It’s time to depoliticise sustainable transportation

How roads became 'Technical' and bike lanes became 'Political', and what to do about it.

I noticed a common challenge politicians and officers face when they try to promote sustainable transport policies. Namely, arguments for sustainable transport are perceived as political and ideological, whereas arguments for more road space are perceived as technical and rational.

This is a serious issue for sustainability because people tend to support or oppose policies that they perceive as political based on their, well, politics, and not based on facts. There are many reasons why sustainable transport is good for “technical” and “rational” reasons, However, our current set of tools was not designed to show that.

I thought I was onto an original idea. But then I came across a paper by Louise Reardon and Greg Marsden who showed how the UK government depoliticised road building by framing it as a necessary reaction to traffic growth and as an enabler of economic growth, while differing sustainable transport policies to local politics. Both Tory and Labour governments pushed demand reduction measures, such as congestion charging, onto the local government, where voters have a more direct say on such policies. At the same time, road building, under the guise of ‘national infrastructure’ (as if allowing people to walk and cycle safely is not a matter of national significance) was outsourced to technical arms-length bodies and regulated by non-political agencies.

To the untrained eye, it is easy to miss the trick of depoliticisation of road building. It lies in the false premise that a. there is an ever growing need to increase road capacity to enable economic growth, and b. there is an ever growing demand for road space by drivers, and it needs to be accommodated. There is no real symbiosis between road building and economic growth. Proliferation of private cars (and roads) only started in the 50s’, whereas consistent economic growth is a 200 years old phenomena. Japan actively restricted the use of private cars whilst it went through the “Japanese economic miracle”. London grew to be the financial centre of the world in the 19th before cars were invented. The most economically successful cities of the last few decades, NYC, Hong Kong, Singapore are famous for being notoriously bad for drivers. And even if we believe that road building is necessary for growth, and I would say, some road building is necessary, historically, it wasn’t substantiated and tested against alternatives when major road building decisions were made. In addition, traffic growth isn’t something that’s imposed on us and we ought to react to it. Many studies showed that traffic growth responds to road building, with almost a perfect correlation in some cases. That is, a 10% increase in road capacity causes a 10% increase in driven distance.

There is a lot more to say about the depoliticisation of certain transport policies (roads) and the politicisation of others (sustainable transport), but from my perspective, one of the most harmful implications which I witness on a weekly basis is the lack of an analytical toolbox to make the case for sustainable transport.

Roads for the economy, buses for the environment

If you want to justify road building, there are a plethora of analytical tools and concepts to make the case. Readily available traffic models will tell you exactly how many seconds each driver will save with the addition of another 2 meters to a road. These, in turn, will be plugged into spreadsheets and multiplied by the ‘Value of Time’ and spit out a Benefit-cost ratio. This would normally be sufficient to be considered for government funding, and to satisfy the transparency requirement of a democratic process.

For sustainable transport schemes, on the other hand, there are far fewer tools available to demonstrate their benefits in a commonly accepted way. For instance, whilst it is clear that bus priority lanes are beneficial for passengers and for bus operators, there is no common model to quantify these benefits. It’s not a very difficult analytical task, but because it’s not something that the central government is implementing itself on a regular basis, there is no ‘National Highways’ for bus lanes, so the relevant tools aren’t readily available. They are expensive and non-standard.

Here is another example. One of the best ways to improve transport sustainability is by developing denser walkable neighbourhoods. Denser neighbourhoods save time for their residents (or future residents) because they are conducive to the formation of destinations inside them, such as schools, shops and employment. Residents can walk to these places, saving time and money. The development of a dense mixed use area, has the potential to reduce travel time for residents of adjacent neighbourhoods as well. Nevertheless, our existing transport appraisal tools can only handle new transport schemes, but they can’t handle planning policies which could generate the same, or a better outcome (i.e., getting people to where they want to go, faster).

The discrepancy in the availability of tools to ‘make the case’ for different transport interventions means that while road building can be promoted relatively smoothly via technocratic processes, sustainable transport has to rely on volatile political decision making.

Take 15-minute cities, for instance. The idea is that a place should be designed such that most of what we need for our day to day, would be accessible within 15 minutes walking, cycling or public transport. This is about saving time on the road, saving money on a car, and it’s also about improving health. The benefit-cost ratio of 15-minute cities measures could be very high, but it is never part of the debate because no-one has calculated it, for lack of available methodologies, I would argue. So instead of talking about quantified economic benefits, we get an unhelpful debate between greens and conspiracy theorists.

It’s not that road building never faces opposition, including in the political sphere. However, the opposition usually takes the form of either environmental activism or NIMBYism, none of whom argues against the idea that roads are necessary to accommodate traffic growth and enable economic growth. So this debate is not about whether roads are good or not, and whether there are other alternatives that could achieve the same outcome. It assumes that roads are good, but it is questioning how far we should go with it.

When roads are seen as something that promotes the economy and makes us richer, but buses, bike lanes and walkability are perceived as policies that are good for the environment, then clearly roads are going to win most times. On average across the population, being richer is simply higher in the scale of needs. Nevertheless, buses, bike lanes and walkability, in some cases, could be supporting the economy just as well as more roads, and for a lot cheaper.

It’s time to develop the tool box to demonstrate how sustainable transport contributes to the economy just as much, if not more than roads do. This task is greater than what can be achieved in one substack post, but one that I hope to explore further in future posts. Subscribing and commenting would certainly help to know that there is the audience for that!