Questioning transport Infrastructures

There are multiple reasons to have a very robust, well-managed and well-funded public transport system. Clearly, social inequality is a fundamental issue. If you entirely distribute mobility via the market, you’re going to marginalise – or ghettoise – huge swathes of the population. Without their own private vehicles they won’t be able to access labour markets, services and, ultimately, democratic participation. Inhabiting a space together sustains the idea of a democratic public society, while a society that splits people off into the private capsules of their cars often struggles to sustain that idea. Just to be visibly present with other citizens of the city in the same place is important.

However, there are not just a social, political and democratic questions here.
Public transport is also fundamental to the economies of cities. It’s far less costly to move a million people or more by public rather than private transport – in terms of land use, pollution and the time wasted in congestion. A final point is that the degree of public transport in cities relates very closely to the quality of life, the landscape and the atmosphere. Mass car use often helps to trigger more urban sprawl, more rushes to the periphery of the city and more catastrophic problems of air pollution – which is fast becoming a major killer in countries like China and India.

There are very interesting contrasts between these two countries – very different governmental systems and traditions of infrastructure provision, and different ideas of privatisation. As well as full state ownership of national monopolies (as with the national rail system), the French system sustains a lot of large, public-private infrastructure providers, especially in the utilities and water local public transport sectors.  These operate with the state on a basis of very detailed regulations and contracts for whole systems. It can be very successful because it allows you to sustain long-term infrastructure systems as a single whole.

The problem with the British system is that it developed from a very radical ideology of markets during the Thatcherite privatisation era and was obsessed with large varieties of providers all competing for the same uses. Yet anyone who understands how markets work and the geography of infrastructure knows that’s not really tenable for public transport. In many cases, there is poor regulation. Subsidies to keep socially-oriented services can be high but don’t have effective results. The dogma against UK state provision means that often you have the strange situation where UK infrastructure is provided by state infrastructure organisations of non UK states.

There can also be problems of confusion and over-complexity where a the provision fails to cohere as an overall system from the user’s point of view (in terms of information, cross-ticketing, and legibility). Outside London, bus operators compete with each other for the same users and don’t integrate with rail transport. It’s also hard to get the best train information.

With the French system, even where there is private provision, the focus tends, within the constraints of EU competition law,  to emphasise single monopolistic systems that operate in a coherent, planned and legible way – based on social, ecological and urban planning objectives. It’s not just about rates of returns and shareholder demands.

There are huge challenges ahead. Climate change and re-engineering systems to minimise their production of greenhouse gas emissions is one. Then there’s the challenge of austerity and social equality that is often entrenching and deepening in societies. How do mobility and public transport systems interact with that and help to address the increasing sense of marginalisation felt by certain groups – whether they be ethnic, social or demographic groups?

Added to that, the nature of cities is changing and we are now seeing the development of multi-centred or ‘networked’ cities across whole regions. Often, it’s not so easy to deliver transport for these geographies because public transport was originally set up as a radial system of commuting into centres. So there’s a need to build networks and to innovate with technologies for these multi-centred, wide-scale urban regions. It’s a huge challenge because many new peripheral urban environments are quite low density and don’t easily support economical public transport.

More broadly, there’s a need to think about the role of public subsidies – that are increasingly coming under pressure from austerity regimes – without rushing into a knee-jerk, ‘market is God’ paradigm.