Bus cuts close doors onto the world
‘It’s like a forgotten world. It makes you feel depressed…we’ve got bus passes – that’s brilliant – I feel like framing mine…But no bus services to use them on. We’re on an estate surrounded by main roads. The whole of life is out there but we can’t access it.’ COVID may have changed the context […]
An unhappy new year for public transport
It’s been a shaky start to the new year for public transport and it could get a lot rougher yet. Let me count the ways… The ‘work from home where you can’ advice has hit public transport’s core commuting market hard. Meanwhile the pre-Christmas binge on shopping and socialising which kept public transport patronage afloat […]
Waters isnt willing to go with the flow
Small countries can do big things on transport – look at the public transport paradise of Switzerland. And when Rhodri Morgan was in his pomp in the early years of the Welsh Assembly it felt like Wales was about to forge its own path. But without that drive from the top, there was a sense […]
Funding and a finely balanced future
Now that the dust has settled from Comprehensive Spending Review, it’s becoming easier to see through the smoke and mirrors and work out what actually happened. The question people often ask is ‘is it new money?’. And ‘is it more money?’. All depends on what you are comparing it with. Which previous year’s actual spend […]
Party conferences and crunch point
It felt like the fallow Covid period has reinvigorated party conferences as institutions that before felt like they were in a slow decline. But as the equivalent of Glastonbury for the party faithful they were far busier and buzzier than I was expecting. The Conservative party conference was a sign of how far the Government […]
Five things I learned from the party conference circuit…
1.The Government has moved right into local transport’s territory with ‘levelling up’ one of the key themes (and devolution a sub theme) of the Conservative party conference. It’s still a very baggy concept onto which all sorts of asks, ideas and wishes can be projected onto but we are told that more definition will come […]
Be like Rotterdam and 'make it happen'
The planet is in danger. The trouble is that all too often targets and declarations can become ‘sign and forget’ – we need to act now “The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s over most land area for which observational data are sufficient for trend analysis (high confidence) and […]
Tiger in the Tank – the story of the first female Secretary of State for Transport
On September 8th more than 350 people took part in the first of the ‘Gender on the Agenda’ events that UTG is sponsoring. A good indicator that this is an issue whose time has come. Meanwhile on October 9th a statue will be unveiled in Blackburn of former local MP, Barbara Castle, on what would have been […]
What the transport decarbonisation plan means for urban transport
Here are five key takeaways, based on an initial run through, of what the Transport Decarbonisation Plan means for urban transport. 1. It accelerates the shift in tone and emphasis in urban transport policy and delivery towards active travel and public transport and makes moves to lock this in (in a quantifiable way) through resuscitating previously […]
From point A to point B with a bit of poetry
Leeds 1953 Leeds was one of many cities that pre-figured what Beeching was to do to the national rail network in the Sixties by trashing their own mass transit system in the fifties. After World War Two housing was a bigger priority for public investment than comprehensively overhauling run down tram systems. At that time […]