Our discussion of transport has focused on walking, since it is the most vivid illustration of the maxim put forward by Ken Worpole in our last editorial contribution: how you travel is who you are. Those who have responded on this site have helped to restore the sense that we are in fact creatures with legs, designed to move around small but familiar territories, and to feel the ground beneath our feet.
Ben Plowden, director of the Pedestrians Association, reminds us that walking is not just a necessary part of city life. It is the experience that most effectively joins you to the city and the city to you. A city lives through its streets, and their safety, interest, peace and charm are the primary values that urban planners should respect; of course, they dont, as Ben Plowden points out. Nevertheless, thanks to our striding and strolling ancestors, our old cities still contain streets that speak to the walker. Nicola Bairds family safari through her neighbourhood evokes the village character of London a city whose poly-centric structure and facade-lined thoroughfares result from generations of leg-work.
Even working-class Manchester had its charm for the walker, as those who remember Ancoats my fathers birthplace before slum-clearance will recall. But as Jim Perrin reveals, those who walked in the streets of Manchester also walked away from them. And they were lucky to find the Pennine Hills within reach, and to be able to stroll along the country lanes without being run over. Walking, of the kind described by Jim Perrin, has been a fundamental part of the national culture since the Romantics: this Donna Landry makes clear, both in her contribution to this site and in her recent fascinating book, The Invention of the Countryside, which compares the parallel contributions made to the ecology of England by hunting and walking.
A weapon on wheels
This ecology is now under threat. And the principal source of the threat is motor transport and the hypermobility that it encourages. In the Czech lands, as Miroslav Pospisils lyrical description of holidays at home reminds us, car use can still remain only a minor part of a far broader recreational experience. But the trend almost everywhere is for the private car to overwhelm the environment and other forms of travel. Most people, even those forced to choose cars, regret this.
Yet as John Adams shows, attempts to replace the car or to render it superfluous merely increase its hold on the economy, the psyche and the infrastructure of the modern world. It is ironical, indeed, that W.G. Sebald the writer singled out by Ken Worpole for his celebrations of walking, and for his ability to express the experience of walking in a style that is both heartfelt and footfelt was, soon after Ken posted his editorial, killed in a car crash.
There can be hardly a person among our readers who has not lost a friend or relative to the car, and the cost of motor accidents to the economy generally and to the Health Service in particular, is one of the many proofs that the motor industry expands and dominates largely because the damage falls on others.
Never has an industry been so successful at externalising its costs: roads paid for and maintained by the taxpayer; obstacles, regardless of their beauty or amenity, destroyed at public expense; risks covered by the buyers compulsory insurance; damage to the environment ignored entirely; injuries dealt with by the NHS, and deaths attributed uniformly and unthinkingly to the users, rather than the manufacturers, of these dangerous weapons no criminal could have devised a more successful scheme for imposing costs on the public, and living from the profits.
Railways past and present
But is there an alternative? And should we not strive to assess the good that cars have brought to us, in addition to the evil? These are the questions that we shall be considering, as we continue to develop our debate about transport and to invite our readers to contribute from their own experience and thoughts.
Our immediate concern will be the railways, not least because those who are most critical of road transport and the damage that it does to townscape and landscape, are apt to propose rail transport as the alternative. And there is no denying that we in Britain once had an admirable and well-run national rail network: the first in the world. During the nineteenth century this network was built up into a remarkable system of communication, linking all major centres of population, without destroying the amenities of those who lived in them.
The architecture of its stations, viaducts and railway furniture did not degrade but on the contrary enhanced the visual amenity of the landscape and was pleasantly integrated into our cities and towns; its side-effects in terms of pollution and energy consumption were miniscule compared with those of the modern roads, and in all matters of human safety, protection of wildlife and social impact, it was immeasurably superior to the road-dominated system that has now replaced it.
But it is now admitted by everyone, even those with an interest in denying it, that the railways are in a state of crisis, and that this crisis goes to the heart of our current problems over transport. We have already carried a contribution from Christian Wolmar, discussing the appalling history of Railtrack, and the ministerial decision to force bankruptcy on a company that had been newly launched as a result of privatisation and whose shareholders were effectively expropriated by the Ministers decision.
Christian Wolmar illuminates the haste, the lack of circumspection, and the absence of an overall strategy which have characterised the privatisation of the rail network, and calls for a period of reflection, in which to take stock of the situation and develop a viable and sustainable Third Way, which will avoid the errors of nationalisation on the one hand and privatised fragmentation on the other. Periods of reflection are seldom granted in politics; but they are granted by openDemocracy, and we urge you to take part in what we hope will be a constructive dialogue on the future of rail transport.
What future for railways?
There are immediate and serious questions concerning the control, maintenance and financing of the railways. Should they remain in private hands? Should the managers and owners be made more accountable, and if so to whom? Should the railways enjoy public subsidies and if so on what terms? Such question are inevitably on the agenda of politicians.
But there are other and in our view more serious questions that need to be discussed. For example, ought we to be so certain of the environmental superiority of rail over road transport? Perhaps our old village-to-village network of slow-moving but punctual trains helped to cement the national economy while safeguarding the landscape and preventing urban sprawl. But what of high speed trains, which permit people to commute one hundred miles in an hour? Does not the Japanese example illustrate the dangers of this, in spreading suburbs over an entire country?
In a submission to the House of Commons Committee of Enquiry into the railways, Stephen Plowden has effectively demolished the view that high-speed rail travel is environmentally friendly in a way that road travel is not. (HC 18-II, p. 239 et seq.) But the government has yet to respond to this, and seems bent on using the crisis in the railways to advance its plans to suburbanise the entire South East of the country.
And what of accidents on the railways? How do we deal with the public tendency to over-react? The Hatfield rail crash in October 2000, which killed four people, precipitated the total collapse of Railtrack. But ten people die on the roads each day and dozens more are horribly injured, without the public taking any notice. Is this a sign that car-addiction is irremediable?
Among those who have followed developments closely, and tried, in vain, to influence them, is Professor George Huxley. It seems that the best way to begin our discussion is to carry a letter sent by Professor Huxley to the Treasury Minister at the House of Commons, outlining a possible solution to some of our current problems. The letter has not been answered and, since it was written, things have gone from bad to worse, with the government-enforced bankruptcy of Railtrack, industrial action on many networks, and a general demoralisation of the industry following alarms over safety and the loss of public confidence.
Rt. Hon. Andrew Smith M.P. Chief Secretary to the Treasury The House of Commons Westminster
Dear Mr Smith,
It is difficult to ignore the threat of catastrophe now hanging over the British railway system. The collapse of Railtrack, together with delays to refranchising, and the uncertainty about the new arrangements for infrastructure, have put a stop to long-term planning or investment. At the same time cost overruns for example on the upgrading of the West Coast main line put into doubt the availability of funds for maintaining existing services. Withdrawals of services in the North of England have been severe, and the political will to bring the economically weaker Train Operating Companies to account has been lacking.
The railways urgently need a vertically reintegrated structure. E.U. rules do not forbid integration they require only that accounting for operations and infrastructure be kept separate. Vertical integration, with a greatly reduced number of T.O.C.s, all responsible for, and owning, track and signalling will reintroduce a coherence into railway operations. It is also necessary, in the interests of operational integration, to divide the rail freight companies between the T.O.C.s, so that adequate paths are made available for freight trains. Whether or not the railways continue in private ownership with subsidy (it would have been much cheaper to leave B.R. in place), the Treasury, whatever the rules concerning P.S.B.R. may be in future, will have to provide greater sums of money for subsidy and investment. Wholesale closures are politically and environmentally unthinkable. New lines are urgently needed for freight and for passengers. (Those of us who pointed out in the 1960s that main lines being closed would be needed soon were dismissed at the M.O.T. as nostalgic.)
Given the environmental advantage of railways and their strikingly lower accident rates per tonne-km and passenger-km, there are, and have been for years, strong reasons to take notice of the true cost of the toll-free road system. Road costs include fatal and non-fatal accidents, pollution, congestion, and the always unclaimed historical interest charges upon the capital value of the road system. Vehicle taxation, moreover, fails to heed that road-surface wear varies as the fourth-power of the axle-loading. The rigorous accountancy applied to the railways has never been directed to the roads; given the economic bias towards road investment and operations, it was sheer fantasy to expect, as Sir Richard Wilson, Sir Steve Robson, Sir Christopher Foster and others did at the time of privatisation, that the railway infrastructure would, through a regime of declining grants to T.O.C.s, become self-supporting.
It is especially depressing that repeated warnings about the dangers in extreme fragmentation of the system were ignored by Ministers, the Treasury, and the Department of Transport during the period of privatisation. Foreigners, in particular Japanese railway economists, have been appalled by what was done then and by the subsequent failure of Mr Prescott and the impotent S.R.A. to tackle the problem of the railways organisation. Much of the blame rests with the Treasury, and it is the Treasury which, at last, will have to be the directing mind towards solutions and palliatives in the functioning of inland transport.
Yours sincerely,
Professor G. L. Huxley
