London needs a transport shake-up, with cheaper rail prices, e-scooters and new funding systems for TfL
One year into the pandemic and London is on the brink of a transport revolution. For many the only obvious step change has been a retrograde one. Londoners continue to avoid public transport with almost the same zeal with which we once crammed ourselves onto tube carriages.
Driving cars, while not quite back in vogue in the capital, has ticked upwards. Meanwhile our appetite for home deliveries has rocketed, further clogging our roads. But quietly, a new change is afoot.
While drivers seem to thirst for ever larger cars, new advances are making smaller vehicles even more green, safe and affordable. The bicycle, the ultimate green vehicle, is being joined by a growing rank of new vehicles that marry small electric motors and digital tech. E-bikes have quickly been followed by e-scooters.
Other variants will follow fast – if we let them. Both across the UK and in London, authorities have been slow to embrace this “micro-mobility” revolution compared with many European cities. Most new vehicle types are illegal to use here, yet that hasn’t stopped us buying thousands of them.
Early in the pandemic the government fast-tracked new rules to allow towns and cities to trial shared (though not personal) e-scooters. They were on the streets, legally, in some towns within weeks of the change in the law.
In London the change has been more sluggish. But now three firms look set to be allowed to run trials across about a third of London’s boroughs. This is a good thing.
Yes, there will be teething troubles, and concerns about both rider and pedestrian safety which are valid, of course. But international experience points towards a growing acceptance that these new vehicles play a useful role in helping city-dwellers get around in ways that don’t clog the streets, poison our air, or warm the climate, without compromising safety and harmony on our streets and pavements.
The government’s push to explore e-scooters was packaged up with other encouraging moves. It fully backed the cycling surge we saw in the sun of last spring, and was enthusiastic about re-allocating street space to pedestrians too.
But since then this enthusiasm has run dry, and alarmingly the continued freeze on fuel duty is in practice lowering taxes in favour of motorists. And where is the strategic thinking around encouraging us back on to trains and buses? Price hikes here are the last thing we need. Once lockdown is eased we should tempt passengers back with short term discounts, especially for rail and the tube. Eat Out to Help Out should become Back on the Rails.
It won’t be easy of course to return to pre-pandemic levels of crowding on public transport. And this leaves space to add in something new: the case for micro-mobility seems all the more compelling.
Micro-mobility does pose challenges for how we should better manage and fund transport in the capital. It doesn’t have high capital budgets, but it doesn’t always have paying customers either, from TfL’s point of view, like cycling, so risks always being second fiddle amongst London’s transport tsars.
We need new approaches that better suit our evolving demands, and our ever-improving understanding of the downsides of different travel options; congestion, pollution, road safety, affordability…
By the end of the month we’ll reach a third episode of brinkmanship between the government and City Hall on TfL’s budget. New funding plans should include a shakeup of TfL that places managing the component parts of our transport “system” on a par with running passenger services. This would mean infrastructure for and governance of new ways of moving about the city that are small, green and active sitting more equally with the traditional powerhouses within TfL – and the Tube in particular.
We should also be open to new revenue sources and levies to help TfL do their job. This could mean charging all larger vehicles to use the road per mile, replacing the Congestion Charge and ULEZ. Or a doorstep delivery levy to encourage us to pick up parcels from nearby collection points. TfL, City Hall, and the government should drive this revolution, holding, and turning, the wheel, or we risk going backwards, not forwards.