality as well as create visual barriers between housing and employment areas. This also provided a network of footpaths between open spaces and the countryside. RMJM proposed a multi-centred growth strategy to disperse economy, employment and amenities throughout the city, giving each area a clear function and equal potential.

The rationale behind this approach was similar to that deployed in other new towns. With the Traffic in Towns report still fresh in the minds of the planners and architects of the time, the focus was on more evenly distributing the flow of trips along several corridors, thus minimising the opportunity for congestion hotspots to develop. All of the seven centres would be linked by a bus rapid transit system, with local buses providing connectivity within the respective urban communities. Segregated pedestrian paths would provide links within local communities and to the main centres, while two dual carriageways running the length of the city connected each local centre by road, and connected the whole city to the motorway network.

And at the centre of all of these was Preston. While the plan dictated that the spread of the development across these seven areas would be somewhat even (though the two new areas at Grimsargh and Longridge would, between them, account for just over twenty per cent of the population), the main administrative and commercial centre of the whole plan would be Preston.

Some of the other details of the plan are truly mind-boggling. The existing villages, which number a total population of between two and three thousand today, would have seen seventy two thousand new homes built in them. The Ribble and Lostock Valleys would have been home to watersports, equestrian facilities, and even a zoo. Chorley would become the cultural hub of the whole city. The whole plan was estimated at a construction cost of around £900 million in 1973, which is about £10 billion today. You could get HS2 from London to Aylesbury for that.

To understand why Preston bus station has the capacity that it does, you need to understand the kind of public transport system that was proposed for the new city. Victoria Jolley again describes what was planned:

The city’s public transport provision adopted a hierarchical three-tier system. Primarily dependant on railway stations at Preston, Leyland and Chorley, the local and national rail networks connected the city to the hinterland beyond the study area and to the region. An express bus with eight stops across the city network supplemented this and, because it ran on a dedicated reserved route, anticipated journey times between adjacent centres were two to six minutes. The longest journey, from Longridge to Chorley, would take only 25 minutes. At peak times between 12 and 20 express buses per hour would operate in each direction.

This was just the core of the network, incidentally. This did not count local bus services operating around each area of the city.

Those of you who know your history will have noticed the obvious issue here. While this plan was published in 1973, Preston bus station was opened in 1969. But you need to remember that 1973 was the zenith of the planning for the Central Lancashire New Town, and was after the city’s formal designation as a New Town by the government in 1970.

This official designation hides the fact that, prior to this point, a lot of planning and technical work had been undertaken by local councils affected by New Towns across the country to try to tackle the issues of population growth and the need for urban renewal. In 1959, Grenfell Baines and Hargreaves (who later became the Building Design Partnership) were originally commissioned with the task of consolidating all of the bus termini in Preston into a single location in the city centre, with a 500 space car park to sit alongside.

As this work was taking place, the idea of the new town developed alongside. It consequently became clearer as the project went along that the New Town was becoming an increasingly realistic proposal. The first designs for the new bus station were, in fact, relatively modest. An article on Mainstream Modern, sourcing the Arup Journal, describes how the first designs were very typical of the time, a single level with cantilevers for shelter, and an apron for vehicle movements.

By 1965, it was clear that the area was one of the preferred locations for a New Town. This is recorded in Hansard, as Robert Mellish, the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, stated:

In February, 1965, this Government announced their first decisions for future new towns. In the South-East we decided to go ahead with a new town in north Buckinghamshire and with major expansions at Ipswich, Peterborough and Northampton. These proposals together provided for planned intakes of some 280,000 people from London by 1981, and in the end we will see populations in those places of perhaps 250,000 each. In the North-West, we proposed a large new city in the Leyland-Chorley area of Lancashire and the expansion of Warrington to take people out of Manchester. The former may rise to 500,000 population, the latter to over 200,000.

These proposals are being pursued with all possible speed. Reports by consultant planners recommending suitable areas for designation have already been published for four towns. A similar report for Leyland-Chorley will come out next year, whilst a decision by my right hon. Friend on the designation in North Buckinghamshire will be made very soon.

As a consequence, a whole series of projects in Preston were announced in anticipation of a new city of half a million people being built. The bus station was one of them.

If the bus station was to cater for a city of this size, the small existing designs simply did not cut it. Furthermore, since the original design contract had been let, the motor car was becoming increasingly central to British transport policy. Dr Beeching was just starting to swing his axe on the railways, and the tenure of Ernest Marples at the Ministry of Transport in the early 1960s oversaw a huge road expansion programme. Of course, prior to all of this, Britain’s first stretch of motorway, the Preston Bypass (now part of the M6) was opened in 1958, and by 1965 the M6 stretched from Staffordshire to north Lancashire. It was determined that car parking was also needed as part of the bus station itself to provide seamless, multi-modal interchange between cars and buses. It was deemed that a multi-storey car park of one thousand one hundred spaces would suffice.

In the end, the Central Lancashire New Town never happened. The idea of accommodating overspill populations from Manchester and Merseyside proved politically toxic. Peter Shore, the Secretary of State for the Environment, announced the curtailment of the New Towns programme in 1976, cutting nearly half a million in population from the targets of the six most recently formed New Towns. For the Central Lancashire New Town, Victoria Jolley says that this cut the target population to twenty three thousand. Finally, the Development Corporation itself was abolished in 1985.

I feel that the experience of Preston Bus Station, regardless of your views on the aesthetics of building, teaches us a lot about how we forecast demand for transport as part of our scenario planning and modelling work. Forecasts tell us as much about the time they were made as they do about our vision of the future, as woven within them are inherent assumptions about what the future will hold.

Imagine if we travelled back to the mid-1960s in Preston. We are stood in the middle of a city in Lancashire that, like many places across the North of England, is down on its luck. It is in need of significant regeneration in order to inject a new lease of life into the place. Lo and behold, there is a boost from the Central Government. The place would be the heart of a new city, based on new and exciting ideas for what the built environment could be like.

If you are a local council worker at the time, your world has changed completely. That small little bus station you have been working with the architects and the National Bus Company on suddenly has had its assumptions changed radically. The Government has stated that the place will be a New Town. It might not be written into law yet, but it’s as good as done. Your planning assumptions now have to change radically, and take in a whole new context. One where a new city will be built, and you don’t want that being served by a brand new, small bus station.

We do not know whether there were dissenting voices in the room at the time, ones that could have foreseen the local political campaign to stop the New Town being successful. Those records have been lost to history, though it’s a reasonable assumption that officers working on the bus station would have at least been aware of the political context in which they sat. With the benefit of hindsight, we find it easy to point out where it became clear that the New Town would not happen, when those in the moment may have had a different view of events as they panned out. Your view is that the New Town is still a policy, and will still happen officially.

We also do not know the precise numbers that informed the requirement for eighty bus stands and just over one thousand parking spaces. Again, while we can make assumptions based on bus service frequencies and potential timings, nothing has been recorded, and no assumptions logged. Today we have uncertainty logs as a requirement of the Uncertainty Toolkit in Transport Analysis Guidance. This requires planned developments to be assessed on a likelihood scale of near certain, more than likely, reasonably foreseeable and hypothetical, with the core scenarios informing the development of schemes only being affected by those that are near certain and potentially more than likely.

At the time, the Central Lancashire New Town was just a government commitment, mentioned in Hansard. Maybe if the officers at the time had access to the Uncertainty Toolkit, they might have judged the New Town as reasonably foreseeable. But even then it would not have been part of the core scenarios for them building the new bus station. Having said this, their response, to build a bigger bus station, was an entirely rational one.

If we are somewhat critical, maybe the best option would have been designing for adaptive capacity. Maybe forty bays, with the structural grid and capacity to extend should the New Town happen, would have been the best way to go. In our current period of significant uncertainty about the future, that would be a logical thing to do when the plans are of such a scale and over such a long time period that they are much more likely to be subject to the winds of change.

But maybe, in a somewhat ironic way, its over-capacity and over-specification might have saved the building itself. It has never been used to its full capacity, and while its visuals are not everyone’s cup of tea, the build quality was such that very little maintenance was actually required to the structure itself. Because the original fabric of the building is largely intact, and not subject to patch and mend jobs like many other buildings of the era, it finally got its designation as a listed building.

This in turn prompted a rethink on the planned demolition. Preston City Council had been the owner pushing for demolition. With the Listed Building status moving that idea off the table, in 2014 ownership passed to Lancashire County Council for the symbolic sum of one pound. It was the County Council that then ran an international design competition through the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2015, attracting over ninety entries, shortlisting five, and putting the finalists to a public vote in which more than four thousand people took part. The winner was John Puttick Associates, a practice founded only the year before, working alongside the Preston firm Cassidy and Ashton.

The competition brief is an interesting read. It specified the need for thirty three bus bays along the eastern side of the building, together with four coach bays in the redeveloped taxi rank to the south. It also recorded the actual operational requirements, which was one hundred and forty arrivals and one hundred and forty departures in each hour through the main part of the day. Two hundred and eighty bus movements an hour is a serious volume of activity by any British standard outside London. It is also comfortably accommodated by thirty three bays. Incidentally, the bus station itself had been running at roughly that level for years.

Work started on site in November 2016 and the refurbished concourse was completed in June 2018, part of a wider programme costing in the region of £23 million. The bus station never closed during the works. All bus stands were consolidated onto the eastern side. The aluminium curtain walling was replaced entirely with a system matching the original profile but capable of resisting modern wind loading. The original timber sliding doors onto the apron, which had become rotted and too heavy for staff to operate, were remade in aluminium at the exact pattern and scale of the originals. Five decades of accumulated interior clutter was stripped out and the original material and colour palette reinstated, down to the route number signage. Redundant iroko barriers were reused as seating.

Buro Happold, who advised on fire strategy and inclusive access, set out just how far the building had drifted from its original coherence. The three pedestrian subways had become hotspots for antisocial behaviour, litter and graffiti. The building fell short of accessibility requirements. Piecemeal safety fixes had eroded its navigability. Most strikingly, it emerged during design that the fire strategies for the bus station and for the car park sitting directly above it were not aligned with one another. In the most noticeable change, the pedestrian subways were closed and replaced with surface level crossings, connecting the building to the city centre at eye level rather than beneath it.

The western apron then became a project in its own right, costing around £2.75 million and starting on site in 2019. The design divides the space into three linked areas, tree-lined, with raised lawns and planting, which can be combined for outdoor events with a capacity of between three and a half and four and a half thousand people. There is covered cycle parking, and half of Tithebarn Street was reconfigured to widen footways and add crossings. The scheme collected a RIBA National Award in 2019, three RIBA North West awards including the regional Conservation Award, and a Civic Trust Special Award for reuse and adaptation.

One element took considerably longer than the rest. The original competition-winning entry placed a Youth Zone at the northern end of the western apron, and the County Council dropped it in 2018. The facility was eventually delivered as a standalone building, The Vault, on the corner of Crooked Lane and Tithebarn Street opposite the bus station, more than a decade after it was first proposed.

Whilst the building itself looms over it, the pedestrianisation and greenery of the new square exudes a sense of calm and restfulness, a far cry from the movement of buses that previously dominated it. Half of a building designed for a city that never arrived is now the civic space of the city that did.

In a sense Preston was lucky, in that the build quality and the spatial footprint of the bus station allowed the opportunity to fix the historical forecasting mistake. Many such places often don’t have the opportunity to do this. Maybe that is one of the takeaways when delivering schemes based on forecasts of the future that are uncertain without our knowledge. If we don’t design and expand iteratively, we should give ourselves the opportunity to repurpose what we have created for something else. That is what happened at Preston, even if this was by accident.

Or maybe it’s something more simple than that. Much like the city’s football team, Preston Bus Station had some initial glory days, and since then has lived in the shadow of them. Maybe their football team could also learn from the bus station, which has showed that a bit of creative thinking and sound investment can make a difference. It may not see them back at the top again, but certainly something the city can be proud of. Preston North End comfortably sit in the Championship, the second tier of English football. Whether you think Preston Bus Station is in the Premier League of public transport facilities is down to you.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

• Opening out and closing down: the treatment of uncertainty in transport planning’s forecasting paradigm

• Estimating the uncertainty of traffic forecasts from their historical accuracy

• Are public transit investments based on accurate forecasts? An analysis of the improving trend of transit ridership forecasts in the United States

😀 Positive News

Your weekly dose of positivity in a world where bad news dominates. Enjoy.

• John Puttick Associates’ Preston Youth Zone opens

• The new towns programme narrows to seven locations

• UK’s leading heritage projects shortlisted for RIBA’s inaugural Conservation Award 2026

💻 Hard Work

This week I spent some time in London, meeting up with the likes of Laura Putt, Rob Goodall, Joe Reeve, and even bumping into Paul Powlesland. While there, I popped into St Pancras Station and said hello to John. Its definitely my favourite station.

🎶 Musical Finale

Yes, there is a song about the bus station. I cannot believe it. It’s to the tune of Sound of the Underground by Girls Aloud. It’s…something.

🪧 Notices

A couple of things worth noting as you read this.

I use AI as a research assistant to find credible, well-cited academic evidence. I check every source, carry out my own research and, where time allows, consult domain experts or their published work. The writing itself is mine, spelling mistakes and all.

I am a transport planner, so my expertise lies in public policy, movement and its impacts. When writing outside that field, I may occasionally get things wrong despite researching carefully. That is on me, and I always encourage readers to do their own research.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

I got ahead by two weeks in order to do research for an upcoming post, promising to post it today. Needless to say that I didn’t do it in time. So you have this post instead. What I am researching is coming, its just life has a funny habit of getting in the way.

While I have you here, there are a couple of public service announcements. Firstly, my good friends at the Young Mobility Network are running a bike tour in London on 2nd September at 5:30pm. If you are a young professional, you should go.

Secondly, it seems my posts are getting cut short by email clients. So under the Latest Research and Positive News sections I’ve cut the summaries and just provided the links. I’ve also cut the length of some of the non-core sections too.

It is quite rare that two very different interests of mine manage to combine themselves together for one fleeting moment. But this week, my interests in transport and astronomy managed to do just that. This last Wednesday, the UK experienced a solar eclipse. We didn’t experience complete totality, sadly, but as the eclipse made its way across Greenland, Iceland, the North Atlantic, Northern Portugal, and Spain, most of the UK experienced a near-total eclipse. The further South West you were, the greater the eclipse was, with parts of Cornwall experiencing ninety-five percent coverage of the sun, whereas Aberdeen experienced a ninety-one percent eclipse.

I had the privilege of not just being around for the last total eclipse that visited the UK, on 11th August 1999, but being in the privileged position of being able to travel easily to go and see it. While full totality would miss where I lived in Barnstaple in Devon, its path would take it over Cornwall, and much of South Devon. So, on the morning of the eclipse, me, my mum, one of my sisters and some of her friends all piled into my mum’s clapped out Citroen ZX, and like many others we joined the journey south.

Whereas the crowds were heading to the likes of St Ives, the Lizard, Penzance, and Plymouth, we decided to head off the beaten track to a village called Shaldon. This is situated on the opposite bank of the River Teign to Teignmouth, and we drove to a hill by the side of Marine Parade. This hill offers a gorgeous view. The mouth of the river and Teignmouth can be seen to the left, before the English Channel opens out in a sweeping view right in front of you. Our view was only blocked by The Ness, a small wooded headland jutting out into the channel, which is also home to Shaldon Zoo - a very small zoo dwarved by its nearest neighbour at Paignton. We arrived two hours before totality, and over the course of that time the hillside slowly filled up with people.

The moment of totality is one that I won’t forget. Naturally, it being the UK, clouds stopped us from seeing its true splendour, but the moment was still something to behold. Darkness came over the hill like a wave, and we could see the moon’s shadow head out across the English Channel. Some of the Devon coast that we could see past Teignmouth was still in daylight, and the contrast could not have been more stark. But what remains with me is the monkeys. The monkey’s screeching loudly as the moment of totality came, and during the two minutes that the darkness hung over us. I don’t know if it was a warning, terror, or excitement, but that sound is something I won’t forget.

Once the moment had passed, everyone on the hillside packed up, got in their cars, and tried to leave. We, being veterans of the usual rush of tourists that come through Barnstaple every summer, decided not to head off, and walked across the Shaldon Bridge to get ice cream in Teignmouth. We walked past a long line of traffic over the bridge, trying to get out of the area.

Some months before that, unknown to a seventeen year old me who hadn’t decided by that point to go for transport planning as a career, the House of Commons published a research briefing called the August Solar Eclipse. It gave MPs indications of what to expect from the eclipse, and with regards to transport its summary highlighted:

The possibility of large crowds converging towards Cornwall and Devon to witness the total eclipse is a mixed blessing for the local tourism industry. Some regular visitors to the counties are reportedly staying away in the expectation of road congestion and over stretched emergency services.

It also gives some insight into the uncertainty associated with the transport planning for the eclipse itself.

No-one knows how many people will travel to Cornwall and Devon to see the total eclipse. However, it is widely accepted that thousands, if not millions, of additional visitors will come to the counties during this time. Gage Williams, the County Planning Co-ordinator for the eclipse in Cornwall, has produced a document entitled Implications of the Eclipse on 11 August 99. This includes an estimate of the likely number of additional visitors to Cornwall, based on the capacity of the three main roads into the county. Assuming that traffic flowed steadily over a two-week period around the time of the eclipse, then up to 1.5 million additional people could visit Cornwall. This would be on top of 300,000 tourists and visiting friends and relatives who would ordinarily be present. Though this figure is probably an overestimate (traffic levels tend to be low in the early hours of the morning), it does not take into account people travelling by other methods or willing to spend more than 2 weeks in the county. In addition, many visitors are likely to opt for South Devon instead. Some estimates place the total number of additional visitors to the West Country as high as 4 million or more.

Such was the uncertainty of the impacts of the eclipse that policy makers at Devon County Council and Cornwall County Council were expressly warned by experts to not promote the eclipse in its annual tourist promotions.

It is estimated that an additional one million people came to Devon and Cornwall with the express intent of watching the eclipse. Me, my mum, my sister and her friends were one of the sixty thousand who travelled south on the day. In the end, people came by all sorts of means. Most drove, many crammed into packed trains, and charter flights were put on to Newquay Airport. Even cross channel ferries stopped their engines under the line of totality in the hope to get a view.

In transport we do come across major events similar to this all the time. Barely a couple of months ago I wrote about the FIFA World Cup and how football matches tend to have a somewhat unique demand profile. People attending football matches typically slowly arrive over the course of a couple of hours before kick off. Starting off with a trickle and slowly ramping up over time before, in the twenty minutes before kick off, everybody starts to go through the turnstiles and take their seats. Just after full time, everyone leaves in a big surge immediately after the final whistle has blown.

But this isn’t quite right in terms of explaining how major, unique events actually affect demand. In this instance, people are trying to get to and from a single point - the stadium. But for some major events their geographical spread is much more dispersed. Even then, there may be key points along the line of route where demand may be concentrated due to ‘the action’ happening in those areas.

A good example is the London Marathon. The Marathon itself runs over a twenty-six mile course, taking in Woolwich, Greenwich, Bermondsey, Wapping, the Isle of Dogs, and the City before the final stretch down The Mall. Yet despite its length and ample opportunities to see the race, travel advice for spectators advises that at eight locations, people should arrive early or expect delays. These are Cutty Sark, Canada Water, Bermondsey, Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, Limehouse, Tower Hill, and the final stretch from Parliament Square to The Mall.

While not as concentrated as eighty thousand trying to get to and from a stadium, this poses a fundamentally different transport management proposition. While there is likely to be isolated changes to entry and exit arrangements at stations and diverting buses on grounds of health and safety, transport network operators can play into the geographically dispersed nature of the event and the network effect of their operations to manage the event.

A solar eclipse takes this to an extreme. Two of the most studied solar eclipses in history in terms of their transport impacts took place in the last ten years, and both were in the United States of America. In 2017, the Great American Eclipse drew a line of totality from Oregon to South Carolina. In 2024, the Great North American Eclipse ran from eastern Canada, south west through the United States, and into Mexico. Keen to understand the impacts of these on how people travel, the Federal Highway Administration studied the impact of both, and came to conclusions that may seem counter-intuitive.

In 2022, Ngeni, Mwakalonge, and Siuhi published a paper on the highway impacts of the 2017 Eclipse, and the lessons learned from this. What their analysis of the FHA’s own data found was that the impact of the eclipse on traffic demand was highly variable. Of the eleven states that they studied, while Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming saw significant traffic increases on the day of the eclipse, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri had reduced daily traffic. The authors put this down to those states transportation agencies advising residents to reduce their errands on the day of the eclipse so as to reduce the traffic impacts.

When they looked in more detail at hourly flows, what they found was that across the whole corridor there was a thirteen percent decrease in traffic below the upper ninety five percent confidence interval during the eclipse time, but soon rose to thirteen percent above the lower ninety five percent confidence interval after the event. In other words, traffic went down as the eclipse took place and just before it, but rapidly increased again. Furthermore, this increase sustained itself for two to three days after the event, and only at that point did normal traffic levels resume. For the traffic drop before the eclipse there was significant variation. In Wyoming, which saw a seventeen percent increase in traffic on eclipse day.

This highly varied picture also occurred during the 2024 Eclipse. Sakhare, Desai, Mathew and Bullock found through the analysis of connected truck data that congestion varied wildly. Overall, across the thirteen states impacted by totality during the event, there was a thirty percent increase in congestion miles (i.e. congestion) compared to two weeks before the event. But even within this there were significant variations. Arkansas, Ohio, New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont saw their levels of congestion increase by well in excess of one hundred percent. Vermont saw its congestion-miles increase by seven hundred and eighty percent. In contrast, there were significant decreases in congestion in Texas, Oklahoma, and in some parts of Kentucky.

What we can see here is that mega events do generate significant movements, and while in some cases they are spatially concentrated, the more dispersed the event, the more dispersed the impact. No doubt had me, my mum, my sister, and her friends got into the car and left immediately, we may well have been caught in traffic attempting to leave Devon and Cornwall after the eclipse had ended. However, the spatial impacts of such an event would have been highly uncertain.

Unfortunately, there is no corresponding analysis of the traffic impacts of the eclipse on the West Country in 1999. I do remember traffic reports on the radio at the time reporting heavy traffic on the A38, the trunk road that runs from Exeter to Plymouth. However, as we were cutting across country, we experienced no delay in getting home.

But there is an idea that I want to introduce here, that we have partly learned over the years. Its not that we cannot predict the impacts of some significant events. Most transport agencies and local police forces can predict pretty well where crowding is likely to be an issue after events in highly concentrated locations such as stadiums, and they handle them well on the whole. But mega events like an eclipse introduce significant uncertainties in demand as a result of the nature of the event and its geographical locations.

In a PhD thesis in 2012, Kangjing He looked at just this, with a specific focus on the Beijing Olympics of 2008. He found that the impact was large but largely temporary. Travel patterns shifted significantly during the Games under the demand management regime put in place, but most of those changes did not persist once the Games ended.

The response was also highly heterogeneous. It varied significantly between demographic groups defined by residential area, age, occupation, income, car ownership and pre-Games mode, and car users and public transport passengers reacted differently from one another in both the short and the long run.

But the most critical finding is the difference between what people said they would do, and what they actually did. The differences were significant across all modes of transport, with walking and the subway the standout mismatches. This significant gap is, in itself, a finding. What He found was that the stated preference surveys undertaken to inform planning for the Olympics consistently predicted incorrectly. Planning built on pre-event stated intentions is therefore working on sand, especially for the discretionary modes.

The second is that the uncertainty is not uniform across the population. Because different segments move in different and sometimes offsetting directions, an aggregate forecast can look stable while concealing large compensating shifts underneath. We often look at the aggregate impact of mega events and how they will affect the transport network, but He’s work suggests that population segments are a more robust model for predicting behaviour changes in such instances.

I can see that in my own experience. A family group who is relatively local and knows the impacts of a sudden rush of tourists into an area is a different proposition to another family driving into the West Country for a few hours to see the eclipse. But even with this, I think the most significant point it also something that He’s work points towards, and the analysis of the eclipses in the United States attempts to tackle. That is the crushing lack of shared knowledge on how to deal with such events.

There was no study of the impact of the 1999 eclipse on travel patterns in the West Country, despite knowing about its date and even specific time for nearly one hundred years. Even the data collected in the United States is partial, and notably omits public transport entirely. And this is not uncommon among transport planning for major events. Much of the knowledge on how to deal with significant events such as this is in the minds of transport system operators, and locked away in management plans in some back office of a council building. The experience of dealing with unexpected situations on the fly is often not captured at all, instead resting in the heads of committed professionals who want to keep transport systems safe and moving.

Us here in the UK will get another chance to learn the lessons of managing the transport demands associated with a solar eclipse. That date will be 23rd September 2090, when once again Cornwall and Devon, as well as much of the south coast of England, will be covered in totality. Get preparing those research applications, and start preparing the management plans for it now - you only have another sixty four years to prepare. From my own experience, I can assure you that it is an event like no other.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

• Real time transit demand prediction capturing station interactions and the impact of special events.

• Understanding travel behaviour change during mega-events: lessons from the London 2012 Games.

• Short-term metro ridership prediction during unplanned events.

• Modelling travel mode choice behaviour for planned special events using a CPT-based HI-MADM approach.

• Modelling crowdedness at public transport stations during special events: a comparative study of eleven cities

😀 Positive News

Your weekly dose of positivity in a world where bad news dominates. Enjoy.

• The World Cup drives record transit ridership across North America

• ScotRail records its busiest week since returning to public ownership

• The London Marathon moves three-quarters of a million spectators

• Milan-Cortina 2026 leans on the railway

• Vancouver posts its busiest transit day since the 2010 Olympics

💻 Hard Work

These last two weeks, as part of the Transport Box project, I got to help out at two sessions that a load of volunteer engineers ran for kids with Special Educational Needs. I’m not sure who loved the sessions more - the kids or the engineers!

🎶 Musical Finale

In what is arguably one of the best live performances of all time, Nirvana performed a pitch-perfect cover of Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam, originally recorded by The Vaselines. It’s only tangentially related to eclipses, but it mentions the sun and I absolutely love it. That is good enough for me.

🪧 Notices

A couple of things worth noting as you read this.

I use AI as a research assistant to find credible, well-cited academic evidence. I check every source, carry out my own research and, where time allows, consult domain experts or their published work. The writing itself is mine, spelling mistakes and all.

I am a transport planner, so my expertise lies in public policy, movement and its impacts. When writing outside that field, I may occasionally get things wrong despite researching carefully. That is on me, and I always encourage readers to do their own research.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

Good day my good friend.

As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter (this week’s as I write it, which is weird), this newsletter has been scheduled in advance as I have a lot on, including researching something that I hope to publish next week. Hopefully the world hasn’t fallen apart in the meantime.

One thing I did want to flag. As part of the Transport Box project that I am helping to run with the excellent people at UK Unplugged, we are running a transport-related activity session for children with Special Educational Needs or are on the CAMHS waiting list in Stockport this Wednesday. We have sessions in the morning and afternoon, being run by volunteers, and its all completely free.

If you have kids who might be interested, you can sign up here. If you know anyone else who has kids who might be interested, forward this to them.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last six months or so, one of the biggest projects currently in transport planning is the planned Mini Switzerland project in the Hope Valley. For those of you who have somehow missed it, Thomas Ableman - who came up with the idea and has worked with the Hope Valley Climate Action Group and many, many volunteers to make it work - describes it as so:

The project represents an opportunity for the East Midlands to demonstrate national leadership in rural mobility by hosting the UK’s first real-world demonstrator of fully integrated bus and rail services outside of a major city.

Unlike many transport schemes, Mini Switzerland does not depend on new railways or large-scale construction. Instead, it focuses on better coordination of enhanced services, supported by modest infrastructure improvements, clear information and simple, integrated ticketing.

I am naturally favourable towards the kinds of projects that back up a sky-high ambition with lots of good work by committed teams to make it happen, even if such projects ultimately do not succeed. In fact, it is my own failure that has taught me almost everything I know about operating integrated public transport services.

This is the story when, in one corner of Bedfordshire, we tried integration, and the result was a bus that carried virtually nobody. The Leighton Buzzard Station Travel Plan - one of the national pilot station travel plans and was award-winning to boot - contained a lot of ideas around how we would integrate the station into work being undertaken by the Cycle Demonstration Town, a new “Dash Direct” bus service to and from a development to the South of Leighton Buzzard, and personalised journey planning.

As we were delivering the station travel plan, we decided that we needed to trial a bus service from rural villages. As Leighton Buzzard is the last stop on fast commuter services into London Euston (taking as little as thirty-five minutes), it had a huge rural hinterland. We chose an obvious candidate village, and immediately started work to design the service. The bus in question was numbered the 27, and it operated a peak hour service between the village of Heath and Reach just to the north of Leighton Buzzard, and Leighton Buzzard railway station1.

Operated by the-then new bus company Grant Palmer, it ran twice a day in each direction. It was timed specifically to meet the busiest trains to and from London Euston - which we knew from spending sixteen hours a day for three days on station platforms counting the number of people getting on and off trains serving the station.

We even sorted the fares. The service accepted PlusBus, the add-on ticket that lets a rail passenger buy a day or more of local bus travel alongside their train ticket at a discount, so the money side of the interchange was about as close to seamless as the system at the time allowed.

On paper it was a model of integration. A dedicated service, timed to the trains, with a through fare already in place. What could go wrong?

It never carried more than about seven people a day. After a few years it was quietly withdrawn.

I have thought about the 27 a great deal since, because it tells me a lot about integration. We treat integration as a problem of ticketing and provision. Put on the bus, sort the fare, line up the times, and passengers will come. The 27 had all three, and they did not come. So the interesting question is not what we did wrong on the surface, but what lurked underneath the surface that scuppered our well-laid plans.

When a service does this badly you owe it to yourself to find out why, so we literally went out and asked people - both at the station and in the village. For some the timing simply did not work. A twice-daily service, however well aimed at the peak, suits only a narrow band of journeys, and plenty of villagers start or finish work at hours the 27 did not serve. For others the honest answer was that they preferred to drive, and a car on the drive next to a station with parking is a powerful thing to compete with.

But the answer that came up most often was that people did not trust it. Not that they thought the bus would fail to turn up necessarily (though it was mentioned), but that they could not see what happened when things went wrong.

The question people kept asking themselves was a simple one: what if the train was late? If you have driven to the station you shrug and walk to your car. If you are trying to catch the last bus of the evening and your train crawls into the station twenty minutes behind schedule, the bus has gone and you now have the task of trying to get a taxi, or calling home in the hope someone can give you a lift. One passenger told us they had missed the last bus for exactly that reason, because their train was late and the 27 could not wait. They never used the bus again after that.

In theory there was a safety net. The 150, the long-standing interurban route that threads through Heath and Reach between Aylesbury and Milton Keynes, offered a fallback. But there was a catch. Catching the 150 back then meant a ten-minute walk across town to the stop on Wing Road, in the wrong direction, at the end of a long day2. A tired commuter will not do that on a wet, cold Tuesday evening in December. So they did the rational thing. They took the car, or never started using the bus at all, because the downside of being caught out once outweighed the upside of a smooth journey most days. Those who did give it a try often bailed once it failed. The 27 was reliable on a good day and useless on a bad one, and people build their travel habits around the bad days.

The things we usually treat as the hard work of integration are actually the easy part, and on the 27 we did them all. Ticketing is largely solved. PlusBus is not perfect, but it exists and offers integrated ticketing. Provision is solved in the narrow sense that we can commission a bus whenever we find the money, which is what the station travel plan did. And timing is solved in the sense that any competent scheduler can build a timetable that meets a train. We did that too, down to the specific London services.

So if ticketing, provision and timing are all things we can deliver, and we delivered them, and the service still failed to earn trust, then the real barrier to integration lies somewhere we do not usually look.

Lets start by looking at the commercial structure of bus operators. Since the Transport Act 1985 deregulated local buses everywhere outside London, the default is a commercial market. An operator runs the routes it chooses, registers them, and keeps the fares. Where that leaves a gap the authority judges socially necessary, the authority can pay an operator to fill it through a tendered contract, so long as it does not directly compete with a commercial service. The 27 was one of those, a supported peak service bought to serve a policy goal rather than a commercial one.

The trouble is that a connection between a bus and a train sits in a gap neither the bus or train operator is paid to close. They are separate businesses with separate revenue. There is no mechanism by which the rail company compensates the bus company for holding a departure, and no shared pot that both draw from when a smooth interchange delivers a passenger who might otherwise have driven. In fact for the train operator, they get the passenger regardless, and may also keep more revenue through car parking.

When there is no commercial agreement to protect a connection, the connection is nobody’s job. It is a benefit that lands on the passenger and the wider network but not on the balance sheet of whoever bears the cost. As the Centre for Cities has argued, deregulation left public transport competing with itself, without the co-ordinated ticketing, pricing and timetabling that integration depends on. A held connection only happens when someone is responsible for the whole journey, and in our system usually no one is.

Then there is the punctuality regime. Bus punctuality in Great Britain is measured against a standard set by the Senior Traffic Commissioner. The rule, essentially unchanged since the practice direction of the mid-2000s, is a window of tolerance. A bus should depart its timing points no more than one minute early and no more than five minutes late, on at least ninety-five per cent of departures.

Missing that does not mean only a stern warning or disappointment from the Traffic Commissioner. Miss it consistently and the operator can be called to account, with financial penalties and, in the worst cases, action against its licence. In the worst cases, operators can have their licences revoked.

The challenge this poses is that the bus timetable does not account for the operational reality of other public transport systems. A driver who holds for eight minutes for passengers on a delayed London train has, in the eyes of the regime that judges them, simply run a late bus. The very behaviour that would build trust with rail passengers is the behaviour the compliance system discourages. We ask bus operators to integrate with the railway while measuring them against a clock that ignores the railway entirely.

It’s easy at this point to be critical of this regime, and many people I know have suggested that Traffic Commissioners should cut bus operators some slack for holding buses to meet trains. But there are very good reasons why this regime exists. The window also exists to stop early running, which strands passengers who arrive on time to find the bus gone, and the evidence from Transport Focus is that passengers hate early running even more than lateness.

Furthermore, even if we swept the punctuality problem aside, a second obstacle would remain. A bus that waits at the station is not sitting in isolation. It is usually part way along a route, with passengers already aboard and more waiting down the line. Hold it for a late train and you delay every one of them.

Let’s use the 150 bus as an example, and assume in a perfect world that, at the time, this hourly bus did what we planned the 27 to do. If it paused at the station to scoop up rail passengers whenever a train ran late, it would arrive late into Heath and Reach and everywhere beyond, to the frustration of the villagers already on board who simply want to get home. The driver is being asked to trade a certain, immediate harm to the people sat on the bus for an uncertain benefit to a handful of strangers who may or may not be on the delayed train. That is a hard trade to make on instinct, and the deregulated route structure, in which a single bus serves many masters along its length, makes it harder still.

A further barrier seems trivial, yet in our experience played a bigger role than we expected. Even a driver who wanted to wait, and was willing to absorb the risk, usually has no way of knowing whether the train is late. There is no feed of live rail running information into the cab, and using the mobile at the wheel is an obvious no-no. To see if the trains were running late, the bus driver would literally have had to lock up the bus, walk into the station, and check the departure board themselves.

This is doubly frustrating because what we have created in terms of data infrastructure runs the opposite way. The Bus Open Data Service means a bus broadcasts its own position and predicted times to journey planners, to bustimes.org, and to the Traffic Commissioner’s punctuality monitoring. We have built an entire system to tell the world where the buses are. We have not built the far simpler thing that would let a driver make an informed decision about a connection, a signal that says the 18:42 from Euston is running nine minutes late, hold if you can. Without it, a willing driver is guessing, and guessing wrong means either a pointless delay to onboard passengers or a missed connection anyway. So the rational driver does not chance it.

Underneath all of this sits a commercial logic that leaves no room for waiting even in principle. Bus operations are planned around the fewest vehicles and tightest driver duties that will deliver the timetable, because vehicles and drivers are the two biggest costs in the business. Recovery time, the slack that lets a service absorb a delay and still start its next trip on time, is minimised because it looks like idle resource. A schedule with enough slack to hold routinely for late trains is carrying spare capacity, and that is the first thing a cost-conscious operator engineers out.

In our case, the bus that operated the 27 was frequently used for other routes during the day, before coming back in the evening to pick up commuters. It could not afford to run late for the second service of the morning, otherwise its whole service pattern for the day would be affected.

Finally, there is the fragility of the thing we commissioned. A peak-only bus running twice a day is, by design, a marginal service. It carries a high subsidy per passenger, it is the first candidate for the axe when budgets tighten, and it can never generate the habitual, turn-up-and-go ridership a frequent all-day service builds almost automatically.

Trust in a bus is largely a function of frequency. If there is another one in ten minutes, a missed connection is an annoyance. If the next one is tomorrow morning, it is a catastrophe, and people plan their whole travel choice around avoiding it. We ask a thin service to prove demand it can never build because it is too thin to be trusted.

Lay these barriers side by side and a pattern emerges. Commercial structure, punctuality rules, route interdependence, information gaps, cost pressure and marginal frequency all push the same way. Each, on its own, makes it a little more rational for an operator not to protect a connection. Together they make the trustworthy behaviour almost impossible, not because anyone is being obstructive, but because the incentives point the other way.

And notice where the failure concentrates. The late running train unravels the whole service. On a good day the 27 worked beautifully. Its problem was that integration which only works on a good day is not really integration. It is two timetables that happen to line up. The value of a genuine connection lies almost entirely in what happens when things go wrong, which is exactly what our system handles worst.

The Mini Switzerland project is seeking to apply to the Hope Valley the lessons learned in the country contained within its name. The contrast is not really about Swiss efficiency or Swiss money, though there is plenty of both. It is about what the system is designed to optimise.

Switzerland built its network around the connection rather than the vehicle. The organising idea is the Taktfahrplan, the clock-face timetable introduced nationally in 1982, in which services run at regular intervals and are timed to meet each other at designated nodes. The Swiss call these nodes Knoten, and stations like Olten, Bern and Zurich are engineered so that trains from several directions arrive together, exchange passengers within a few minutes, and depart together. The whole timetable pulses, and buses are woven into the same rhythm, so the Postbus in the valley is built to meet the train at the station, not by luck but by design.

The philosophy behind this inverts our instinct. Under the Rail 2000 programme the Swiss adopted the principle that trains should run as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible. Rather than chasing raw speed and hoping the connections fell out of it, they fixed the connection times first and then invested in the track and signalling needed to hit them.

But the part that matters most for the 27 is not the timetable at all. It is the governance and the money underneath it. Swiss regional transport is organised through tariff associations, with public authorities specifying and funding an integrated network, so revenue is pooled across operators and modes rather than fought over. When the money is shared, an operator that holds for a connection is not handing a gift to a rival at its own expense. The benefit and the cost sit inside the same system, so waiting becomes affordable because the incentive to wait is built into who gets paid. One body owns the journey, so the connection is somebody’s job.

It should be noted that even in this world class system, the Swiss do not hold buses indefinitely. PostAuto itself notes that because the timetable is so tightly interlocked there is only limited scope to wait, and delays are handled through national compensation rules rather than bus drivers waiting for twenty minutes at stations. The lesson is not that Swiss buses wait forever. It is that the system is punctual and co-ordinated enough that holds are rarely needed and, when they are, short.

That reliability is bought with sustained investment and a settled governance structure Britain does not have, and the honest caveat is that our own evidence base on integration of this kind is thin. Most of the good practice we cite is imported, from Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, and it needs adapting rather than copying.

The system incentivises connections and accessibility. Not speed. And the governance is built around that goal.

We reach, again and again, for the parts of integration that are legible and deliverable. We sort the ticketing, we commission the service, we time it to the trains, and we present that as integration being done, because those things photograph well in a travel plan. What we reach for far less often is the incentive structure underneath, the commercial agreements, the punctuality rules, the information flows and the funding models that actually determine whether an operator behaves in a way that earns a passenger’s trust.

And trust is the whole game. If the train is running late and you know, with confidence, that the bus will wait, that is a categorically different proposition from the one we offered in Heath and Reach. Under our arrangements the bus cannot promise to wait, because every incentive it faces tells it not to. We built the 27 to generate trust inside a system that gives operators every reason not to provide it.

None of the fixes are exotic, they are just tricky. A contractual connection guarantee with a funded allowance to hold. A live rail feed into the cab so a driver can make an informed choice. A punctuality standard that recognises a protected connection rather than punishing it. Revenue pooling so that waiting does not bankrupt the operator that waits. The franchising and Enhanced Partnership powers in the Bus Services Act 2017, used to put one body in charge of the whole journey. Each is a change to an incentive, not to a timetable or a ticket.

The 27 was not a failure of ticketing, and it was not a failure of scheduling. Those we got right. It was a service asked to do the one thing our system is built to prevent, and to be trusted when things go wrong. Until we are willing to work on the incentives and governance rather than the basics, we will keep commissioning careful, well-timed, properly ticketed little buses and watching them carry five people a day until the money runs out. This village bus taught me that the timetable was never the hard part. The hard part was everything we did not put on the timetable.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Creating bus timetables with maximal synchronization

TL:DR - The authors turned the intuitive goal of making buses meet into a formal optimisation problem, maximising the number of simultaneous arrivals at connection nodes and solving it as mixed integer linear programming.

Not all transfers are created equal: towards a framework relating transfer connectivity to travel behaviour

TL:DR - The penalty a passenger attaches to a transfer depends on its quality, not merely its existence, and that planning practice routinely lacks a clear behavioural framework linking the design of stops and interchanges to how people actually decide to travel.

Assessing the cost of transfer inconvenience in public transport systems: a case study of the London Underground

TL:DR - Puts hard numbers on the psychological cost of transfers on the London Underground, finding that a large share of the burden is not walking or waiting time but the penalty passengers assign to the act of transferring itself.

Users’ willingness to ride an integrated public-transport service: a literature review

TL:DR - Both research and practice have over-concentrated on the operational mechanics of transfers and under-studied the psychological and policy factors that actually shape whether people will use an integrated service at all.

The effects of travel time and cost savings on commuters’ decision to travel on public transport routes involving transfers

TL:DR - Time and cost savings on their own do not reliably persuade people onto routes that involve a transfer, because reliability and confidence carry heavy weight in the decision.

😀 Positive News

Your weekly dose of positivity in a world where bad news dominates. Enjoy.

Greater Manchester’s franchised buses keep growing

Bee Network bus patronage rising over the rolling twelve months from 168.9 million journeys in January 2025 to 176.3 million in January 2026, with passenger numbers up eight per cent year on year in the first tranche of franchised areas and ten per cent in the second. Metrolink recorded its busiest January on record at 3.7 million journeys, and the network now runs affordable capped contactless ticketing across bus and tram.

Contactless pay as you go spreads across the South East

The Rail Delivery Group confirmed that tap in, tap out contactless ticketing has gone live at thirty further stations, taking the total to fifty three, with a further twenty including Stansted and Southend airports to follow this summer 2026. More than 5.6 million contactless journeys have been made since the rollout began in June 2024.

Liverpool City Region brings back franchised buses after 40 years

Merseytravel named the operators for its first franchised services in four decades, with invitations to tender for the second tranche covering Knowsley, Liverpool and Sefton commencing in February 2026. The first phase begins in St Helens and Wirral in autumn 2026, rolling out region wide by the end of 2027.

The West Midlands moves to franchising with an electric bus rapid transit backbone

Transport for West Midlands issued its first tranche invitation to tender in May 2026, with reliability, better integration and more affordable fares set as the primary goals. The plan is anchored by Sprint, a bus rapid transit scheme for the A34 and A45 corridor running 24 tram like battery electric articulated buses with dedicated charging infrastructure.

Germany's national ticket holds firm through a price rise

The Deutschlandticket, the single monthly pass valid on almost all local and regional buses, trams, S-Bahn, U-Bahn and regional trains across Germany, retained more than 13 million active subscribers after its price rose to 63EUR a month in January 2026. Estimates from mid 2025 suggested that around a fifth of trips made on the ticket were net additions to public transport rather than journeys shifted from existing tickets.

💻 Hard Work

As I mentioned last week, I probably won’t write this section for a couple of weeks due to the reason given in my introduction. So if you really want to hear what I have been up to which isn’t meetings, Teams calls, and riding up and down railways, you are going to have to wait. Sorry.

🎶 Musical Finale

Sorry to say that Bachelor Girl’s song Buses and Trains is not about buses and trains. It’s about boring things like relationships. Who’d sing about those kind of things?

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. For this particular article, I did get AI to write a first draft of some paragraphs, to give some ideas for structuring the article, which I subsequently edited into my own words. Otherwise, the words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

Good day my good friend.

The next couple of weeks are going to be a bit strange as, rather than writing each post in the week that I post it, today’s and next Friday’s posts are already done and dusted. This is partly as I have a lot of work on over the coming couple of weeks, but also as I need to spend more time researching something I am hoping to publish in a couple of weeks time. In the meantime, enjoy!

The other day, someone who I respect greatly posted something that has started a bit of a debate (as much as debate can be had on social media, anyway). Omer Bor posted his views about the planned change in the bus fare cap in England to £2. His views in short are there are probably better uses for half a billion pounds than a simple nationwide flat fare, which caused a bit of discussion in the comments section of that and one subsequent post - including from yours truly.

Rather than rehash the debate again but in longer form, I thought what would be more useful ns looking at the different pricing mechanisms, and their relative strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of modal shift, equity, and economic efficiency. Each of which is usually contained in the vision and objectives of the transport strategies that such fares are meant to help deliver1.

I also do this partly as I find that people weirdly get really protective about their own chosen method of pricing public transport. Seeing panellists at a conference get quite angry that someone disagrees that free public transport might actually not be a good thing is quite something, I assure you. But hopefully here you may be able to learn something about the value of each method of pricing.

This needs to start from the basis of understanding how public transport use responds to changes in prices, in particular the price elasticity of demand - or how sensitive consumers of a product (in this case using buses) are to price changes. In a synthesis for the Department for Transport, the short-run bus fare elasticity comes out at about -0.4, rising to roughly -0.56 over five to seven years and around -1.0 over twelve to fifteen years. This means a ten per cent fare rise loses you around four per cent of passengers in the first year or two, around six percent over seven years, and ten percent over fifteen years.

That inelasticity cuts two ways, and holding both edges at once is the whole discipline of fares policy. Because demand is relatively inelastic in the short run, raising fares almost always raises revenue, which is why hard-pressed operators reach for it. Because demand becomes relatively elastic in the long run, the same increase quietly hollows out the ridership base over a decade. Everything that follows is a variation on how you distribute that trade-off across different people, times and distances.

Let’s start with the obvious example: free fares. Abolishing fares is the boldest option and the one with the most misleading reputation. The strongest single piece of evidence is Cats, Susilo and Reimal’s 2017 study of Tallinn, the Estonian capital that made public transport free for registered residents in 2013. This work is built on travel diaries from fifteen hundred households before and after the change. It found ridership rose by about fourteen per cent, and the mobility of low-income residents improved, which is a real equity gain. The catch is where the extra trips came from. Much of the growth was newly generated travel and journeys switched from walking, not journeys switched from cars. The modal shift away from the private car, which is the usual justification offered to sceptical taxpayers, was slight.

Dunkerque in France, which went fare-free across its network in 2018, is often cited for a larger effect, with reported ridership growth around sixty per cent and roughly half of new riders said to have come from cars. I would treat that headline more cautiously than the Tallinn figures, because the Dunkerque numbers circulate largely through advocacy and press summaries such as this account from the Observer Research Foundation rather than through an equivalently controlled academic study. Luxembourg became the first country to abolish fares nationally in 2020, and Hasselt in Belgium ran the pioneering scheme from 1997 before abandoning it as costs outran the budget.

The honest summary is the one the UITP reached in its policy brief. Free fares are a blunt instrument. They deliver ridership and a strong political signal, but they are an expensive way to help poorer travellers, because the largest cash saving flows to whoever already travels most, and much of that group is not poor. They also surrender the entire farebox at the moment operators most need revenue to protect frequency, and frequency matters more to most riders than price. A recent review in Transport Policy drawing on more than one hundred and fifty studies reaches much the same verdict, that the ridership effect is real but the car-substitution and equity claims are weaker than advocates suggest.

A flat fare charges everyone the same regardless of distance, and it dominates bus networks in Britain and the United States for obvious reasons. It is cheap to administer, trivial to understand, and reduces boarding times - a major source of delays to buses. This in turn has a secondary effect, because boarding speed affects journey time and journey time affects ridership more strongly than fares do.

The problem is buried in the arithmetic and has been known since Cervero’s foundational work in the early 1980s. Under a flat fare, the passenger travelling two stops subsidises the passenger travelling twenty, and short off-peak trips return far more per mile than long peak ones cost to provide. Because lower-income riders in many cities make shorter trips, a flat fare can be quietly regressive in horizontal terms even where it looks fair on the surface. The 2025 literature review by Kouwenberg and van Oort, which synthesises fifty-eight studies, treats the regressive tendency of flat fares as one of the field’s more settled findings.

There is, however, one small catch here, in that flat fares are only regressive where poorer people take shorter trips. What we know from the National Travel Survey is that, on average, people in households in the lowest income quintile take shorter trips across a range of modes of transport compared to those in households in higher income quintiles. For public transport, the average trip distance for those in the lowest income quintile was eight miles, compared to sixteen miles for the highest income quintile.

But this can vary according to the geographies of deprivation in cities. In cities where low-income households have been pushed to the periphery and now make the longest commutes, a flat fare can protect them and a distance-based one can punish them. The geography of who lives where does more work in this argument than the fare table itself, which is a theme I return to later.

Zonal fares divide an area into concentric or geographic areas and charge according to how many boundaries a trip crosses. London is the obvious example, and the structure is best understood as a deliberate compromise between the simplicity of the flat fare and the fairness of the distance-based one. It captures the broad relationship between distance and cost without demanding the passenger’s exact origin and destination, which historically mattered a great deal when tickets were sold by hand.

The compromise carries its own distortion, the tariff cliff at the zone boundary. Two passengers travelling almost identical distances can pay markedly different amounts if one happens to cross a line and the other does not, and stations or stops just inside a cheaper zone acquire a premium that has nothing to do with the service offered.

Zonal systems also tend to draw their boundaries around a historic centre, which suits radial commuting into that centre and serves orbital trips between suburbs poorly. On efficiency grounds zonal fares are a clear improvement on flat fares and a clear step short of true distance pricing. On equity they inherit a softened version of both parents’ problems, being fairer than a flat fare across long distances but retaining arbitrary unfairness at the margins. For most large networks I think they remain the sensible default, precisely because they are legible to passengers in a way that pure distance pricing is not.

Distance-based charging, or charge strictly by the mile, means that, in principle, price finally matches the cost of provision. This is the structure that performs best in several equity studies. Brown’s analysis of fares in Los Angeles concluded that non-capped distance-based fares combined with time-of-day pricing produced the most equitable outcome once you weighed ability to pay, the benefit riders receive and the cost of serving them. Smartcard and contactless technology has removed most of the historic objection that distance fares were too costly to administer. The reader who taps in and out is already handing the operator the data a distance fare needs.

There are, however, two serious drawbacks. The first is behavioural. Distance pricing directly taxes the long trip, and the long trip is exactly the one where one mode of public transport - the train - competes hardest against the car and where mode shift is most valuable. So a strict distance fare can discourage the journeys you most want to win.

The second is distributional, and this is where you get into all sorts of arguments about fairness. Farber and colleagues’ study of the Utah Transit Authority found that moving from flat to distance fares helped low-income, elderly and non-white riders on average, but that the benefits were unevenly spread. Some residents on the urban fringe were, in fact, made worse off. Where the poor have been priced out to the edge of the city, the fairest-looking structure bills them for the distance that poverty imposed on them. This can be worked around through capping distance-based fares, or grouping locations into fare zones in a mini-zonal fare system. But this is all incredibly fiddly as a workaround. This is a case of a policy that can be vertically progressive and horizontally cruel at the same time.

Anyone who has caught a British train before 9am on a weekday will know all about Peak Pricing. Peak pricing charges more when the network is busiest, and of all the approaches I outline here it has the tidiest economic logic. The cost of carrying a passenger is concentrated in the peak, because it is the peak that dictates how many vehicles, drivers and platforms an operator must own. Off-peak passengers ride largely spare capacity. Charging them the same price is the mispricing that peak fares exist to correct. Furthermore, peak hour travellers - who are often commuters - are often less sensitive to changes in price compared to their off-peak counterparts.

The behavioural evidence is encouraging where it exists, though much of the best of it is imported rather than British. Currie’s 2010 study of Melbourne’s Early Bird scheme, which made pre-seven-o’clock travel into the centre free, shifted about twenty-three per cent of affected peak passengers into the shoulder, a substantial result from a pure price signal. The elasticity work supports the mechanism, since off-peak fare elasticities in Britain run at roughly twice their peak equivalents. Balcombe and colleagues’ 2004 review put peak bus elasticity near -0.26 against off-peak values closer to -0.48, which tells you that off-peak riders are the ones you can move with price and peak riders largely are not. Liu and Charles’s 2013 review of differential fares gathers the international evidence for this peak-spreading effect.

The equity sting is that the people with the least control over their working hours are disproportionately the low-paid. The salaried professional can start at ten and pay the cheaper fare. The cleaner, the carer and the shift worker cannot, and a naïve peak premium taxes precisely the travellers with the least flexibility to avoid it. Peak pricing is efficient, but it is only equitable if it is designed with discounts or exemptions that recognise who is genuinely captive to the peak.

Dynamic pricing has been around in various forms of public transport for decades, though its modern equivalent has largely been imported from low cost airlines. It lets the fare move continuously with demand rather than sitting in fixed peak and off-peak bands. It is the logic of the airline seat applied to the rail seat, and long-distance operators have adopted it enthusiastically. Consultancies describe European high-speed operators such as SNCF extracting revenue premiums of around a quarter through demand-responsive pricing, though I state that this figure comes from industry advisory material rather than independent evaluation, and revenue extracted is not the same as welfare gained.

For the operator the appeal is obvious. Prices track willingness to pay minute by minute, high-demand departures are rationed by price rather than by crush, and cheaper off-peak seats can be sold to travellers who would otherwise not go at all. The problems are informational and political. Passengers cannot plan around a price they cannot predict, and the structure rewards the sophisticated and the flexible over the occasional and the anxious, and the sense that the machine is charging you the most it thinks you will bear corrodes trust in a service that presents itself as a public good.

Dynamic pricing typically suits a competitive intercity market where the alternative is a car or a plane. On a captive urban network, where the passenger has no realistic option and the operator faces no competitive discipline, the same technique reads as extraction.

Yield management is the cousin of dynamic pricing. Where dynamic pricing floats the headline price, yield management allocates a fixed set of seats across fare classes, deciding how many cheap advance tickets to release before protecting the remainder for late-booking, higher-paying travellers. It is the system behind Britain’s advance rail fares.

Used well, it improves the efficiency of a fixed asset. A train has a set number of seats and every empty one at departure is revenue lost forever, so selling early seats cheaply to leisure travellers while reserving capacity for business travellers who book late can raise both revenue and total ridership. The equity picture is mixed. The organised traveller who can commit weeks ahead gets a fare that may be a fraction of the walk-up price, which helps the leisure market, but the person who must travel at short notice, often for reasons entirely outside their control such as a family emergency, faces the full unprotected fare.

The essential caveat, and one the more candid revenue management practitioners concede, is that yield management is a tool for competitive markets. On a route where the operator holds a monopoly, the same optimisation shades from clever capacity management into simple exploitation of captive demand.

The last approach is the one that most of the equity literature quietly points towards, which targeted discounts. Namely, this is keeping a base fare and layer targeted discounts onto it for groups you have a reason to help. Britain’s largest example is the English National Concessionary Travel Scheme, which gives free off-peak bus travel to people over state pension age and to eligible disabled people. The House of Commons Library briefing records that England spent around eight hundred and seventy-seven million pounds on it in the year to March 2023, and that the national scheme sits alongside more generous local schemes such as London’s Freedom Pass.

The Department for Transport’s own evaluation of concessionary travel confirms that free passes generate real additional travel, particularly among the seventy to seventy-nine age group. There is also a live distributional argument, captured in a recent Westminster Hall debate reported by route-one, over whether a universal age-based concession is the right priority when younger people at the start of working life often face the highest fares of anyone.

That does not mean there are not issues. Targeted schemes depend on the reimbursement formula, and the principle that operators should be left no better and no worse off is almost always contested. A former local authority colleague of mine used to joke that behind every discount for bus passengers is a council officer getting an earful from a bus operator, and like any good joke there is a hint of truth there.

Additionally, eligibility drawn by different characteristics that are administratively simple is a crude proxy for need. For instance, why favour discounts for pensioners and job seekers, while missing the working poor entirely?

Even so, targeted measures are usually both more effective and more manageable than blanket free fares when the actual goal is affordability for those who need it.

As you can see, none of these structures win on all three tests. Free fares buy ridership and a political statement at a heavy cost to the farebox and with a weaker equity punch than they promise. Flat fares buy simplicity at the price of a quiet regressiveness that depends entirely on your city’s geography. Zonal fares are the legible compromise most large networks settle on. Distance fares are the fairest in theory and the fiddliest in practice, and cruel to whoever poverty has pushed to the edge of town unless they are capped. Peak pricing is the cleanest efficiency case and the sharpest equity trap. Dynamic pricing and yield management earn their keep where there is competition and a car or a plane to lose the passenger to, and curdle into extraction where the network is captive. Targeted discounts are the imperfect instrument the evidence keeps recommending, provided the reimbursement is honest and the eligibility is drawn around need rather than age.

If there is a single thread, it is the one Peter White’s elasticity work established four decades ago and which the newer equity literature has only sharpened. Fares are a relatively weak tool for moving ridership and a strong tool for distributing cost, so the interesting question is almost never how much to charge in the aggregate but who should bear the charge. The technology to price with real precision now exists in the smartcard reader and in contactless payments. Whether we use it to match price to cost, to match price to ability to pay, or simply to match price to whatever the passenger can be induced to tolerate, is a choice about values. And anyone who says that their fare structure can give you it all is selling you something. Probably their new ticketing system.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

The demand for public transport: the effects of fares, quality of service, income and car ownership

TL:DR - Probably the most important paper on the subject. It’s a bit old, but it distils decades of British evidence into a single set of demand elasticities, and its headline finding is the uncomfortable one for anyone who thinks price is a lever you can pull hard.

The prospects of fare-free public transport: evidence from Tallinn

TL:DR - The most careful empirical study we have of what actually happens when a city stops charging. Tallinn made public transport free for registered residents in 2013, and the authors tracked fifteen hundred households before and after with travel diaries.

Accessibility, affordability and equity: assessing 'pro-poor' public transport subsidies in Bogotá

TL:DR - Bogotá built a subsidy aimed specifically at poor households rather than a blanket discount, and the authors show it is genuinely progressive, narrowing the accessibility gap between richer and poorer residents rather than simply handing the largest saving to whoever already travels most.

Assessing social equity in distance based transit fares using a model of travel behavior

TL:DR - The paper that stopped me calling distance-based fares simply fair. Modelling travel behaviour across the Salt Lake City region, the authors find distance fares are socially progressive on average, cutting costs for low-income and minority riders while raising them for the affluent. The sting is in the geography.

Equity in transit fare policy: a literature review

TL:DR - It is a systematic review of fifty-eight studies on fare equity, and it sorts the whole messy field into sensible categories running from flat versus distance fares to capping and free travel. A very good overview.

😀 Positive News

Your weekly dose of positivity in a world where bad news dominates. Enjoy.

England freezes regulated rail fares for the first time in thirty years

Announced alongside the Budget in November 2025 and biting at the point the annual rise would normally have landed, the freeze holds all regulated fares, meaning season tickets, peak commuter returns and off-peak returns between major cities, steady until March 2027.

England's national bus fare cap set to fall back to two pounds for 2027

Having held the single-fare cap at three pounds through 2026, the government confirmed in July that it will return to two pounds for the whole of next year as a cost-of-living measure. The figure attached to it is a government estimate that the earlier two-pound cap generated around thirty million additional bus journeys in ten months.

Ho Chi Minh City sees bus ridership jump more than thirty per cent after going fare-free

From 1 July the city removed fares on 134 subsidised routes, and within five days it had recorded more than 1.32 million trips on those routes, according to the city's Public Transport Management Center reported by VnExpress. The first day carried nearly 274,000 passengers, about one hundred and twenty-eight per cent of the same day a year earlier, and ridership peaked near 283,000 on 3 July.

Boston extends its fare-free bus pilot to the end of 2026, and the operational gains are the interesting part

The City of Boston reports that removing fares on routes 23, 28 and 29 enabled all-door boarding that cut the time buses spend stopped at stops by about twenty per cent, with ridership on route 28 recovering to more than ninety per cent of its pre-pandemic level and nearly 23,000 fare-free trips taken every weekday across the three routes.

Massachusetts public transit passes its pre-pandemic peak for the first time since 2019

Statewide ridership has climbed over twenty nine percent to surpass 2019 levels, as reported by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, with the fare-free Pioneer Valley Transit Authority contributing a twenty one percent rise in the 2025 financial year followed by a further seven percent in 2026.

💻 Hard Work

I probably won’t write this section for a couple of weeks due to the reason given in my introduction. So if you really want to hear what I have been up to which isn’t meetings, Teams calls, and riding up and down railways, you are going to have to wait. Sorry.

🎶 Musical Finale

You can hear the guitar riff of Iggy Pop’s The Passenger in your head right now, can’t you? I don’t think there is a more iconic song about being a bus passenger.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. For this particular article, I did get AI to write a first draft of some paragraphs, to give some ideas for structuring the article, which I subsequently edited into my own words. Otherwise, the words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

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If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

This week’s newsletter was prompted by a session that I attended at last week’s Transport Practitioners Meeting. It is something that I have chewed over for a while, because it is about a document that is often cited and frequently misunderstood but even the most knowledgeable of professionals. So its time to put things right.

In the early 1930s, the Ministry for Transport had a problem. The motor vehicle, which fifteen years beforehand seemed to be a fad, was now coming to dominate British streets, and the impacts on the safety of road users had become starkly clear. In previous decades, the Ministry had try to legislate matters such as excessive speed and poor driver behaviour out of existence. But the result was not a quelling of the issue - in fact motor vehicle incidents were increasing as the ownership of motor vehicles continued to climb - but a mish-mash of regulatory requirements, and poor understanding of the rules by road users who, for centuries beforehand, had not been subject to many of them.

But the passing of the Road Traffic Act 1930 signalled a change in emphasis. While the entirety of the Act has subsequently been rescinded or superseded by other legislation, it was the first time where the fragmented legislative contents of roads and highways in the UK was brought under a single national framework, with a not-so-subtle priority: to support the growth of the motor vehicle.

It covered many areas, such as establishing the need for third party insurance as a legal requirement, and driving offences such as drink driving and reckless driving. But what I am interested in is hidden in Section 45 (1):

The Minister shall as soon as may be after the commencement of this Act prepare a code (in this section referred to as the “ highway code “) comprising such directions as appear to him to be proper for the guidance of persons using roads and may from time to time revise the code by revoking, varying, amending or adding to the provisions thereof in such manner as he thinks fit.

In 1931, the Highway Code was published for the first time. Consisting of twenty seven pages and costing a penny, for the first time all of the rules of the road were in one place, in an accessible format. In the foreword, Transport Minister Herbert Morrison said this:

It is hoped that the code of conduct now issued in accordance with the direction contained in the Act may come to be universally respected and obeyed. The Act provides that a failure to observe any provision of the code shall not of itself be an offence, but that in any proceedings whether civil or criminal, including any proceedings for an offence under the Act itself, any such failure may be relied upon as tending to establish or negative any liability which is in question.

This points at something long misunderstood about the Highway Code. It is not, in the ordinary sense, a set of rules. Most of what it says creates no offence, carries no penalty, and cannot be enforced against anyone.

So if the Code is not a rule book, what is it, and why does it matter so much? Understanding the Code means seeing that its authority does not come from obedience. It comes from coordination.

We should start with the channel everyone assumes is the important one. Does publishing a rule in the Highway Code change what road users do? In short, maybe.

The best recent test comes from the 2022 revisions, which introduced the hierarchy of road users and gave pedestrians priority at side road junctions under the new Rule H2. A naturalistic observation study by researchers at University College London watched eight hundred and nine interactions between drivers and pedestrians at London side roads and found that only around thirty one per cent of drivers actually gave way as the new rule required. A companion study used a before and after design around the 2022 changes and found that the revisions did not predict any measurable improvement in drivers’ knowledge, though drivers who did hold better knowledge held more positive views of how cyclists position themselves on the road. Transport Scotland’s evaluation of road user awareness found that although about three quarters of respondents said they knew the Code well or fairly well, only around half were aware of the 2022 changes at all, and only fifty-four per cent could correctly identify the hierarchy of road users, with almost one in five wrongly placing some motor vehicles among the vulnerable users the hierarchy is meant to protect.

In short, knowledge matters, but if we rely on the Highway Code to deliver it, we are missing a huge trick. And the reason for this is obvious to everyone who has taken a driving test in the UK.

The same Transport Scotland study found that forty per cent of drivers surveyed had not looked at the Code since passing their test, and most of those had passed more than twenty years earlier. The stated versus observed comparison in that evaluation is the most telling single finding in the whole field. Seventy nine per cent of drivers said they always give way when turning into a side street, but observation showed them actually giving way in about seventy one per cent of relevant interactions with cyclists and in fewer than half of interactions with people on foot. The gap between what drivers believe they do and what they are seen to do is precisely the space in which the rule book theory falls apart.

Behind this sits a much larger and more rigorous body of human factors and psychological research on why people comply with road rules at all, and it is worth drawing on because it explains why the compliance picture is so varied.

Seminal work by Florent Varet and colleagues published in 2021 found that the perceived legitimacy of a traffic rule (meaning whether people regard it as fair, effective, and morally aligned with their own values) is often a stronger predictor of compliance than classical deterrence. Its equally important secondary finding is methodological, and speaks directly to the interpretation problem, namely that definitions and measures of legitimacy across the literature are heterogeneous and present validity issues, that most studies are cross sectional, and that most rely on self declared behaviour rather than observation. The same team turned this into a measurement instrument in 2024, where perceived legitimacy outperformed perceived deterrence, perceived accident risk, and social norms as a predictor of compliance across a sample of eight hundred and thirty-three drivers.

Looking further back in time, the work of Claire Corbett and her research partners sorted drivers into four responses to enforcement in relation to speed cameras. These are:

• Conformers who already comply;

• Deterred who change behaviour to avoid detection;

• Manipulators who slow down only where they think they will be caught and speed up elsewhere, and;

• Defiers who carry on regardless.

The psychological point that travels well beyond speed cameras is that a single intervention produces four different mechanisms at once, and only one of them represents the rule actually changing behaviour. TRL made a related distinction in its 2016 report for Highways England, separating purposeful non-compliance from the accidental non-compliance that arises from inattention or from simply not understanding the rule. That distinction is the one studies of the 2022 rule changes keep saying they cannot resolve, which is why the report remains valuable as a framework even though it predates these changes.

While we are here, I think it is worthwhile covering two other points. First, a growing body of work, much of it Australian, finds that the three classical deterrents of certainty, severity, and swiftness of punishment do not reliably increase compliance, and that prior experience of punishment matters more. The strongest single piece of causal evidence, a randomised field experiment by Bates and colleagues published in 2023 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, found that a “procedurally just flyer” reduced subsequent speeding offences using actual reoffending data rather than attitudes. Second, almost all of the higher quality research in this field is Australian, French, or North American. The UK evidence base underpinning the education led approach the Highway Code embodies is comparatively thin, and much of the practice informing thinking is imported from other contexts.

You cannot read the Highway Code as a lever that reliably moves behaviour. Awareness is patchy, knowledge decays after the test with no refresh mechanism for ordinary drivers, and what shifts behaviour is legitimacy and perceived enforcement rather than publication. If the Code’s power lay here, it would be a weak instrument. So where does its power actually lie?

Before I get onto the matter heavily implied by the foreword to the original Highway Code, I want to bring to the light how the Code is powerful in an unseen way. Unseen because it happens inside the profession. Namely that is provides a common understanding of behaviours.

In designing schemes, engineers have to take account of a wide variety of design guidance, from LTN 1/20, to the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges, to Manual for Streets, as well as the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions. They tell engineers things like lane widths, how long lines should be, and accessibility standards.

Where the Highway Code comes in is providing a shared behavioural model. By outlining the rules of the road, including interactions between modes of transport and in specific circumstances, the Code provides a shared assumption about behaviours. When a designer draws a junction, they are making assumptions about what road users will do, who will yield to whom, how a pedestrian will read a priority, how a driver will interpret a give way marking. The Highway Code is the common reference that lets designers working on unrelated schemes assume the same behaviour of road users.

Naturally, there are some variations, and notable differences in behaviour and matters of detail are picked up in detailed design guidance. But that coordinating function is its real contribution to the built environment, and it is worth far more than its patchy record on individual compliance.

You can see the Code moving into design guidance in the way the 2022 hierarchy has been written into local design documents. For example, Leicestershire’s highway design guide instructs designers to consider the hierarchy of road users and to put those most at risk in the event of a collision at the top, citing the Highway Code directly. Hertfordshire’s Place and Movement guide follows the same structure, deriving its user hierarchy from the local transport plan and treating the Code as the behavioural framing rather than the technical rule.

The pattern is consistent. The binding standards sit in the design manuals, and the Code sits underneath them as the stable, commonly understood account of how road users are expected to behave.

To date, there is no published literature on how the 2022 changes to the Highway Code have influenced the behaviour of designers. But a designer cannot design for behaviour without a shared model of behaviour, and in the UK that shared model is the Highway Code. When the Code changes, as it did in 2022, it changes the assumed behaviour that every subsequent scheme is designed around, which is a slow and systemic influence that will show up in the built environment is years to come.

Finally, I get onto the matter hinted at in the foreword of the original Highway Code. It runs through the civil courts and the insurers who operate in their shadow. A breach of the Highway Code is not an offence1 but is admissible in evidence, and this is what lets it establish liability or reduce damages in a personal injury claim. This the true mechanism by which the Highway Code works.

The way it works is through the twin concepts of blameworthiness and causative potency that govern how the courts apportion contributory negligence under the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act 1945. Causative potency is the idea that some conduct is simply more capable of causing serious harm, and the courts have long held that a motor vehicle is more causatively potent than a pedestrian because it can do far more damage. The key case for this is Eagle v Chambers, decided in 2003, in which Hale LJ observed that it is rare for a pedestrian to be found more responsible than a driver, and set out that apportionment turns on both the blameworthiness of each party and the causative potency of their conduct.

The older foundation is Froom v Butcher from 1976 (the “seat belt case”), which established that a claimant’s failure to protect themselves could reduce their damages even where it did not cause the collision. The principle was applied again in Smith v Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire in 2012, where a pedestrian’s contributory negligence was cut sharply because the police car that struck them had been travelling too fast, as recorded in the analysis of that line of cases.

Because of the nature of how common law works in the UK, you quickly come to quite an amusing finding - at least in my mind. The Courts were, in effect, already applying the 2022 changes to the Highway Code to some degree. The hierarchy of road users did not invent the idea that those who can cause the greatest harm bear the greatest responsibility. It restated in plain language a principle the civil courts had applied through causative potency for decades.

What the revision does is give that principle an explicit reference in a document that courts and insurers already reach for, which strengthens injury pleadings for pedestrians, cyclists, and horse riders without creating a new liability regime. This is a largely settled position across legal commentary.

There is genuine academic disagreement underneath this. A paper in Legal Studies examines whether apportionment should follow fixed rules or judicial discretion, and records Robert Stevens’ argument that the fixed reduction bands laid down in Froom effectively ignore the statutory language of the 1945 Act, which calls for a reduction that is just and equitable rather than a tariff. The Code enters a legal machine that lawyers themselves are still arguing about, which is a useful corrective to any assumption that the liability effect is mechanical or settled.

If a breach of the Code raises your exposure to a finding of liability, and if insurers price and settle claims in the light of that exposure, then the Code should in principle feed back into behaviour through the cost of getting things wrong. A driver who knows that failing to give way at a side road weakens their position in any subsequent claim has a financial reason to comply that has nothing to do with awareness campaigns or the risk of prosecution.

This is the sense in which my third argument loops back to the first. The Code can influence behaviour not by being a rule that people obey but by being the yardstick against which fault and cost are measured after the fact. And when people experience that associated punishment, most will adjust their behaviours accordingly. I want to be honest that the evidence for this feedback is indirect. But the mechanism is coherent, and it is exactly the kind of quiet, priced in influence that a document without enforcement powers can still exert.

So where are we? The Highway Code exerts almost no reliable direct force on behaviour, as the research makes clear. It exerts a quiet but structural influence on the built environment by giving designers a common model of road user behaviour to reason from. And it exerts an influence through the civil and criminal courts, where it serves as the yardstick for liability and feeds back into the incentives that shape conduct. None of these is the function of a rule book. All of them are the functions of a shared reference framework.

That is why I think it is an error to judge the Code by whether people obey it. Asking whether drivers comply with the Highway Code is a bit like asking whether people understand the dictionary - most will say yes, but few have read it for a long time. The Code’s authority does not rest on obedience. It rests on being the single agreed account of how the road is meant to work, which everyone else can build on. Its silent power is that it coordinates. It gives a nation of drivers, designers, and courts a common set of expectations, and it is that shared expectation, not enforcement, that does the work.

If the Code’s real value is coordination rather than compliance, then the way to strengthen it is not another awareness campaign. It is to improve the legitimacy of its rules to further close the refresh gap that leaves ordinary drivers relying on knowledge that they last looked at decades ago, and to build the kind of UK evidence base that at present we mostly import from elsewhere. The Highway Code is a more interesting and more powerful document than the rule book we mistake it for. We would get more out of it if we understood what it actually does.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Driver compliance with the 2022 UK highway code rule on giving way to pedestrians at side roads: A naturalistic observation study

TL:DR - The UCL team observed 809 driver and pedestrian interactions at London side roads and found that just 31 per cent of drivers complied with Rule H2 when turning into a side road where pedestrians were waiting or approaching. Female drivers and taxi drivers were more likely to yield, as were drivers facing a group of pedestrians rather than an individual.

Yield decisions and perceived right-of-way at junctions: road traffic rule knowledge, simple road crossings, warning sign and pedestrian behaviour effects

TL:DR - A hierarchical regression tested whether knowledge of Rule H2 predicted drivers’ decisions to give way, controlling for age, crash involvement, violations, speeding rates and driving exposure. Knowledge of the rule was a significant predictor, and so was perceived legitimacy of traffic laws, which was the only other variable predicting both yielding and perceived pedestrian right of way. The study also tested low cost treatments such as warning signs.

The role of perceived legitimacy in understanding traffic rule compliance: A scoping review

TL:DR - Across the reviewed literature, whether road users regard a rule as fair, effective and morally aligned with their values is often a stronger determinant of compliance than the perceived threat of punishment.

Toward a Multidimensional Model of Legitimacy: Validation of the Traffic Rules Perceived Legitimacy Scale

TL:DR - The research team converts the above scoping review into a validated instrument, splitting legitimacy into instrumental and normative components and four measurable dimensions of effectiveness, efficiency, moral alignment and fairness. In a main study of 833 respondents, perceived legitimacy outperformed perceived deterrence, perceived accident risk and social norms as a predictor of compliance.

How knowledge of cycling practice and changes to the British Highway Code relate to perceptions of cyclist discourtesy

TL:DR - A repeated measures before and after design around the January 2022 revisions found that the changes did not predict any improvement in driver knowledge of cyclist positioning rules. Drivers who did hold better knowledge held more positive views of how cyclists position themselves, controlling for whether they cycled themselves.

😀 Positive News

Your weekly dose of positivity in a world where bad news dominates. Enjoy.

Pedestrian deaths fall by nine per cent

The Department for Transport published provisional road casualty estimates for 2025 on 28 May 2026, based on police data as at 11 May. An estimated three hundred and seventy-two pedestrians were killed, a decline of nine per cent on 2024, and car occupant deaths fell by eight per cent to 638. Total fatalities were estimated at 1,556, down three per cent.

Understanding of pedestrian priority climbs twenty points

In a written answer dated 25 February 2026, the Department for Transport set out its tracking of public understanding of the 2022 changes. Understanding of pedestrian priority at junctions rose from fifty-two per cent to seventy-two per cent, and awareness that cyclists may ride two abreast rose from thirty per cent to forty-six per cent.

A new Road Safety Strategy, and a Manual for Streets refresh

The government published its new Road Safety Strategy on 7 January 2026, the first in over a decade. It allocates £24 billion for road maintenance and improvements between 2026 and 2030, and commits to updated guidance on setting speed limits and to revisions to Manual for Streets to help authorities design roads that prioritise pedestrians and cyclists.

Public dashcam evidence reaches nearly 7,500 drivers in West Yorkshire

The West Yorkshire Combined Authority reported on 10 June 2025 that 10,486 pieces of footage were submitted through Operation Snap over the preceding year, a twenty-six per cent increase on the year before, with action taken against drivers in seventy-one per cent of submissions, equivalent to nearly 7,500 drivers.

Humberside reports six hundred submissions in a single month

Humberside Police released figures in June 2026 showing that the force received nearly six hundred video submissions from the public in March alone, leading to court appearances, education courses and driving bans.

💻 Hard Work

I’m going to level with you. Most of my weeks are spent driving to clients, on Teams calls, and shuffling bits of paperwork to get stuff done. I am working on some seriously cool projects, like new transport strategies and three separate transport campaigns, but its really hard to say “yeah, I had an amazing Teams call this week.”

That being said, I am sharing some content on LinkedIn on Mobility Camp. Like the below video shot on an extremely warm evening near Shardlow in Derbyshire. You can see it in the wild on LinkedIn here.

🎶 Musical Finale

I’ve been waiting ages to post this song, Bad Habit by The Offspring. Its about road rage and disobeying the rules, and the lyrics leave no room for interpretation. Warning: there is colourful language.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

This week has been a good week. I have spent much of it catching up with friends new and old at Active County Cambridgeshire and the Transport Practitioners Meeting. It is always energising to laugh and joke, and to engage in serious discussions in between, and it always recharges my batteries. For those of you I said hello to, it was honestly a pleasure. For those who I did not get a chance to, I am sorry to have missed you. We will talk again soon.

Oh, and we do not mention the disappointment of Wednesday evening. Ever. Ok?

A couple of months ago, in between attending an International Transport Forum conference in Leipzig and going to see my sister and my nephews in Weinheim, I stayed over in Frankfurt. I got the chance to explore not only the extensive public transport system (which is amazing) and see the work they have done to encourage more cycling (also amazing). But I also got to see something you rarely see within cities in Europe.

The Frankfurter Stadwaldt literally translates as the Frankfurt City Forest. It is an extensive forested area to the south of the city of around fifty-eight square kilometres, of which just under forty are officially within the city limits. My work on Forest City has got me interested in how we best integrate extensive habitats such as forests within the build form of the city, and how it interacts with the transport networks that are so fundamental to city life. So in the morning I headed out of my city centre hotel, boarded tram line 17 just outside the front door, and headed south.

As the tram skirts through the suburbs and alongside the railway line, the trees appear ever more frequently, and before you know it you are in a forest of, well, trees. The tram flies past the trunks, with the occasional dirt track in view, before it pulls into the tram stop at Oberschweinstiege. On this morning, a group of young school children also alighted at the stop with me, with people whom I assumed were their teachers, heading to what my sister later informed me was a ‘Forest School’ where they had practical lessons in nature and conservation.

What really struck me when walking around the forest for most of the morning was the contrast between the different types of transport infrastructure and their effects on the experience of being in the forest. For much of the walk, the birds sang loudly and I could hear scratching in the undergrowth. Even the occasional stag beetle crossed my path. This is to be expected, as for most of the trails it is walking and cycling only, so apart from the occasional cyclist and groups of dog walkers, I spent much of the time on my own.

When I was close to the tram tracks, the bird song was as loud as any other place in the forest. While the tram line itself cuts a thin slither through the trees, and the occasional tram speeding past did disturb the peace, the sounds of nature continued unabated. This was also the case a short time later when planes from Frankfurt Airport – the sixth busiest airport in Europe and the main operational hub of Germany’s national carrier Lufthansa – started to fly overhead. While the engines of departures to all corners of Europe and the World screamed overhead, the birdsong fell silent. Once the metallic birds had left, the ones that were living reasserted their dominance.

Note: You need the sound on for this video

This was not the case, however, for the roads that crossed the forest.

I walked up to the Isenberg Schneise, a relatively minor radial route cutting through the forest that, while not as busy as the Autobahns close by, had a steady stream of vehicles of all types. As I approached on the gravel path, the low hum of the traffic started to build and the sounds of birdsongs and insects diminished. To the point where, as I stood by the roadside, the only animal that I managed to hear was a dog in the field used as parking for fans attending the nearby football stadium.

Note: You need the sound on for these videos

At the time, it left me with a thought about how, if we were to design a city with nature at its heart, we would practically have to rip up all roads, and have no vehicular access within the city limits. From my observations, nature was more easily able to adapt to the presence of trams, trains, and even planes, compared to that of cars. Yet, as I began to read of the work that Frankfurt am Main does on nature conservation, and the wider literature on road ecology, I realised something more profound, and something that we often forget when we think of the relationship between transport and nature.

Nature is more flexible, and more stubborn, than we give it credit for.

Much of the dominant narrative around the relationship between transport and nature is focussed around one thing. Transport infrastructure being wildlife corridors, and how our movement corridors – rail or road – act as a severance between habitats. We build green bridges over motorways, thread mammal tunnels beneath them, fence amphibians towards culverts, and talk about stitching severed habitats back together.

The assumption is that our job is to help nature move through the infrastructure we have built, to reconnect what our roads and railways have cut apart. That work is real and worth doing. But I have come to think it rests on a mistake, and the mistake is to treat movement as the whole of what nature needs from our land. In many respects, it repeats the same mistakes that we made when thinking of our streets for many decades – seeing them as corridors of movement only.

Biodiversity is not mainly a problem of movement. Species need corridors to move along, but they also need places to be, patches and islands of habitat where they feed, breed, shelter and simply stay. A landscape that offers only movement is, in its own way, as impoverished as one that offers only isolation. As transport planners we spent decades learning that a street is not only a link for through traffic but a place in its own right. The same distinction, movement and place, is what nature needs us to apply to the land our infrastructure occupies.

The corridor has become the respectable face of nature in scheme design, and it deserves some of its good reputation. Over the past two decades, green bridges, wildlife crossings and amphibian fencing have moved from the fringe to the mainstream, and the principle behind them is sound. Infrastructure severs habitats, isolated populations wither, and reconnecting them helps. None of that is wrong. Animals need to move to new hunting grounds, water sources, and of course migrate.

The trouble is what the corridor habit quietly assumes. It casts the road as a barrier and nothing else, a wound in the landscape whose only remedy is a bridge across it. In their landmark review Roads and Their Major Ecological Effects, published in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics in 1998 and cited several thousand times since, Richard Forman and Lauren Alexander set out the roles a road corridor actually performs. It is a barrier and a filter, yes, but also a conduit, a habitat and a source. We have built policy around the first two and largely ignored the last two. Forman later estimated, in a 2000 paper in Conservation Biology, that around a fifth of the land area of the United States sits inside the ecological influence of the road system. That is one of the largest semi-natural land holdings in any developed country, and we treat almost all of it as a gap to be crossed rather than ground to be lived on.

Movement is the easy half of the problem to see, because it fits how we already think. A road stops an animal getting from A to B, so we engineer a way across. What that framing cannot capture is the animal or plant that never needed to cross, that lives its whole life on the land beside or between our carriageways. For that creature our transport infrastructure is not a barrier at all. It is home.

The deeper reason to distrust the corridor habit is that biodiversity does not actually organise itself into lines. It is much better to think of the natural world as a mosaic through which patterns of movement weave themselves, and the great flexibility of this is that a nature can make its home almost anywhere. For years the orthodoxy held that conservation value lived overwhelmingly in large, unbroken blocks of habitat, and that the job of the planner was to protect the big blocks and connect them. Small scattered patches were treated as leftovers, too fragmented to matter much.

That orthodoxy is now being contested. In a 2017 review in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Lenore Fahrig examined the empirical studies that isolate the effects of habitat fragmentation from the effects of habitat loss, and found that where fragmentation on its own had a significant effect it was far more often positive than negative. Her conclusion was that there is no basis for assigning lower conservation value to a small patch than to an equivalent area inside a large one, and often the reverse. A scatter of small islands, taken together, can hold as much biodiversity as a single big block, and sometimes more, because it spans a wider range of conditions. I should flag that this is a live argument rather than a settled one, and a group of ecologists led by Robert Fletcher pushed back hard in 2018. But this is enough of a dispute to challenge a common narrative that, while vast tracts of open and unfragmented land are beneficial for many species, what is good for many is not necessarily good for all. Biodiversity wants variety of habitat, a mix of large and small, connected and discrete.

Within this context, our main framing of transport infrastructure facilitating the movement of biodiversity is not helpful.

Between 2010 and 2013 the biodiversity mapping group at the Senckenberg research institute surveyed the interior of the Frankfurter Kreuz, the interchange where the A3 and A5 meet at the north-eastern edge of the airport. This is not just a normal motorway junction. It is by traffic volume the busiest motorway junction in Central Europe.

On roughly thirty-one hectares hemmed in by ten lanes of traffic on each arm, they recorded three hundred and nineteen species of ferns and flowering plants, more than twenty-two per cent of all the plant species then known in the whole city of Frankfurt, on about 0.12 per cent of its area. Nine of them were on the German and Hessian red lists of endangered species. Nothing is passing through the middle of that interchange. The species are there because they can stay. The interior is an island, an accidental nature reserve barely entered by anyone between management visits, and its value is entirely a value of place.

Once you start looking for place rather than passage, the transport estate fills with it. When Senckenberg carried out its survey of flora, fauna and biotope types around Frankfurt Airport, extending across the whole municipal forest south of the Main river, it found the Agile Frog, classed as highly endangered nationally within Germany, in unexpected strength. Previously recorded in the eastern city forest only in tiny numbers, it was counted in the springs of 2000 and 2001 with populations of more than one thousand five hundred spawning females. That is not a species using the forest as a route to somewhere better. It is a species living there, under the flight paths of one of Europe’s busiest airports, in woodland threaded by motorways and rail.

The pattern holds well beyond Frankfurt. In a 2019 paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, one of the highest-impact journals in the field, Ben Phillips and colleagues showed that road verges and their hedges form an extensive network of semi-natural habitat that acts as a refuge for pollinators in farmed landscapes stripped of almost everything else, a point they developed in a companion 2020 paper on the services that verge network provides. A verge is a corridor and at the same time a place, a strip of grassland many species never leave. In a country that has lost ninety-seven per cent of its wildflower meadows since the 1930s, those ribbons may be among the most important habitat we have left, precisely because they escaped the ploughing and spraying that erased everything around them.

There is a framework sitting in plain sight that could fix this, and transport planners built it. For fifty years, British streets were designed as if their only purpose was to move vehicles from one place to another, the philosophy the 1963 Buchanan report captured in its image of roads as corridors between rooms. The Link and Place approach developed by Peter Jones and Stephen Marshall, set out in their 2007 guide, absorbed into the Department for Transport’s Manual for Streets and now woven through local transport strategies and the basis of much design guidance ever since, broke that habit. It insists that every street has two independent functions, a link function for movement through it and a place function as a destination in its own right, and that a street strong on one and weak on the other is only half designed. A high street is not a pipe. It is somewhere people stop.

Under the old paradigm the movement function came with full design standards, quantitative performance measures and an appraisal system that priced every minute of saved travel time. The place function came with partial standards, qualitative description and no comparable way to count its worth, so it was handed whatever space movement did not want. That is precisely how we treat nature. The movement half, from the plants briefly visited by pollinator to the huge wildlife bridges, gets engineered, specified and costed. The place half, the habitat, gets a paragraph in the environmental statement and whatever verge is left after the sightlines are drawn. Maybe the drainage ditch if its lucky.

Where my thinking has got to is this. We should classify and manage the land our infrastructure occupies on two axes for nature, exactly as Link and Place taught us to do for people. Every parcel, every verge, embankment, cutting, roundabout and interchange interior, carries a movement value for nature – its worth as a corridor that connects populations – and a place value – its worth as habitat where species live out their lives. The two are related but distinct and this produces a simple matrix with four broad types, each implying a different job.

At one corner sit the pure connectors, high on movement and low on place, where a green bridge or a fauna underpass belongs and the design task is permeability, getting species safely across. At the opposite corner sit the refuges, high on place and low on movement, of which the interior of the Frankfurter Kreuz is the extreme case, an island going nowhere that happens to be a botanical hotspot. There the task is not connection but protection, shielding the habitat from disturbance and from the tidying instinct that reads long grass and scrub as neglect.

In another corner sit the parcels that score on both, a well-structured verge network or a wooded railway cutting that carries species along its length and shelters others that never leave. In the last corner sits open habitats with minimal coverage such as highly managed grasslands, with limited diversity of a few species, and next-to-no cover for the moving or sitting animal.

Naming the two values is what unlocks the rest, because you cannot design, measure or maintain for a function you have not acknowledged. There is a beginning here to build on. England’s biodiversity net gain rules, mandatory since February 2024, put a standardised number on habitat for the first time, scoring parcels by size, condition and distinctiveness with a multiplier for sites that serve a wider nature network. But that metric measures place for new development, not for the estate we already run, and it barely touches the corridor function. A movement and place framework for nature would extend the same logic to the transport infrastructure we already have, and give the movement value a measure of its own alongside it.

The teeth show at the level of routine maintenance. Managing the Frankfurter Kreuz as a high-place site would mean keeping its scrub deliberately open, because the Senckenberg surveyors found species such as the Red-Backed Shrike – a beautiful bird just bigger than a sparrow with a distinctive red back and even more distinctive call – breeding inside the interchange and warned that letting it grow over into dense bushland would erase the open ground the bird needs. Read that way, the mowing schedule is a conservation instrument.

A framework is only as good as the evidence feeding it, and this is where Frankfurt has quietly done the hard thing. Since 1985 the city’s environmental agency has commissioned Senckenberg to map the biotope types across the whole urban area, extending the survey into the municipal forest from the year 2000 and revisiting it on a roughly six-year cycle, an arrangement renewed in 2023 as a twelve-year research collaboration. Frankfurt has measured the biodiversity of its transport-threaded landscape continuously, for four decades, through a serious scientific institution. It also holds its forest inside a positive planning frame rather than a defensive one. The city treats the Stadtwald as core infrastructure, forming almost half of the GrünGürtel green belt and certified to Forest Stewardship Council standards since 2015, one of the systems rather than the obstacle the systems route around.

Put the evidence base and the infrastructure frame together and Frankfurt is pointing at something more significant than a well-run city forest. It has the building blocks in place for something genuinely radical, a transport landscape planned for the needs of nature as an equal priority to the needs of people. The institutional capability is the part almost nowhere else has. Four decades of continuous mapping is the thing that lets you say with authority which junction interior is a place worth keeping and which verge is a corridor carrying the last local population of something. Evidence of that quality can shape decisions rather than merely record the damage after it is done.

A framework is only worth building if it changes decisions, which means wiring it into operational policy, the design standards, maintenance specifications and appraisal weights that determine what actually gets built and cut. The failure mode is on display whenever we count only what is easy. When Frankfurt Airport built its fourth runway, the operator Fraport reports that 282 hectares of woodland were cleared and 288 hectares replanted, a tidy hectare-for-hectare balance that is movement thinking applied to place, treating a centuries-old forest as interchangeable with saplings on another plot. The place value, the part that cannot be replanted on a compliance schedule, does not enter the account because we have no settled way to make it.

We are, in truth, only at the start. Where authorities engage with nature at all they reach first for the easy wins: wildflower verges, cutting less and later, bee banks and swift bricks, none of which I would discourage. But in movement and place terms they are scattered gestures of place with no strategy behind them, and the scale of the problem has outgrown them. The State of Nature 2023 report compiled by more than sixty research and conservation bodies, found the abundance of the UK species it tracks down by around a fifth since 1970, one in six species at risk of being lost from Great Britain, and pollinator distributions down by 18 per cent. A country losing nature at that rate cannot treat its single largest networks – its roads, railways, canals and much more beside – as just a place for humans. It has to plan that network as a natural system in its own right, one of the largest habitat mosaics we hold that also happens to move people and goods.

What Frankfurt offers is not a template to be copied in its entirety, as its history makes it difficult to. Its forty years of Senckenberg mapping and its FSC-certified forest are the products of a particular civic culture, and few authorities will replicate them wholesale. But we can learn the lesson underneath. The land our infrastructure occupies is not dead ground and not merely a barrier to be bridged. It is a working mosaic of corridors and islands, movement and place. If the inside of the busiest highway interchange in Central Europe can be host to a haven for species, then most areas can be places for wildlife. Every transport body is already managing habitat, whether it means to or not.

The movement and place framework for people did not arrive fully formed, and that is the encouraging part. Someone had to build it. Jones and Marshall argued the place function into existence against fifty years of traffic-first orthodoxy, gave it a matrix and a set of indicators, and saw it written into the Manual for Streets and from there into the local transport strategies and design standards that now shape how a generation of planners think. Nature needs the same deliberate act. We need a movement and place framework for nature, developed with equal seriousness and embedded in the guidance and strategies that govern what we build and maintain, until classifying a verge or an interchange by its corridor value and its habitat value is as ordinary as classifying a street by its link and place status.

That is the shift I am arguing for. Its one I don’t think is particularly hard either – we just need people to do the initial intellectual work and framing to establish as a serious idea, and not just one from the mind of a single writer. We already know how to plan for two functions at once, because we learned to do it for streets when we stopped pretending they were only for traffic. Extending the same discipline to nature is not a scientific leap but a decision, and Frankfurt has built the evidence base that makes the decision defensible. The wildflowers on the verge are a start. Finishing the job means building the framework, and learning at last to see our roads and railways not as lines drawn across the landscape but as places within it.

It also challenges something more fundamental in ourselves. We often see the human world and the natural world as separate entities, partly built upon our own historical fears of what lurks in the dark recesses of the forest. Those fears were built from a time where there were monsters lurking in the dark. Today they have names, like bears and wolves. But that mindset has stuck, and is reinforced by how we try to manage transport networks as human infrastructure. Today we call that risk management, and seeing nature as a threat to safe and efficient operation of transport systems.

It’s time we thought different to that.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Do wildlife crossing structures mitigate the barrier effect of roads on animal movement?

TL:DR - A global synthesis that asks the awkward question about the thing we keep building. Of 313 studies reviewed, only 14 per cent actually tested whether a crossing changed animal movement across the road. The evidence suggests crossings can reduce the barrier effect, but many have been poorly implemented or evaluated. The takeaway is that we are spending millions on structures we rarely monitor.

Demographic effects of road mortality on mammalian populations —

TL:DR - A UK-led systematic review pulling together 83 studies covering 69 mammal species and 150 populations. The sobering finding is that raw roadkill numbers understate the damage, because road mortality can push death rates above reproduction rates and tip vulnerable populations toward local decline.

A global map of roadless areas and their conservation status

TL:DR - The paper that quantified fragmentation at planetary scale. About 80 per cent of Earth’s land is still roadless, but that space is shattered into roughly 600,000 patches, more than half of them under 1 square kilometre and only 7 per cent larger than 100 square kilometres.

Evaluating and elevating the role of wildlife road crossings in climate adaptation

TL:DR - A fresh argument that crossings are not only about safety and reconnection. Beyond reducing mortality and reconnecting habitat, they let species shift their ranges as the climate moves, which makes them a piece of climate-adaptation infrastructure we have been undervaluing.

Ecological Responses to Habitat Fragmentation Per Se

TL:DR - The most-cited challenge to corridor-and-big-block orthodoxy. Reviewing the studies that separate fragmentation from habitat loss, Fahrig found the effects of fragmentation itself were far more often positive than negative, and that a scatter of small patches can hold as much biodiversity as one large block.

😀 Positive News

World’s largest wildlife crossing gets an opening date

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101 Freeway near Los Angeles will open on 2 December 2026, spanning ten lanes of freeway using twenty-six million pounds of concrete. The roughly ninety-two million dollar structure has been topped with living soil and will carry more than fifty native plant species, and butterflies and birds are already turning up on it before it even connects to the land.

India opens its first dedicated wildlife-overpass corridor

On the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, through the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve buffer zone, the National Highways Authority of India built five wildlife overpasses of five hundred metres each plus the country’s longest wildlife underpass at 1.2 kilometres, planting 35,000 trees along the way.

National Highways doubles its green bridges in England

Three new wildlife bridges are under way, the A30 Marazanvose crossing in Cornwall, Cockrow Bridge over the M25 at Wisley installed in January 2025, and a crossing on the A417 near Gloucester, which together will double the number of green bridges in the UK within two years.

Scotland’s councils build pollinator networks into their verges

NatureScot’s Pollinator Strategy progress report describes councils setting up roadside verge and grassland schemes to create Nature Networks for pollinators, cutting and lifting at the end of the season while leaving twenty per cent uncut for winter cover.

💻 Hard Work

As I mentioned, this week I presented at Active County Cambridgeshire and at the Transport Practitioners Meeting. I cannot share the slides that I presented yet, but at Active County Cambridgeshire I presented some work that I have done on Forest City, and at Transport Practitioners Meeting I presented work I did with the Scottish Rural and Island Transport Community on ferries. You can see the report for the former here, and the report for the latter here.

In addition to this, the work on the Transport Box picked up the pace. We held two in-person workshops with a group of committed volunteer engineers, as my good friend Diana Powell showed how to run fun and interactive sessions with young people. The brilliant Ed Downer, Pauline Johnstone, and our work experience student Bethany Babrovskie helped make it all happen, despite - how to say - unexpected issues that were faced. And the heat was not one of them.

🎶 Musical Finale

I can’t help but hear the song Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead and laugh. While the band wrote the song as a bit of a joke, the lyrics perfectly encapsulate our need to try and shape nature according to our tastes and whims.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

Good day my good friend.

As I mentioned last week, on Monday I will be presenting at Active County Cambridgeshire, and next Wednesday and Thursday I will be at the Transport Practitioners Meeting. If any of you are at either of these it will be great to see you there. Come and say hi - I don’t bite!

I have got a confession to make. I don’t like hot weather. I don’t do well in hot weather at all. The minute the mercury passes 26C I start to feel it. The lethargy, the discomfort, and the feeling that every ounce of energy is being drained from me by either the sun or the humidity. Or in the case of a recent heatwave, both.

I grew up in Devon, an area of the UK where the air temperature was heavily modulated by the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1990s in Devon, 25C was a hot day. 30C was insufferable. One day it went north of that, and if I have not headed to Saunton Sands to spend the day swimming in the waves, I might not have made it.

Where I live now in Bedfordshire is one of the hottest parts of the country. As I write this, we are in the middle of our third heatwave of the summer. We are sat under our second hot weather warning of the summer, and we are thankful that it is only an amber warning and not a red warning like two weeks ago. It now regularly exceeds 30C for at least two weeks every summer. And the frightening thing is that compared to what is coming, this might actually be a cool summer.

The Met Office offers a completely free service that is amazing and nobody knows about called the Local Authority Climate Service. What it does is provide data at a local authority level as to what the impacts of a warming climate are likely to be. For my local authority - Central Bedfordshire - the data is showing likely increases in temperature between 1C and 4C. This is the future world we must adapt to.

In this context, many discussions have turned to something surprisingly controversial - air conditioning. In my mind, far too many people see it as a threat to the climate (as it increases electricity use substantially, which can burn fossil fuels), or a matter of social justice (namely that the poorest are less likely to own air conditioning, which is reasonable). As you know, I like to try and look at things differently, and what I have discovered is that far from being something that is for the comfort of the rich, air conditioning actually saves lives on our transport network right now. So maybe it does not deserve a reputation of being a rich persons technology that we should turn our noses up at.

We need to start with understanding quite what heat does to us. When the air around us climbs above the narrow band our physiology prefers, thermoregulation stops being a background process and becomes an active demand. Blood is redirected towards the skin to shed heat, the heart works harder, fluid is lost through sweat, and the brain finds itself competing for resources it would otherwise spend on the task in front of it. The result is not simply discomfort. It is a measurable tax on cognition and mood.

If you have ever felt that your normal work on a hot day is much harder, that is because it is. In normal conditions, your background brain capacity regulates your temperature. But when it becomes hot, the brain needs more capacity to dedicate to stopping you from overheating, and it takes it from your conscious mind. You literally have less capacity to think, because your brain is trying to keep you cool.

The most authoritative synthesis of this is a meta-analysis by Hancock, Ross and Szalma, published in Human Factors in 2007. Pooling 528 effect sizes across 49 studies, they confirmed a substantial and consistent negative effect of thermal stress on human performance. They found that abstract cognitive tasks were the least affected of the categories they examined, while psychomotor and perceptual tasks degraded more severely.

Put this in a driving situation. You are driving a car, and the air conditioning doesn’t work. Its hot and you are sweating from the heat. Your driving suffers hugely in this situation. The hand-eye co-ordination, hazard detection, vigilance and rapid response are psychomotor and perceptual actions. The capacity for which your brain raids first to keep you cool.

A later systematic review and meta-analysis by Taylor and colleagues in Building and Environment in 2018 put numbers on the shape of the decline. Relative to a comfortable baseline, performance falls away as temperature rises, with the sharpest losses on the most attention-demanding tasks and a bell-shaped curve centred on thermal comfort. We do not lose a little of everything evenly. We lose most of the very faculties a driver leans on hardest.

A key term here is relative to a comfortable baseline, as the baseline air temperature varies by region. For instance, in the UK, the south is generally warmer than Northern England and Scotland, and so the baseline for what constitutes hot in places like Glasgow and Newcastle might be a slightly warm day in Milton Keynes.

There is now neurophysiological texture to this too. A controlled cabin study using electroencephalography, published in Sustainability in 2023, exposed drivers to cabin air at 20C, 23C, 26C and 30C and found that cognitive ability declined as the temperature rose, with subjective ratings of thermal discomfort and self-reported mental load climbing in step. The subjective and the objective moved together, which is important. People know they are struggling, and their brain activity confirms it.

The psychological pathway runs alongside the physical one, and it is at least as consequential for safety. Heat does not only slow us down. It makes us angrier. The foundational work here is Craig Anderson’s long programme on the heat hypothesis, summarised in his review chapter on temperature and aggression, which draws together field, laboratory and archival evidence that uncomfortable heat raises aggressive motivation and, given the right provocation, aggressive behaviour. The mechanism most relevant to transport is irritability. When we are hot we perceive minor provocations as larger ones, and our threshold for an aggressive response drops. Or, in more simple terms, we get angry much more easily in hot weather.

If heat degrades the faculties that keep us safe and raises the emotions that endanger us, we would expect to see it in the crash record. We do.

The cleanest demonstration comes from Barcelona. Basagaña and colleagues, writing in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2015, analysed more than 118,000 motor vehicle crashes in Catalonia across a decade and found that crash risk rose by around 7.7 per cent on heatwave days compared with otherwise similar warm days. Note that this is isolating the effects of extreme heat, rather than the effects of a warm summer day which may result in more driving. The extreme heat itself is correlated with more collisions.

The pattern replicates across very different settings. A study of the continental United States published in Accident Analysis and Prevention found road fatalities rising on heatwave days relative to non-heatwave days, and reviewed the mechanisms behind it, from drivers becoming drowsy and irritable to missed signals and larger, later steering corrections. Work in New York City has identified a temperature threshold of around 26C above which each additional degree lifts crash counts by roughly one and a half per cent. European analyses in France and the Netherlands have found that a single degree of warming raises motor vehicle injuries by one to two per cent. The effect sizes differ with climate and method, as we should expect, but the direction of travel is strikingly consistent.

The burden is not shared evenly. A time-stratified case-crossover study of Jinan in Frontiers in Public Health in 2024 found that pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists faced greater injury risk than occupants of enclosed vehicles under both hot and cold extremes. More recent work in California shows extreme heat disproportionately increasing high-severity crashes, particularly at intersections and among vulnerable road users. The people with the least protection from the heat carry the most risk from it.

What we mentioned about the link between heat and aggression also shows up. The classic study is Kenrick and MacFarlane’s field experiment on horn honking, in which a participant deliberately stalled at a green light and the researchers measured how drivers responded. As the Association for Psychological Science summarises, honking rose directly with temperature, and the effect was concentrated among drivers whose windows were down - which is to say drivers without air conditioning.

Most of these are observational studies, and several of their authors are careful to say they establish association rather than proof of causation. But the convergence of laboratory studies, field experiment and epidemiological association across continents is about as strong as this kind of question allows, and the mechanism is not mysterious. After all, we all get angry when we are hot.

The road is only half the story. Public transport concentrates people in metal boxes that heat readily and cool slowly, and the consequences fall on both passengers and staff.

The passenger side is oddly under-studied given how visible it is, and the reason is instructive. When Greenham and colleagues examined the relationship between heat and delays on the London Underground in Meteorological Applications in 2020, they deliberately stripped passenger illness, staff illness and personal injury out of their dataset in order to isolate infrastructure causes. That methodological choice tells us two things. Passenger illness is logged as a distinct and recognised category of delay, and it has been left largely unquantified in the academic literature. We know it holds trains and closes platforms. We have not properly measured it.

What we can measure is the discomfort that precedes the collapse. A study in Nature Cities in 2026 analysed more than 85,000 crowdsourced commuter posts across Boston, London and New York and mapped widespread thermal discomfort in underground systems, with recurrent peaks by hour, by day of the week and by season. A packed, poorly ventilated carriage in a heatwave is a place where a vulnerable passenger faints, with inevitable consequences.

Bus drivers, train drivers and control room operators are doing exactly the sustained, vigilance-heavy, psychomotor work that the thermal stress literature identifies as most vulnerable to heat. A driver in a hot cab is subject to the same degradation of reaction time and judgement documented before, except that this driver is responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives rather than one.

Active travellers sit outside the cooled cabin entirely, and their relationship with heat is more complicated than the simple assumption that good weather means more walking and cycling.

The relationship is not linear, it is bell-shaped. Böcker and Thorsson, writing in Weather, Climate, and Society in 2014, drew on panel travel-diary data and found that warmth encourages cycling only up to a point, after which higher temperatures suppress it, with the turning point sitting lower than most people assume, often in the mid to high twenties Celsius. Above that threshold the discretionary and less confident cyclists are the first to disappear. Warmth is the friend of active travel and heat is its enemy, and the two are separated by only a few degrees.

The heat that remains for those who still ride carries a health cost. Research on the heat health risk of cycling, published in Applied Geography in 2025, uses satellite land surface temperature data and shared-bike trajectories to map the exposure cyclists accumulate on hot commutes, and identifies where that exposure concentrates. Walking is affected too, in ways we can measure at the level of gait. A study in Scientific Reports found that walking cadence correlates inversely with maximum temperature, and suggested that the mechanism regulating our pace begins to fail when the heat becomes excessive.

Here I have to be honest about the limits of my own argument. Air conditioning does nothing for the cyclist at the traffic light or the pedestrian on the pavement. For them the interventions are different: shade, street trees, water, cooler surfaces. A piece arguing that AC saves lives has to concede that it saves the lives of people inside vehicles and carriages, and that the exposed majority need a separate and arguably more urgent set of protections. The active travel evidence belongs here not because AC helps these users, but because it completes the picture of who heat endangers, and reminds us that the enclosed cabin is a privilege the road does not extend to everyone.

So we arrive at air conditioning itself. The claim is not that cooling is pleasant, which is obvious, but that it reverses the specific physiological and psychological damage the earlier sections described, and that this reversal has a safety value we can trace.

Take the physical pathway first. A controlled experiment on driver thermal comfort published in Applied Sciences in 2021 measured drivers using electroencephalography, photoplethysmography and skin temperature while cabin conditions were moved from uncomfortable heat towards comfort. Cooling a 35C cabin measurably lowered the surface temperature of the forehead, hands and abdomen, and, crucially, the study tracked a stress index derived from heart rate variability that fell as the cabin approached a comfortable range. In plain terms, cooling the cabin calmed the driver’s autonomic nervous system. The body stopped fighting the environment and returned to a state in which it could attend to the road.

The cognitive pathway follows the same logic in reverse. If rising cabin temperature degrades cognition, then restoring a comfortable temperature restores the cognitive headroom that driving demands. Air conditioning is the mechanism that holds the cabin inside the narrow band where the performance curve is at its peak, rather than out on the degraded tail.

Then there is the psychological pathway, and here the evidence is almost poetic in its directness. Recall Kenrick and MacFarlane’s finding that the drivers who honked most in the heat were the ones without air conditioning. The corollary is that the drivers who kept their cool literally, kept their cool figuratively. A cooled cabin does not merely make an aggressive driver slightly less aggressive. It removes one of the triggers that manufactures aggression in the first place. Given how much of road danger is behavioural rather than mechanical, an intervention that lowers the baseline level of irritability across every occupied vehicle on a hot day is acting as a safety valve that no other single measure can match.

The strongest evidence that cooling saves lives comes not from transport at all, but from public health, and it is worth borrowing because it establishes the principle at scale. Barreca and colleagues, in a landmark paper in the Journal of Political Economy in 2016, tracked the United States across the twentieth century and found that the mortality impact of extremely hot days fell by around three quarters, with almost the entire decline occurring after 1960. Their central conclusion is stark. The diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the whole of that decline. A supporting analysis of 105 US cities in Environmental Health Perspectives documented the same broad flattening of the heat mortality relationship over time.

Barreca studied homes, not vehicles or carriages, and their finding is about residential cooling and all-cause heat mortality rather than transport collisions specifically. But the underlying physiology is identical. If cooling the home removed most of the death from hot days across a continent, it is not a leap to expect that cooling the cab, the carriage and the car addresses the transport-specific expressions of the very same stress.

None of this lets air conditioning off the hook for its costs. Cooling demands energy, and in a still largely fossil-fuelled system that energy carries emissions. The refrigerants themselves are a problem, since many are potent greenhouse gases when they leak, which they do across the life of a unit.

In electric vehicles the cost is visible in range, with cabin cooling and battery thermal management drawing on the pack, a loss quantified by testing from bodies such as AAA. At the systemic scale the waste heat that air conditioning rejects into the street contributes, perversely, to the very urban heat island that makes more cooling necessary, a feedback loop we should take seriously. And there is a sharp equity dimension. Cooling protects those who can afford it and those whose transport happens to be well specified, while leaving the exposed majority, the pedestrians and cyclists and the passengers on older un-refurbished stock, to bear the heat unaided.

These are reasons to deploy cooling thoughtfully. They are not reasons to treat it as an indulgence. This is a trade-off to be managed rather than a choice to be refused: cleaner refrigerants, cooling powered by decarbonised electricity, efficient thermal design that reduces the load before we meet it, and a deliberate prioritisation of the modes and users where the safety return is highest.

Moderate warmth carries a number of genuine benefits for transport. Extreme heat carries almost none. It degrades the driver, inflames the passenger, increases the number of crashes and amount of illness in ways we can measure across continents and decades.

We have spent decades treating air conditioning as a comfort feature, a line item to be value-engineered out of a bus specification or tolerated as an indulgence on a train. The evidence asks us to reclassify it. In the cab of a vehicle it protects the reaction time and the temper of the person we have entrusted with other lives. In a carriage it is the difference between a bearable journey and a medical incident that stops a line. At the scale of a whole society, the public health record suggests that cooling removes some of the death that hot days used to bring.

It does its work invisibly, which is exactly why it goes unthanked. That invisibility is the mark of good safety engineering, not the absence of it. Air conditioning is a silent saviour on our transport network, and for all its real environmental costs, it deserves to be named as one. The evidence has been sitting quietly in the corner for years, keeping us safe while we looked the other way. It is time we returned the favour and paid it some attention.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Increased Risk of Work Safety Accidents During Extremely High Temperatures

TL:DR - Using an environmental epidemiology approach across Chinese cities, researchers found that exposure to extreme heat was associated with an 18.7 per cent increase in work safety accidents, with road transport and vehicle accidents among the categories most susceptible.

Extreme heat disproportionately increases severe road traffic crashes in high conflict settings and among vulnerable road users in California

TL:DR - An analysis of police reported crash data from 177 Californian cities and found that extreme heat raises the risk of fatal and severe crashes in particular, concentrated at intersections and among people walking and cycling.

Impact and control of conditioned air supply modes in automobiles on drivers’ thermal comfort

TL:DR - The authors test how different air distribution strategies affect driver thermal comfort under summer conditions, and find that directing airflow onto the hottest body areas stabilises comfort fastest while trimming energy use.

Measuring transit riders’ heat exposure and mitigation during the 2021 Vancouver heatwave

TL:DR - This study quantifies how much extreme heat public transport passengers actually accumulate across a whole journey, including the walk and the wait, and reveals stark socio-spatial inequalities in who gets thermal reprieve and who does not.

Climate and Crash: Unveiling the Environmental Impact on Road Trauma, a Systematic Review

The researchers pull together the evidence on how weather, including heatwaves and extreme temperatures, shapes road trauma, and confirm that heat affects driver behaviour and vehicle performance alongside the more familiar effects of snow and rain.

😀 Positive News

Heat haters rejoice, for there is plenty of good news on the AC front.

London launches Heat Ready London, its first ever city heat plan

The Mayor’s first citywide heat plan confirms that more than 190 Tube trains, around 40 per cent of the Underground, are now air conditioned, alongside all London Overground and Elizabeth line trains, with air conditioned Piccadilly line and DLR trains to follow and every new double decker fitted with air cooling.

Athens Metro secures €149.5m to fit air conditioning to Lines 2 and 3

Greece has approved a major EU co-funded programme to modernise twelve older trains on two of the capital’s busiest lines and equip them with new air conditioning, with officials explicitly linking passenger comfort to encouraging a shift away from private cars.

Metro de Madrid invests €3.5m to reinforce air conditioning on 93 trains.

The regional government awarded a four year contract to maintain and optimise 744 air conditioning units on Lines 1 and 5, which together carry almost 197 million passengers a year.

Mumbai adds 26 new air conditioned suburban trains

From late January, Mumbai’s Central and Western Railway lines began running 26 additional air conditioned local services, targeted at the busiest corridors and peak hours where overcrowding on non air conditioned stock is worst.

Delhi rolls out 300 new air conditioned electric buses,

Delhi’s latest batch of 300 air conditioned electric buses continues a staged expansion that has taken the city fleet past 6,000 vehicles, pairing zero tailpipe emissions with cabin cooling.

💻 Hard Work

I’ve run out of time to write this section, believe it or not. So next week, perhaps.

🎶 Musical Finale

This is a fantastic cover of a classic song by Type O Negative. Its about finding comfort in domestic bliss, with a very strong summer theme to it.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free to do so, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

Good day my good friend.

I’m starting this week with a couple of public service announcements. I am going to be at two conferences in a single week. On Monday 13th July, I will be at the Active County Cambridgeshire conference in Cambridge, giving a presentation on work that I did with the Transport Expert Group on Forest City. While the title of my talk is on planning, its more about governance and whether good today is good enough for tomorrow.

Later that week, on Wednesday 15th July and Thursday 16th July I will be at the Transport Practitioners Meeting in Manchester, presenting the work with I did with Jenny Milne and Alex Reid on the Future of Water Transport (i.e. ferries).

When New Jersey Transit announced in April that a round trip to a World Cup match at MetLife Stadium would cost $150, the reaction was swift and unforgiving. The same nine mile ride from New York Penn Station to East Rutherford normally costs $12.90. Charging fans almost twelve times the standard fare for a fifteen minute journey looked, to most people who heard about it, like straightforward gouging. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on social media that more than $100 for a short train ride sounded awfully high. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was considerably less measured. FIFA itself piled in, warning that elevated fares would push fans towards other modes and create congestion the region would regret.

Over the following weeks the price came down, and it came down in public. By early May NJ Transit had cut the fare to $105. A week later, with the help of corporate sponsors, Governor Mike Sherrill announced a further reduction to $98. On the New York side, the express bus fare was slashed from $80 to $20. The episode is worth dwelling on, not because the numbers are shocking, but because it exposes a question that transport authorities almost never have to answer in public. When a stadium empties tens of thousands of people onto a public transport network in the space of an hour, who should pay for moving them, and how much?

It’s worthwhile dwelling on why NJ Transit did what it did, as the position it was in was unique. FIFA designated MetLife Stadium a no parking, transit only venue for security and congestion reasons. Much of the stadium’s enormous car park is being used for a fan village, staging areas and shuttle operations. The practical effect is that around 40,000 fans per match must arrive by public transport, roughly four times the matchday rider volume the Meadowlands line normally handles. NJ Transit put the additional cost of running that service at $48 million.

Under the terms of the agreement for hosting a World Cup that host nations sign with FIFA, the host nation bears almost the entirety of the cost of hosting the tournament, while FIFA makes all of the money - around $11 billion this time around. Normally, the promise of extra visitors to a country and the ‘feel good factor’ of hosting the tournament promises an increase in spending, which makes the business case for hosting such a tournament marginally less bad, or at least justifiable. But during this tournament, things are slightly complicated.

This cost for hosting the tournament is often shouldered by state agencies, including public transit agencies like NJ Transit. To make things even more complicated for NJ Transit, much of the uplift in spending is in fact expected to take place across the Hudson river in New York, which is an entirely separate transit agency. So the State of New Jersey faces a situation where they bear most of the cost of hosting matches at the Met Life Stadium, while the State of New York benefits the most from it.

So NJ Transit had a decision to make: should people going to matches at Met Life Stadium shoulder the cost, or New Jersey taxpayers? NJ Transit’s chief executive, Kris Kolluri, framed the surcharge as cost recovery rather than profit, arguing that the $48 million bill should not fall on the commuters who rely on the network every day. Governor Sherrill, who inherited the FIFA agreement from her predecessor, made the same case more pointedly, insisting that New Jerseyans would not subsidise World Cup ticket holders. There is a genuine principle buried in here. The fans attending a one off mega event are not the same population as the daily riders who fund and depend on the system, and asking the beneficiaries of a temporary surge to cover its marginal cost is, in the abstract, a coherent application of the user pays idea.

FIFA’s response is also worth taking seriously, because it points to the central weakness of the strategy. Heimo Schirgi, the tournament’s chief operating officer, warned that high fares would have what he called a “chilling effect,”1 pushing fans towards cars, rideshares and informal options that would undermine the transit only plan central to the operation of the tournament. This is the contradiction in using a fare surcharge to manage demand at a venue where the whole point is to force people onto public transport. Price the train too high and you encourage exactly the modal choices the event was designed to prevent. The fact that fans cannot park at the stadium does not make them captive. It makes them resourceful, and a $150 fare gives them a powerful incentive to find a way around it.

Strip away the politics and the World Cup glamour and what remains is a textbook case of peak demand. A stadium event generates a sharp, predictable spike in travel that lasts a few hours and then vanishes. As the classic peak load pricing framework set out by Marcel Boiteux and developed in studies such as this analysis of Stockholm’s network makes clear, the short run marginal cost of carrying an extra passenger rises steeply during the peak period.

This sounds counter-intuitive, as surely public transport authorities should be making money during peak periods. So let me break it down for you. The entirety of the operation of a public transport network is driven by something known as Peak Vehicle Requirement. This is as simple as it sounds - the number of vehicles you have in a fleet is determined by the number that you need to cater for peak travel periods, plus some allowances in case of breakdowns and repairs. All of those vehicles cost money to own and service.

Furthermore, when a public transport authority needs to increase the number of vehicles on a network during a peak, that in itself has running costs. Staff and fuel are the most notable, with the former sometimes having to be offered enhanced rates of pay to work unsociable hours.

Finally, there is also the marginal costs associated with crowding. Extremely high demand at specific periods not only means higher costs associated with running more vehicles, but you may need specific vehicles just for this purpose. Like double-decker buses or longer trains. Furthermore, the cost of this whole service needs to account for the fact that for half of its mileage, these vehicles will have to run nearly empty as the demand will likely be in a single direction at any one time.

What this means that even if you charge peak hour fares, they may not cover the additional costs of running peak hour services. Off-peak this is not an issue, as the capacity is available within the existing services. But when you have 80,000 fans trying to get to one point within a two hour time period, this places an extreme demand on the network that can only be covered in an expensive way.

This is why three goals pull against one another:

• Affordability and access, the principle that getting to a match should not be priced out of reach for a sport with deep working class roots;

• Demand management, the need to shape when and how people travel so the system can cope; and

• Revenue and cost recovery.

A surcharge of the NJ Transit kind serves the third directly and the second incidentally, but, as FIFA pointed out, it damages the first and can backfire on the second.

A further complication is the price elasticity of sports fans. Fans are somewhat unusual in that they are price inelastic at the higher income ends, but price elastic at the lower income ends. An international visitor who has paid thousands of dollars for flights, hotels, food, and tickets won’t be happy with an extra $100 to pay for the train, but they will likely pay it. But locals working on a modest budget who want to come and see a once-in-a-lifetime tournament in their city will likely not.

The real question is whether the peak can be managed and the cost recovered without loading it onto the fans least able to bear it. And as always when it comes to doing the right thing by fans in football, there is one country we look to for the way forward. Germany.

The German Bundesliga2 has arrived at almost the exact opposite of the New Jersey approach, and it is worth understanding why. At most German clubs, your match ticket is also your travel ticket. The Kombiticket, short for Kombinationsticket, automatically includes free travel on local public transport within the regional transport association’s zone, covering trams, buses, the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, typically from a few hours before kick off until the early hours of the following morning. The fan does nothing. There is no separate fare, no validation, no queue at a ticket machine. The cost of travel is bundled invisibly into the price of admission.

This is not a recent innovation. German footballing giants Borussia Dortmund and the local transport operator DSW21 introduced the model in 1990, and Dortmund has since extended the benefit so that a match ticket is valid for travel from anywhere in North Rhine-Westphalia. Around eleven Bundesliga clubs now offer some version of the scheme. It depends on something the United States and much of the United Kingdom lack, namely dense regional transport associations such as the VRR in the Rhine-Ruhr or the MVV in Munich, which already integrate ticketing across operators and can therefore fold a stadium into an existing zonal structure without much friction.

The reported outcomes are striking. A club survey at 1. FC Köln found that around 40 per cent of fans use public transport to reach matches, and Eintracht Frankfurt have reported figures above 60 per cent. I would treat these numbers with care, since they are self reported by the clubs that operate the schemes, and clubs have every reason to publicise high modal shares as evidence of their environmental credentials. But the direction of travel is consistent with the wider integrated ticketing literature. Removing the friction of buying a separate ticket genuinely changes behaviour.

The crucial point is that the German model does not make the cost vanish. What the Kombiticket does is reassign the payment, building it into the admission price so it is shared across every ticket holder rather than charged at the point of travel, and channelling it through a transport association that already has the commercial relationships to settle the bill. This is based on a simple understanding that all fans benefit from having as many of them travel to the stadium using public transport as possible, therefore they should all chip in to cover the cost.

This is where the boring world of transport governance comes into its own. New Jersey, lacking that integrating institution and facing a one off event with no established cost sharing arrangement, had to charge the cost explicitly and visibly at the fare gate. The difference between a celebrated model and a vilified one is partly a difference of plumbing.

Before we hate on New Jersey too much, its worthwhile remembering that they are hardly an outlier here. For the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Île-de-France transport authority nearly doubled the price of a single metro ticket, from €2.10 to €4.00, for the duration of the Games. A ten ticket carnet rose from €16.90 to €32. The regional president, Valérie Pécresse, justified the surcharge in language almost identical to Governor Sherrill’s, declaring that it was out of the question for the residents of Île-de-France to finance the Games.

The Paris scheme is instructive because it shows a more refined version of the same instinct. The surcharge applied to single tickets bought by visitors, but holders of the monthly and annual Navigo passes, overwhelmingly locals, were shielded entirely. The authority also introduced a dedicated Paris 2024 pass at €16 a day or €70 a week, partly to manage the queueing problem that a surge of one off ticket purchases would otherwise create. This is price discrimination in the technical sense, and it is doing something New Jersey’s flat surcharge did not. It separates the captive daily user, who is protected, from the visiting event goer, who pays the premium. The principle that residents should not subsidise a transient mega event is preserved, but the burden is aimed more precisely at the population that can absorb it.

That said, Paris was not spared criticism. There were objections that the measure penalised volunteers and lower income residents who lacked a Navigo pass, and the advice to locals to stockpile cheap tickets before the surcharge took effect rather gave the game away. A two tier fare is administratively neat, but it still rests on a judgement about who counts as a visitor and who counts as a resident, and that judgement is rarely as clean as the policy implies.

The obvious question for a British reader is why the English game, with a fanbase every bit as large and loyal as Germany’s and home to ninety-two professional football clubs, has nothing resembling the Kombiticket. The answer is that the Premier League and the Football League have largely left matchday travel to individual clubs, and the results are a patchwork. The Campaign for Better Transport, in its Door to Turnstile report, pointed out that in the Premier League alone more than 650,000 fans travel to matches every week, a movement of people on the scale of a small city, yet no league wide framework exists to help them do it without a car.

A few clubs have built something good. Newcastle United’s Magpie Mover gives season ticket holders matchday public transport across Tyne and Wear for around £25 for the whole season, which is about as close to the German model as English football gets. Arsenal, working with Transport for London and others, cut the share of fans arriving by car from roughly 30 per cent to 10 per cent after moving from its historic home at Highbury to the Emirates, largely through transport planning rather than pricing. At the other end, the same research found that Old Trafford, the home of my club Manchester United, is not well served by high capacity public transport and at the time of the research was operating on a travel plan nearly a decade out of date. The contrast with Dortmund, where a single integrated arrangement covers every fan automatically, is stark.

I want to be fair to the clubs, because the fragmentation is not entirely their fault. The German model is enabled by regional transport associations that pool operators under one fare structure, and the fractured British public transport system offers no equivalent partner to negotiate with. A club that wanted to replicate the Kombiticket would have to strike separate deals with multiple train operators, a bus company and, in the larger cities, a tram network, each with its own commercial incentives.

It is worth pausing on what the evidence says supporters themselves want. The Door to Turnstile research, which surveyed more than a thousand fans, found that rail is comfortably the mode supporters most wish they could use more, with thirty-six per cent naming the train as the option they would like to use more often, ahead of the bus on twenty-three per cent and the tram or tube on seventeen per cent. For away games, fifty-seven per cent already take the train for at least some fixtures. The appetite is clearly there, but so are the barriers.

Fans reported being put off rail by rising ticket prices, inflexible booking arrangements and engineering works, and one barrier is peculiar to football. Because kick off times are frequently moved at short notice to suit television audiences, supporters often cannot commit to the cheap advance fares that make rail affordable, since booking early risks holding a ticket for a train that no longer fits the times of kick off and full time. The result is that the fans most willing to take the train are penalised by the very flexibility that television broadcasters demand. Campaign for Better Transport’s proposed remedies followed directly from this. It called for a One-Two Ticket that would let a match ticket double as a local transport ticket, explicitly modelled on the German Kombiticket, and for a dedicated football supporters’ railcard to soften the advance fare problem. Neither has been adopted at any scale.

There is an environmental dimension too. A study of spectator travel to English football by Dosumu, Colbeck and Bragg, drawing on more than 1,600 respondents, documented a heavy dependence on the car and limited car sharing among fans, with the associated emissions scaling up substantially at national level. The lesson is not that fans are indifferent to sustainability, but that they default to the car when the public transport offer is fragmented, expensive or unreliable, which is exactly what an integrated matchday ticket is designed to fix.

Set these cases side by side and a pattern emerges that the academic literature has been describing for years. The foundational synthesis is Graham Currie and Amer Shalaby’s review of transport planning for the world’s largest events, published in Transport Reviews, which treats demand management rather than raw capacity as the core discipline of event transport. The most effective interventions are those that flatten or redistribute the peak, through staggered arrivals, expanded service windows and behavioural nudges, rather than those that simply price people off the network.

In a funny way, football clubs in the English game have been doing this already, even if they don’t know it. In recent years, there has been a commercial push by clubs to hold more activities before and after matches, with the intention to bring in additional commercial revenue for the club. The prime example of this is Tottenham Hotspur, where their new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium keeps concession stands, bars, and food outlets open before and after the match to encourage people to stay. These are often supplemented by tours of parts of the stadium, the museum, and even talks from former players. It is also home to an F1 Driving Experience, and a Skywalk of the stadium roof. All of which do their little bit to encourage fans to arrive earlier and leave later.

Currie’s later work with Adam Jones and Janet Woolley on the London 2012 Olympics introduced the memorable idea of the “big scare,” the observation that much of the demand management success in London came not from the formal plan but from sustained public messaging that persuaded regular travellers to stay away or change their routes. London managed a far larger peak than any World Cup match, through information and capacity, without resorting to a punitive matchday fare.

The integrated ticketing evidence points the same way. A stated preference study of car commuters in Sweden found that integrated ticketing had a positive effect on the willingness to switch from car to public transport, and cited a UK Department for Transport estimate that national integrated smart ticketing could be worth over £1 billion a year. The repeated finding, across that work, the German Kombiticket experience and the Department for Transport’s own appraisal, is that bundling and simplifying fares increases public transport use, whereas adding cost and complexity at the point of travel suppresses it. If the goal of a transit only event is to maximise the share of fans arriving by public transport, a high, visible, separately purchased fare is close to the worst available instrument. It manages the peak by deterring travel altogether, which is effective only in the perverse sense that the empty trains of priced off fans are indeed less crowded.

Britain has its own unresolved version of this crowd management issue, and Wembley is the sharpest illustration of it. The national stadium handles upwards of 80,000 people on event days with no general spectator parking and, in practice, near total dependence on a single London Underground station. Wembley Park, on the Jubilee and Metropolitan lines and connected to the stadium by the wide pedestrian sweep of Olympic Way3, does most of the heavy lifting. The other two stations are far more marginal than the stadium’s own literature implies. Wembley Stadium station, served by Chiltern Railways from Marylebone, is unstaffed and effectively closed except on event days, and for the very largest crowds Chiltern has shut it entirely when it lacks the trains and crew to run it safely. Wembley Central is a secondary option subject to managed queuing. And when engineering works take out the Underground lines through Wembley Park itself, as happened before a National League play off final in 2025, the whole crowd is thrown onto the two lesser stations at once. The system copes on most days through capacity and crowd management rather than any thought out pricing strategy, and on the wrong weekend it does not cope at all.

Nearly two decades ago the London Assembly produced a report, A Question of Sports Travel, that looked into matchday travel to the capital’s stadiums and concluded that integrated ticketing, of broadly the German kind, should be introduced so a fan could buy a single ticket covering both entry to the match and travel. That recommendation has largely gone nowhere.

This is where I come down, and I want to state it as a judgement rather than a certainty. Pricing public transport for sporting events is a legitimate tool, and the cost recovery instinct behind both the New Jersey and the Paris surcharges is defensible. There is nothing inherently wrong with asking the beneficiaries of a temporary surge to contribute to its cost, and the symmetric version of this argument is one I would apply across the board, including to events I happen to like.

But the evidence is fairly consistent that a high, visible fare charged at the point of travel is a clumsy instrument that achieves cost recovery at the expense of access and, often, at the expense of the modal shift the event was supposed to deliver. The German model is more attractive not because it is free, which it is not, but because it resolves the same cost allocation question through integration and bundling rather than through paying at the station ticket office or ticket machine as a penalty. The supporters’ own stated preferences point in exactly that direction.

New Jersey’s climbdown from $150 to $98 is being told as a story about political pressure and corporate sponsorship riding to the rescue. I think it is better understood as a transport authority discovering, in real time and in public, that it had reached for the wrong instrument. The cost of moving 40,000 people in an hour is real, and someone has to pay it. The question the Bundesliga answered thirty five years ago, and the one the London Assembly posed and Britain never resolved, is whether you make fans confront that cost at the turnstile of the railway or quietly fold it into the price of the game. The places that chose the second answer have, on the whole, moved more people more cheaply with less acrimony. That is the difference between treating transport as a barrier to be priced and treating it as part of the event itself.

This final point is much more important than many transport professionals think it is. Travelling to and from the stadium is part of the experience of going to match as much as the ninety minutes of action. As a Manchester United fan who goes to watch his team at least once a season, I can tell you the experience without missing a beat. Once I board the tram at Piccadilly, it is often busy with expectant fans. Some friends are in the corner discussing whether Bruno Fernandes will be asked to play in the Number 10 role or drop deeper into midfield. A father is with his excited son taking him to his first match. Another group at the far end of the carriage has started a rendition of United Calypso.

Then, at the Old Trafford tram stop, we all pile off. As we walk past the cricket ground everyone’s pace picks up. During midweek games, the light from the floodlights of the stadium glows above the houses in the distance. Just before we head onto Sir Matt Busby Way, I hang a left and pick up some fish and chips at Lou Macari’s Chip Shop. As I leave and head towards the stadium everyone is excited, with people pouring out from streets and back alleys to walk to the stadium as one. Horns blowing, chants becoming louder, the conversation quick and excited by what lies ahead.

While Manchester United do not have a combined match and travel ticket, this is what taking public transport to the stadium offers the match-going fan. It builds the anticipation and atmosphere, and the excitement in a way that driving in a car cannot. This is why, for me, no matter the merits of the NJ Transit and Paris approach, spreading the cost and reducing the barriers to using public transport in the way that Germany does makes the whole experience of going to match a much better one for all involved. No matter what the result is.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research on moving crowds to and from major sporting events. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author, as they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

The application potential of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) at mega events: A case study of Hangzhou 2022 Asian Games

TL:DR - Published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, this paper runs a stated preference survey and two mixed logit models to work out which bundled MaaS packages spectators would actually subscribe to when travelling to the Hangzhou Games. It finds strong behavioural inertia and wide variation in what different fans want from a bundle, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that offering an integrated travel product is enough on its own to shift behaviour.

Understanding changes in traffic demand during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games

TL:DR - This study in Transportation Research Part A uses disaggregated trip records and a difference-in-differences design to isolate the effect of the expressway toll surcharges applied during the Games. It estimates that the surcharges cut passenger vehicle demand by 25 per cent on weekdays and 36.8 per cent at weekends, and because freight was exempt it can separate the pricing effect from everything else going on, which is exactly the kind of clean identification the field usually lacks.

Qatar’s success story during FIFA World Cup 2022: Role of travel demand management and impact on travel behavior

TL:DR - A mixed-methods evaluation in Case Studies on Transport Policy combining metro ridership data with resident surveys, reporting a 73 per cent jump in metro ridership and a fall of 2.8 car trips per week per resident during the tournament. The honest limitation, which the authors flag themselves, is a reliance on self-reported behaviour and the exclusion of tourists, so the resident-side findings are stronger than the visitor picture.

Sport events and the environment: Assessing the carbon footprint of spectators’ modal choices at professional football games in Austria

TL:DR - Also in the Journal of Cleaner Production, this one takes a single Bundesliga-level case, Rapid Vienna, and quantifies the emissions attached to how fans actually travel to a home game. The striking headline is the asymmetry, with the 42.4 per cent arriving by car producing 71.6 per cent of emissions while the 52.8 per cent using public transport account for just 27.1 per cent, which makes the case for modal shift about as vividly as a single club study can.

Empirical study on traffic system management applied to the metropolitan expressway during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games

TL:DR - The supply-side companion to the Tokyo demand study above, also in Transportation Research Part A, evaluating physical traffic system management such as onramp closures and junction control against a constructed counterfactual. It finds delays cut by nearly 27 per cent on weekdays and argues for intensifying these measures during peak hours, a reminder that pricing is only half the toolkit and that managing the network itself does a lot of the work.

😀 Positive News

Plenty of good news on getting fans to the big occasion without a car lately, much of it prompted by a World Cup summer and a Winter Olympics that both leaned hard on public transport. Here are a few from the last few months that caught my eye.

Free rides home on SEPTA after every World Cup match in Philadelphia

The City of Philadelphia confirmed on 10 June 2026 that, through a partnership with tournament sponsor Airbnb, the ride home on SEPTA’s Broad Street Line would be free after all six of the city’s World Cup matches, with late-night service added on every match day and trains running every 30 minutes overnight. With Lincoln Financial Field sitting inside the city on a direct metro line, Philadelphia has quietly ended up with the cleanest fan-travel offer of any US host, and the free return is a neat nudge that removes the one friction point, the journey home, that most often pushes people back towards cars and cabs.

Los Angeles runs direct, car-free transit to every World Cup match

In the run-up to the tournament LA Metro and a dozen regional partners set up direct, nonstop bus and rail service to every World Cup match at SoFi Stadium, with no transfers and no expensive stadium parking, alongside commemorative World Cup TAP cards and enhanced Metrolink trains. For a region with a reputation for car dependence, persuading fans to reach a major venue entirely by public transport is a genuinely notable shift, and one Metro clearly hopes will leave a habit behind after the final whistle.

Kansas City’s ConnectKC26 offers free airport buses and low-cost tournament passes

Kansas City built a dedicated ConnectKC26 motorcoach network for the World Cup, with a free Airport Direct service linking the airport to the downtown fan festival, a flat $5 fare from the fan festival to Arrowhead Stadium, and unlimited regional passes at $5 a day or $50 for the whole tournament. It is a rare example of a mid-sized, car-oriented American city standing up a genuinely affordable, integrated event-travel product from scratch, and the pricing is deliberately pitched to keep fans out of their cars rather than to recover costs from them.

The South Tyrol Guest Pass puts Winter Olympic travel in the room rate

During February’s Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, South Tyrol leaned on its Guest Pass, a scheme that folds the cost of regional public transport into the price of accommodation so that visitors travel on trains and buses without buying a separate ticket. The province reported 5.7 million passes issued and 7.85 million public transport journeys in the previous year alone, and Trenitalia used the Games to trail new cross-border high-speed links to Munich with Deutsche Bahn and ÖBB. It is the accommodation-bundled cousin of the German Kombiticket, and a reminder that the most effective way to get people onto trains is often to make the fare invisible.

Everton’s new waterfront stadium leans on foot, rail and the Mersey ferry

Everton’s move to the Hill Dickinson Stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock for the 2025/26 season has been built around a deliberately car-light matchday model, with road closures creating safe walking routes from the city centre, enhanced Merseyrail services to Sandhills and neighbouring stations, cycle parking along the dock wall, and a matchday Mersey Ferries cross-river shuttle from the Wirral. Coordinated through a Liverpool City Region transport working group, it is a rare chance to design fan travel around walking, rail and water from day one rather than retrofitting it, and a useful English test case as the same stadium prepares to host UEFA Euro 2028 matches.

💻 Hard Work

This week has been an unspectacular one, as I have had my head in developing PowerBI dashboards to support the development of a transport strategy. I wish I could say it was more thrilling than that.

🎶 Musical Finale

Every World Cup has an unofficial anthem, and for England, this time its Wonderwall. I remember belting this out in my room at home over the Christmas of 1995, much to the annoyance of my mother who came to hate the song because of it. Good times.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

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Good day my good friend.

This week’s newsletter is a good example of something where I set out to write one thing, did the research, and actually found out something more interesting and instead I am writing about that. Yes, I am writing about Andy Burnham - everyone seems to be after all - but this is not a story solely about him. And it explains a lot about how Manchester has come to be seen positively in transport circles.

You have probably read a lot about Manchesterism in recent weeks. You might be sick of reading about it, or at least sick of every person saying that their specific viewpoint on the world is somehow the defining feature of Manchesterism.

For those of you who have somehow escaped the political shenanigans that now seems to define British politics, Manchesterism is the brain child of former Mayor for Greater Manchester Andy Burnham. As the Wikipedia article defines it:

The funny thing is, this isn’t the first Manchesterism that we have seen. The original Manchesterism emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century. To the creed of Cobden and Bright and the Anti-Corn Law League, this meant free trade, open markets and a deep suspicion of the state’s hand in the economy. With a more equitable society resulting from this, especially through the abolition of the Corn Laws which kept food prices artificially high. It was laissez-faire with a Lancashire accent. Nowadays, it is known as Manchester Liberalism.

There is a quiet irony, then, in the fact that the city which once exported economic liberalism to the world is now lending its name to something close to the opposite. The flagship achievement of the Burnham era, bus franchising, is the reassertion of public control over a market that was set free in 1986. Today’s Manchesterism is municipal, interventionist and proud of it. It has become the standard-bearer for a new English devolution.

That makes it tempting to do a very simple thing. You look at the trams gliding through the city centre, or the yellow Bee Network buses, or the integrated ticketing, and you think “I want some of that.” You are a convert. Manchesterism works, you conclude, and Burnham is its embodiment. The trouble is that there is more to the story than bees on buses. What you are actually looking at is not the achievement of one mayor or one term. It is the downstream consequence of a long, often unglamorous and frequently losing campaign, fought across decades, to wrestle power and money away from Whitehall. The trams are the easy part to see. The fight that produced them is the part that actually matters, and it is the part most likely to be missed by anyone trying to copy it.

Greater Manchester did not wake up with devolved transport powers. It built the institutions to hold them over more than half a century. The body now called Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) began life as the SELNEC Passenger Transport Executive in 1969, became the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive in 1974, and was rebranded and re-empowered as TfGM in 2011.

The Manchester Metrolink also had a somewhat humble start. The Manchester Corporation Tramways shut all tram lines in 1949. Early ideas for improving public transport in their absence included a railway tunnel between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria, and countless studies were undertaken by local councils on the viability of light rail systems for the city. Eventually, what was known as Project Light Rail got the green light, and in 1992 Phase 1 of Metrolink - between Bury and Altrincham via Piccadilly - opened to the public.

Over the years, the Metrolink has slowly expanded. The Eccles branch opened in 2000. The MediaCity spur opened in 2010. Between 2011 and 2013, lines towards Droylsden, Oldham, and St Werbugh’s Road opened. In 2014, this extended further to Rochdale, Ashton, East Didsbury, and Manchester Airport. All done line by line, government grant by government grant, long before any mayor existed. By the time Andy Burnham was elected in 2017, the city-region already ran the largest tram network outside London and had the institutional muscle memory of having built it.

That muscle memory was the work of people as much as structures. The council leaders Graham Stringer and then Sir Richard Leese, paired with the long-serving chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein, built the pragmatic, deal-making, public-private approach that became known as the Manchester model. Stringer’s council had already shown what the approach could do, driving the expansion of the publicly owned Manchester Airport into a national asset and bidding, repeatedly and at first unsuccessfully, for the Olympic Games. The bids lost, but the habit of bidding, of assembling coalitions and making the case to government, became a civic skill in its own right. Losing taught Manchester how to win, and the Commonwealth Games of 2002 were the proof.

Bernstein in particular, an officer of Manchester City Council for forty-six years and its chief executive from 1998 to 2017, was as clerk to the old passenger transport authority one of the people who pushed the original Metrolink into being. He led the city centre’s reconstruction after the 1996 IRA bomb, brought the 2002 Commonwealth Games and the regeneration of east Manchester, helped create the Combined Authority in 2011, and led the negotiations for the 2014 devolution deal. The tributes after his death in 2024 called him the architect of English devolution, and that was not hyperbole. He retired in the spring of 2017, the same season Burnham was first elected. The machine passed, substantially complete, from one to the other.

The single most instructive episode in the whole saga was, with some degree of irony, a defeat. In December 2008, Greater Manchester held a referendum on a £3bn transport package part-funded by a peak-time congestion charge and part-funded by the Department for Transport. All ten boroughs rejected it, by around seventy-nine per cent on a turnout close to half the electorate. It was a comprehensive rejection of a big-bang, vision-led, demand-management scheme put directly to the public.

And yet the striking thing is what happened next. The Department for Transport did not walk away. It would have been easy to, and no doubt the Treasury would welcome that saving. But it didn’t. Its £1.5bn in funding remained on the table, and funded the expansions of the Metrolink towards Droylsden, Oldham, and St Werbugh’s Road. Manchester lost the public debate on road user charging, but kept much of the money anyway.

The lesson the city drew from that defeat is the hinge of the entire story. It stopped asking the public to swallow grand, abstract, all-at-once schemes, and it started earning trust through visible, incremental delivery. Build a tram line. Open it, ideally early. Show Whitehall that the money was well spent. Ask for the next line. This is the discipline of the quick win, and it does two things at once. It gives residents something tangible to ride, and it builds delivery confidence in the one audience that ultimately controls the purse, which is central government. Devolution in Greater Manchester was never simply seized. It was earned, deal by deal, by a place that kept proving it could deliver.

The institutional record bears this out. After a statutory city-region pilot in 2009, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was established in 2011, the first in England, with the ten boroughs choosing to pool sovereignty over transport, planning and economic development when nobody was forcing them. The 2014 devolution agreement with George Osborne created the elected mayor and transferred real transport powers, and it was explicitly built on that track record. It even included an earn-back mechanism, which tied a share of future funding to the economic growth the investment generated, the principle of delivery confidence written directly into the financial settlement.

A sequence of further devolution deals followed, deepening the powers each time, culminating in the 2023 trailblazer agreement and a single, integrated funding settlement of the kind previously reserved for Scotland and Wales. The mayoralty itself was the unlock for the boldest move of all, because the Bus Services Act 2017 reserved bus franchising powers for places with an elected mayor, which is why Greater Manchester could do what no other English authority outside London had dared since deregulation.

It is easy to conclude from this what Whitehall continually lost a political battle against savvy local authorities from one of the major cities of the UK. But its not quite like this. It was Whitehall repeatedly choosing to back the place that kept delivering, and Manchester trail-blazed the template that other city-regions are now asked to follow.

It would be dishonest to present this as a clean run of victories, because the transport policy itself has been distinctly uneven.

The clear success is bus franchising. Greater Manchester became the first place in England to take its buses back into public control since deregulation in 1986, and the early operational data in the GMCA’s Delivering the Bee Network update is genuinely encouraging. Patronage is up, by around fourteen per cent year on year in the first franchised areas. Punctuality has climbed from roughly two thirds of services on time before franchising to about seventy-six per cent by early 2025. The zero-emission share of the fleet has gone from under two per cent to seventeen per cent. A flat £2 single fare, held since 2022, made the network markedly cheaper, especially as the national cap was raised to £3. These are improvements that passengers can feel, and they arrived quickly.

Franchising is the quick-win discipline applied to the hardest target on the network, and so far it is working. The necessary honesty flag is that the pre-franchising comparison rests on a reconstructed baseline, because network-wide patronage data did not exist before the TfGM took control, and some of the growth reflects the wider recovery from the pandemic and a rising population rather than people switching out of cars. The story is strong. It is not yet finished.

Road safety deserves a place alongside it, as a quieter quick win that rarely makes the headlines. The casualty data shows people killed or seriously injured on Greater Manchester’s roads falling from 1,187 in 2017 to 799 in 2023, a reduction of nearly a third, with a formal Vision Zero target of eliminating road deaths by 2040 now in place. The caveat is familiar, that the fall broadly tracks a national trend and that the lockdown years distort the middle of the series, so the local contribution is real but hard to isolate. It is progress earned steadily rather than a single dramatic intervention, which is rather the point.

Active travel tells a more chastening story. The ambition set out in Chris Boardman’s Made to Move work was genuinely radical, including a target of getting cycling to ten per cent of trips. The honest assessment, made most plainly by researchers at the Manchester Urban Institute, is that cycling mode share has stagnated at around two per cent, nowhere near that headline figure. What this forced was a radical recalibration of expectations. The early assumption that building the network would quickly deliver the behaviour change was wrong, or at least wildly optimistic on timing. The work had to be reframed around the patient accumulation of safe, connected infrastructure, more than 130 kilometres of it now in the ground, in the understanding that the riders follow the network only slowly. That recalibration is only now beginning to bear fruit, and even then the returns are modest and local rather than transformational.

Behind both stories sits the headline ambition of the Greater Manchester Transport Strategy 2040, which is to get car use down to no more than half of all trips. On the published travel-diary data, car driver and passenger trips together still account for somewhere around fifty-six to fifty-eight per cent of journeys. The dial has barely moved. Modal shift, the thing the entire strategy exists to achieve, has been the most stubborn target of all, and progress on it is notably slow. That is not a Manchester failing so much as a reminder of how hard the underlying behavioural problem is, even for the best-resourced city-region in England.

Transport impacts are felt years, often decades, after delivery. The effects of a new tram network accrue as people slowly reorganise their journeys, as homes and offices and shops cluster around the stops, as land values shift and development follows. The benefit is real but it is also diffuse, lagged and entangled with everything else happening in the economy. The strongest evidence we have that transport investment has paid off in Greater Manchester comes from the Metrolink Phase 3 evaluation of lines completed between 2010 and 2014, well before Burnham, precisely because enough time has now passed to measure them. The Bee Network, completed as an integrated system only in 2025, is far too young for any equivalent verdict.

The economic claims made for the network show how careful one has to be here. It is easy to find large figures attached to Metrolink’s contribution to the regional economy, but the most-quoted of these trace back to authority-commissioned research rather than independent appraisal, and they bundle together effects that no single scheme can claim on its own. Manchester’s economy has grown faster than the national average for two decades, and the transport network is plainly part of that, but so are the airport, the universities, the financial and creative sectors and a planning system that pushed density into the core.

The honest statement is narrow and unsatisfying. Good transport almost certainly helped, the precise contribution is unknowable in the short term, and anyone offering a confident pounds-and-pence figure is selling something. If no improvements to transport were made, the city would almost certainly be in a worse position than it is now.

The consequence is that understanding the impact of what has been delivered is necessarily indirect and inferred. Often you cannot draw a clean straight line from a specific scheme to a specific outcome in the wider city. The environmental record makes the point sharply. The GMCA’s own Five-Year Environment Plan concedes that transport emissions have been broadly static since 1990. Roadside nitrogen dioxide has improved, with exceedance sites falling sharply according to Clean Air GM, but much of that reflects national fleet renewal rather than local policy.

This is exactly why consistent delivery matters more than any single scheme. If you cannot prove the impact of one tram line in the short term, the rational strategy is not to wait for proof before building the next. It is to keep delivering, steadily and credibly, on the reasoned expectation that the accumulated effect will show up later at some point. Devolution gives a city-region the one thing that makes that long game playable, which is a stable, locally accountable institution able to keep delivering across electoral cycles. The point of the machine is not that it guarantees the impact. It is that it sustains the delivery long enough for the impact to arrive.

The obvious question for everywhere else is whether other city-regions can simply jump to where Greater Manchester is now, skipping nearly fifty years of learning the hard way. The honest answer is that the leap is genuinely hard, and it is worth being clear about why.

Manchester’s position rests on things that cannot be conjured quickly. It has unusually cohesive boroughs with a long habit of cooperation, and a geography where the police, health and transport boundaries broadly align, which makes integration far easier than in more fragmented regions. It has decades of officer-level continuity, embodied by figures like Bernstein. It has a major asset base already built, the largest tram network outside the capital. And, crucially, it has a track record that earned Whitehall’s trust and, with it, a uniquely favourable funding settlement.

Most newer combined authorities have thinner institutions, messier geographies, a weaker asset base and, above all, no comparable history of delivery to point to when they ask the Treasury for money. Many of them are barely a decade old, created in the mid-2010s wave of city-region deals, and several cover areas where the constituent councils have no deep tradition of working together at all. Some are being set up right at this moment. Delivery capability, the unglamorous machinery of engineering, procurement, data and programme management, is the hardest thing of all to acquire, because it is learned by doing rather than legislated into being.

And yet the attempt to leapfrog is necessary, and should be encouraged rather than discouraged. No region can afford to spend another fifty years building capability from scratch, and none should be asked to. The way to read Manchester is not as a finish line that others must somehow teleport to, but as proof that the apprenticeship is real and that it ends somewhere worthwhile. Other city-regions have to start delivering now, accept that their early wins will be modest, and use those wins to build exactly the delivery confidence, locally and in Whitehall, that Manchester spent decades accumulating.

The leapfrog will likely be imperfect and the early results will underwhelm. That is not a reason to hold back. It is the necessary, unavoidable process by which regional delivery capability gets built in the first place. The mistake would be to look at Manchester’s polished network and conclude that the capability comes first and the delivery second. It is the other way around.

So what is Manchesterism, really? Stripped of the branding, it is not yet a story about measurable transport outcomes only. It is a story about process and philosophy. It is about where decisions get made, and by whom, and about the patient, decades-long construction of institutions capable of making decisions and delivering against them. The trams and the franchised buses are evidence that the process works as a process. They are not yet evidence that it has transformed how a city-region lives and moves, because that evidence takes a generation to mature.

That reframing changes the questions worth asking. The real questions Manchesterism poses are not whether Burnham has already delivered modal shift, because he plainly has not, or whether the carbon numbers have fallen, because they largely have not. The real questions are these. Should power over transport be devolved to the places that live with the consequences? I think it clearly should. And should we build serious delivery organisations, with real capability and real money, rooted in the regions rather than in Whitehall? Again, yes. Greater Manchester is the best evidence we have that both answers are right, not because it has finished the job, but because it has shown that a place given control and held to account will build the machine to use it.

The impact will come. It will arrive slowly, indirectly and years from now, and it will be hard to attribute cleanly to any one decision Burnham or Bernstein ever made. But it will come, because the delivery has been consistent and the institution is built to last. To sign up to Manchesterism on the strength of the trams alone is to admire the wrong thing. The achievement worth admiring, and worth copying, is the fifty-year fight that made the trams possible, and the simple, radical proposition underneath it - that the places should be trusted to run their own affairs.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Fiscal centralization versus decentralization of transport infrastructure operation and maintenance

TL:DR - This paper builds a stochastic evolutionary game model of central and local government behaviour and tests it on China’s transport sector. It finds that a centralised system struggles to motivate two local governments at once, whereas a decentralised approach can incentivise both under the right conditions.

Transport governance system response during the COVID-19 pandemic: the allure of a ‘new normal’ and its implications for tackling the polycrisis

TL:DR - A paper that examines how the system responded to the pandemic and what that reveals about its capacity for deeper change. It works through the UK’s devolution and policy divergence between its constituent nations, and asks whether devolved structures actually enable the radical shifts that climate and other goals demand.

The intersection of productivity and governance capacity in spatial inequality: the case of England’s devolution periphery

TL:DR - This article in maps England’s asymmetric decentralisation and identifies a ‘devolution periphery’, mostly in the east and west, that lags in both economic and governance capacity. It states that the places most in need of devolved delivery, including transport delivery, are often the least equipped to do it, which is exactly why leapfrogging is so hard.

The role of meta-governance in public transport systems: a comparison of major urban regions in Denmark and England

TL:DR - This paper compares public transport governance in the Copenhagen region and the West Midlands, with the English case focused on buses given how little influence the regional level has over rail. It finds the passenger transport authority acting as the core ‘meta-governor’ in both, and is a strong read for understanding what a combined authority actually has to do to make a fragmented bus network behave like one system.

Regulatory regimes: national and comparative regulation of public transport

TL:DR - A paper that revisits the idea of a ‘regulatory cycle’ in which bus markets swing between deregulation and public control. It is the most useful academic framing for Greater Manchester’s franchising, placing the Bee Network not as a one-off but as the latest turn of a long international cycle, and asking what institutional designs actually sustain good outcomes once the swing back to public control has happened.

😀 Positive News

Plenty of good news on transport and devolution lately, much of it the slow, institution-building sort this blog keeps banging on about. Here are a few from the last few months that caught my eye.

Goodbye to the original Tyne and Wear Metro trains

Nexus confirmed on 2 June 2026 that the original 1980 Metro fleet would make its final guaranteed passenger runs in the week beginning 22 June, completing the £362 million replacement with 46 new Stadler-built trains. After 46 years and roughly 1.7 billion journeys, North East Mayor Kim McGuinness framed the switch-over as a milestone for the publicly owned Metro, with a Washington extension, new signalling and further station upgrades to follow. A quietly significant moment for a devolved network finally seeing a generational fleet renewal through to completion.

Transport for Wales launches contactless pay-as-you-go rail in the north east

In May 2026 the Welsh Government-owned Transport for Wales switched on contactless tap-in, tap-out ticketing at 15 stations across North East Wales and the borders, automatically calculating the best-value fare and removing the need to buy in advance. It is a modest change with an outsized convenience benefit, and it lands alongside a wider run of good news for the operator, which has posted record passenger numbers and its most improved reliability in years as new trains and the South Wales Metro electrification bed in.

Every Greater Manchester borough to get Bee Network night buses

On 18 March 2026, Mayor Andy Burnham announced 36 service changes for 2026/27 that extend Bee Network night buses to every Greater Manchester borough, with Oldham, Stockport, Tameside and Trafford gaining overnight services for the first time, plus an order for 55 electric Wrightbus vehicles. TfGM expects around 740,000 residents to benefit, with the £2 single and £5 day fare caps held to the end of 2026.

Tram approval powers to be handed down to West Yorkshire’s mayor

In May 2026 the Chancellor announced that the Department for Transport would consult on devolving Transport and Works Act Order powers, letting West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin sign off her own mass transit scheme rather than wait on Whitehall, potentially shaving up to a year off the long-delayed Leeds tram timetable. A national mass transit taskforce was announced alongside it.

💻 Hard Work

The highlight of last week was definitely last Friday, where along with Meg Drinkall and Katie Foulkes, I went to see the venue for this year’s Mobility Camp. We usually choose a good venue, but this one is utterly spectacular. Just check out the pictures. Katie also gave us a tour of the fantastic Grey to Green scheme.

Travelling back afterwards was not so good. As many of you likely know, on that day two East Midlands Trains services collided just to the south of Bedford - barely a few miles from my home - and as of the time of writing the driver of one of the trains was tragically killed and nine people are critically injured in hospital. In that context, my two hour detour to Milton Keynes Central is nothing.

The rest of the week has been a mix of meetings, chasing people, and trying to beat the heat. I have to present some findings from a data collection exercise next week, so that has been taking up a lot of time and a lot of brain space.

🎶 Musical Finale

You are stuck for choice when it comes to music from Manchester. I could so easily have chosen tracks from the likes of the Happy Mondays, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Courteneers, and Oasis. But as there is a World Cup on, I had to go with the best World Cup anthem ever made by New Order. Now if you will excuse me, I have to watch a video of David Platt’s volley against Belgium on repeat.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

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Good day my good friend.

This week’s post is about a report that was in my pre-holiday reading that never happened pile. Sitting alongside about thirty books collected at various charity shops and second-hand book stores. I don’t say this to boast, but more to say that not enough time is dedicated to reading.

I have driven this route hundreds of times, to the point where I can probably do this in my sleep. After crossing the motorway at Junction 12, you hit Toddington, a pretty Bedfordshire village whose streets are traffic calmed by lines of parked vehicles on either side of the road. Which is always fun for the bus. As you exit the village again, the All Saints Church passes on the left, which has sat on this Bedfordshire hillside since at least the 12th Century. The church garden is lovingly tended to, and the bell tower casts a long shadow in the afternoon sun.

Then, its a sudden right-hander before dropping quickly down the hill. If you have a passenger, they can see across the valley towards the northern reaches of Houghton Regis, with fields of cereals coating the hillside leading towards a horizon marked by new homes, telegraph poles, and electrical wires. You as the driver, however, are fully concentrated on the downhill, which hangs a sharper-than-you-think left at the bottom.

A short way on, I flick the indicator and turn right. Today, I am taking some things that were previously gathering dust in the shed for recycling or reuse at the Recycling Centre at Thorn Turn. When I was just out of university and heading to my first job - a Planning Trainee at South Bedfordshire District Council in Dunstable - I drove this route every day. Cutting along Thorn Road was a popular rat-run for those of us wishing to avoid congestion at the lights in the centre of Houghton Regis. Except I am not going this way. I have not turned onto a small country road1, but instead I am on a dual carriageway.

The Dunstable Northern Bypass - or the A5 to M1 Link to give it the official title - was a key part of the first Local Transport Plan I ever helped write. We at Central Bedfordshire Council identified that this scheme, proposed by the Highways Agency at the time, achieved a number of aims:

• alongside the Luton and Dunstable Busway, it would reduce chronic traffic congestion in the centre of Dunstable by taking through traffic (especially HGVs) off the A5 through the town, and instead directing them to the M1 to complete the same trip;

• unlock major housing growth planned to the north of Houghton Regis, which our modelling at the time indicated could not be delivered without radical traffic reduction within Dunstable;

• improve east-west connectivity by providing a more direct link between the A505 to the south of Leighton Buzzard and the M1.

Driving along it now, it is quite stark on how not busy the A5-M1 Link is. In March 2025, the 5 Year Post-Opening Project Evaluation was published by National Highways, and one paragraph on page 14 provides some validation to this casual observation:

When you delve into the data, a variable picture emerges. While some routes saw changes in traffic levels that were less than forecast, others saw more. The B579 Luton Road was completely out - where the traffic model predicted increases in vehicles, the observed impact was in fact a decrease in vehicles.

The report contains some health warnings. Some of the traffic count data on the A5 was missing, for example, and this needs considering when interpreting these results. Additionally, changes in traffic levels on the M1 between Junctions 9 and 11a were used as a proxy for changes in traffic owing to the scheme, which are affected by numerous other factors affecting demand on the M1 corridor, notably the completion of managed motorway schemes in the area.

I know what you might be thinking. This is another example of traffic forecasts over-estimating the benefits of a scheme. However, I see it differently. I see this as a failure to understand nuance when it comes to forecasting and induced demand. And to help make this point, I am going to draw on the findings of a recent think piece published by Dr Phil Goodwin to make my point, as well as provide some commentary of my own.

Before doing so, I should state right now that Dr Goodwin’s work builds a lot upon economic theory and its application to transport. While I know enough about this to be able to understand an economic case and be able to identify appraisal results that are obviously questionable, transport economics is not my specialism. I approach this as someone more based on the practice side of transport planning as opposed to operating detailed calculations of benefits. Bear this in mind.

What Dr Goodwin’s work usefully does is separate out the ideas of induced demand and induced traffic. The latter is very simple: its extra vehicle traffic. But the former considers changes in the level and structure of the demand for movement, of which induced traffic is just a part of this. In other words, induced traffic concerns itself with the amount of vehicle traffic on a road, and induced demand concerns itself with how demand changes as a result of social and economic changes brought about by the scheme. The former is more static, the latter is variable.

This challenge is central to how we appraise schemes and policies. How do we know that changes resulting from a new road are as a result of that new road specifically, or as a result of wider changes in society and the economy?

Goodwin’s answer to this question is, on the surface, straightforward. You build a counterfactual. You work out what would have happened without the scheme, and you compare it to what actually happened with the scheme in place. The difference between the two is the effect of the scheme. Easy to say. Much harder to do well. And it turns out that the way we have done it for the best part of two decades has been quietly, systematically wrong.

This is the heart of the matter, and it is worth dwelling on because it reframes everything that comes after it. For most of the life of the Post-Opening Project Evaluation programme, which National Highways and its predecessors have run since around 2002, the assessment of induced traffic rested on a comparison that sounds reasonable but is not. The method compared the traffic observed after a scheme opened against the traffic that had been forecast for it during the appraisal. If the road carried less than forecast, the conclusion drawn was that there was little or no sign of induced traffic. A substantial and growing majority of schemes were reported, in anonymised meta-reports, as showing no such signs at all.

The trouble, as Goodwin sets out, is that this entire period was one in which national traffic growth was being persistently overestimated. The official National Road Traffic Forecasts from 1989 onwards were revised downwards again and again as reality failed to keep pace with them. If the national forecast is too high, the local forecast that sits underneath it tends to be too high as well. So when a scheme carried less traffic than predicted, the most likely explanation was not that induced traffic was absent. It was that the underlying growth forecast had been too optimistic in the first place. Comparing the out-turn to a forecast that was already wrong tells you almost nothing about induced traffic. All it says is that the original forecast was wrong.

The proper counterfactual is not the old forecast at all. It is the observed trend on comparable roads that were not improved, in the same region, over the same period. You measure how traffic grew on the untreated roads, apply that growth rate to the treated road to estimate what it would have carried without the scheme, and the gap between that estimate and the actual flow is your induced traffic. This is not a new idea. It is essentially the method that the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Countryside Agency had been pressing for years. I should be honest that I have not read those two reports in full myself, and I am relying on Goodwin’s account of them, but the methodological point is clear enough and it is not seriously contested.

What is genuinely encouraging is what happened next. National Highways did not engage with the criticism for a long time. Then, quietly, after 2019 it stopped publishing the meta-analyses that claimed most schemes showed no induced traffic, and in 2024 it issued a revised evaluation manual that, in effect, adopted the very method its critics had been advocating, and criticised its own earlier approach. This is the POPE Methodology Manual 2024, and it is the same document referenced in the footnotes of the A5-M1 evaluation I have been quoting.

In other words, the report that prompted this whole piece is itself a product of the better method. When the A5-M1 evaluation talks about comparing observed journey times against an estimate of how they would have deteriorated without the scheme, that is the counterfactual at work. When it attributes growth on the M1 above national and regional trends to the project, that is the counterfactual at work. I can be confident that the changes I have seen on the ground are down to the scheme itself and not wider factors.

The reason induced traffic and induced demand have been so poorly understood is not that the underlying ideas are obscure or exotic. It is that the evaluation of schemes has, for a long time, been of poor quality on precisely the question that has been at the heart of transport planning for more than fifty years. We measured forecasting error and called it induced traffic, and the two are not the same thing.

This is why I get uneasy when the A5-M1 result is read as just another case of forecasts overstating benefits. The appraisal assumed larger changes in traffic than were observed, and the model’s assumptions about economic development and traffic patterns were a likely factor. The forecasts for the M1 between junctions 9 and 11a were reasonably accurate, but for most of the local roads and the A5 north of the bypass they fell outside the accepted plus or minus fifteen per cent range, with the difference on the A5 north of the bypass at around thirty-four per cent. That is a story about forecasting accuracy and model assumptions. It is not, on its own, a measurement of induced traffic, and the evaluation is careful not to pretend otherwise. It also flags real data quality problems, with some count sites differing from expectations by more than half, and one site excluded altogether. These caveats are not throat-clearing. They are the difference between an honest evaluation and a misleading one.

The good news is that the tools to do this properly now exist. National Highways’ 2024 manual is the obvious one, and Goodwin treats the recent re-evaluation of the M1 all-lane-running junctions, published in February 2026, as a proof of concept that the new method can deliver sensible conclusions even if it has not yet been used to recompute the appraisal effects of induced traffic in full.

Beyond the strategic road network, Active Travel England has been building out its own monitoring and evaluation guidance and its scheme review tools, and commissioned an evidence review in May 2025 looking at how appraisal guidance should be updated to capture the benefits that current methods miss. That last point matters more than it might first appear. The same logic that produces extra traffic when you add road capacity produces reductions when you reallocate it to public transport or active travel. The effects are as important for the objectives of Active Travel England and local planning departments as they are for the highways authorities.

If the counterfactual is the first technical issue, the treatment of freight is the second, and it is more uncomfortable because it is a known error that we have chosen to live with.

Here is the position as Goodwin describes it. The DfT’s guidance on variable demand modelling, TAG Unit M2.1, devotes a single sentence to freight. It says, in effect, that any response in the demand for freight transport is not considered, and that total freight traffic is generally assumed to be fixed, though it can be re-routed. National Highways has gone further than this, stating in evidence that light and heavy goods vehicles do not experience variable demand at all because their journeys are driven by commercial needs, and so they remain constant between the do-minimum and do-something scenarios.

In the words of Captain Blackadder, there is one small flaw in this plan: it is b******s.

Goodwin’s judgement is blunt and reflects my own thoughts on this for years. The assumption of fixed freight demand is simply wrong. Goods traffic plainly responds to changes in the time and money cost of travel, whether brought about by new capacity, by traffic management, or by pricing. The big operators run sophisticated optimisation of their own fleets and schedules. The small operators survive on their awareness of road conditions and their willingness to fit in one more delivery if the journey gets quicker. The industrial case made for schemes like the Lower Thames Crossing, that they will let firms reach new markets, is itself an admission that freight traffic is induced. To assume otherwise is, as Goodwin puts it, to build a major and systematic bias into economically crucial activity, and to call it a fixed quantity.

This bears directly on the A5-M1 evaluation. The bypass was meant to remove strategic traffic, and heavy goods vehicles in particular, off Watling Street through Dunstable, and the local authority backed this with weight restrictions on the local network. The evaluation found that flows for heavy goods vehicles on the new bypass were two to three per cent higher than predicted2. It then could not say what that meant for emissions, because there was not enough speed data, and the greenhouse gas benefit could not be re-forecast at all. Think about that. A scheme whose central purpose involved redistributing freight, evaluated using a framework that assumes freight demand does not vary, with the freight-relevant outcomes left unquantified due to want of data.

The important thing about the freight problem is that it is not a problem you can fix by flicking a switch. Goodwin is clear that freight cannot simply be bolted onto the classic four-stage model built for personal travel. A delivery round visiting a hundred different addresses, different every day, with pricing structures and competitive pressures all of its own, and with the blurring of the line between goods delivery and the household shopping trip it replaces, is a different beast that needs a different kind of model. That is a major exercise, likely to take years, and he argues it should be programmed as a matter of urgency rather than parked until the current freight modelling work is finished. In the meantime, he proposes pragmatic interim fixes, such as mirroring the induced-traffic adjustment already calculated for cars onto freight, given that the empirical elasticities appear to be broadly similar. The honest summary is that this is a known fault with a partial short-term workaround and a long, properly resourced research programme as the only real cure3.

My third central point is the one I most want readers to take away, and the A5-M1 is the perfect illustration of it. Even if we measured induced traffic perfectly, it is just one aspect of how success is judged. You have to look at the whole picture.

Consider what the bypass actually achieved in Dunstable. The town centre had a declared Air Quality Management Area (AQMA), with two locations where pollution exceeded the standards. The scheme was designed to route strategic through-traffic, and the heavy goods vehicles in particular, around the town rather than through it. The five-year evaluation, drawing on Central Bedfordshire Council’s own 2023 air quality monitoring, found widespread compliance with the nitrogen dioxide objective across Dunstable, including within the Management Area. As a result, in 2024, the AQMA was fully revoked.

It is not the only benefit either. Personal injury collisions in the project area roughly halved, from an average of thirty-two before construction to sixteen after, with reductions in both serious and slight collisions. Journeys became faster and more reliable than both the before period and the counterfactual, and the evaluation estimated nearly six hundred thousand vehicle hours saved in the fifth year alone. The bypass took an average of around thirty-six thousand vehicles a day out of the centre of Dunstable, with local roads such as Thorn Road and Luton Road seeing large falls in traffic against a regional backdrop of rising traffic. The scheme came in under budget, at £148 million against a forecast of £160 million. While it’s re-forecast value for money came out as lower than what was anticipated, this was a fall from ‘very high’ to ‘high’ value for money. This shortfall was driven mainly by lower journey-time savings because traffic grew more slowly than the appraisal assumed.

This does not mean that building a road was the right solution, or that it is always the right solution. It is that, ultimately, the right verdict on the A5-M1 is a multi-criteria one, weighing cleaner air in Dunstable, safer and more reliable journeys, and real local decongestion against slower-than-forecast growth, an uncomfortable wider safety signal, gaps in the emissions evidence, and yes, increases in traffic levels. Reduce it to a single number for induced traffic and you would learn almost nothing useful about whether it was a good scheme. Goodwin makes the same argument from the theory side. There are circumstances, he notes, where induced demand brings additional economic, health and environmental benefits without imposing extra costs, and the question of whether benefits exceed costs can almost never be settled by looking at highway capacity and traffic in isolation.

So where does this leave us, and what should we actually do? I want to end on the conclusions I have come to, as they pull in a direction that I think the current mood in transport planning is in danger of missing.

The first thing that worries me is over-correction. Having spent this whole piece arguing that our models have been used badly, I am not about to argue that we should stop using them. Yet there is a growing undercurrent in vision-led planning where modelling is quietly ignored, or treated as a tiresome second-order check to be brought out only once the vision has been agreed. I understand the impulse. But a vision without a model is just a wish. Modelling, done honestly and read with appropriate humility about its limits, is one of the few tools we have for thinking rigorously about the future and the consequences of our choices within it. The right response to a flawed instrument is to recalibrate it, not to throw it away and navigate by feel. If we disregard model results in favour of grand visions, we will simply have swapped one kind of motivated reasoning for another, and the second kind is harder to argue with because it is based on gut feel.

The second thing follows from the first. We should challenge our assumptions about induced traffic and induced demand across every scheme through rigorous assessment and evidence. The induced-demand idea is symmetrical. It applies to the new bypass, the bus lane, and the new segregated cycle track. If we are serious about it, we test it everywhere, with the same counterfactual rigour, and we follow the evidence even when it inconveniences us. Maybe this will help us to challenge some other more popular matters considered to be truths, such as railways always underestimate their demand.

Poor evidence is what got us into this mess. A lack of evidence will not get us out of it, and neither will a confident vision that declines to be tested. The only way out is the slow, honest, accumulation of better evidence, applied evenly to everything we build and everything we choose not to build, including evidence that may tell us an inconvenient truth.

👩‍🎓 Further Reading

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Congestion in highways when tolls and railroads matter: evidence from European cities

TL:DR - Using data from the 545 largest European cities, the authors show that expanding lane kilometres increases vehicle traffic and does not solve urban congestion. It is a strong read because it is the leading European counterpart to the famous US studies, and crucially it finds induced demand is much smaller where road pricing applies and that congestion falls with expanded public transport

Do highway widenings reduce congestion?

TL:DR - This Dutch study looks at the effects of widenings on congestion and travel demand up to six years afterwards, and finds that although travel-time savings erode in the long run through induced demand, the welfare benefits during the transition are substantial.

Suburbanization and transportation in European cities

TL:DR - This study examines whether highway and railroad improvements cause population suburbanization across 579 European cities in 29 countries between 1961 and 2011. This is the long-run land-use side of induced demand, showing how infrastructure reshapes where people live and not just how much they drive, which adds depth to any discussion of demand that goes beyond short-term traffic counts.

Vehicle miles traveled induced demand, rebound effect, and price and income elasticities: A US spatial econometric analysis

TL:DR - This recent paper uses US state-level panel data from 2000 to 2019 and a Spatial Durbin Model, finding that increased vehicle miles travelled in one state spills over to increase travel in neighbouring states.

Who does new trips and why? An analysis toward the modeling of induced demand

TL:DR - This paper proposes a three-step framework to identify and model induced trips, using discrete choice models in which trip frequency depends on factors such as age, household type, car ownership and trip purpose

😀 Positive News

Not so much positive news on induced demand (have you tried searching for something like that? Good luck!), but some general commentary on the matter that might be of interest to you.

RIS3: the future of England’s roads

Former National Highways chief Graham Dalton reviews the third Road Investment Strategy, published on 26 March 2026 and covering 2026 to 2031, noting it focuses on maintenance and renewal, builds no new smart motorways, and lists the Lower Thames Crossing as effectively the only big capacity project.

National Road Traffic Forecasts 1965-2025: Why did they become so inaccurate, and how can they be improved?

Phil Goodwin sets out how for most of the last 35 years official forecasts have systematically over-predicted traffic growth, with successive forecasts revised downwards, and how the high predictions led to extra capacity that itself induced traffic, creating an element of self-fulfilling forecasts at local level.

Germany’s ‘most expensive motorway’ opens in Berlin

This reports the opening of the A100 extension in Berlin, a 3.2 kilometre section costing around 721 million euros, the most expensive stretch of new highway in Germany at roughly 225,000 euros per metre. It is a vivid European case study of the politics of urban road expansion

💻 Hard Work

Over the last week, I have run two Evidence Safaris to inform a transport strategy. They were excellent, but tiring!

🎶 Musical Finale

Trying to find a song about induced demand is really hard, you know that? Instead, how about a song that (tangentially) deals with traffic restraint? That is what Talking Heads’ (Nothing But) Flowers is. Ok, its more a screed against the modern world and the evils of capitalism, but when it talks about ripping out roads and returning to nature, its a good enough fit for me.

🪧 Notices

This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

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The curse of the transport planner is that, even when you are having a break, you cannot switch off, because transport happens all around us. I guess it was inevitable that, by having a holiday on the Norfolk Broads, I would be writing about boats.

Oh, and back by popular demand, I have created a voice-over of the main article in the newsletter. If you want to hear the sound of my voice while doing busy things (or laugh as I stumble over words), then you can do so from now on.

🚣‍♂️ A Ferry, Cross the Yare-ey

In the heart of the Norfolk countryside, the sound of clanking chains is unmistakable. Clank, clank, clank, metal sliding over metal, broken only by water lapping against steel panels. “Stand back!” shouts a man, raising a hand, and the clanks slow and stop. On the river bank a small flock of ducks ignores the commotion, busy cleaning their feathers or dozing in the afternoon sun. Drinkers outside the pub barely look up from their pints.

My journey is over. The safety rules say cars go first, ahead of those of us who came on foot, despite walkers being very much the majority. The single vehicle, a slightly beaten up Ford Focus, nips off the moment the wooden ramp comes down. Me, my wife and my two dogs, Belle and Ollie, follow with another five or six people. Most of us are heading for the pub, the Reedham Ferry Inn. The ones in walking boots and carrying sticks make for the Wherryman’s Way along the river bank. One hardy soul sets off up the road to the village.

The Reedham Chain Ferry has crossed this stretch of the River Yare since 1949. Its original purpose was a practical one: to move agricultural workers and vehicles between the countryside of South Norfolk and the Southern Broadlands, including Halvergate Marshes, Acle and Reedham itself. This was a time of upheaval in farming, as British policy shifted from small scale agriculture towards driving up crop yields. With some of the most productive arable land in the country sitting either side of the river, getting workers and supplies across it mattered.

The case for the crossing still holds. Even now, the nearest road crossings of the River Yare are on the A47, one an eighteen mile drive west over the flyover on the Norwich Southern Bypass, the other a sixteen mile drive east at Breydon Bridge in Great Yarmouth. Transport purists will point out that barely a mile away the Wherry Lines cross the Yare at the Reedham Swing Bridge. That misses the point. While Reedham station is a handy fifteen minute walk from the ferry, the nearest station on the southern side is at Haddiscoe, which has just 1,305 people living within three kilometres of it.

But in a lot of ways, the picture is very different today. Changes in farming have cut the demand for agricultural labour, and heavy machinery is no friend of a small boat with a seven and a half tonne weight limit. The ferry still runs on demand until 10pm every day, starting at 6:30am on weekdays and 8am at weekends and on bank holidays. The demand is more mixed now, a core of regular users alongside big peaks in leisure traffic. The pricing reflects this. A day return in a car costs £8, though regulars can buy a multi-card giving ten return trips for £32. Pedestrians pay 50p a single trip. Belle and Ollie travelled for free.

For that, you get a two minute voyage. Set against an alternative that can run to an hour behind the wheel, maybe £8 is not so bad after all.

When you picture a river ferry in the UK, the Reedham Chain Ferry is probably not what springs to mind. You might think of a gentle river cruise or a water taxi, the kind you find in Cardiff or Bristol. You might think of the Thames Clipper services in London, or of the handful that make a genuine river crossing, such as the Woolwich Ferry or the Shields Ferry. Anyone of a certain generation will go straight to the ferry across the Mersey, made famous by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Yet, as I found while researching the Scottish Rural and Island Transport Community’s project on UK water transport, river ferries come in all shapes and sizes.

Just a few miles from Reedham, on the River Waveney, a foot ferry runs between the Waveney River Centre and Carlton Marshes, reopened by David Bellamy no less. On the Isle of Wight, an island that is (in)famous for its ferries, getting between Cowes and East Cowes, two of the most densely populated spots on the island, means using the Cowes Floating Bridge, which is far more floating than it is a bridge. The most striking example is the Portaferry to Strangford ferry in Northern Ireland. It has operated in the same place for four hundred years, and it connects two sections of the A2, a major road. This is the equivalent of National Highways deciding the bridge that takes the A1 across the Tweed near Berwick is surplus to requirements, and a ferry should do the job instead.

River ferries sit in a peculiar governance arrangement in the UK. The vast majority are privately operated. At Reedham, the present owner, David Archer, built the current ferry himself with the late Fred Newson, a boat builder from Oulton Broad. Some services receive public money to keep going, often with no specification beyond a requirement to run. In 2023/24 the Harwich Harbour Ferry, across the mouth of the Stour and Orwell, took just over £31,000 from various local councils.

Five river services in the UK are provided directly by a public sector authority. The busiest is the Woolwich Ferry, crossing the Thames between Woolwich and North Woolwich. Its estimated two million passengers a year are carried at a cost of around £9m a year to Transport for London. Another is the Shields Ferry, run by Nexus between North and South Shields across the Tyne, carrying around 400,000 passengers a year at a cost estimated at £6m a year. The ferry across the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead receives around £3.5m a year in revenue support from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority for a peak hour service, operated by Merseytravel under the Mersey Ferries brand. The Cowes Floating Bridge and the Portaferry to Strangford ferry, mentioned already, are provided by Isle of Wight Council and the Department for Infrastructure in Northern Ireland.

Even with public sector operation, integration with other modes is mixed at best. The Shields Ferry does it well, folded fully into the Nexus fare zones and the regional POP card. The Woolwich Ferry is technically well integrated, being free to use, and on many other London river services you can tap an Oyster card, subject to an extra charge. The Mersey Ferries sit within Merseytravel’s Saveaway ticket. The Cowes Floating Bridge and the Portaferry to Strangford ferry, by contrast, want you to buy a separate ticket. And for all of them, local public transport is often a fair walk from the landing.

The regulation of these services is, in the time-honoured tradition of British transport governance, fragmented. There are three broad legal requirements on anyone running a river ferry in the UK: navigation, the safety of the vessel, and the competency of the master. This is where the post gets properly nerdy, but it is nerdy for a reason. So strap in.

Take navigation first. Anyone operating a ferry on UK inland waterways is subject to rules set by a navigation authority. There are around thirty of them, and the biggest are the ‘Big Three’: the Canal and River Trust, the Environment Agency and the Broads Authority1. The Reedham Ferry falls under the Broads Authority. Each authority has its own responsibilities and powers. Broadly, most can:

• register or license boats on the waters they control;

• charge a licence fee, tolls, or both, on vessels using the waterway;

• set rules for how vessels are navigated;

• maintain locks and other structures;

• dredge the main navigation channels, and

• manage flood control

Even where there is a general right to navigate along or across a river, that right can come with rules and charges that change from river to river. To add to the fun, some crossings carry ancient ferry rights that have to be upheld. That is a whole post in itself, but as a taster, the Helford Ferry in Cornwall was recorded in 1023, by King Canute of wave-commanding myth, as having the right to run a ferry.

Then there is the safety of the vessel, which turns on Vessel Certification. To boil down some genuinely dull and technical regulation, it hinges on passenger numbers.

For twelve or fewer passengers, with the vessel not going to sea, you can comply with either the relevant Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) code or the local authority’s licensing scheme. The Inland Waters Small Passenger Boat Code, produced jointly by the MCA and the Association of Inland Navigation Authorities, sets the national framework for equipment, build and manning, which local authorities can apply in full, in part, or swap for their own rules.

For more than twelve passengers in UK categorised (inland or estuarial) waters, the Merchant Shipping (Passenger Ships) (Safety Code for UK Categorised Waters) Regulations 2010 apply, unless the ship already holds a passenger certificate under the 1995 Survey and Certification Regulations. Every passenger ship of this size needs a passenger ship safety certificate.

Waters are classified A to D, with seagoing classes beyond, and the category of your particular stretch of river sets the standards for construction, stability and equipment. Vessels are surveyed and certificated, normally on a five-year cycle with annual checks, including hull and bottom inspections.

Finally there is the Boatmaster, or the captain as you and I would call them. No random person can just turn up and start up the engines. A Boatmaster’s Licence, issued by the MCA on behalf of the Secretary of State, is required to master passenger vessels on the UK’s inland waters in categories A to D, covering canals, rivers, lakes and some estuaries, as well as limited coastal work. The governing instrument is the Merchant Shipping (Boatmasters’ Qualifications, Crew and Hours of Work) Regulations 2015, which also sets the rules on crewing and hours.

It is partly because of this tangle of rules that transport planning so often ignores inland ferries. Professionals will also tell you to keep a sense of proportion. The Woolwich Ferry carries in a year what the London Underground carries in a single day. So why should transport planners care about ferries at all?

We should care for one simple reason: connectivity. Like a ferry to an island, a river ferry stitches together communities and places that the water would otherwise hold apart. And the crossings it provides are not marginal. The Reedham Ferry saves an hour’s drive through Norwich or Great Yarmouth. The nearest alternative to the Portaferry and Strangford ferry is seventeen miles away. The Woolwich Ferry has had other river crossings nearby since the 1990s and 2000s - first the DLR extension to Lewisham and then another separate DLR extension to Woolwich Arsenal - but neither is a convenient swap for the communities living next to the ferry landings.

This is the part that gets lost. River ferries are rarely about moving large numbers of people across a city. They are about a few thousand people, sometimes a few hundred, for whom the alternative is not a slightly slower journey but a completely different shape of daily life. Lose the Reedham Ferry and the school run, the trip to the shop, the visit to a relative on the far bank and the commute to work all lengthen by the better part of two hours there and back. At a national scale that barely registers. At the scale of a household in Reedham or Thurlton, it is the difference between two places being neighbours and being strangers.

Connectivity at this scale does quiet, important work. It keeps a village pub trading, because the walkers and cyclists on the Wherryman’s Way can actually reach it. It keeps a small business viable when its customers and suppliers sit on the far bank. It widens the pool of jobs a person can realistically reach, and the pool of workers a local employer can draw on. For anyone without a car, which in a rural community is a larger share of people than we sometimes assume, that 50p crossing is not a convenience but a lifeline. None of this turns up in the headline passenger figures, and none of it survives the crude test of asking how many people use the thing. The value of a river ferry is not in the size of the flow of passengers across it. It is in what becomes possible because the ferry exists at all.

There is also a subjective side to connectivity that ferries expose rather neatly. We can estimate the change a crossing makes in journey times and costs. What is harder to capture is feeling. A river is a psychological barrier as much as a physical one. Even where a direct link exists, the presence of water can make two places feel like separate worlds. A ferry partly bridges that feeling. Reedham and Thurlton sit across the Yare from one another, and the sense of distance between them would be far greater without the ferry tying the banks together.

That feeling matters more than transport professionals like to admit. People decide where to live, where to work, where to send their children to school and where to spend their evenings on the strength of whether somewhere feels reachable. A ferry that runs on demand until 10pm tells a community that the other side is open to it. Take it away and you do not simply add miles to a journey. You quietly redraw the mental map of a place, and you make a whole side of the river feel like somewhere you no longer go.

But the thing that struck me most while researching river ferries, the thing we forget when we are drawing up our grand transport plans, is their cultural weight. Ferries have a peculiar habit of becoming woven into the identity of a place in a way that almost no other river crossing manages. Nobody writes a song about a flyover.

The clearest example is the ferry across the Mersey. I am quite sure Merseytravel could save itself £3.5m a year by scrapping the Mersey Ferry outright, with little real effect on most people trying to get between Birkenhead and Liverpool. It could even pour the savings into more buses and trains through the Mersey Tunnels. But doing so would be what my old Director of Transport at Buckinghamshire County Council used to call “like shooting Bambi.” Yes, you can do it. It might even make sense on paper. But the uproar would not be worth it, because this is exactly the kind of thing communities value in a way that logically appears unreasonable.

That unreasonable attachment, however, is not sentiment to be tidied away. It is a real asset. The Mersey Ferry is on the postcards, in the song, in the way the city pictures itself. The only things that are arguably more of a cultural icon on Merseyside are The Beatles, Liverpool FC, Everton FC, and possibly the Liver Building2. It pulls in tourists who would never set foot on a local bus. Liverpool City Region understands this, which is why it treats the ferry as an income generator rather than a cost to be trimmed. A ferry can be a landmark, a ritual, a thing people take their visitors on, a backdrop to a thousand photographs. Try generating that kind of affection for the Mersey Tunnel.

You see the same thing on a smaller scale at Reedham. The ferry is not just a way across the Yare. It is the reason the pub is busy on a Sunday, the punchline of half the local stories, the first thing visitors go and see. The chains and the clank and the wooden ramp are part of what Reedham is. Strip the crossing back to its bare function and you would still have a way of getting a car to the other side. What you would lose is harder to name and harder to replace.

I am quite sure that if the people of Reedham woke up to the news that the operator was packing it all in, they would be on the phone to their councillors and MPs within the hour.

The funny thing is that the transport planner in me knows there is a better answer to the basic problem of getting from one bank to the other: build a bridge. It is the logical thing to do, and on a spreadsheet it would win every time. And yet these ferries keep running, in defiance of logic. We have done the logical thing before. I doubt anyone crossing the Severn on the M4 into Wales longs for a return to the ferry that ran there until 1966.

But maybe it is no bad thing that we have not replaced every one of these crossings, and maybe the tension in how we treat them is the whole point. Across the UK, river ferries are never going to top the list of problems facing the transport network. At a community scale, though, they are vital, or at the very least they carry an importance far out of step with the modest size of their operations.

Transport planning has a proud tradition from engineering, data analysis, mathematical modelling, and applying logic to identified transport issues. But I think river ferries are an example of our need to sometimes embrace the illogical. The ferry that has worked that crossing for four hundred years is not the most logical solution, but at a human level, it feels like the right one. Our data shows that inland ferries are of relatively little low value. In fact, at a national level we don’t even collect data on the number of passengers using river ferries. But that does not mean they are not valuable in other ways. Our policy making needs to find a way of embracing this unknown value.

For me, the reason I like ferries is a personal one. They provide the opportunity to slow down, and enjoy the process of travelling. At Reedham, should there have been a bridge, we could have driven across the river in about five seconds, saving time on getting to the other side. But we would have not noticed the ducks pruning their feathers, or seen the changing colours of the river as we crossed. We would have missed the gentle wind blowing through our hair, and the light conversation between friends on board.

Its for that reason that I hope the likes of the Reedham Chain Ferry continue for decades to come.

While I love writing this, and my writing will always remain free to view, if you are able to donate whatever little you can to help out it is much appreciated. I do have bills to pay after all! You can do that right here.

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Can River Ferries Deliver Smart Growth? Experience of CityCats in Brisbane, Australia

TL:DR - Ever heard of Ferry-Oriented Development? You have now.

Water Transit and Ferry-Oriented Development in Sweden: Comparisons with System Trends in Australia

TL:DR - Compares water-transit patronage growth and the role of FOD and planning policy, noting water transit is a small but growing share of public transport (0.5% of trips in Stockholm to 3.7% in Brisbane).

Boat commuting, travel satisfaction and well-being: Empirical evidence from Greater London

TL:DR - Commuting by boat makes you happier.

The local socio-economic impact of improved waterborne public transportation: The case of the New York City ferry service

TL:DR - Contrasts the predictions of NYC’s Citywide Ferry Study with observed spatial, social and economic transformations around ferry terminals, examining whether terminal construction causally changes neighbourhood socio-economic conditions.

There Used to Be a River Ferry: Identifying and Analyzing Localities by Means of Old Topographic Maps

TL:DR - Builds a GIS database of 514+ historical river-crossing ferry sites from old military topographic maps, analysing how ferries served and shaped localities over time.

😀 Positive News

There has been some positive news on ferries recently, and here are those stories.

Orbit Clipper launch marks new era for sustainable London transport

Thames Clippers’ Orbit Clipper, described as the UK’s first fully-electric cross-river passenger ferry, completed its first passenger trip across the River Thames between Rotherhithe and Canary Wharf, with a launch ceremony attended by the Mayor of London. The 150-passenger vessel is being phased into operation alongside the existing Twinstar, with full exclusive service expected in spring 2026 and crossings every 10 minutes on weekdays.

Hyke Electric Ferry Pilot Sees Success in Norwegian Public Transport

Norwegian firm Hyke’s fully electric F-15 Shuttle operated on the Bekkhus–Vaterland route across a 225-metre crossing of the Glomma River as part of Fredrikstad’s municipal transport system, carrying more than 41,000 passengers between April 2024 and July 2025.

Mayor Mamdani Announces Most Summer Ferry Service in City History Ahead of 2026 FIFA World Cup

New York City announced addition summer ferry services, running through to 13 September 2026. The East River route also recorded its two highest ridership days ever at more than 40,000 boardings over a single weekend.

Sydney will get its first-ever electric ferry – starting with a route to the new Fish Market

The New South Wales Government announced that construction on Sydney's first 24-metre battery-electric ferry will begin in 2026, modelled on the existing Parramatta River Class ferries and initially servicing the Sydney Fish Market route at Blackwattle Bay. Shoreside charging infrastructure will be installed at Barangaroo Wharf, with twelve months of testing set to begin in early 2028.

💻 Hard Work

I was hard at work…enjoying the countryside and coastline of East Anglia.

What can I say? It was a week that was well worth the travel for. Every evening was a lovely walk along the beach at Caister-on-Sea. We even managed to spot some seals playing just offshore - though they were too quick for the cameras.

There was a lot of dog walking. Most of the photos below are from Fairhaven Gardens, which truly do live up to their name. Carlton Marshes and Hickling Broad are other personal favourites.

To fill in the downtime, there was reading, and I managed to finally get through George Monbiot’s Feral. If you are a nature lover, you will love it.

🎶 Musical Finale

Orinoco Flow by Enya is the best song involving boats and I won’t hear a word otherwise. Sorry, Gerry and the Pacemakers.

What can I say about it? It’s that song you know that you know, but you forgot its name (for those of you who haven’t clicked on it, think the words ‘Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away’). It was released in 1988 but sounds like it could have been released last week. The video looks stunning. It’s the best new age song in history and I can proudly say its my guilty pleasure. Which makes it not a guilty pleasure, weirdly.

Two public service announcements for you today. Firstly, there will be no newsletter next Friday. I will be spending the week with my feet up in a converted barn in Norfolk. Or sailing on a Norfolk Broad. Or eating ice cream at the seaside. Regardless, I won’t be in front of my computer. So no newsletter.

Second, the deadline for signing up to the Transport Box project I mentioned two weeks ago has been extended. You can now sign up by Friday 12th June. As a quick reminder, by being part of this project you will get training and support throughout June, attend an in-person co-design session, and deliver a session with local children with Special Educational Needs and children accessing Child and Adolescent Mental Health services in July. The whole thing is worth around 7.5 hours of CPD focused on community engagement and social value.

Sign up now!

🧠 The Psychology of Waiting

A few weeks back, I shared my story of being on the scene of a road traffic collision in Cambridgeshire. I shared my frustrations at how people reacted to seeing a man injured, and how it was an example of “motonormativity in action.” Little did I know that the psychology of how people react to road traffic incidents beyond their control would soon be staring me in the face once again.

It started how you might expect. With a sea of brake lights. The traffic slowed in a ripple, in that way that you usually see on a motorway. One or two vehicles flicked on their hazard lights in case people behind them really didn’t get the message. It was just after 8pm on a sunny Thursday evening, on the M1 southbound just past Junction 23A near Nottingham. It had been a long day in Bradford, so long that the train was no choice unless I wanted to get back home close to 1am. I had driven that day, and that choice to head down the M1 put me on the path to experiencing traffic psychology first hand.

After about 15 minutes, it was clear we were not going anywhere. There was no traffic heading northbound, so the motorway had clearly been closed. Drivers ahead and behind me were switching off. Some opened their doors. A few stepped out and stretched, looking forward at a road that was not going to move for some time. One even got their dog out to stretch its legs.

Then, strangely, I spotted a woman walking up the northbound carriageway. This woman had parked her car carefully on the hard shoulder. From my position, I could not tell anything about her age or her circumstances beyond her demeanour. She was on her own. She was walking. She was in distress.

Well, not quite on her own. Two paramedics were following her, with I presume a third close behind in an ambulance. They were clearly trying to talk to this lady, and encourage her into the ambulance for her own safety. When they moved towards her, she would head up the grassy embankment. When they paused or pulled back, she would come down again. It was like a pebble being pushed along a beach by the waves. The paramedics pushing her up and along, and as they retreated she came down. Rinse and repeat.

You can probably guess from my experience at the road traffic collision in Cambridgeshire that I am not the kind of person who likes to stand idly by. But in this situation help, however well meaning, from anyone would have made things worse. The emergency services were close, they had an ambulance with them, and any movement from a stranger on the southbound side would only have added pressure to an already delicate situation. So I sat. I waited. I tried not to stare too obviously.

After what felt like a very long time, but was perhaps forty minutes, several police cars approached from the south. That must have been her cue, because once they approached she hopped into the ambulance without further invitation.

All through this, the overhead sign on our side of the road flashed its warning: Pedestrians on Motorway. A short time later, the motorway reopened.

The mood on my side of the road was less than generous. There was an overwhelming sense of confusion and frustration. Why is the motorway closed? For how long will it be closed? Some of them could not see what was happening on the other side of the road, or at least not as well as I could.

After about twenty minutes, the muttering started. A man two cars in front of me leaned on his bonnet and shook his head at me as he caught my eye, the universal gesture of “can you believe this.” Another, further along, kept walking up and down the lane between his car and the next one, phone pressed to his ear, giving a loved one a live and frustrated commentary. The guy next to me asked the question that was on everyone’s minds: “why can’t we just go? She’s over the other side!”

Then came the shouting. Just one or two voices I must stress, aimed across the central reservation, broadly in the direction of the emergency services and the woman herself. “Come on, love, get on with it,” I heard from one man leaning out of his car. “Just grab her and bundle her in” came another from someone in an SUV. Other voices, lower, agreed in murmurs.

I’m not sure my interjections into the conversation helped. While saying that the paramedics can’t just man-handle people and that the police have closed to road for our safety as much as hers is technically correct, its not reassuring.

Nobody, I should say, was cruel in any sustained way. I didn’t detect any real menace in what was said. It was the irritated frustration of people who had been stopped for an unknown reason for an unknown length of time. It was understandable, though not easy to listen to.

The bit of psychology most useful for understanding the irritation around me is the simplest. In 1939, a group of researchers at Yale led by John Dollard published a book called Frustration and Aggression. In it, they proposed what is now called the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which says that when our progress towards a goal is blocked, we experience frustration, and that frustration acts as a basis for aggression1. To us that sounds obvious, but someone, at some point, had to study it and codify it.

Sitting in a stationary car on a motorway is, in the language of this theory, almost a textbook example of goal blockage. You set out with a destination. You may have a meeting, a child to pick up, a train to catch, a relative to visit. The motorway is, for those few hours, woven into the fabric of your plan. When it stops, your plan stops, and you cannot move the obstacle yourself. It feels deliberate and unfair, and so frustration builds, seeding the ground for aggression - whether that be a sarcastic remark or something more sinister.

The closure was not, of course, deliberate or unfair. But in that time period between being blocked and finding out the reason, the brain does not know that. It just knows that the path is closed and that you are stuck.

A separate but related strand of research deals with how we experience waiting itself. Research by David Maister established principles of the psychology of waiting. This includes the observation that:

unexplained waits are longer than explained waits.

Lets use a public transport analogy here to show this. Two trains arrive ten minutes late at a station due to signalling failures, the first scheduled to arrive at 10:00 and the second at 10:20. For the first train turns up at 10:10, and all the time the departure screen showed the train as ‘Delayed.’ For the second train, the departure screen showed the estimated arrival time as 10:30, and gave the reason for the delay. It turns up at 10:30.

Both sets of people waiting for each train faced a similar extra waiting time. Yet for those waiting for the first train, each minute likely felt like five. For those waiting for the first train, each minute likely felt like two or maybe three. That is because their end goal is in sight (the new arrival time) and the reason for delay has been explained to them.

This was very much my experience on the M1. Until the lady walked into view, people did not know the reason for the delay. The frustration builds as each minute feels like an eternity. National Highways likely could not tell people of the reason for the delay in those few minutes because they were still diagnosing the issue themselves.

People are far more tolerant of long waits when they know how long the delay will last. In contrast, when no end is in sight, frustration grows exponentially. The exponential part matters. The first ten minutes might feel like twelve. The next ten feel like twenty. The next ten feel like an hour.

The body is not neutral about any of this. A systematic review in the journal Transport Reviews on the effects of congestion and delays on mental wellbeing notes that being stuck in traffic has been linked to left-hemispheric EEG activation associated with anger and worry, and that congestion and delays are “a source of road anger and frustration, so that they are not only likely to impact mental health/wellbeing, but also traffic safety.”

A more recent study describes traffic adversity as triggering the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the same hormones that drive the fight-or-flight response. The list of consequences it gives is long. Stress, anger, aggression, tension, impatience, frustration, helplessness. The last one is worth pausing on, because helplessness is often the underlying current beneath the visible irritation. You cannot do anything. You cannot fix it. In our case, you could not even leave.

When you put a body that is producing stress hormones inside a metal box with limited movement and no clear end point, you have made a pressure cooker. The lid stays on for most people. For some, the lid comes off as muttering or pacing. For a few, it comes off as shouting at a stranger across three lanes of motorway.

The other piece of the picture is the car itself. There is a body of work in psychology on what is called deindividuation, the loss of self-awareness and personal accountability that can come from being part of a group or feeling anonymous. Philip Zimbardo, in the 1960s, identified the conditions that tend to produce it:

• Anonymity

• Diffused responsibility

• Group activity

• Altered temporal perspective

• Emotional arousal

• Sensory overload.

If you read that list and think it sounds rather like a motorway in a long queue, you are not alone. Many of you have probably read Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, which made exactly this argument, and a piece in Slate summarises the point neatly:

When you look at Zimbardo’s description of conditions that contribute to a sense of deindividuation, it basically reads like a list of everyday road conditions.

Cars give us the illusion of being unseen. We can shout, gesture, swear, and the person we are shouting at cannot really see our face. The people who called across the motorway that evening would, I am fairly sure, never have shouted those words at a woman they passed in the street. They were not bad people. They were people in cars, in queues, in stress, in groups, in an unexplained delay. They were, in the language of the literature, deindividuated.

As if to prove the point further, an experimental study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, found that participants in a driving simulation drove more aggressively when their identities were concealed than when they were identifiable. The effect was modest but real. Anonymity, in a car, makes aggression a little easier.

While the people in the queue on my side of the motorway were wondering when the road would open, the people on the northbound side were doing something that takes time. While just clearing up the problem sounds fine in theory, the reality of dealing with emergencies is more nuanced than most believe it to be.

When a person walks onto a motorway in distress, the response is governed by clear principles. The first is obvious - preservation of life, both the person’s and that of any responder. The second is to slow everything down. The College of Policing’s guidance on suicide prevention and response sets out the role of officers in offering crisis intervention and approaching such incidents in a “standardised way.” Standardised does not mean fast. It means careful.

Initiatives like Merseyside Police’s Operation Copenhagen, formed with the local authority, National Highways, Wirral MIND and Samaritans, recognise that motorway bridges and carriageways are recurring locations for people in crisis. The work involves more than retrieval. It involves engagement, often with a single officer or paramedic in slow, unrushed conversation, while colleagues maintain a wider perimeter and other vehicles are kept at a distance.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct, in a learning lessons publication on mental health responses, describes an incident very similar to the one I watched. A woman, alone on a motorway hard shoulder, in visible distress, with members of the public calling police because of an “immediate risk to life.” Officers attended. They located her. They took her to hospital. The mental health crisis team arranged an assessment. It is, on paper, a short paragraph. In life, it was slow, methodical, and careful.

The pattern I saw, where she headed up the embankment whenever responders came close, has its own logic too. A person in crisis often experiences the approach of others as pressure. Movement away is not necessarily refusal of help. It is, sometimes, a way of holding ground while the rest of the brain catches up. Responders trained in this work know to read it. They retreat, regroup, and approach again. They do this, in some cases, many times. Twenty minutes of this looks like nothing happening to a distant observer. It is not nothing. It is the work.

Such situations necessitate road closures. I should not have to explain this to you I am sure, but this kind of situation unfolding with traffic roaring past at seventy miles an hour means there is no margin for error. A distressed person getting spooked and running into the live traffic lanes of an open motorway would likely lead to only one outcome, and for those frustrated at being delayed for an hour it would also mean a delay much longer than that. Closing the motorway, even for an hour, is what gives the responders the space to do the slow and necessary work.

I want to be careful here. I do not know who the woman was, what brought her there, or what happened to her after the ambulance sped off. From my vantage point all I saw was her in distress - it was about the most I could make out across three lanes, a hard shoulder, and a central reservation. I hope she is alright.

I hope the people who helped her have her, by some route, in the right hands. The BBC has reported many incidents of motorway closures across the UK in recent years for what police describe as welfare checks or concern for a vulnerable person, including one near Watford and one near where I live in Bedfordshire. Most do not become news stories beyond a paragraph about reopening times. Each one, though, is somebody’s worst day.

After about an hour, the officers from National Highways signalled to the vehicles at the front of the queue that our side was now open. There was a mini-mad dash from several people to their vehicles. The engines started and we were rolling. As my journey restarted, I could see the rolling road block on the northbound side finally getting things moving.

All of the shouting and muttering was gone. Replaced by conversation between friends and family, or in my case a Green Day CD. Most drivers will have driven off and not given the woman another thought, because that is how a busy life works and there is no shame in it. But for a moment, there was a sense that something had passed.

I want to be sympathetic to everyone here, because I think everyone deserves it.

The people who shouted were not villains. They were likely tired, stressed, late, anxious, and unable to see or understand what was going on. The psychology of their reaction is well documented, and I must admit that despite my own knowledge of this, the pangs of frustration did rise in me once or twice. Most of us are not very good at being in queues with no end in sight. Our bodies object before our minds catch up.

The emergency services were not slow. They were doing their job in exactly the way they are trained to do it, which is to say carefully. Speed is the enemy of good outcomes in this kind of work. The hour they took is the hour the woman needed, and the hour the public did not realise was being spent on her behalf.

The woman was not selfish. People in crisis on motorways are not making a logical decision, and are certainly not thinking about other people’s journeys. They are, by definition, people for whom the ordinary fabric of decision-making has come apart in some particular way. The fact that a motorway closure ripples out into the lives of thousands of strangers is a feature of how traffic works and how we manage our road network, not of her choices.

If there is anything to take from an hour spend stood on a closed motorway, it is perhaps this. The next time the motorway closes for an unexplained hour and the air starts to fill with sighs, it is worth remembering that one reason the traffic stops is because lives are being attended to. The body’s frustration is real, and the psychology behind it is real, but so is the work happening half a mile up the road.

Sometimes sitting in a car and watching, and choosing not to add to the shouting, is helping in a small way. Sometimes the most useful thing strangers can offer a person in crisis is simply not making the moment any worse than it already is. Doing nothing is, in such situations, doing a lot.

On a serious note, if you are struggling, the Samaritans can be reached at any time on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or by email at jo@samaritans.org. SHOUT, a 24/7 text service, can be contacted by texting SHOUT to 85258.

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

You may have also noticed that I am shifting this section more towards the subject matter in the main part of the newsletter. 😉

Driver mental workload measurement trends and cognitive impacts

TL:DR - A review of 59 studies published between 2020 and 2025 on how driver mental workload is measured, covering subjective reports, physiological measures, behavioural indicators and hybrid machine-learning approaches. The key takeaway is that both overload and underload matter: high workload can impair hazard detection and lane control, while underload in automated driving can reduce situational awareness.

What is needed to address psychosocial hazards in road transport? Using implementation science to understand the gaps

TL:DR - This paper looks at psychosocial risks in road transport work and uses implementation science to identify where current practice falls short. It is road-safety-adjacent rather than classic “driver cognition” work, but it fits the broader traffic psychology field because it addresses how working conditions shape driver wellbeing, risk and behaviour.

From Initial to Situational Automation Trust: The Interplay of Personality, Interpersonal Trust, and Trust Calibration in Young Males

TL:DR - A simulator study with 30 young male participants comparing manual, Level 2 semi-automated and Level 4 automated driving. The study found semi-automation improved hazard detection sensitivity but increased physiological cost, and that high interpersonal trust was linked to slower reaction times under semi-automation — described as a “social complacency” effect.

From Anger Detection to Intensity Modeling: A Two-Stage Machine Learning Approach Using Driving Performance and Physiological Signals

TL:DR - This study models driver anger across multiple intensity levels using driving performance and physiological signals. Rather than treating anger as simply present or absent, the authors use a two-stage machine-learning approach: first detecting anger, then classifying its intensity.

Driver mental workload and automation: real-time monitoring is becoming the centre of gravity

TL:DR - One clear theme from the workload review is that the field is moving towards real-time, multimodal and ethically grounded workload detection systems that combine cognitive, emotional and contextual information.

😀 Positive News

There has been some positive news in the field of traffic psychology recently. And the M1 is nowhere to be seen.

Cycling UK calls for a new Highway Code awareness campaign

Four years after the Highway Code was updated to introduce the hierarchy of road users, Cycling UK called for a renewed THINK!-style campaign so drivers actually understand rules around safe overtaking, junction priority and opening car doors safely with the “Dutch Reach”. The positive news here is that the campaign is not framed as cyclists versus drivers, but as a practical way to reduce uncertainty and conflict in shared spaces, especially for people walking, wheeling and cycling who often carry the stress of negotiating with faster, heavier vehicles.

ROADPOL’s 2026 Safety Days will focus on pedestrians, not just drivers

ROADPOL announced in April that its 2026 Safety Days campaign, running from 16 to 22 September, will focus on pedestrians as one of Europe’s most vulnerable road-user groups. The campaign’s emphasis is refreshingly practical as it focuses on more attentive driving near crossings and busy urban areas, better speed management, improved lighting, clearer road design, safer crossings, traffic calming, pedestrian zones and wider use of lower urban speed limits.

Behavioural researchers say the new GB strategy could turn policy into real safety gains

Behavioural Research UK published a piece in May arguing that the GB Road Safety Strategy will only work if behavioural research is built into delivery, because almost every action either directly targets behaviour or assumes behaviour will change. That is a positive sign because it moves the debate beyond slogans and into implementation.

💻 Hard Work

My work this week has focussed primarily on not getting fried in this unexpected heatwave, and a few odd jobs ahead of heading to Norfolk. This has meant doing a lot of promotion of the Transport Box - you should sign up and the deadline for sign ups has extended to 12 June!

I have also been in sales mode on Mobility Camp - talking to people about sponsorship and how they can get involved in Mobility Camp. If sponsoring a fun, innovative, and unconventional transport event sounds good to you, you should drop me a line!

Finally, I have been planning for an Evidence Safari for Bradford Council. This means working with a bunch of very clever people at the Council and its Health Determinants Research Cluster to gather together evidence on transport’s impacts on areas as varied as health and the needs of young people. As well as the practical logistics of it all.

🎶 Musical Finale

Bad Habit by The Offspring is probably the best song about road rage and psychosis triggered by traffic that has ever been written. The lyrics are written with a lot of dark humour, so you have been warned.

🪧 Notices

Yes, a new section to the newsletter. This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.

Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.7) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.

Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.

✅ Sign Up

If you have been sent this newsletter, please consider signing up. Its free, and I don’t spam your inbox with random rubbish - just my own words.

You know what, this week has been a good week. So I am feeling in somewhat of a chipper mood. Its just as well because this weekend it will be glorious sunshine and, in the words of the British, bl**dy hot. At least in the part of the country where I am.

I also haven’t mentioned Mobility Camp in a while. Our early sign ups have been great, and if it keeps going we will have the biggest Mobility Camp ever. Its in Sheffield on 30th September. So, you should sign up.

Sign Up to Mobility Camp

🚖 Why you cannot trust national statistics on taxis and private hire vehicles

If you tried to guess where the country’s busiest private hire licensing authority was, you would probably point at London. A reasonable second guess might be Manchester, or Birmingham, or another big city that is part of national conversations on regeneration and increasing productivity. You almost certainly would not point at a West Midlands city of 268,000 people that most national commuters would struggle to place on a map.

And yet, according to the Department for Transport’s latest taxi and private hire vehicle statistics, the City of Wolverhampton Council is responsible for one in every nine Private Hire Vehicles (PHVs) registered in England and Wales. It licenses more PHV drivers than the population of small market towns. Its driver register has grown by a factor of forty in just over a decade. And the vast majority of the people on that register have probably never set foot in the city itself.

It is partly a story about a clever bit of legislation, partly a story about app-based dispatch, and partly a story about a council that spotted an opportunity and ran with it. But more than any of those things, it is a story about a quiet methodological problem for anyone trying to understand the taxi and private hire trade in their own patch. Wolverhampton’s numbers do not just dominate the league tables. They distort the entire picture of who is operating where, and that should bother anyone responsible for transport policy in a place that has nothing obvious to do with Wolverhampton.

Let us start with the headline number. In 2024 Wolverhampton licensed 29,173 private hire vehicles and 145 taxis. That is 29,318 licensed vehicles in total, sitting behind a council that serves a population of 267,651 according to the latest mid-year estimate. By the simple arithmetic of dividing one by the other, Wolverhampton has 109 PHVs licensed per 1,000 residents.

To call that an outlier is to undersell the case. Across the 316 individual licensing authorities in England and Wales, the median figure for PHVs per 1,000 people is 1.64. The mean is 2.74. The 95th percentile is just over 7. Even the 99th percentile, the threshold above which an authority counts as one of the three or four most concentrated in the country, sits at 13.7 PHVs per 1,000 residents. Wolverhampton’s figure is roughly eight times that 99th percentile, and around 66 times the national median. It is not at the top of the distribution. It is on a different distribution.

The next-closest authority on the league table is Uttlesford in Essex, at 19.2 PHVs per 1,000 people. Sefton on Merseyside comes in at 17.8. London’s combined Transport for London licensing area, which covers nearly nine million residents, manages 10.4 PHVs per 1,000. Wolverhampton is therefore around five-and-a-half times more PHV-dense than the next ranked council, and more than ten times the per-capita density of London itself.

Even within the West Midlands the picture is bizarre. Solihull, just down the road, has around 10 PHVs per 1,000 people. Birmingham, with a population more than four times Wolverhampton’s, has 5,921 PHVs licensed, against Wolverhampton’s 29,173. So a city that is roughly a quarter the size of Birmingham licenses around five times as many private hire vehicles. The numbers stop making physical sense if you assume the vehicles are actually being driven in Wolverhampton.

The historical viewmakes the divergence even sharper. In 2013, Wolverhampton licensed 643 PHVs. In 2015, it licensed 669. By 2019 the number had jumped to 9,222. By 2023 it was 22,345. By 2024 it had reached 29,173. That is a 45-fold increase in eleven years, set against a national PHV stock that has grown by perhaps a third over the same period. Wolverhampton’s driver register has followed a similar curve, climbing from 1,047 in 2013 to 42,843 in 2024, of which 42,622 hold PHV-only licences. Industry reporting suggests that by 2025 the council had pushed its PHV licence count toward 35,000, with driver numbers approaching 45,000.

This matters for transport planning, and it matters for very specific reasons. The first is that the DfT itself acknowledges the issue in the small print of its statistical release. The national and regional figures are labelled accredited official statistics, but the figures for individual licensing authorities sit outside that scope. They are, in DfT’s own phrasing, less robust. Translated into plain English, the department is warning users that you can trust the totals, but you should be careful about taking any one council’s numbers at face value.

The second reason it matters is more practical. If you are a planner in Manchester, or Bristol, or rural Cornwall, and you go to the official statistics to understand the taxi and PHV supply in your area, you will find a number. That number will reflect the vehicles licensed by your own council. It will not reflect the very large number of vehicles licensed elsewhere that are actually operating on your streets. The data will tell you, for example, that there are around 2,900 PHVs licensed in Manchester. It will not tell you that several thousand more, including many Wolverhampton-licensed vehicles, are routinely picking up passengers there. The map and the territory have come apart.

The third reason is that taxis and private hire vehicles are often treated as a peripheral topic in transport planning. They tend to get a chapter at the back of a Local Transport Plan, or a section in a town centre access study, and not much more than that. They do not get the attention that bus, rail, walking or cycling receive. When the data underpinning that secondary attention turns out to be unreliable, the problem compounds. We are not paying close attention to the trade in the first place, and the headline numbers we do glance at are systematically distorting how we think about it.

The mechanism behind the Wolverhampton effect is not complicated, but it does require holding two separate ideas in your head at once. The first is the Deregulation Act 2015, and specifically the changes it made to the way private hire bookings can be subcontracted. Before 2015, an operator licensed in one district could not pass a booking to another operator outside that district. After 2015 it could, provided the booking was passed to an operator licensed elsewhere who in turn used a driver and vehicle licensed in the same district as that second operator. This is sometimes called the triple lock, because the operator, the driver and the vehicle must all be licensed by the same authority for the chain to be legal.

The legal architecture remains intact. What changed is the use to which it was put. Once the subcontracting principle was settled, a national app-based platform could in principle obtain a single set of operator, driver and vehicle licences from a single sympathetic authority and dispatch work nationwide. Consequently, the Local Government Association has formally called for a Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Licensing Reform Bill to replace the existing legislation.

Wolverhampton’s role in all of this is partly accidental and partly deliberate. According to written evidence to the parliamentary inquiry, councils in Greater Manchester argued in late 2025 that Wolverhampton’s specific operating choices have helped accelerate the trend. The example most often cited is vehicle testing. Most licensing authorities require licensed vehicles to be tested within their own area, often at council-run or council-approved garages. Wolverhampton, by contrast, accepts an MOT certificate from any MOT station in the country, which makes it practical for a vehicle being driven in Berwick-upon-Tweed to hold a Wolverhampton licence. The application process is generally regarded as fast and predictable, and the fees are competitive. The council itself has publicly defended its work and pointed to safeguarding measures such as daily DBS monitoring and mandatory training. Whatever view you take of those individual choices, the cumulative effect has been to make Wolverhampton an attractive home for drivers and operators with no real connection to the city.

A Freedom of Information disclosure cited by Salford City Council found that around 9,000 Wolverhampton-licensed drivers are resident in the Greater Manchester area alone. Industry data published by Zego suggested that in the year to March 2024 the council issued 32,169 PHV licences, of which only a few hundred went to drivers actually living in Wolverhampton. There is now a regular pattern of cross-border enforcement operations in which Wolverhampton compliance officers travel out to places like Cheltenham, Chorley, Macclesfield and Cheshire to check on the vehicles bearing their plates. Those operations are praised by some and criticised by others, but they reveal something important. The trade Wolverhampton regulates is, in physical reality, taking place hundreds of miles away.

For planners, the analytical problem here is more subtle than the headline numbers suggest. It is not simply that Wolverhampton’s count is too high relative to its size. It is that the very category of locally licensed vehicle has become an unreliable proxy for locally operating vehicle. Once a national operator can plug into any authority’s licensing regime, the geographic information embedded in the licence ceases to map cleanly onto where work is being done. The same is increasingly true at the other end of the league table. Many authorities now have very few locally licensed PHVs, not because there are no PHVs operating in their area, but because their local drivers have gravitated to Wolverhampton or to one of a small number of other permissive authorities. Their headline figures understate the trade just as Wolverhampton’s overstate it.

There is also a user-facing dimension. Researchers at the University of Leeds looked at the impact of the Deregulation Act on taxi-related incidents and crime events in the city. They found a marked increase in new private hire driver licence applications in Leeds after the Act came in, much of it tied to the rise of app-based dispatch. They also identified shifts in the pattern of taxi-related calls for service. If you want to study how the trade actually behaves in Leeds (or any other local area), you cannot just go to the council’s licence register. You need to build a more careful picture from operational data, on-the-ground observation and police records. The Wolverhampton effect makes that necessity universal.

It also distorts comparative work. Place-based research that ranks authorities on, say, the proportion of wheelchair-accessible vehicles, or the share of PHVs with low-emission engines, will tell you something interesting about Wolverhampton’s specific policy choices. It will tell you very little about the actual mix of vehicles on the road in any given city, because the licensing categories no longer map onto the operating categories. Local councils end up regulating a tiny share of the vehicles serving their residents, while a different council somewhere else regulates a very large share of the vehicles serving residents it never sees.

The first move, and the most practical one for anyone in transport planning right now, is to stop relying on the licensing data as a single source of truth about local taxi and PHV supply. The DfT’s own caveat is doing a lot of work in that respect, and it should be read carefully. National and regional figures remain robust. Authority-level figures should be treated as one input among several, not as a definitive count of the trade in a given place.

The next move is to invest in local intelligence. This is well-trodden ground for licensing officers, but less familiar to the wider transport planning community. The Department for Transport’s Best Practice Guidance from 2023 sets out a recognised methodology for taxi unmet demand surveys, refined over many years by the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds and used by practitioners such as the TAS Partnership and Vector Transport Consultancy. The core of the approach is the Index of Significance of Unmet Demand, an index that combines patent demand observed at ranks, suppressed demand identified through public attitude surveys and other measures into a single value. Values above 80 indicate significant unmet demand. The methodology has been applied in places as diverse as Bath and North East Somerset, Stirling, Dundee and Milton Keynes, and most respected practitioners follow some version of it.

The methodology matters because it gives planners a way to characterise the local trade that does not depend on the licensing register. Rank observation tells you how the visible part of the trade is performing. Trained interviewers asking the public about their recent experience of taxis and private hire vehicles will surface the suppressed demand that ranks alone miss. Stakeholder consultation with the trade, with disability groups and with employers like the night-time economy gives texture to the numbers. Done properly, an unmet demand survey is the most honest description you can get of how the trade is functioning, regardless of where the underlying vehicles are licensed.

A complementary move is to work with operators rather than just with councils. The trade in any given town is, in practice, organised around a small number of dispatch platforms and PHV operators. They know how many active vehicles they have on the road on a Saturday night. They know how many bookings they refuse and how many they fulfil. They know where their drivers come from and which licensing authorities have granted them their plates. Getting that information into the planning process requires building working relationships, signing data-sharing agreements where appropriate, and accepting that commercial data will sometimes have rough edges. But it is far more useful than guessing from a distorted licence register.

Practitioners who have spent time on this work tend to give similar advice on how to make it pay off. Start with a clear brief about what you actually need to know, because operator data tends to be voluminous and unfocused unless you ask specific questions. Be honest about what you will do with the information, since operators are understandably cautious about data that might end up justifying a cap on numbers or a tougher policy. Anonymise where you can, aggregate where you cannot, and treat the engagement as a long-term relationship rather than a one-off ask. The strongest evidence bases for taxi and PHV policy tend to involve several rounds of operator dialogue, repeated rank observation across different times of year, and a willingness to revisit the methodology when new dispatch patterns emerge. None of that is exotic. It is the same patient, locally rooted approach that distinguishes the best transport planning in any mode.

There is also a substantial amount of useful intelligence sitting in cross-border enforcement work itself. Joint operations of the kind Wolverhampton conducts with Cheshire East, with Cheltenham and with Greater Manchester licensing officers produce structured information about which vehicles are turning up where, and how they are behaving when they get there. Where local authorities can coordinate compliance with each other, they end up with a much better picture of the trade than either could produce alone. The Institute of Licensing has been active in promoting this kind of joint working, and several regional groupings have begun to formalise it.

At the national level the policy direction is finally moving. In November 2025 the government added a clause to the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill that gives the Secretary of State for Transport powers to introduce national minimum standards for taxi and PHV licensing. In January 2026 the Department for Transport launched a consultation on transferring licensing responsibility from the existing 263 lower-tier authorities to around 70 local transport authorities, with the explicit aim of reducing the number of permissive outliers and tightening the safeguarding regime. Whether or not the cross-border framework itself is changed, the combination of national minimum standards and fewer licensing bodies will narrow the gap between the most and least demanding authorities. Some of the practical incentive to shop around for the cheapest licence should weaken.

None of that will eliminate the underlying problem for planners. Even with seventy authorities instead of two-hundred-and-sixty-three, the geographic disconnection between licence and operation will persist. App-based platforms will continue to dispatch work nationally. The taxi and PHV trade will continue to behave as a mostly national market with strong local accents, rather than as a collection of self-contained local markets. The planner’s job will continue to involve triangulating across multiple imperfect data sources rather than reading the answer off a single table.

The constructive way to think about all this is that the Wolverhampton effect is a useful reminder of something we should already have known. Taxi and PHV statistics are administrative data, produced as a by-product of regulation, and they reflect the structure of the regulatory system rather than the structure of the trade itself. Whenever the regulatory system has an unusual feature, the data will inherit that feature. In the current system, the unusual feature is that one council out of 263 holds the licences for a very large slice of the national trade. That is a fascinating fact about regulation. It is a much less useful fact about transport.

If we want better data about transport, we have to go and collect it. Unmet demand surveys are an established route. Operator engagement is another. Cross-border enforcement intelligence is a third. None of them is glamorous. All of them are within reach of any reasonably resourced local authority or transport body that decides taxis and PHVs are worth taking seriously. The Wolverhampton numbers are, in a strange way, a gift. They make the case for local intelligence so vividly that nobody who has looked at them can keep treating the official licence register as the whole story.

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

A fuzzy logic model for taxi service assessment using passenger survey data from Ukraine and Poland

TL:DR - Builds a Mamdani fuzzy inference system that maps three passenger psycho-emotional factors (Trust, Empathy, and Control) into a star rating for taxi trips. A useful reminder that service quality is more than waiting time and fare, and that operators wanting to lift ratings should be paying attention to how drivers make passengers feel.

The air quality effects of Uber

TL:DR - Uses staggered difference-in-difference estimators on EPA air quality data to identify the causal effect of Uber’s arrival on US urban air quality. Finds that Uber improves it, with most of the gain coming from falling summer ozone. Counterintuitive given the deadheading and induced-demand literature, and an important reference point for anyone arguing about whether ride-hailing helps or hurts urban sustainability.

Exploring preference heterogeneity of electric ride-hailing drivers’ charging decisions under time uncertainty

TL:DR - Looks at how electric ride-hailing drivers actually decide when and where to charge when they cannot predict their next fare. Identifies distinct preference clusters, which matters for charging infrastructure planning because designing for an average driver leaves a lot of the fleet badly served.

Acceptance of Electric Vehicles in the Ride-Hailing Scenario of Third-Tier Cities: A Comparative Study of Full-Time and Part-Time Drivers in China

TL:DR - Surveys 432 ride-hailing drivers in Zhangzhou and compares EV acceptance between full-time and part-time drivers. The split matters because most electrification policy treats ride-hailing drivers as a uniform group, when in fact part-timers face very different economics around charging downtime and depreciation.

How vehicle design, infrastructure conditions, and ableism create barriers to travel for people with disabilities: a mixed method study

TL:DR - A mixed-methods look at how transport barriers for disabled travellers are built up from vehicle design, infrastructure and driver behaviour together. Includes specific findings on rickshaw and ride-hailing reluctance to carry wheelchair users, and the so-called disability tax that passengers end up paying.

😀 Positive News

Some good things have happened in the taxi and private hire world recently. It’s not all about Wolverhampton.

Hackney rolls out 50+ rapid EV chargers, with taxis in mind

Hackney Council switched on the first nine of a planned 50-plus 100kW rapid chargers in March, delivered with ESB Energy and running on 100% renewable electricity. The bays are designed for larger vehicles including taxis and PHVs, with extra space and easier access for drivers with accessibility needs. A discounted overnight rapid rate for residents with EV parking permits is included, which is the kind of detail that makes the difference between a driver who can switch to electric and one who cannot.

LEVC delivers electric TX black cabs to Gibraltar

LEVC handed over 11 new zero-exhaust-emission-capable TX taxis to the Gibraltar Ministry of Transport in late March. It is the first time the iconic London black cab has been deployed in the territory, and because the TX is wheelchair accessible by design it lifts the accessibility floor for the local taxi fleet at the same time as it cuts emissions. Over 12,000 TX taxis are now on the road globally, with a claimed 360 million kilograms of CO2 avoided to date.

FREE NOW by Lyft offers a £500 bonus to bring more women into London’s black cab trade

To mark International Women’s Day, FREE NOW by Lyft put a £500 sign-on bonus and six commission-free weeks on the table for any female black cab driver registering with the platform by 31 March 2026. Women still account for under 3% of London’s licensed taxi drivers, so the headline figure matters less than what sits behind it, which includes accident and sickness insurance, parental and compassionate leave, and EV charging discounts through OVO and bp pulse. A small step in a sector that has been overwhelmingly male for a very long time.

Ireland renews its electric taxi grant scheme for 2026

The 2026 Electric Small Public Service Vehicle (eSPSV) Grant Scheme is open again, with €7 million on the table to help Irish taxi and ride-hailing drivers switch to electric. Drivers can get up to €25,000 for a wheelchair-accessible EV or €17,500 for a battery EV when scrapping a high-polluting older vehicle. Since 2018 the programme has put €65 million towards 3,600 vehicles, and while this year’s budget is smaller than last year’s it still keeps the pipeline open at a moment when several other countries have let theirs lapse.

Bolt publishes a 2026 women’s safety roadmap with onboard dashcams and self-defence workshops

Bolt set out a structured 2026 plan to improve safety for women on its rideshare platform, built around four pillars including the Women for Women service, training, deterrent technology and user empowerment. The most interesting practical bits are free monthly self-defence workshops open to female passengers and drivers, and a smartphone-as-dashcam solution that records the road and the cabin without forcing drivers to invest in hardware. The roadmap will be reviewed every six months, which is the kind of governance discipline these initiatives often lack.

💻 Hard Work

Mobility Camp and the Transport Box project have been going good guns for the last week. For the former, we have been organising some outside sessions (as these things need booking WAY in advance). For the latter, we have been recruiting engineers to be part of the project.

🎶 Musical Finale

Thrash metal. A spectacular light show. Smashing equipment. Sychronised head-banging. It can only be a Slipknot song. This is the best song, off their best album since Iowa. If you love heavy metal, you will love it. If you don’t, you won’t. Its that simple.

I just thank you to everyone who reached out after my recent newsletter on my experience of a road traffic collision. That does mean a lot to me, thank you. But I can assure you that I am ok. As I mentioned in the newsletter, this is not my first road traffic collision. Anyway, onto something more joyful.

There is a particular kind of question that only a child can ask. You know what I mean. The questions that are devastatingly simple. They are direct, curious, and have no patience for professional terms. It does not care whether your answer fits neatly into a job title, or an important email.

I was reminded of this at a Transport Box session in Birkenhead, where I spent time with a group of kids and their parents talking about transport. The Transport Box is designed to bring engineers, transport professionals, young people, families and community partners together through creative, practical activities about how transport works in everyday life.

I was asked loads of questions.

About trains. There were a lot of questions about trains, including questions about expansions to Merseyrail I had never even heard of.

About signals. That was more Joanna’s bag, but I think I held my own. Though if I was posed a question about the software used to determine signal timings I would have been in trouble.

About how things work. How exactly do you tell a child about how you choose one route or another, and not bore them with an explanation about Transport Appraisal Guidance?

About what I actually do every day. This one is the hardest one to answer.

It is easy enough to explain a signal in simple terms. It is possible to describe a train line, a junction, a crossing, or a bus route. But explaining what you do, and why it matters, is different. It forces you to strip away the language we sometimes hide behind. It asks you to find the humanity in it all that people can relate to.

And the humanity is the point.

Transport can become abstract very quickly. We talk about networks, flows, demand, capacity, mode shift, interventions and outcomes. All of that matters. But it only matters because people are trying to get somewhere. I often think we forget that transport is a derived demand. People are trying to get to school, work, home, to see family and friends, go to a medical appointment, or see a football match, or much more besides. A place where they feel like themselves.

The Transport Box, created by UK Unplugged working alongside volunteers from Mobility Camp, works because it starts there. It makes transport visible and practical in human terms. Its activities include a race across a city, creating a model of a skateboard, bus stop bingo, and much more. In Birkenhead, we played a swept path game created by Mai-Leen, and Joanna’s signals game. All simple things that help children understand engineering and transport planning ideas in accessible ways.

It is not trying to deliver a dry technical lesson. It is trying to create something playful, welcoming and accessible, where young people can notice how streets work, ask questions, think about different needs, and imagine how transport could be safer, fairer and easier to use.

That is more powerful than it sounds.

Because once you start answering questions from children, you realise how much of our work depends on trust. Why is a crossing there and not somewhere else? Why do signals take so long? Why can some people travel easily while others cannot? Why do roads feel dangerous? Why do buses not always go where people need them to go?

All of these asked by children. But these questions are far from childish. They are the questions at the centre of transport planning.

The session in Birkenhead was hugely inspiring in its own way. Not because everyone left wanting to become an engineer or a transport planner, although some might. Not because I had all the answers, because I definitely did not. It was inspiring because it reminded me that our work matters, and people can see how it matters. We can share what we do in open and accessible ways.

I have sat in numerous Transport Planning Society meetings where the matter of engaging with young people and getting them interested in transport planning comes up. But then we talk about it like its moving numbers on a spreadsheet and doing stuff behind a computer screen. This is important, but we have to be clear to young people that this is about achieving an end goal. We do this because we are planning to make every day journey’s better.

I might be running numbers to develop a business case for a scheme. But ultimately, this is about things like creating a new railway line to link two places together, or to provide somewhere that people can ride their bikes safely. And when you talk about it like that, something shifts.

Explaining why what I do is important is an amazing feeling. It is easy to forget that when the day job is full of meetings, emails, spreadsheets and deadlines. But in that room, answering the questions of excited 8 year olds, the connection was obvious. Transport is not just infrastructure. It is independence. It is access. It is safety. It is confidence. It is whether people feel that the places around them have been designed with them in mind.

That is why projects like the Transport Box matter.

They give young people a way into transport planning and engineering without making it feel remote. They also give professionals a way back to first principles, and to tell the world why what we are doing matters.

The Transport Box project is now looking for engineers and transport professionals to get involved, with training, co-design activities and in person events that make transport engineering more visible, accessible and relevant to young people and their families. We will be running sessions and versions of the Box in Stockport and Leeds, and if you want to be part of it then sign up by 30th May. You can find out more details on this on the Mobility Camp website.

If you work in transport, highways, rail, signals, planning, safety, public transport, walking, cycling, accessibility, systems or anything nearby, I would really encourage you to take part.

Not because outreach is a nice extra. Not because of the CPD (though you will get the equivalent of 7 hours for it). But because exciting the next generation is an amazing feeling, and we need them to carry on our task of creating a better world.

We need people who can design better systems. We also need people who can explain them, question them, and invite others into the conversation. The Transport Box does that in a way that feels generous, grounded and genuinely useful. And if even one young person who we engage with goes on to become an engineer, its worth it.

So sign up. Bring what you know. Be ready for brilliant questions. And be ready to remember why what we do matters.

Sign Up To Be Part Of The Transport Box

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

On the way to school: Co-producing pathways for evidence-based implementation of active mobility to school interventions

TL:DR - This paper is explicitly about Active Mobility To and from School (AMTS) and focuses on children and adolescents aged 8–16 years in Bogotá, Maputo and Marracuene. It treats school travel as a transport-planning and public-health issue and develops a four-step implementation framework for walking- and cycling-to-school interventions in low- and middle-income settings.

Validation of the behavioral regulation in cycling to and from school scale among students from Germany

TL:DR - This study looks at children and adolescents aged 10–17 and develops a validated tool for measuring the motivation behind cycling to and from school. It found that a three-factor model of motivation worked well, and that both autonomous motivation and controlled motivation were associated with a greater likelihood of cycling to school, while amotivation reduced it.

A bidirectional association between school environmental factors and physical activity habit formation among Chinese urban adolescents: a cross-lagged panel model

TL:DR - Using three-wave longitudinal data from 1,235 urban adolescents in Shanghai, the study found that facilities/environment, teacher competence, and curriculum design all positively predicted later physical activity habit formation. The strongest longer-term influence came from curriculum guarantees, while peer effects appeared later rather than immediately.

Parental and adolescents’ perspectives on environmental predictors of active commuting to school – findings from the ARRIVE mixed-methods study

TL:DR - This mixed-methods study used parent–adolescent dyads (N = 517) plus qualitative interviews to examine barriers and predictors of active school commuting. It found that adolescents and parents both saw luggage, weather, traffic safety, convenience, lack of social support, and “getting a lift” as important barriers.

Association between school commuting and adolescent mental health: Insights from a longitudinal study amid the pandemic

TL:DR - This longitudinal study of Brazilian high-school students found that public transport use was associated with roughly a threefold increase in the odds of worsening depression, and that this rose even further for students living 5 km or more from school.

💁‍♂️ Help Available

Over the last few months I have been working with a great guy called Kevin, who is interested in getting into transport planning. He has been helping me out with some odd projects, and I can safely say that he is a hard worker and very eager to learn. However, I am in a position where my work for him is starting to dry up, and he has come so far that I don’t want him to lose momentum.

So, I am reaching out to you, dear reader. If you are someone who is willing to take on an intern or volunteer to shadow you in your transport work, and you have the patience to make it work and are based in the UK, please let me know by emailing in response to this newsletter.

💻 Hard Work

The work part of last week was boring. Mainly meetings. However, last weekend was not work, but it was great fun as I spent a few days in Germany.

Many of these days were spent with my sister and three of my nephews in Weinheim in Baden-Württemberg. I also spent some time in Frankfurt which I will write about next week, but Weinheim is just stunning. Being sat in the sun in the Marktplatz, outside a cafe eating Schnitzel, listening to your nephew who wants to become a Städteplaner = perfect.

Oh, and I got to finally pay a visit to Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbahnhof, a station that Deutsche Bahn refers to as the most important station in Germany. I must admit that this is probably the first station I have been to that I did not feel safe at. Mainly because there were a lot of blackshirts around for reasons I did not ask about (if you don’t know what blackshirts are, don’t Google it). It was also extremely busy with a relatively confined area for passenger movement that reminded me a lot of the layout of Liverpool Street Station. However, the architecture of the station is amazing.

🎶 Musical Finale

I love Daughter by Pearl Jam as its a banging tune. Its only in recent years that I finally understood that the lyrics describe the experience of children with learning disabilities. As Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder said:

The child in that song obviously has a learning difficulty, and it’s only in the last few years that they’ve actually been able to diagnose these learning disabilities, that before were looked at as misbehavior; as just outright rebelliousness, but no one knew what it was. These kids, because they seemed unable or reluctant to learn, they’d end up getting the s—t beaten outta them. The song ends, you know, with this idea of the shades going down—so that the neighbors can’t see what happens next. What hurts about s—t like that is that it ends up defining people’s lives. They have to live with that abuse for the rest of their lives. Good, creative people are just f——-g destroyed.

This turns it from a great song into something much more profound.

Needless to say that I was not expecting to write this. However, after last Thursday’s local election results and - if I am being quite honest - lot of whining and hand-wringing from far too many people about how it did not go the way they wanted, I thought I would publish something quickly based on some research I did on How To Make Friends And Influence Councillors. In the hope it might be useful.

Oh, and before anyone says anything - I didn’t particularly like the results. But from my experience of working across political parties the overwhelming majority of members of most parties are actually reasonable people even if you disagree with them. So bear that in mind. Anyway.

A change in political control can feel like someone has picked up the council, given it a good shake, and put it back down with all the furniture either in slightly different places, or the whole place is trashed. Depending on your point of view.

For councillors, it is exciting and daunting. They arrive with a mandate, promises to keep, campaign scars still fresh, and a very short window to show that voting for them made a difference. For senior officers, it can be equally challenging. Years of programme development, funding bids, design work, consultation, and carefully balanced stakeholder relationships suddenly have to be reinterpreted through a new political lens.

The temptation, particularly in technical areas like transport, is to think the answer lies in better evidence, better modelling, better design standards or better consultation. All of those matter. But the my research on How To Make Friends and Influence Councillors makes one thing very clear. The most critical factor in making things work is the relationship between senior officers and councillors. Not the committee paper. Not the transport model. Not even the funding agreement. The relationship.

That is not a soft point. It is a delivery point.

The councillors interviewed for my research were blunt about how dependent they are on officers. Officers bring the technical expertise, the knowledge of what is legal, fundable, deliverable and operationally sensible. Councillors bring the democratic mandate, the political direction, the connection to communities, and the judgement about what will or will not survive contact with local politics. Sustainable transport delivery happens best when those two roles are not blurred, but properly connected.

One quote from my research sums it up nicely:

Without my officers I wouldn’t be able to do anything.

Another councillor put it just as clearly:

Senior officers are the people who deliver what we want.

That is the essence of the relationship. Councillors decide the destination. Officers advise on how to get there. The danger comes when either side misunderstands the other.

Officers can sometimes treat political change as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a democratic instruction to be understood. Councillors can sometimes underestimate how long it takes to change strategies, redesign schemes, secure approvals, consult properly and deliver something that will still work in ten years’ time. Newly elected councillors often arrive with big ambitions, only to discover that policy change, scheme development, consultation, funding and implementation can swallow most of a four-year political cycle.

That is why the first few weeks after a change in political control matter so much.

Senior officers do not need to become political. They absolutely should not become partisan. But they do need to become politically literate. There is a difference. Political literacy means understanding the mandate, the personalities, the red lines, the manifesto commitments, the internal dynamics of Cabinet, and the community pressures sitting behind the new administration. My research highlights that Cabinet often operates as the political nervous system of the authority, with major or controversial decisions discussed between Cabinet members long before they appear formally on an agenda. If officers only engage at the formal decision point, they are already late.

Wider research reinforces this. Public acceptability has a demonstrable impact on political decision making, particularly when issues are salient at election time. Controversial transport measures can become more accepted after implementation, but getting to that point requires political confidence, early engagement and a process that people see as fair. My literature review also notes that public opinion, political conflict, media framing and local community networks all shape whether sustainable transport schemes survive.

So, if you are a senior officer facing a new political administration, what should you do now?

1. Start with the manifesto — and say how you will deliver it

This is the big one.

Do not begin with “here is the current programme”. Begin with “here is how we can help you deliver your priorities.”

That does not mean pretending every existing scheme magically fits the new administration’s agenda. It means doing the work. Read the manifesto. Read campaign material. Listen to what the new Leader, Cabinet Member and group have been saying publicly. Then map current programmes, funding commitments, statutory duties and live risks against those priorities.

Senior officers should go into the first serious meeting with a clear, honest delivery note:

• These are the commitments we think relate to our service area.

• These are the things already in train that support them.

• These are the things that may need changing.

• These are the quick wins.

• These are the difficult trade-offs.

• These are the decisions we need from you.

This matters because councillors are judged on delivery. My research found that councillors often see manifesto delivery as the practical expression of their political philosophy. In other words, they may not talk abstractly about ideology, but they care deeply about whether they can go back to voters and say: “we said we would do this, and we did.”

2. Establish the working relationship before the first crisis

The worst time to work out how a Cabinet Member wants to operate is when a scheme has blown up on social media.

Early on, senior officers should have a deliberate conversation about ways of working. How often does the councillor want briefings? What level of detail helps them? What decisions do they want early sight of? What kind of ward issues should be escalated? What does “no surprises” mean in practice?

The report recommends establishing ground rules for engagement in the first meetings, including asking decision makers how they prefer to work and being clear about what officers need from them. That is simple advice, but it is powerful.

This should not be a one-way induction where officers explain the council machine and councillors nod politely. It should be a two-way learning relationship. Officers need to learn the political context. Councillors need to understand legal duties, delivery constraints, funding conditions and technical standards. Done well, this builds trust before trust is tested.

3. Do early political sense-checking

One of the strongest messages in the report is that councillors want to be involved early enough to shape things. They do not want to be presented with a nearly finished scheme and told that changing it now would be expensive, risky or impossible. That is when relationships deteriorate.

For senior officers, this means building political sense-checks into the early stages of policy and scheme development. Not as a way of watering everything down, but as a way of understanding the democratic and community context before too much technical momentum builds.

Ask early:

• Does this align with the new administration’s stated priorities?

• Which Cabinet colleagues will care about this?

• Which ward councillors need early engagement?

• What will residents think this scheme is really about?

• What is the likely headline?

• What are the non-negotiables?

Councillors in my research repeatedly described their value as providing strategic direction and spotting political controversy, such as parking loss, access changes or impacts on local businesses. Officers who use that insight early will avoid wasted work later.

4. Translate technical work into public value

Transport professionals are very good at explaining transport benefits to other transport professionals. That is not enough.

The report found that councillors often wanted officers to make wider policy links much more explicit. This might include health, accessibility, local business, social care, inclusion, town centre vitality and quality of life. Too often, these links are implied rather than clearly stated. Councillors then have to do the translation themselves.

After a change in political control, this becomes even more important. The new administration needs a story it can tell. Not a glossy comms line, but a credible explanation of why a proposal matters to the people they represent.

So instead of saying:

“This scheme improves modal shift and supports LTP objectives.”

Say:

“This will make it easier for children to walk to school, help older residents reach the bus stop safely, support the town centre by improving the street environment, and deliver your commitment to safer neighbourhoods.”

That is not dumbing down. That is doing the job properly.

5. Help the new administration understand the delivery clock

New administrations often have four years, sometimes less, to show progress. Transport schemes, unfortunately, do not care about electoral cycles.

There is a mismatch between political time and delivery time. Changing policy can take years; scheme development can take months or years. Consultation and implementation can land awkwardly close to elections, and controversial schemes need time to bed in before the benefits are widely recognised.

Senior officers should therefore be upfront about the delivery clock. Set out what can be done in 100 days, one year, two years and four years. Separate symbolic early actions from structural reforms. Identify which inherited schemes can be adapted, which should continue, and which genuinely need reconsidering. This is about sequencing ambition so it survives.

The bottom line is that when political control changes, the instinct can be to retreat into process. But process will not carry the day if the relationship between senior officers and councillors is weak.

The report is clear: delivery depends on mutual respect, early engagement, clear language, political awareness and shared ownership of outcomes. Officers do not need to agree politically with the new administration. But they do need to understand its mandate and show, quickly and practically, how they will help deliver it.

Because in local government, especially in transport, the best schemes are not just designed. They are navigated. And the most important navigation tool is the relationship between the people elected to set direction and the people trusted to make it happen.

I need to start with an announcement. As part of my work on Mobility Camp, I am working with UK Unplugged on delivering a project aimed at improving engagement with young people with educational needs and mental health issues - the Transport Box! And we want you to be part of it.

There are more details on the Mobility Camp website, but in short if you want to develop some public engagement skills with a hard-to-reach group, and you can get to Stockport or Leeds easily, this will be for you. We need you to sign up by 30th May at the latest. And yes, I WILL be mentioning this a few more hundred times.

Anyway, go sign up!

Sign Up To Help With The Transport Box

There’s something strange about reviewing a document you helped write. You remember the meetings, the arguments, the compromises, the late nights trying to make the numbers stack up. You remember what didn’t make it into the final version and why. And you remember the genuine excitement of producing something you believed in — even as you quietly wondered whether any of it would actually happen.

Central Bedfordshire’s Local Transport Plan 3 was adopted in April 2011. It covered 15 years — from 2011 to March 2026 — and it was, as I keep reminding people, the first ever Local Transport Plan this authority had produced. We were a new unitary authority, created only in 2009 from the former Mid Bedfordshire and South Bedfordshire districts. We had a blank sheet of paper, a tight budget, and a genuinely exciting opportunity to set the strategic direction for transport across a large, complex, predominantly rural area for the first time.

Now, as LTP3 reaches the end of its intended lifespan and LTP4 begins to take shape, I think it’s worth being honest about how it went.

One of the things I’m still fond of is the decision to organise the plan around journey purposes rather than modes of transport. It sounds like a subtle shift, but it changed how we thought and talked about investment.

The conventional approach — and plenty of plans even now still do it — was to divide transport into its component parts. Usually roads, buses, rail, cycling, walking, freight. Each gets its own section and its own targets. The result is a fragmented strategy that tells you how each mode is performing but rarely asks the more fundamental question: are people actually able to get where they need to go?

We asked that. Why do people travel? To work, to school, to the doctor, to the shops, to see friends and family, to move goods around. We structured the objectives around those purposes, and it opened up multi-modal thinking. You stop defending bus subsidies in isolation and start thinking about which combination of footway improvements, real-time bus information, and workplace travel planning will actually make it easier for someone in Houghton Regis to get to their job in Luton without a car. At least, that was the theory.

It also made the plan an easier political sell. Transport for its own sake is a hard sell in a tight budget environment, especially in an environment where anything seen as restricting car use was part of a “war on the motorist.” Transport as the thing that gets people to jobs, to hospitals, to schools — that’s a much easier conversation to have with elected members.

I still think the framework was broadly the right one. What I’m less sure about is whether it was followed through on in the delivery phase — particularly in rural areas where the journey-purpose approach revealed the sharpest gaps but the money was thinnest.

The Luton–Dunstable Busway isn’t something I can take credit for in full — while I helped with the business case it was already in development when we were writing LTP3, and Luton Borough Council were the Project Sponsor. But embedding it centrally in our plan, and tying our objectives to its success, while ensuring the wider network of improvements in Dunstable and Houghton Regis was designed to connect with it — that was deliberate, and it mattered.

The busway opened in September 2013, five months late and substantially over its original £51 million budget (it came in at £91 million, driven by underground utilities, soil contamination and Japanese knotweed, which as any gardener knows is a nasty thing to get rid of). At the time there were people — including, I’ll admit, some within the industry — who were sceptical. Guided busways have a chequered history, and Luton and Dunstable are not the most obvious candidates for rapid transit. This was not helped by the fact that the same contractors who delivered the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway - with its issues with poor construction - were appointed to construct the Busway.

But it worked. It now has over two million passengers a year riding on it. And its still running more than ten years on. The route gives Dunstable and Houghton Regis residents a genuinely fast, reliable connection to Luton Airport, Luton town centre, and onward rail services in under 30 minutes (its close to an hour in peak times on the main road). And alongside the guided track, there’s a cycleway that around 500 people a day now use — something I don’t think any of us predicted would happen, but which exemplifies exactly what we were trying to achieve with the integrated approach.

There are still gaps. Local politicians have rightly noted the lack of an extension to Leighton Buzzard at the western end, which would support development and would give busway users a direct interchange with the West Coast Main Line. That extension was always an aspiration rather than a commitment in LTP3 — we were realistic about what the funding envelope could support — but it remains a missed opportunity.

If the busway was the headline public transport win, the A5–M1 Link and Woodside Connection were the headline highway wins. And I won’t pretend the timeline wasn’t frustrating.

We knew the A5 through Dunstable town centre was a serious problem when we were writing the plan. Thousands of vehicles a day — including significant HGV traffic — running through the historic high street, causing congestion, air quality issues, and making it difficult for Dunstable to develop as a town centre in its own right.

As someone who is pro-sustainable transport, you would expect me to say that we should have chosen to invest significantly in public transport and active travel. And in the Busway, we did with the former. But sometimes you have to look at the situation and realise that just maybe, a bypass can help by tackling the fundamental issue. In the case of Dunstable, the A5 through the town was a major strategic road (owned and operated by Highways England) with a lot of movement straight through the town. Movement not easily shifted into other modes. So the solution was clear: a northern bypass connecting the A5 to the M1 at a new Junction 11A, with the Woodside Link providing access from the industrial areas of Dunstable and Houghton Regis.

In LTP3 we expected construction to start in 2014/15. The Public Inquiry had been postponed by the Coalition Government in 2010, and the scheme was delayed further by the usual combination of funding negotiations, procurement, and statutory processes. Both the A5–M1 Link and the Woodside Connection ultimately opened in spring 2017 — about two to three years later than we’d expected.

But they opened. And the impact has been real. The 7.5-tonne weight limit on local roads through Dunstable and Houghton Regis — the thing that actually gets the lorries off the High Street — became possible because the bypass existed. Dunstable’s town centre regeneration could begin to take shape. The industrial areas got the motorway access they needed without routing HGVs through residential neighbourhoods.

Occasionally I drive through Dunstable, and the impact is very visible. On Hockliffe Road leading into Dunstable, traffic reduced by around 61% according to National Highways. Most roads in Dunstable have seen traffic reductions between 20% and 60%. That’s what we were trying to do. It took longer than I’d have liked, and the frustration of watching those delays was real. But the outcome is the right one.

I remember the conversations about East–West Rail in the early planning stages of LTP3. There were people who thought including it was optimistic to the point of wishful thinking — a scheme that had been discussed for years, with a chequered funding history and formidable political and engineering challenges. My view then, and it hasn’t changed, is that you have to back the right infrastructure even when it’s hard to deliver. And East–West Rail is the right infrastructure.

We pointed to a benefit-cost ratio of 5:1 and described the case as “exceptional.” That wasn’t spin — the economics of the project genuinely are strong, and the connectivity benefits for Central Bedfordshire, particularly for the Marston Vale communities, are significant.

Now, in 2026, East–West Rail is slowly moving. Freight services began using the Bicester–Bletchley route in June 2025, but progress with passenger trains is frustratingly flow. The government has committed £240 million to the Bletchley–Bedford works, with an Oxford to Bedford passenger service targeting the end of the decade. The Bedford–Cambridge section is still contested, but it’s funded and in statutory consultation.

This is not the 2026 outcome LTP3 envisaged. I had hoped the Marston Vale line improvements would be further advanced by now, and the proposed consolidation of existing stations into four new ones will be controversial — communities that have grown around their local station will understandably push back. But the direction is right, and the momentum now feels different from what it did five or ten years ago.

I wish I could say the same about the Wixams station. I won’t gloss over this one. We included a new station on the Midland Mainline between Bedford and Flitwick at the planned development at the Wixams in LTP3 with a planned completion date of 2014. A new 4,500-home community being built on the Elstow Storage Depot site, straddling the Central Bedfordshire and Bedford Borough boundary, with a station on the Midland Main Line as the cornerstone of its sustainable transport provision. The logic was sound. The station was supposed to come first, or at least early, so that residents moved in with a train service rather than entrenching car dependency from day one.

It didn’t happen in 2014. It still hasn’t happened now. The houses are being built on the Wixams and at two further housing sites close to Houghton Regis, and the station is still not there. Funding was withdrawn by Network Rail. Years of negotiations followed. Construction finally began in September 2024 — a decade late — and was on track for a 2026 opening. Then the potential Universal theme park development nearby triggered a pause, with around £28 million already spent. There is no confirmed timescale on its opening. The delivery of this station is now critical for the delivery of Universal Studios, and Universal has spades in the ground now. No such movement on the station, though.

This is exactly the kind of outcome that makes you question whether the planning system is really designed to deliver sustainable communities or just houses. The transport infrastructure that was supposed to underpin the new settlement has been repeatedly deprioritised, delayed, and is now caught up in a completely separate commercial development that arrived long after the housing was built. Residents of Wixams have been living there without the station they were promised for years. There is a very real chance that Universal Studios will open, and people will have to be bussed to the theme park from Bedford station.

That’s a failure, and I think it’s important to name it as one — even when it’s uncomfortable to do so about something I helped plan.

Away from the big-ticket projects, a lot of LTP3’s actual delivery happened through the Local Area Transport Plan programme — and I think this is underappreciated.

We committed in the plan to producing LATPs for the whole authority, starting with the four main growth areas and rolling out over time. Eleven LATPs were ultimately completed. Each one involved genuine community engagement, local scheme identification, and a funded programme of delivery. Bus stop improvements, cycling infrastructure, safe routes to schools, shared space in town centres, pedestrian crossings, public transport information — not glamorous, but real and tangible.

The “myjourney” branding we developed for the consultation and engagement process was something I was particularly invested in. The idea was to give the plan a human face — to make transport feel personal rather than technical. Transport isn’t about infrastructure, it’s about people getting to the things they need. Whether it fully landed with the public is debatable, but it helped us reach audiences that dry planning documents typically don’t.

What the LATP process also did was force us to have honest conversations at a local level about priorities. With £1.26 million in the Integrated Transport Block for 2011/12, covering the whole authority, you can’t do everything. The LATP framework gave communities ownership of what would be prioritised in their area, and it gave the authority a defensible, evidence-based basis for those decisions. I look back at that structure and still think it was the right one, even if its ability to deliver was questionable.

I’d be doing a disservice to anyone reading this — particularly anyone working on LTP4 — if I didn’t say honestly where I think we fell short.

The smarter choices ambition was probably too high. We leaned heavily on DfT research suggesting that well-implemented smarter choices programmes could reduce urban car use by up to 21% in peak hours, and our positive experience with the Leighton-Linslade Cycle Demonstration Town. That research was real. But Central Bedfordshire is not an urban authority — it’s a predominantly rural one, with dispersed employment, limited public transport outside the main corridors, and long average commute distances. The conditions for smarter choices to work at scale simply aren’t present for most of the authority. I don’t think we were always honest enough with ourselves about that gap when we were writing the targets.

We also relied a lot on developer contributions, which cannot substitute for strategic funding. The logic is sound — development generates travel demand, so developers should fund mitigation. But contributions come in when permissions are granted and development proceeds, and they’re often tied to specific sites. The cumulative impact of multiple developments across an area isn’t neatly mitigated by site-specific contributions. Communities in growth areas felt the pain of additional traffic before the mitigations arrived. That’s a legitimate grievance, and I think we underestimated how acute the timing problem would be. Not helped by the fact that the planning system has been radically reformed over the last 15 years.

I also feel we could have been bolder on freight. The Designated Road Freight Network and freight strategy were sensible and necessary. But freight is an area where stronger ambition — more rail freight, better last-mile logistics, more pressure on developers to locate logistics-intensive uses near strategic road access — could have reduced the impact on communities more meaningfully. I think we were too cautious.

Bus services outside the main corridors remained, and still remain, fragile. We set a target of growing bus passenger journeys by 41% over the plan period, much of it driven by the busway. The busway delivered, but we did not meet the target at all. The rural and interurban bus network has faced ongoing commercial pressure, route withdrawals, and subsidy cuts that the plan couldn’t fully protect against. For many villages in Central Bedfordshire, bus services are thinner now than they were in 2011, and some have had their services withdrawn entirely. That troubles me.

LTP4 is in development, covering 2026–2040. I’m not directly involved in that process, but I’m watching it with interest — and some familiar anxieties.

The challenges LTP4 will face are, in many ways, the same ones we identified in 2011. Car dependency remains deeply entrenched. Housing growth continues to outpace transport investment. Rural communities have needs that don’t fit neatly into traditional cost-benefit analysis. And the decarbonisation imperative, which was present but relatively modest in LTP3, is now a central strategic challenge that can’t be ignored.

What’s different is the funding context — potentially for the better, with East–West Rail now backed by serious government commitment, and active travel funding streams that didn’t really exist in 2011. And the institutional maturity is different. Central Bedfordshire now has fifteen years of experience as a unitary authority managing its own transport network.

The politics of the place is one of flux. A long-held Conservative stronghold on the Council was broken by a coalition of independents in 2023. In a by-election in Stotfold in September 2025, Reform won a seat from Labour, and are expected to perform strongly in the next elections in 2027. Whether this will affect the new LTP remains to be seen.

I hope LTP4 builds on what worked in LTP3. Namely the integrated thinking, the journey-purpose framing, the honest engagement with communities about what’s realistic. And I hope it’s bolder in the areas where we were cautious — particularly on sustainable travel in rural areas, on freight, and on the kind of long-term infrastructure commitments that take a decade to deliver but are right to start now.

If you asked me to mark LTP3 on how well it has achieved what we set out to do, here’s what I’d say.

We set out to produce a coherent strategic framework for transport in a new authority, centred on some critical major schemes, and build a local delivery mechanism that reflected community priorities and worked within genuinely tight financial constraints. Broadly, we did those things. The major schemes we championed — the busway, the A5–M1 Link, East–West Rail — were the right calls. Two delivered within the plan period, one is finally in delivery. The LATP programme produced real, tangible improvements across the authority. The journey-purpose framework gave the plan a coherence and community relevance that I think was genuinely distinctive for its time.

Where I’m less satisfied is in a few areas. Namely the behaviour change ambitions were too optimistic for the context, the delivery of sustainable transport alongside housing growth was too uneven, and some of the communities we most wanted to serve — rural, car-dependent, without strong public transport — are still waiting for something the plan promised them in principle but couldn’t fully deliver in practice.

That’s the nature of transport planning. It’s incremental, it’s slow, and it’s shaped by forces — national funding decisions, commercial operators, planning appeals, political cycles — that you can never fully control. The test isn’t whether every commitment was delivered on time and on budget. It’s whether the authority and its communities are in a better place now than they would have been without the plan.

I think they are. But I’m also aware that I’m not exactly a disinterested judge.

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Decarbonizing emissions from last-mile deliveries in Chinese cities

TL:DR - The authors estimate last‑mile delivery emissions across 365 Chinese cities using data from 14 billion orders and 1.9 million couriers, which gives the study unusual scale and resolution. The headline finding is encouraging: order volumes rose by 83.5% from 2023 to 2024, but emissions increased by only 31.3%, suggesting delivery systems can become more efficient rather than scaling emissions linearly with demand. The paper also finds that smaller cities can have per-order emissions up to four times higher than larger cities because of lower delivery efficiency, and its mitigation scenarios suggest emissions could be cut by up to 84.2%.

Cycling accessibility and equity: a systematic literature review

TL:DR - This is a PRISMA-based systematic review of 71 peer-reviewed studies on cycling accessibility and equity, covering bicycles, e-bikes and bike-sharing. The review proposes a framework that links accessibility measurement to different equity concepts, including egalitarian vs sufficientarian approaches and horizontal vs vertical equity.

University students’ awareness of the social dimension of sustainable transportation: The case of Amasya/Turkey

TL:DR - This uses a mixed-methods approach combining attitude analysis, surveys and field observations to examine how university students understand the social side of sustainable transport, including equity, accessibility, health and safety, individual responsibility, integrated planning, and cultural values. The study reports that female students accounted for 60% of bicycle users, that 73.2% of cyclists came from middle- and low-income groups, and that 47.3% of participants used bicycles for short distances.

Navigating ordinary hybridity in urban transport: the role of ‘4 + 1’ vehicles in Maseru, Lesotho

TL:DR - The study looks at the ‘4 + 1’ system in Maseru, where private cars carry four passengers in addition to the driver, and argues that it should be understood as an ordinary and integral part of urban mobility, not simply a policy failure. The paper finds that the system provides affordable, accessible and reliable mobility, especially for underserved areas, and also contributes to income generation and employment.

Community-based ultra-flex autonomous mobility system: A framework for advancing urban transportation spatial equity

TL:DR - Rather than imagining autonomous mobility as a stand-alone future system, the paper explicitly frames it as a complement to existing transport networks. The proposed framework rests on three pillars — community-based operations, ultra-flex service, and an adapted autonomous mobility system — and tries to achieve equity through a three-ring spatial model, tailored autonomous driving classifications, low-cost vehicle-to-everything (V2X) deployment, and a government-enterprise-community governance model.

😀 Positive News

Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.

TfL restores bus frequencies on multiple London routes

From Saturday 25 April 2026, TfL says routes 6, 16, 27, 36, 46, 55, 56 and 95 all received timetable changes with frequencies restored, including improvements during daytime, evening and weekend periods on several routes.

Tilehurst gains full step-free access to all platforms

Network Rail announced that passengers at Tilehurst are now benefiting from step-free access to all platforms for the first time, following the installation of three new lifts and a new walkway between the car park and platform 1.

Beeston station transformation combines accessibility, cycling and service uplift

Network Rail said a celebration event marked the transformation of Beeston station after more than £7.6 million of investment, including a refurbished historic canopy and waiting shelters, while East Midlands Railway added a new cycle shelter, extra seating, improved lighting and a remodelled forecourt.

Hampden Park footbridge reopens after refurbishment, with accessibility upgrades

The reopening of the Victorian footbridge at Hampden Park station in East Sussex is another good example of practical, positive investment. Network Rail says the bridge has reopened after a three-month refurbishment, with new stairs and decking, stronger materials, improved slip resistance, upgraded handrails, safety mesh and a renewed protective coating to extend the structure’s life and reduce future repair needs.

Lagos Unveils 2050 Transport Vision, Shifts Focus to Integrated Mass Transit System

Lagos is explicitly shifting away from “roads first” thinking and toward integrated mass transit. According to the official LAMATA summary, the updated plan will anchor the city’s future around rail expansion, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), ferry services, cleaner-energy buses, and improved last-mile access.

💻 Hard Work

I already mentioned the launch of the Transport Box at the start of this newsletter. Last week, I also got the chance to talk about Forest City with students from the University of East Anglia. They presented ideas on how to bring a cultural element to the city, and their ideas were far better than anything I could have come up with at University!

The long weekend was mostly dog walking, but I had great fun in my first game of Walking Football at Maulden Walking Football Club. Its actually refreshing to play football with people who do it just to have fun, rather than the competitive streak that is now found in 5-a-side. No goals for me, but then again my style of play has always been more Rio Ferdinand in his prime than Erling Haaland.

🎶 Musical Finale

This wormed it way into my ears last week on a long drive to Yorkshire, and its remained in my brain since then. Dilemma by Green Day is about the struggles with addiction faced by their lead singer, Billy Joe Armstrong. I like it not because of its raw lyrics, but because it is a classic Green Day banger.

A forewarning ahead of this week’s post. My tone can only be described as that of righteous fury, and so it gets a bit ranty and goes off in tangents. If you don’t like that kind of thing, or you don’t like reading about road traffic collisions, its best to give this week’s a miss.

On Thursday morning, on Cambridge Road near Orwell in Cambridgeshire, I found myself standing in the middle of a scene that I cannot stop replaying in my mind. I arrived probably a minute after it happened. I did not see the collision itself. I cannot tell you how it happened, who was at fault, or what the seconds before impact looked like. What I can tell you is what I arrived to. A motorcyclist was lying injured in the road, his motorcycle smashed to bits some way behind him. He was screaming in pain. The sound of it cut through everything - the hum of engines, the confusion, the rush of people trying to understand what had happened. The plans for the day of several people wrecked by all-too-familiar horror.

This is not my first time on the scene of a road traffic collision. Nor will it likely be my last. The downside of being a transport planner or engineer is that at some point you will be on the scene of a road traffic collision. I have been on the scene of several. Some were fatal collisions caused by the idiocy of the person who somehow walked away. Others had the people in the vehicles involved joking at the roadside, shaken but otherwise unharmed. After a while, you almost get numb to it. An automatic response kicks in - whether it be to help the injured, dial 999 or something else.

In those moments, there are things you expect to see from people. Shock, certainly. Concern, hopefully. Hesitation, perhaps. Sadly, there is something else I have come to expect. Something that always leaves me angry. That was the number of drivers who looked at a badly injured man lying in the carriageway and still tried to drive through the scene. Not around it, through it. Literally passing within inches of him and those trying to help.

I would normally say it seems unreal, or that it’s too ugly to true. But it isn’t. This is not the first time I have seen this at the scene of a serious collision, either.

There were people there who did exactly what you would hope strangers would do. Some stopped immediately, and tried to comfort the injured rider. Others were visibly shaken themselves but still stayed. A handful of people became the sort of people a situation like this needs. They put decency ahead of inconvenience. I want to say that clearly because it matters. It matters that kindness was present in that horrible scene. It matters that some people, with no obligation beyond their own humanity, stopped and helped.

But it also matters that others did the opposite.

My role, in the end, became traffic management. None of us wake up expecting to stand on a road trying to keep other road users from driving over or near an injured person. Yet that was where things ended up. I found myself directing vehicles, signalling for drivers to turn around, trying to create the most basic level of safety around an already unsafe and chaotic scene. All while those with some medical training helped before the emergency services arrived. And the awful truth is that the only way I could finally stop some drivers from trying to push through was by working with others to physically block the road. Starting with myself and another woman, then with cars near the scene, then using a lorry and the kind actions of an unknown lorry driver, and finally some kind hearted highways engineers who happened to be passing by who put out their own Road Closed sign. All before the police finally came to do the job properly.

Think about what that means for a moment. An injured man was lying in the road, in clear distress, with people around him trying to help. And still the message some drivers seemed to take from the situation was “can I still get through?” Even when blocked some tried to take chances. Some got angry at us for not allowing them through. Angry. As if the real offence in that moment was not the suffering in front of them but the interruption to their journey.

I have spent a lot of today thinking about that anger. What makes someone see a road traffic collision, see an injured human being, and respond with irritation at being delayed. What sort of mental framing puts convenience above care so quickly, so instinctively, that the suffering of another person seems not to matter. I keep coming back to the same answer. This is motonormativity in action.

Motonormativity is the name given to the way our culture treats motor vehicle use, and the harms, risks, and expectations wrapped up in it, as normal, acceptable, and often beyond question. It describes the strange moral leniency we extend to driving and to the inconvenience driving imposes on others. It is the reason why many forms of danger, noise, delay, intimidation, and even death are absorbed into public life as regrettable but ordinary. They are simply the price worth paying. It is the reason roads are so often treated first and foremost as channels for vehicle flow, rather than as public spaces where human vulnerability matters.

When motonormativity takes hold, the presence of a car shapes how people think. It creates a worldview in which stopping is an affront, where delay feels like injustice, and where anything that interrupts the smooth onward passage of traffic is treated as the problem. An injured man in the road becomes not the centre of concern but an obstacle. The person trying to protect the scene becomes not someone acting out of basic responsibility but someone who is in the way.

In a weird way, this is why I don’t think those who drove through the scene are fundamentally bad or evil people. The conditioning of society makes them do bad things but it also makes them feel that doing what they did is right, or at least justified.

That is what is so enraging. You can make the case that this is at least selfishness, but its not one that is a judgment on a person’s character in the traditional sense. It is a deeper and more embedded selfishness, one dressed up as normal behaviour because our roads teach it every day. Drivers are encouraged, in subtle and obvious ways, to see the road as theirs to move through. If a road closes, people ask how they can get around it. If someone is hit, injured, or endangered, the question too often becomes how long will this take and can I get through, with not how that person is being a secondary question.

That moral inversion is not accidental. It is built into the way we design roads, talk about traffic, and assess inconvenience. We speak about keeping traffic moving as though it is a public good above almost all others. Congestion is framed as a social ill. Against that backdrop, empathy is a fragile thing.

I do not want to exaggerate what I saw, but neither do I want to soften it. There were drivers who were prepared to continue inching through a collision scene while a badly injured person lay in front of them. There were people who, even when confronted by someone trying to stop them for reasons that should have been blindingly obvious, still acted as if the unwritten rules of the priority of traffic ought to prevail.

This is what motonormativity does. An obvious cruel act is easy to point at and judge. More often it produces a deadening of moral attention. It trains people to keep looking ahead to their own destination, their own schedule, their own lane position, their own right of way. It does not necessarily make people evil. It makes them casual in the presence of risk to others, and impatient around vulnerability.

It is such vulnerability that, in the scene of a collision, is hard to ignore. It’s not an abstract risk. It’s a man screaming in pain in the road. That is the thing the insulated logic of car culture tries to hide. Behind a windscreen, with the engine running and the route in mind, it is all too easy to experience the world as a set of moving and stationary impediments. The car cocoons us. controlling temperature, sound, speed, music, comfort, direction. It can turn public space into private bubble. But outside that bubble are people whose vulnerability does not vanish because your trip to you.

What I felt this morning was anger, yes, but underneath it was something like grief for the quality of public life that we lose when this way of thinking becomes normal. Road traffic collisions show if our moral core is able to overcome motonormativity. Faced with sudden harm, who are we? Do we slow down and help? Do we step back and give space? Do we act with care? Or do we press on, privately resent the disruption?

The answer, today, was mixed. That is partly why it has stayed with me.

I saw people who were clearly in shock. That is completely understandable, as these events are frightening and disorienting. Not everyone knows what to do, nor are they equipped to take practical action. I do not judge that. We are human, and emergencies are hard. But there is a world of difference between being overwhelmed by what you have witnessed and being annoyed that somebody else’s trauma is slowing your commute. One is a human reaction to something awful. The other speaks to whether your moral core can see past the world shown to you by your windscreen.

The people who stopped to help deserve more than a passing mention. They were strangers. Most did not know the injured rider, as far as I could tell. They had no special duty to him beyond the duty we all owe one another as fellow human beings. Yet they stopped. They cared. They stayed - after all, half of the effort of being there for someone is physically being there. There was no audience. No applause, nor reward. Just people recognising suffering and refusing to walk away from it.

That matters. It matters more than I can say, because if all I had seen this morning was indifference and aggression, I think I would feel worse than angry. I would feel despair, but I don’t. Anger? Certainly, and disgust at the conduct of some drivers. But I also feel that decency is still there. It may not always be the most obvious thing. But if you look, it is there.

The reason I keep returning to motonormativity is precisely because I do not think this was simply about a handful of unusually selfish people. I think it revealed something more widespread and more ordinary. Too many people are accustomed to seeing delays as personal affronts. They have learned, through habit and infrastructure and culture, to put the needs of traffic above the needs of people.

If we are serious about tackling that, we need more than pleas for individual kindness - we need a cultural shift. We need to rehumanise what roads are for and who they are for. Roads run through communities. They connect homes, schools, shops, villages, workplaces, and lives. They are not just conduits for moving vehicles. They are shared spaces where the first principles should be safety, caring, and fostering a sense of community.

That means changing how we talk. It means refusing to treat injury and death on the roads as an inevitability to manage. This means questioning assumptions that put vehicle speed and convenience first. It also means recognising that impatience behind the wheel is not a harmless personality trait when it shapes behaviour around vulnerable people.

It also means changing how we respond in the moment. If you come upon a crash scene, your first instinct should be to slow down, stop if safe and appropriate, follow directions, and understand that your inconvenience is trivial compared with somebody else’s injury. That should be obvious. Yet clearly, for too many people, it is not. We need to say it anyway. We need to say that trying to squeeze through a live collision scene is dangerous and stupid. That doing this is a moral failing, even if you are not a bad person.

I keep thinking about how closely the drivers in those vehicles came to making the whole thing worse. Inches. Literal inches between a person already grievously hurt and vehicles still trying to pass. Inches between help and further harm. It should never have come to that. The fact that it did should trouble all of us, especially those who care about road safety, transport policy, and the broader culture that surrounds car use.

And yet, for all that anger, I do not want to end on a bad note because that would not be true to what I witnessed either. I also saw courage, compassion, and calm. There were strangers who did not know each other and certainly did not plan to spend their morning together, but who became a temporary community because somebody was hurt and needed help. In the middle of noise and confusion, they chose to do the right thing.

That choice matters because it reminds us that motonormativity is powerful, but it is not total. People can resist it. They can step out of the logic of urgency and entitlement. They can remember, all at once, that a road is not simply a route but a place where human beings can suffer and where other human beings can decide to care. They can refuse the thought that says keep going, find a gap, protect your own progress. They can choose instead to stop.

We had to improvise to block the road because words and gestures were not enough for everyone. That fact still sits heavily with me. It should not be on bystanders to physically create safety because some drivers cannot or will not recognise an obvious emergency. But if there is any consolation in that, it is that once the road was properly blocked, the basic truth of the situation could no longer be bargained with. The road and drivers, however briefly, were forced to acknowledge the gravity of the situation, even if they didn’t like it.

Perhaps that is what we need more broadly. A forcing of acknowledgment. A refusal to let the convenience of driving dominate every moral calculation. A willingness to say that no, your journey is not the most important thing in the world. In times like this, the person lying injured is what matters.

I do not know the motorcyclist. I do not know how he is tonight. I hope that he is receiving the care he needs and that he recovers well from whatever injuries he suffered. I know only what I saw and what it showed me. It showed me how quickly some people will dehumanise others when their own passage is interrupted. It showed me how deeply our transport culture can train selfishness into ordinary behaviour. It showed me the everyday brutality hidden inside the phrase keeping traffic moving.

But it also showed me something else. It showed me that strangers will still stop. They will kneel beside someone in pain. They will absorb shock and act anyway. They will put compassion ahead of convenience. They will form, in the middle of a road on a chilly spring morning in Cambridgeshire, a fragile line of care against the harder, colder, and uncaring necessity demanded of motonormativity.

That is the part I am choosing to carry forward.

I am angry, and I think I should be. We should be angry that basic decency had to compete with entitlement, and that a person could lie screaming in the road while some drivers still searched for a way through. That anger is not unreasonable. It is a sign that something in us still recognises the difference between what is normal and what has merely been normalised.

And along with anger, I am holding onto hope. Hope in the concrete actions of the people who stopped. Strangers who helped because help was needed. Hope in the fact that even amid the worst instincts produced by motonormativity, humanity still shines through.

If we want safer roads, we need better engineering, better enforcement, and better policy. But we also need something more basic. We need to recover the idea that other people are real, that their bodies are fragile, that pain outranks punctuality, and that no one’s hurry justifies an extra ounce of danger at the scene of a crash. We need to challenge motonormativity not only in theory and policy but in the habits of mind that get behind the wheel with us every day.

And if we can do that, if we can strengthen the instinct to stop, to care, to give way to vulnerability rather than demand priority for ourselves, then perhaps mornings like this might reveal something better about us. Not perfection or saintliness. Just a basic, shared refusal to let the convenience of traffic matter more than a human life.

That should not be a high bar. The good news, if there is any, is that some people cleared it without hesitation. They saw suffering and answered it with humanity. For all my anger, that is what gives me hope.

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Towards Safe Mobility: A Unified Transportation Foundation Model enabled by Open-Ended Vision-Language Dataset

TL:DR - This paper introduces an open-source urban traffic vision-language dataset (11.6K VQA pairs) and a new foundation model (UniVLT) designed to reason about safety risks across heterogeneous roadside camera views; the authors position it as a way to bridge autonomous-driving intelligence with city-scale traffic analysis.

Integrating Spatial Heterogeneity and Nonlinear Dynamics for Interpretable Dockless Bike-Sharing Demand Prediction

TL:DR - Using data from Nanjing, the authors build a hybrid GWRBoost model that combines geographically weighted regression with XGBoost to predict dockless bike-sharing demand. The key value is that it links population density, POIs, land use, and proximity to subway access with bike-sharing demand in a way that is both more accurate and more interpretable for urban planners.

Equity-based spatial clustering of unmet DRT demand for fixed-route transit optimization in underserved areas

TL:DR - This is an open-access paper focused on using equity-based spatial clustering to identify unmet demand for demand-responsive transport (DRT) and use that evidence to optimise fixed-route transit in underserved areas—highly relevant if you’re tracking research on equity, accessibility, and network redesign in cities.

Sustainable Parking Allocation for Smart Cities Using Digital Twin and Agentic Optimization

TL:DR - This paper tackles one of the perennial urban transport problems—parking management—by proposing a digital-twin-based framework combined with “agentic” optimisation to allocate parking more efficiently in large cities. In practice, it sits at the intersection of smart-city technology, urban traffic management, and sustainability.

Driver Behavior in Mixed Traffic with Autonomous Vehicles

TL:DR - This open-access review looks at how human-driven, partially automated, and autonomous vehicles interact in mixed traffic, with a focus on adaptation, response, and the behavioural issues that will matter for safety, regulation, and deployment as automation becomes more common on public roads.

😀 Positive News

Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.

The Energy Crisis Has a Two-Wheeled Solution: Making Cycling a Cornerstone of Affordable Transportation

This article frames cycling as a fast, affordable, low-energy response to fuel-price pressure and energy insecurity, which is exactly the kind of near-term, scalable sustainable transport story that tends to get overlooked in favour of bigger-tech stuff.

How we fit new, longer trains into SkyTrain stations built 40 years ago

TransLink published an explainer focused on how it is adapting older SkyTrain stations for longer trains, signalling a practical investment in higher-capacity public transport rather than just incremental service tweaks.

Indian Blackbuck EV expands beyond e-coaches with 9-meter electric city bus VIRO 2X

Hyderabad-based Blackbuck EV launched the VIRO 2X, a 9-metre battery-electric city bus aimed at urban mobility, corporate transport, and premium shuttle services.

💻 Hard Work

This week has mainly been spent researching and preparing for the launch of the Transport Box I mentioned last week. So not much to discuss really.

🎶 Musical Finale

Dead Man’s Curve by Jan & Dean is probably the first major song globally about a road traffic collision. It’s not an easy listen, lets put it that way.

This week has been somewhat of a roller coaster, so I will get to the point and just get on with it.

✔️ It’s Not What You Say, It’s What You Do

I have been writing transport strategy documents for 20 years now. So I like to think that I know a thing or two about them. One of the things that I have learned is that, whenever the Department for Transport (DfT) releases a major strategic document, an entirely predictable ritual takes place:

• When the document goes live commentators, policy analysts, lobbyists, and industry professionals open the file and immediately hit Ctrl+F.

• They look for their specific area of interest. Popular search terms likely include “active travel,” “rail,” “buses,” and much more. They also look for their specific pet projects and ideas.

• They might look at the financial commitments

• Based on that, they brand the strategy a success or a failure.

This is the wrong way to look at any strategy document.

When I looked at Network North when it was published, I posed four questions which, in my mind, identify whether the strategy is a good one or not. I said the following:

With the recent publication of the Better Connected strategy, the cycle has once again started. You have probably seen the screeds and opinions on LinkedIn, so I won’t repeat them here. To me this is flawed, and as mad as it sounds, you don’t judge a strategy solely by its content, but by how it sets up an organisation to deliver.

After reading the document countless times on trains, and even getting the excellent NotebookLM to generate a podcast discussing it (if you want to hear two Californians discuss any matter you have material for, its good fun), I have come to the conclusion that this is a good strategy. Not because its promises billions in active travel and rail, and cancels road building plans (it doesn’t), but because - for the first time in decades - it sets out how transport public policy will be delivered in the UK. Something well overdue and long welcome.

To me, the most important two paragraphs of the whole document can be found in the introduction. They are:

This indicates to me a fundamental shift in how transport policy is delivered, with the DfT shifting from direction (i.e. telling people what to do) to enabling (i.e. supporting others to deliver within an overall framework). While not going as far as I would like, the strategy is shifting from the highly centralised model of Whitehall management and replaces it with more of a distributed hierarchy of action. This shift relies heavily on the principle of subsidiarity—ensuring that interventions are managed and delivered by the smallest, lowest, or least centralised competent authority.

The DfT is stepping back from dictating local projects to focus on enabling others to get on with the work. A notable example here is how the Combined Authorities are taking centre stage in this strategy, and are given significantly more of a role as the main means of delivery. Instead of forcing regions to compete against one another in resource-draining bidding wars for fragmented pots of money, Combined Authorities are handed consolidated, multi-year funding blocks.

This approach is heavily supported by national research. For example, the Institute for Government’s comprehensive report, Net zero and devolution, stresses that without giving mayors and Combined Authorities total strategic oversight of transport and regional budgets, spatial planning for sustainable growth is impossible. Better Connected formalizes this vital transfer of power.

In this new way of delivering ecosystem, national bodies like GBR and National Highways are repositioned. They are no longer expected to operate in silos, ignoring how their networks interact with local streets. Their role is elevated to providing overarching strategic direction, national safety standards, and long-term capital planning for freight paths and intercity connections. Crucially, they are legally required to integrate their strategic hubs with the local networks managed by Combined and Local Authorities.

You might be thinking that this sounds like technocractic mumbo-jumbo that is not in any way relevant. But I have seen the most perfectly-crafted and brilliant strategies come undone because they don’t deliver. For decades, strategies have functioned as aspirational wishlists, while remaining woefully light on the mechanics of implementation. When transport strategies focus exclusively on content (the “what”), they neglect the machinery required to make those things happen (the “how”).

So, is this a good strategy? I reviewed it against my four rules, and was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

Rule 1: A good transport strategy either sets a clear vision for the future it wants to achieve, or clearly sets out how it will achieve a wider shared vision.

Better Connected strikes this with a direct hit. It’s a very good start. And it does this by realising that transport is a derived demand. It is an enabler, not an end in itself.

Accordingly, instead of setting a siloed vision focused purely on transport metrics, the strategy outlines how the DfT will serve a wider shared vision of spatial regeneration and economic equality. By linking transport appraisal to Local Plans and Growth Plans, Better Connected acknowledges that building a successful network is tied to where we place homes, hospitals, and commercial areas.

Siloed departmental visions inevitably fail the communities they are meant to serve. By setting a mandate that transport planning must happen in lockstep with spatial planning, the strategy ensures that new housing developments will not be built as isolated islands entirely dependent on the private car. Or it at least reduces the risk of it.

Rule 2: A good transport strategy is based upon sound evidence and good judgement that is clearly auditable.

This test is passed as well, just about. This is one that Network North failed with flying colours, so its good to see a return to form here.

This is not just about data, incidentally. Its about having the processes for evaluating that data being transparent, rigorously tested, and easily auditable by external stakeholders. Better Connected does something strange. It does embed, or at least make reference to, evidence throughout the document. There is a supporting evidence pack, an analysis of the call for ideas, and an analysis of the policy engagement, but they don’t really go beyond the “this is what is happening stage” when good evidence collection should answer the question of “why this is important.”

You could argue this is being pendantic. But personally I favour an approach that deep dives into specific issues alongside providing a general commentary on the current state of play. That gives the potential for better policy.

But then the document does something I have not seen a transport strategy do. It commits to being evidence-led and opening up assessment and evaluation in the future. For too long, transport appraisal in the UK has relied on opaque, top-down forecasting models that prioritise easily monetisable metrics (like time saved for business travelers) while struggling to properly quantify the immense societal value of active travel, environmental restoration, or community cohesion.

Better Connected moves towards dynamic, open-source, and data-driven appraisal. It demands that transport interventions be judged on actual, measurable outcomes rather than the forecasts used to secure initial funding.

I await the see the outcomes of this in the future. I am not convinced that open data inherently leads to better decisions - just ones that are auditable and therefore theoretically better. This is something to watch in the future.

Rule 3: A good transport strategy has a sense of wider ownership, ideally evidenced by support for its outcomes by critical stakeholders.

I am not a fan of strategies written in Whitehall, aimed at a Whitehall audience (though plays with mentioning elsewhere and being a wider strategy), and delivered by Whitehall. Better Connected is a welcome change from that.

It has a structural emphasis on “Partnership,” and this is where you start to see this document be very different to other transport strategies. It moves DfT away from dictation of priorities into a delivery partner that trusts local ecosystems to understand their own specific needs.

Too often I find the word “capacity building” to be just throwing money at temporary staff resource to plug a delivery gap. But this strategy does soemthing different. Its about those skills, but also mentions simpler, more accessible and consistent funding to give authorities and local communities the chance to actually build capacity.

By doing this, local authorities are finally freed from the exhausting, resource-draining process of bidding into fragmented funding. It also allows smaller, highly specialized entities to actively participate in the design and delivery of transport systems. SMEs operating in transport planning, companies offering specialized data analysis, and grassroots campaigning organisations often hold the most relevant knowledge of what places actually need to make cycling safe or make a bus route viable.

Rule 4: A good transport strategy should have a clear roadmap to the future it seeks to achieve that is plausible, and ideally funded.

It is on this fourth rule where the strategy is probably its weakest - barely scraping a pass.

If you go looking in the strategy for something entitled “roadmap” or a clear visual showing what progress will be like, you will be disappointed. But even actual maps, with no scale and with no concept of where North is, can still provide useful direction.

From my reading of the document, the roadmap of the strategy can be broken down into the following phases of work to be led by DfT:

• Phase 1: Silo Dismantling: Restructure DfT directorates from mode-specific siloes (e.g. Roads Directorate) into integrated, place-based, and outcome-driven delivery units focused on holistic journeys.

• Phase 2: Appraisal Reform: Overhaul the central transport appraisal frameworks to prioritise spatial integration, carbon reduction, and public health, moving away from simple monetised time-savings for drivers.

• Phase 3: Procurement Overhaul: Establish direct transport-related research and development grants (both for exploratory research and wider programmes) explicitly tailored for small businesses and researchers.

• Phase 4: Devolution: Issue devolved powers and funding, primarily to Combined Authorities, Local Transport and Local Highways Authorities. Only issue direction where essential to do so.

• Phase 5: Consolidated Funding: Replace fragmented, ring-fenced modal funding pots with consolidated block grants for Combined Authorities, allowing them to flexibly fund integrated networks.

In reality, all of these phases are taking place at the same time. Appraisal reform is taking place right now, the Devolution Bill is making its way through Parliament, and plans are afoot for consolidated funding.

But where this strategy excels is that it presents these changes as part of a cohesive whole. It argues that structural change is needed as well as the schemes and initiatives, otherwise the strategy will fail. Outside of a few mentions of local powers, I have never seen this before in a national transport strategy, and its a recognition that is long overdue.

So, where does this leave us? Allow me to share a few more final thoughts on this document.

It is entirely inevitable that highly passionate advocates for specific modes of transport will continue to scrutinise this document and declare that it falls short. These frustrations are understandable. After years of underinvestment and fragmented policy, the desire for massive, immediate, and explicit commitments is strong.

However, we must state this clearly, forcefully, and unequivocally: the institutional realignment of the DfT is a resoundingly good thing, regardless of what the strategy explicitly says on public transport and active travel today.

Why? Its because of the one thing that any strategy should be judged upon - it’s delivery. We cannot judge a strategy as good or successful now. We will only be able to judge that in five years time once there is actually some action, and we can judge the results of it.

But setting yourself up for delivery is the first step. And for the first time in any transport strategy I have ever seen, Better Connected takes that step.

Should the DfT be structurally optimised for execution rather than just policy announcement, the downstream effects could be transformative:

• For Active Travel: When local leaders are empowered with flexible funding, they have the agility to integrate cycle networks into broader high-street regeneration projects.

• For Public Transport: When the planning system is fundamentally altered so that new housing developments focus on access and not just on mitigating impacts, public transport ridership is baked into the community from day one.

• For Integrated Journeys: When the DfT supports the boring backend work of standardising digital tap-and-go technology, it seamlessly integrates local transport services with intercity rail networks.

If the machinery of government is broken, the policy content does not matter. The promises are simply air. By using Better Connected to systematically dismantle the silos and fix the machinery, the government has created an environment where good transport policy can actually survive and thrive.

Anyone who reads the document and gets depressed that your particular policy priority is not there, don’t worry. It should not be read as a promise to spend billions more on active travel or cancelling the roads programme. It is a declaration of institutional reform. That is far more transformative than you realise it is.

We should welcome the fact that we finally have a national strategy focused on the unglamorous, deeply complex, ayet highly effective reality of getting things done. As much as it doesn’t make sense, don’t judge a strategy by words on the page. Judge it by how it is setting the foundations for delivery.

For the first time in a long time, I am excited about what the future could hold.

👩‍🎓 Latest Research

The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Parameterized Reinforcement Learning with Route Guidance for Controlling Urban Road Traffic Networks

TL:DR - This paper develops a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for urban traffic control that integrates route guidance with perimeter control strategies. It addresses limitations of traditional macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) approaches by handling incomplete system knowledge and dynamic traffic conditions. The findings show improved network efficiency and congestion mitigation, highlighting RL as a scalable next-generation traffic management technology—particularly relevant for smart cities and AI-enabled transport systems.

Conference air travel’s relevance and ways to reduce it

TL:DR - This article examines the environmental impact of academic air travel and evaluates alternatives such as virtual conferencing and modal substitution. It demonstrates that reducing conference-related flights could significantly cut emissions while maintaining knowledge exchange. The study situates transport demand within broader climate policy debates, showing how behavioural and institutional changes in travel practices can contribute to decarbonisation.

Spatial transferability of pedestrian trip generation models

TL:DR - This paper evaluates how well pedestrian trip generation models perform when applied across different spatial contexts. It finds that model transferability is limited without calibration, due to variations in land use, demographics, and built environment characteristics. The research contributes to transport planning practice by highlighting the need for context-sensitive modelling approaches, particularly for active travel forecasting and urban design integration.

Exploring the focus and gaps in mobility justice-related surveys: A scoping review approach

TL:DR - This review synthesises how mobility justice is currently measured in transport research, identifying gaps in capturing equity, accessibility, and inclusion. It finds that many surveys underrepresent vulnerable populations and overlook qualitative dimensions of mobility disadvantage. The paper calls for more comprehensive frameworks that integrate social equity into transport planning and policy evaluation.

Navigating the future of transport infrastructure and governance

TL:DR - This editorial synthesises interdisciplinary research on sustainable mobility transitions, focusing on governance, institutions, and public acceptance. It argues that transport transformation is not purely technological but deeply political and societal, requiring coordination across energy systems, infrastructure planning, and stakeholder engagement. The paper frames transport as central to broader sustainability transitions.

😀 Positive News

Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.

New rail station reconnects communities

A new £39.5m station at Charfield is under construction, restoring rail access after decades and linking to Bristol, Gloucester, and beyond. The scheme includes cycle parking, bus integration, and pedestrian access, aiming to reduce car dependency and improve regional connectivity.

Better road crossings, lighting and greenery for Wandsworth Town Centre

A town centre scheme will deliver safer crossings, improved lighting, and more greenery, enhancing walkability and urban biodiversity. This reflects a broader push toward people-first street design and healthier public spaces.

Bath starts work on new city-centre active travel route

Construction is starting on a walking, wheeling and cycling corridor connecting key parts of Bath. The project strengthens active travel networks and integrates with existing infrastructure to encourage modal shift.

Harlow completes phase one of sustainable transport corridor

The first phase of a major scheme has been completed, delivering new bus priority, walking/cycling links, public spaces, and greenery. It’s part of a wider network connecting neighbourhoods to jobs and rail stations.

“Cardiff Crossrail” moves into construction phase

A new tram-train system linking Cardiff Central to Cardiff Bay is entering construction. This is a transformational public transport project designed to boost low-carbon travel and urban regeneration.

💻 Hard Work

Last Sunday was the best day of work I have had for a long while. I joined the UK Unplugged team for the launch of the Transport Merseyside box in Birkenhead on Merseyside. It was an amazing day, where we did activities with kids focussed on transport, using the brilliant transport box Diana Powell and her team have created.

I have never been asked so many questions about trains and street lights in my entire life!

A massive well done to Diana, Joanna, Meg, Mei, Gracia, Tom, Jo, and Molly who made this all happen.

Then, on Wednesday, I attended a Community E-bike event at WomenZone in Bradford. This is part of engagement being undertaken to develop a Transport Strategy for Bradford. My colleagues Jas and Sofia were the stars of the show, as they spent all morning talking to women about their experiences of the transport system and the issues that they face.

By actually meeting with people and engaging on their terms, you learn far more about these kinds of things.

🎶 Musical Finale

Another album that I listened to in the car this week was All Hope Is Gone by Slipknot. The main single from this album was Psychosocial, which is postively pop-like by Slipknot standards. Whereas your usual Slipknot song hits you with the force of a freight train, this is more of an old school rock song. Again, by Slipknot standards.

This week, something that I have been working on in the evenings at weekends has finally become public. Forest City is a radical plan for a new city to the East of Cambridge, and I was tasked with - along with others who do not wish to be named - devising what a transport system for a city of 1 million people would look like. With nature at its heart.

No pressure there. But in doing so, it has made me reflect on what enabling radical change means. And what it shows that what we consider to be radical now may not be enough.

Imagine, for a moment, standing in the middle of a vast, quiet field on the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk border. The wind is rustling through the hawthorn hedgerows, a few rooks are circling overhead, and beneath your boots is nothing but dry earth, chalk, and grass. Now, close your eyes and try to overlay a thriving, breathing city of a million people onto that landscape. I’m not talking a modern city of a similar size like Sheffield. I am talking about a highly connected and nature-friendly city.

As a transport professional, being handed a blank canvas to design such a place is a dream. I grew up playing world-building games like Sim City and Civilization. Doing that kind of thing (minus the alien attacks and “Nuclear Ghandi”) sounds like something most of us will never get to experience.

We are so painfully accustomed to retrofitting—spending years trying to squeeze a barely functional bus lane into a medieval street pattern, or fighting tooth and nail in planning committees to carve a sliver of safe cycling space out of an arterial road that is already choking with congestion. The opportunity to start from absolute scratch, to design the systems of a brand-new city before a single spade hits the dirt, is a once-in-a-century privilege.

I got that chance with Forest City. I got to work with a lot of brilliant, inspiring people to think about what such a city could look like. And write a report on it, which you can now read online.

This experience showed me something I did not expect it to. While it is a dream, it is also absolutely terrifying.

With that blank canvas comes a crushing weight of professional and moral responsibility. The questions start immediately, echoing in your head during site visits and every late-night drafting session. How do you actually envision something completely new? What is the process of breaking away from a century of ingrained ways of doing things?

And, most daunting of all, you eventually hit a realisation you never thought about in a million year: What we currently think of as “good” in sustainable transport is simply not going to be enough.

When transport professionals sit down to design a sustainable development, we usually look to the acknowledged gold standards. We look at the cycling infrastructure of Copenhagen, the Dutch public transport system, or the car-lite developments of Vauban in Freiburg or Houten in the Netherlands. We point to them and say, “That is what we want. That is the pinnacle.”

But when you are staring at a blank canvas with the remit to build a nature-friendly city for a million people in the middle of a climate emergency, the realisation hits. Those cities are brilliant, yes. But they are essentially 20th-century cities that have been exquisitely retrofitted for the 21st century. They still accommodate the private car, even if they heavily restrict it. For example, even in Copenhagen - the poster child of sustainable transport - 36% of all trips are still made by car.

Even the most radically pro-sustainable professionals today suffer from a failure of ultimate imagination. We have a deep-seated, almost subconscious urge to “balance” the network, or to compromise to get good through. I too am guilty of this. I have sat in rooms with brilliant active travel professionals who will design a very good segregated cycle track, but then over-engineering the junctions “just in case” the traffic models are right and the cars come flooding back. We might advocate for car-free neighbourhoods, but we will still build colossal multi-storey car parks on the fringes. We effectively just displace the carbon and the spatial dominance of the car, rather than eliminating it.

For Forest City, we have to look at the ‘best in class’ and tell ourselves that their achievements are not our ceiling. They are our baseline.

We are terrified of getting it wrong, so we build the road capacity for 50% private car use as a backup plan to our 80% sustainable transport target. But infrastructure dictates behaviour. If you build the contingency, you ensure the failure of the vision. If driving a private car across the city is accommodated as a fallback, people will fall back on it.

To break free from the trap of “good enough,” we have to abandon the entire paradigm of traditional transport planning. I have written at length about ‘Predict and Provide.’ Even modern sustainable transport planning often falls into the trap of simply trying to mitigate damage. We try to make the bad things slightly less bad. We propose electric cars to reduce tailpipe emissions, ignoring the embodied carbon, the tyre particulate pollution, and the spatial inequity of traffic jams.

For a city of the future, we have to pivot to a concept. In Forest City, we call Symbiotic Mobility.

Symbiotic mobility is the radical idea that a transport network should not just mitigate its damage to the environment and society. It should actively heal and enhance both. In a traditional setup, transport is a parasite. It eats up land, severs communities, and creates runoff that pollutes local waterways. Symbiotic Mobility asks: what if the transport network was a restorative force?

Symbiotic Mobility is a vision‑led transport system designed to simultaneously support:

• Human wellbeing and social inclusion

• Economic productivity, and

• Ecological recovery

At its heart are three core performance indicators that define success:

1. More than 80% of all trips by sustainable modes
   Walking, wheeling, cycling and public transport become the most convenient and attractive choices.

2. Greater than 30% Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)
   Transport corridors double as wildlife corridors through green bridges, verge management, SuDS, and lighting control.

3. Less than 10% of residents at risk of Transport‑Related Social Exclusion (TRSE)
   Accessibility to jobs, health, education and community life without car

These are underpinned by 8 design principles.

Modal Hierarchy

Streets and networks are designed to prioritise pedestrians, wheelers, cyclists and public transport, with private vehicles accommodated but no longer dominant. This hierarchy directly shapes street layouts, route directness and junction design so that sustainable modes are the easiest and most convenient ways to travel.

Infrastructure as a Platform

Transport infrastructure is treated as an integrated physical‑digital platform that can host multiple services and evolve over time. Open standards, connectivity and digital tools are embedded from the outset to actively manage demand and support innovation, replacing predict‑and‑provide planning with decide‑and‑provide delivery.

The Whole Journey

The transport system is designed around complete door‑to‑door journeys, ensuring that accessibility, safety and affordability are addressed at every stage. Universal physical design is combined with digital personalisation so that all people, including the most vulnerable, can travel confidently without needing a car.

Give Nature Space

Transport corridors are planned to avoid, reconnect and enhance natural habitats rather than fragment them. Where infrastructure is required, it is designed to function as part of a wider ecological network that delivers biodiversity net gain alongside mobility.

Building for 150 Years

Infrastructure is designed for long‑term resilience by prioritising adaptability, modularity and climate robustness over short‑term optimisation. This ensures the transport system can respond to technological change, environmental pressures and evolving travel patterns without repeated reconstruction.

Reduce Whole‑Life Carbon

Decisions are based on total lifecycle carbon, including the embodied emissions of construction as well as operational impacts. Carbon pricing, material transparency and low‑carbon design are used to ensure that building the system does not undermine long‑term net‑zero goals.

Freight as an Economic Engine

Freight is planned as essential urban infrastructure, not an afterthought, with logistics integrated into the city’s spatial and transport structure. A tiered consolidation approach enables efficient goods movement while minimising pollution, congestion and conflict on local streets.

Healthy and Happy Lives

Transport investment is explicitly linked to improving physical health, mental wellbeing and social connection, not just movement efficiency. The system is judged by how it supports daily activity, clean air, attractive public space and access to opportunity for all residents.

This all sounds utopian. It sounds unachievable. And that is exactly where the professional dread creeps in, and where the necessity for faith begins.

This is the crucible of the entire project. At a certain point, after you have argued with the modellers and stared at the masterplan until your eyes blur, you realise a fundamental truth about planning for an unprecedented future: certainty is a myth.

The models, the economic appraisals, the standard operating procedures that govern our profession—they are all inherently conservative. They look backwards at how people behaved in flawed, car-dominated systems to predict how they will behave in the future. They cannot compute a paradigm shift. They cannot model a cultural revolution (ok, they can, its just not in its nature). To actually deliver a vision that surpasses “good enough” and achieves Symbiotic Mobility, you have to do something that professionals are trained never to do.

You have to take a profound leap of faith.

As transport planners, we are conditioned by the state and by the industry to mitigate risk, and play it safe. We love our contingencies, and it feels natural to be conservative, and not upset the apple cart. But Symbiotic Mobility demands that we step away from the ledge without a parachute. It asks us to take a monumental leap of faith in human adaptability.

We have to genuinely believe that if we build an environment that is intuitively beautiful, inherently safe, and seamlessly efficient, human behaviour will naturally and eagerly align with it. It is the belief that people do not inherently love sitting in gridlocked traffic, paying extortionate running costs, and breathing polluted air; they simply do what the infrastructure dictates is the easiest, safest way to get to work or drop the kids at school.

Taking this leap means sitting in a room with some highly-sceptical fellow professionals, looking them in the eye, and saying, “No, we are not keeping a wide corridor of land for a future road expansion just in case the public transport system fails. We are giving that land to a biodiversity corridor permanently.”

It means trusting that culture will shift if the environment facilitates it. It is trusting the future residents of Forest City to embrace walking, wheeling, and public transport not out of environmental martyrdom or forced coercion, but because it is objectively the most joyful, logical, and dignified way to navigate their home.

It is an act of supreme vulnerability. It is terrifying because if you are wrong, the city grinds to a halt. But if you don’t take the leap, the city is doomed to repeat the carbon-heavy failures of the 20th century before the first brick is even laid.

But taking a leap of faith as a professional does not mean operating on blind, niave hope. You have to anchor that faith in rigorous evidence. You have to look at the academic literature from reputable bodies, both nationally and globally, and use it as a foundational bedrock to justify the radical departure from the norm.

First, you have to confront the stakeholders with the brutal climate reality. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change) makes it unequivocally clear in its chapter on transport. Electric vehicles go a long way, but cannot do all of the lifting. The embodied carbon in the vehicles, alongside the vast infrastructure required to support mass private car ownership, will obliterate our remaining carbon budgets. We need spatial planning that reduces the need to travel long distances, and we require massive shifts to active and public transport. You point to this global consensus and say, “If we build a car-centric city today, or even a ‘compromised’ sustainable city, we are knowingly locking in carbon emissions that violate international treaties. The status quo is scientifically indefensible.”

Then, you address the public health crisis. You bring in direct reports from the World Health Organisation, such as their comprehensive guidelines on Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep, which highlight the public health burden of inactivity. You pair this with the staggering local costs of air and noise pollution. Building a city that implicitly forces people into sedentary, isolated metal boxes is practically engineering a public health hazard by design.

Crucially, to justify the radical shift away from private vehicle dominance, you have to tackle the underlying psychology that permeates all of us. The groundbreaking work on ‘Motornormativity’ by Ian Walker and colleagues, detailed in their paper “Motornomativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard”, is essential here. This research perfectly articulates how society has developed a massive, culturally ingrained blind spot to the spatial inequities, dangers, and environmental harms of the private car. When people ask, “Why are you being so radically anti-car?”, you say you are simply trying to design a system that corrects a dangerous, century-old societal bias that harms our most vulnerable citizens.

And finally, you have to talk about cold, hard economics and spatial efficiency. You point to foundational reports from the Urban Transport Group, like “The place to be: How transit oriented development can support good growth in the city regions”. You show the undeniable data that sprawling, car-dependent developments are financially unsustainable for local authorities to maintain. Conversely, dense, transit-oriented places generate higher regional productivity, vastly better retail footfall, and fundamentally improved social mobility.

Thinking about delivering something as radically different as Symbiotic Mobility in Forest City is a daily, exhausting rollercoaster of optimism and professional despair.

The existing practices will push back. The status quo will fight for its life, because there are billions of pounds tied up in the business of pouring asphalt and building sprawling, isolated housing estates. The temptation to water down the ambition, to put the safety nets back in, and to compromise just to get a spade in the ground, will be immense. A good many people may use their cars for a very good reason. But that is not a reason to opposed radical, positive change.

But then you go back to that empty field in Cambridgeshire. You look at the academic evidence staring you in the face. You look at the climate data, the health statistics, and the sheer spatial inequality of our current transport systems.

You realise that as professionals entrusted with the future, we do not have the luxury of giving in to the status quo anymore. We don’t even have the luxury of settling for the current ‘best in class’. The era of “good enough” sustainable transport simply won’t survive the realities of the challenges we as a society face in the next fifty years.

Envisioning a truly new city is an act of radical hope. It requires the humility to accept that our past practices have caused immense harm, but the audacity to believe that we can engineer our way into a better, fairer, and greener future. It requires us to fight the exhausting battles in the planning committees, to arm ourselves with evidence, and to relentlessly challenge our own industry to aim much, much higher.

Ultimately, it requires us to close our eyes and take that monumental leap of faith. Because if we can’t be brave enough to get it right on a blank canvas, we don’t stand a chance anywhere else.

😀 Positive News

Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.

Oxford Street pedestrianisation confirmed to proceed

The Mayor of London has approved plans to pedestrianise a central stretch of Oxford Street, with delivery planning now underway and implementation expected to begin later in 2026.

York & North Yorkshire launches £1m active travel fund

A £1 million fund has opened to support local walking, wheeling and cycling schemes, including safer crossings, school streets and local network improvements.

Paris expands car-free school streets programme

Paris is expanding its school-street pedestrianisation programme, adding more car-free zones around schools to improve safety and reduce pollution exposure.

West Yorkshire invests in walking and cycling hubs

Nearly £500k has been allocated to community walking and cycling hubs offering training, repairs and support to encourage active travel uptake.

💻 Hard Work

Last week I went to Shipley. It has a triangular station. It’s really nice there. You should go.

🎶 Musical Finale

While on the way to Shipley, I enjoyed some classic 90s grunge. Ugly Kid Joe’s album America’s Least Wanted is vastly underrated and this was the lead single. It’s a toe-tapper.