To grow the economy we need more trams, and fewer kebabs

Britain’s second-tier cities are being held back by a simple problem, too many people still cannot get across them quickly enough to reach the jobs, customers and opportunities that drive growth.

Ever since the Neolithic era, humans have been willing to spend roughly the same amount of time travelling each day: about one hour out of their twenty-four. It doesn’t matter which culture or time period you look at, whether it is commuting into Delhi or London, or chasing after a woolly mammoth with a pointy stick, the so-called Marchetti’s constant has remained pretty constant. Some people will do more, some less, but the average keeps coming out at around thirty minutes each way.

If you want the economy to grow, as this government is rightly focused on, one of the most important things you can do is make sure more people can get to more of the things that make them productive within that allotted time. That means maximising the number of jobs a worker can reach, the number of businesses competing for a consumer, the number of training opportunities for young people, and the number of chances smart people have to bump into each other and generate good ideas. Economists have longer words to describe all this, but the basic point is that a lot of growth is about making it easier for people to get to stuff.

Planning reform, where this government has made bold and radical changes, obviously supports these agglomeration effects. It helps if homes, jobs and services can be built closer to each other. But cities can only get so big, or so dense, before their roads start seizing up and the traffic makes it too slow to get across them. That is usually where mass transit should come in. If a city is big enough you need to develop a way of moving large numbers of people around quickly.

But that is where Britain has become obscenely bad.

The cost of building tram lines here is wildly out of whack with comparable countries. In Britain, tram projects cost around £87 million on average per mile, rising to over £200 million for some recent schemes. This compares with a European average of around £42 million.

Partly as a consequence, every French town or city with a population of more than 150,000 has some form of mass rapid transit, most commonly a tram. In the UK, only around a quarter of places that size have one. Leeds is now the biggest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system; Birmingham has just a single tram line.

Meanwhile, Tom Forth has calculated that, at peak time, fewer than one million of the three million people living in the Birmingham urban area can reach the city centre within 30 minutes by bus.

SOURCE: TOM FORTH

So, it is no coincidence that one of the defining features of the British economy is how weak our second-tier cities are compared with comparator countries. For all the talk of levelling up, only six UK cities have a higher productivity than the European average. Half of UK cities are among the 25% least productive.

SOURCE: CENTRE FOR CITIES

That is not because places like Bradford, Leeds or Birmingham lack talented people, good universities, or ambitious businesses. They plainly have all of those things. The problem is that we keep expecting them to compete with peer cities abroad while denying them one of the basic bits of kit that successful big cities tend to have.

Which brings us on to what we can do about it. There are five main reasons why we do not have enough trams in the UK. Keep an eye out for the usual cast of characters from Britain’s long running national drama, Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?

1. Environmental regulations

Trams are good for the environment. They reduce car use and therefore emissions. Even compared with electric buses, steel wheels on steel tracks produce fewer particulate emissions than rubber tyres on roads, and so are better for air quality.

And yet, as part of the approval process, we still insist on full environmental assessments of tram schemes. When they tried to add a one-mile extension to the West Midlands Metro, the paperwork ran to 3,201 pages. Laying those pages end to end would get you further than the extension itself.

The picture below shows part of the route covered by that environmental assessment. As you can see, those assessments were clearly essential. We needed to understand the threat posed to the wildflower meadow, the startled badger emerging from behind a Greggs, the possibility that a confused muntjac might bound across Curzon Street. The delicate ecosystem of central Birmingham clearly hung in the balance.

The less facetious point is that if you are laying tracks on roads that already exist or running a tram through an already built-up urban area, you shouldn’t really need to be doing these assessments. At the very least they should be dramatically slimmed down.

2. Gold plating

As with so many things in Britain, we do not just build, but overbuild. As stakeholders pile in it leads to everything being over-specced, overdesigned and overcomplicated.

There are many examples of this happening with tram projects, but the most relevant example is track depth. In the West Midlands, for example, track is laid over around 600mm of concrete, because that’s the standard practice. But other countries do not do this in the same way. In places like Oregon, Strasbourg, Portland and Vienna, projects are often digging to around 300mm. Digging less deeply means lower costs, but it also has another benefit. Which brings us to…

3. Utilities

In the UK, when new track is laid, utility companies get a remarkable amount of say over which pipes and cables under the road must be moved, while the tram promoter gets the pleasure of paying for it.

In other European countries those costs are fairly split. Here, 92.5 per cent of the cost can end up falling on the organisation building the tram. That pushes up costs straight away, but it also creates an incentive for more works to be done than are strictly necessary. If someone else is paying, the definition of essential can become extremely elastic.

And the deeper you dig, the more utilities you hit. The more utilities you hit, the more people appear to explain why something extremely expensive needs moving just to be on the safe side. Martin Fleetwood from UK Tram has put the point well: “when utilities are moved, they [utility companies] often get effectively “new for old”, which is very expensive, and can amount to up to a third of the cost of the track works.”

Changing the codes of practice, rebalancing costs, and taking a more proportionate approach to what actually needs moving would make a big difference.

4. Overcentralisation

If a city wants to build a new tram line, or even extend an existing one, it usually has to go through the Transport and Works Act Order process. That was meant to simplify things when it was introduced in the early 1990s, replacing the need to get a private Act of Parliament for each large transport project. And, on paper at least, it does give promoters some useful powers, like making byelaws, acquiring land where needed, and protecting them against certain legal challenges. But the legislation was mostly written with heavy rail projects in mind. Forcing it onto light rail has made the process a painfully slow and expensive way of asking central government for permission to do something that is local in both purpose and benefit.

A TWAO can take up to four years to get approved and cost millions in legal and consultancy fees. For some schemes, the full journey from idea to delivery can stretch to well over a decade. That is not a serious way to build urban transport.

The below chart, from Create Streets, shows the length of time it took to build 1 mile of tram extension in the West Midlands, compared to 12 miles in Dijon. The results are unsurprisingly depressing.

That is why powers and funding should be devolved. Metro Mayors and local transport authorities should be able to sign off tram projects in their own cities, with a lighter and more proportionate approval process, instead of treating every line like a mini HS2. If a mayor wants to build a tram on streets their own voters use, they should not have to spend years waiting for Whitehall to decide whether they are allowed.

Central government’s objection is that Metro Mayors and local transport authorities do not always have the capacity or technical expertise to take on that role. And, to a point, Whitehall is right. In too many places there simply is not a deep bench of people who have spent years developing tram proposals, navigating approvals and taking schemes from concept to construction. Leeds is the clearest example. The largest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system recently had its project delayed until the end of the next decade, in part because Whitehall doesn’t think they have the institutional machinery needed to move quickly from ambition to delivery.

But that is not an argument for hoarding power as much as it’s a consequence of it. If local areas are denied a clear, timely sign off process and never trusted with real responsibility, they will never build the muscle memory required to deliver these projects. Capability comes from doing, and the only way to rebuild it is to give places the powers, the pipeline and the incentive to get good at this again.

And the history here is hard to ignore. Before the Transport and Works Act came into force in the mid 90s, local authorities were the ones driving tram development. In the years leading up to it, Manchester, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands all brought forward tram plans through locally led legislation. Then, in the final rush before the new regime took hold, Parliament approved the Leeds Supertram Act 1993, the legislation for the Docklands Light Railway extension to Lewisham, and the Croydon Tramlink and Greater Nottingham Light Rapid Transit Acts in 1994. All but one of those schemes ended up getting built.

Since then, central government has occasionally been willing to inefficiently extend lines that already exist. What it has not done is support the creation of any new ones. That’s despite John Prescott promising 25 in his integrated transport strategy at the turn of the century.

Instead of this process, DfT should focus on the things only central government can do. It should try to nudge the timings of projects so we have a constant pipeline, meaning supply chains can develop and costs can come down over time. It should also help create standardised models for tracks and trams that local areas can build from. One reason other countries do this better is not that they have discovered some secret French gene for laying tram track. It is that they build enough of the things for people to get good at it.

And it should second staff from the department into combined authorities to help build the skills needed to develop project plans. We have seen this approach work elsewhere, for example through ATLAS in MHCLG, which provides councils with access to a central pool of expertise on major planning applications.

5. The Department for Transport really doesn’t like trams

At this point I should make clear that I am neither an engineer, nor an environmental consultant, nor a transport planner. I am self-aware enough to realise you should be at least mildly suspicious of my expertise on the challenges facing tram projects. If you have more time, I would strongly recommend the longer report from Create Streets and Britain Remade, who have looked into this in more depth than I am willing to spend the time on, and from whom I have shamelessly borrowed a good number of the examples above.

But the reason I wanted to contribute to the debate is that there has, so far, been too little interest in fixing these challenges.

Part of that is cultural. The DfT takes heavy rail more seriously than light rail. We have hardly covered ourselves in glory there either, hello HS2, but it still carries more status inside the system. More officials work on it, more ministers talk about it, and more political attention flows towards big intercity projects than the less glamorous business of helping people get across large cities. Which is odd, because as set out above, urban mass transit makes a bigger difference to day-to-day life.

Ad man Rory Sutherland has a joke about High Speed 1. He argues that instead of spending £6 billion to cut the London to Paris journey by 41 minutes, you could have hired the world’s top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus, still had roughly £5 billion left over, and ended up with passengers asking for the trains to be slowed down. For an occasional trip to Paris, and ignoring the mix-up over capital and day-to-day spend, he may even have a point. But for the daily commute across a big city, a small number of minutes stack up.

The department is also scarred by tram projects that went wrong, above all Edinburgh, which became such a byword for delay, overspend and chaos that it spawned a full public inquiry. This fear has reached the point where, I’m told, a senior DfT official joked at their leaving drinks that their proudest achievement was making sure no new tram projects were brought forward over their years in the department. A fine record, if your goal is preserving departmental peace and quiet. Less fine if your goal is improving transport in Britain’s cities.

And that, really, is the problem. Too much of Whitehall has stopped asking how we can build these things better, learning from the mistakes of the past, and started congratulating itself for finding ways not to build them at all. Instead, the department has been captured by a type of person who has done untold damage to Britain. I call them the CIBABs, pronounced like kebabs, whose answer to every proposal is, “Can’t it be a bus?”

You can see the appeal of the argument. Buses do not require expensive fixed infrastructure, and they are not tied to a single route. They can adapt to changes in demand, and if one breaks down, the others can easily shuffle around it and carry on.

I am sure people like this have always existed. They were probably the sort asking the Wright brothers what was wrong with travelling at surface level, asking Brunel why the canals were not perfectly adequate already, or asking Henry Ford if he had considered faster horses.

But the evidence is clear. Trams are often better than buses, especially in larger urban areas where capacity, reliability and permanence have a bigger impact. Pretty much everywhere we have put them in, including places where the project itself felt like a disaster at the time, they end up popular, well used, and economically useful.

Trams can also help pay for themselves in a way buses cannot. Developers and investors like them for the same reason everyone else does: they have the reassuring quality of looking as though they might still exist in five years’ time. That pushes up the attractiveness of nearby land, support regeneration, and creates land value uplift that can help fund the infrastructure. Create Streets reports that, in Croydon, the tram is estimated to have increased nearby land values by around 20 per cent, while in Manchester estimates range from 6 to 12 per cent. Buses move people around. Trams can reshape places.

They also do a better job of pulling people out of cars. Studies have found that drivers are six to eight times more likely to switch to trams than to buses. Partly that is because people simply prefer them. In the National Travel Attitudes Study, 34 per cent of respondents said they avoid the bus, compared with just 7 per cent who avoid the tram. That may not feel entirely rational in some economist’s model, but past projects have also demonstrated this difference in practice.

And they are usually just a better service. They are smoother, easier for wheelchair users and others with mobility needs, and, as the chart below shows, usually more reliable too. That means people can actually plan their lives around them.

SOURCE: TOM FORTH

In many places better buses or hybrid systems should absolutely be part of the answer. In my patch in Milton Keynes, we are currently looking at a trackless tram solution as a starting point for improving our public transport. And in fact, the two have a habit of working remarkably well together. Some of the places where buses work best are also places with decent trams, like Nottingham and Manchester.

But the British habit of treating buses as the automatic alternative to trams, regardless of the size or needs of the city in question, is a good example of the low ambition that has infected too much of our infrastructure thinking. Sometimes the answer really is a tram, and the sooner the CIBABs make peace with that, the better.

The good news is that the solutions here are not especially mysterious. We mostly just need to stop making tram projects far harder and more expensive than they need to be.

That means rolling back the environmental assessment process where it has become plainly disproportionate, rebalancing the costs between tram promoters and utility companies, and giving Metro Mayors the power to run their own Transport and Works Act style approvals.

There are two obvious places to start. The first is Coventry Very Light Rail, which is one of the few projects in Britain that has looked at the absurd cost of building stuff here and tried to redesign the problem. Coventry has spent years developing a lighter vehicle and a much shallower track meant for built-up British streets.

The Coventry model uses a track form requiring only around 300mm of dig depth, can be installed over most utilities, and is targeting installation costs of around £10 million per kilometre, with the 2025 city centre demonstration installed in just over eight weeks. That is exactly the kind of project government should be doubling down on if it is serious about bringing costs down and building domestic know how.

Secondly, we should use the New Towns programme as a chance to roll out more of these systems. While we should still be retrofitting big cities, if we are building entirely new places, or major urban extensions, there is even less excuse for a lack of ambition. Installing alongside new greenfield developments is both cheaper and easier. You can lay roads and tracks together, build density around new stops, capture land value uplift, and have fewer existing utilities to contend with.

That is why it is hard not to raise an eyebrow when somewhere like Tempsford, which could eventually have over 100,000 homes, would be built around a few regular bus routes. Rolling out Coventry style light rail in places like that, as they are built out over the coming decades, would be a much more serious signal that we want these communities to be well connected, sustainable and less reliant on the car.

To be fair, there are at least some signs of life coming from DfT. When the integrated transport strategy was released last week, the announcement most people noticed was that Google Maps will finally start showing live bus locations and expected arrival times. While this is genuinely useful, it’s a feature the app has had for 15 years, waiting for us to catch up.

But buried deeper in the detail of the strategy was a commitment to establish a Mass Transit Taskforce, following a recommendation from the New Towns Taskforce. They say it will “assess the wider economic, spatial and social benefits of integrated mass transit systems, and examine the funding, governance and delivery barriers that can impede their development.” That matters far more than the Google Maps headline, but only if the project is done properly.

If it is simply parked inside the DfT, given the department’s longstanding allergy to light rail, there is every chance it ends up as the usual civil service exercise in self-obstruction. It should be run from the Cabinet Office, with enough clout to take on the Treasury, the DfT and the wider tangle of rules and habits that make trams so punishing to deliver. We have already seen the success of this approach with the Fingleton review into nuclear regulations. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones has asked for more of those kinds of cross-government taskforces to be proposed. On this issue, it is exactly what is needed.

If we are serious about growth, we need to get more jobs, homes, training, and opportunity within reach of more people. In big and medium sized cities, that means mass transit. It means trams.

Because if Neolithic man could grasp the value of getting somewhere useful and back in under an hour, it’s slightly embarrassing for twenty first century Britain not to manage the same.