Transport Insights

The transport stories you won't see in the industry-friendly media

Author

Chris Ames

  • Roads minister tells councils not to waste money on prevention

    Could transport ministers’ messaging over local authority road maintenance be any more mixed? They want to tell councils to prioritise preventative maintenance but can’t help going for headlines with talk of “fixing potholes”.

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has issued a press release (with the image below) on the start of new rules for funding in which it claims simultaneously that there is a lot more money and that there might not be a lot more money:

    Councils will face new rules on how they spend funding to fix potholes and maintain local roads, as the government sets out new requirements to ensure taxpayers see real improvements.

    Under the new measures, local highway authorities that fail to demonstrate they are maintaining roads effectively could lose around a third of their £1.6 billion funding for the next year.

    Fixing potholes and maintaining local roads could be a sensible balance of reactive and preventative maintenance until roads minister Simon Lightwood puts his foot in his mouth:

    Drivers deserve smooth, safe journeys and we’re making sure every pound goes straight into fixing roads and tackling potholes, not being spent elsewhere.

    If every pound goes straight into fixing roads and tackling potholes, that leaves no money for preventative maintenance.

    Fortunately, the DfT press release has some quotes from motoring organisations to point out that Lightwood doesn’t know what he is talking about.

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  • Growing very wrong

    The shambles that is National Highways’ replacement replacement tree planting alongside the A14 continues, with the government-owned company still not entirely sure what it is doing.

    The BBC reports:

    National Highways has admitted its “performance on tree planting has not been good enough”, as it looks to put in 50,000 more along the A14 where thousands have died.

    The trees will be planted along the new part of the A-road, between Huntingdon and Cambridge, where many of the 860,000 that were originally put in never grew.

    The government-owned company said after “identifying losses caused by several factors”, it had started “a 50,000 tree trial to test new measures and inform our future planting regime”.

    Vhari Russell, the founder of Creating Nature’s Corridors, welcomed the trial but raised concerns about the trees being planted at the wrong time of year.

    I researched and wrote this piece last year for Transport Action Network, which pointed out that to make way for the £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme, 400,000 trees and shrubs were cleared, but National Highways said it would replant more trees than it had felled.

    However, Sky News revealed in 2023 that three-quarters of the 850,000 saplings planted to replace veteran trees felled for the project had died. This would be around 600,000 dead trees. National Highways said it would replant the trees at a cost of £2.9m.

    The BBC notes that while National Highways said in March 2023 that it would replant 160,000 trees and shrubs, a Cambridgeshire County Council meeting last June heard that sections of the £1.5bn road still looked “like a desert”, leading to local residents planting new trees themselves.

    In its one-year-after Post Opening Project Evaluation for the scheme – published in September 2024, four and a half years after it opened – National Highways said:

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  • The spirit of devolution

    Last week the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) responded to the leaking of the secret “peer review” of its plan for trams by claiming the support of the (now defunct) National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) – but what the NIC actually said does not justify this claim.

    A quick recap: The House magazine has obtained the review by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) into WYCA’s mass transit scheme, which was said both to criticise the authority for pursuing “unrealistic milestones” under a “political agenda” and to show buses to be better value for money than trams.

    As I reported, in response the WYCA doubled down on mayor Tracy Brabin’s highly performative “spades in the ground by 2028” pledge. But I’ve also obtained its full statement, which both asserts the need for more devolution and invokes the support of the NIC over its insistence on the need for trams, rather than buses.

    A spokesperson said:

    Delivery of major infrastructure projects in the UK is too slow, and in the spirit of devolution we want to innovate to deliver mass transit more quickly.

    NISTA’s predecessor body, the National Infrastructure Commission, set out clearly in 2023 that Leeds needs a tram. 

    The second bit is a reference to the Commission’s 2023 Second National Infrastructure Assessment, which does reference the case for trams in Leeds but in a far more cautious way:

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  • Lightwood plums new depths of churlish opacity

    Roads minister Simon Lightwood, who was complicit in hiding the smart motorway evaluation reports and seems to have gone into politics to hide things from the public, has blanked a question from an MP about safety spending under the new road investment strategy (RIS).

    Asked by Helen Morgan how much money is committed to the Safety National Programme and Small Schemes National Programme elements of the RIS, Lightwood said:

    RIS3 included for the first time a set of four National Programmes, which are a new way for National Highways to deliver defined outputs that support RIS3 objectives, where these are not funded in other programmes. Details of the funding for each National Programme will be confirmed in National Highways’ Delivery Plan for 2026-31, which is expected to be published in the summer.

    It’s worth unpicking this to see how evasive Lightwood is being. The RIS, written by his department, is literally a strategy for spending on the strategic road network. Its purpose is to give National Highways a budget and tell it, Parliament and the public how it should be spent.

    Lightwood knows how much is in the budget for the Safety and Small Schemes National Programmes but is simply choosing to hide this.

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  • Is Labour doing a John Terry?

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has – perhaps justifiably – praised councils for doing good things with the bus funding it is giving them, but once again spoiled a good news story with hype.

    On the back of announcing just £3m for six mayoral authorities to progress bus franchising, the DfT has proclaimed:

    Millions of bus passengers across England are benefitting from cheaper fares, new routes and better services as local authorities are putting government funding to work in their communities.

    With the cost-of-living crisis continuing to play a part in people’s everyday lives, local authorities are stepping up to make buses work better for everyone, reducing the burden on households.

    That’s very positive, as is:

    These schemes are all backed by the government, with more than £3 billion invested through the Local Authority Bus Grant between 2026 and 2029 – money that local leaders can spend on the things passengers actually need.

    (Apart from the baffling but seemingly obligatory reference to subsidies being an investment.)

    But is the £3bn really “record” funding, as both the DfT and minister Simon Lightwood claim? There is no evidence in the press release to back this up and I have asked the DfT to justify it.

    The six authorities that are getting half a million quid each are:

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  • Are Brabin’s mass transit plans just spin over substance?

    The senior councillor who called out West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin over her “dishonest” presentation of the secret report into her mass transit plans has renewed his call for it to be published in full and criticised her for engaging in “spin over substance”.

    The statement from Cllr Alan Lamb, leader of the Conservative group on the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA), followed the leaking of the report to The House magazine, although he did not mention it directly.

    Lamb said:

    I still cannot disclose the contents of the Independent Peer Review. But I can say it made material recommendations about governance, the business case and other key matters. We know those findings directly preceded the Government’s decision to delay the programme. That matters because residents were told publicly – with great confidence – that spades would be in the ground in 2028. If there is a gap between public certainty and private evidence, that gap must be addressed openly.

    The “peer review” by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority is reported to have criticised Brabin for focusing on an “unrealistic milestone” of “spades in the ground” by 2028, which it warned could be followed by a significant and costly gap before “the start of actual work”.

    Lamb added:

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  • “Britain’s bridges are crumbling”

    The Telegraph has an article on what it calls a “crisis in British bridges”, focusing on the closure of a couple of Thames crossings but said to be “by no means limited to west London”.

    It’s an important story, but a terrible article. Let’s start with:

    Last summer, the Government spoke of a £1bn Structures Fund to “inject cash into repairing run down bridges”. Slightly worryingly, the statement mentioned that approximately 3,000 bridges nationwide were not fit for 21st-century purpose and that the number of collapses had risen. “A stark reminder of the need for urgent action,” it warned.

    But bridge experts say that not only is the 3,000 figure likely to be on the low side, but £1bn will not be anywhere near enough money to solve the issue – not least because local authorities will have to bid against each other for the money.

    In fact, as I have pointed out before, the £1bn is to be split between the Structures Fund and local road upgrades, so it won’t be anywhere near anywhere near enough money.

    The article also quotes the Department for Transport as saying that “stakeholders” will be surveyed to determine how best to deliver the Structures Fund, when this actually happened two months ago.

    It also cites a 2021 survey by ADEPT/the RAC foundation as the source of the 3,000 figure, when in fact the latest is a 2023 survey published in March 2024.

    It’s on firmer ground (sorry) when it cites RAC Foundation director Steve Gooding:

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  • Committee sets low bar for new transport strategy

    Following publication of the government’s “Better Connected” so-called strategy for integrated transport last week, the Commons Transport Committee is to hold another session in its inquiry into “joined-up journeys”, including asking witnesses whether the strategy sets out a feasible approach to better integration.

    The main aim of the session, led by committee chair Ruth Cadbury, is to probe factors shaping transport users’ behaviour with a number of experts, including behavioural scientists.

    But, according to the committee’s explanation of the context for the inquiry, the problem to be addressed is quite a drastic one, beyond the scope of behavioural science:

    The session comes as Government data shows that most passenger miles travelled in the UK in 2024 did not involve any mode of public transport. One of the reasons advanced for this in evidence to the Committee is that transport systems are often not reliable or convenient enough for people and that in some cases this is due to a lack of integration.  

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  • Should mayors be trusted to build mass transit schemes? Can they?

    Pro-building lobby group Britain Remade is making headlines with its “Give mayors the power to build” campaign, citing Leeds in particular as an example of where a lack of mayoral power is causing British cities to fall behind.

    With West Yorkshire’s mass transit plans firmly in the news, Britain Remade is also running a Leeds Needs Trams campaign, but its latest pitch covers other cities, such as Bristol and Birmingham.

    New analysis by Britain Remade has exposed the scale of the gap between England’s major cities and their European twins. As a result, the campaign group is calling on the Government to give England’s 14 directly elected mayors the powers they need to change this.

    The data, drawn from tram, metro, and light rail systems across Europe, paints a damning picture: English city-regions twinned with well-connected European cities are being systematically left behind. Not because of a lack of ambition from local leaders, but because those leaders are forced to go cap in hand to Westminster for every penny and every planning permission for major infrastructure projects.

    The lobby group doesn’t appear to have published the “new analysis”, other that what is in its (two) press releases, but it highlights clear disparities in the scale of mass transit systems in England and France and Germany.

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  • BBC only tells half the story on Silvertown

    The BBC has an astonishingly poor story about the Silvertown Tunnel a year on, with Transport for London (TfL) claiming that it is reducing congestion elsewhere, based on some very selective data, and with a huge piece of misinformation from the broadcaster,.

    I have obtained (via TfL) the statement on which the BBC report was based and it is a pretty accurate version, with one exception.

    The broadcaster reports:

    One year after the Silvertown Tunnel opened, Transport for London (TfL) said the project had reduced “chronic congestion” and improved journey times.

    New data suggested that drivers who used the neighbouring Victorian-era Blackwall Tunnel saw journey times reduced by more than 10% during weekday peak periods, TfL said.

    So, we only have weekday peak data with a reduction in journey times that doesn’t seem to justify a £2.2bn scheme that will see drivers charged tolls for years to come.

    And that is only one river crossing. Has congestion increased near the new tunnel? David Rowe, director of investment planning at TfL, said:

    We are continuing to monitor the impact of the Silvertown Tunnel both on congestion and the surrounding areas and environment as we pass this important milestone.

    I think that’s a yes.

    Rowe also said:

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