Michael Baker - Dissertation - Equity in Transport Planning
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"..... One of the major difficulties in dealing with past and present [transport] policy is that [the] alms [of transport policy] have seldom been clearly stated..... Even the briefest of surveys of the field brings out the conflicting objectives in policy. Transport requires a substantial input of resources, both in construction and operation, it can impose substantial costs on others, it can aid the generation of employment and it must, in some fashion or other, be related to land use and social policies ..... Apart from direct transport objectives, transport can be used as an instrument of several policies." (Hart 1973). In general it has only been these direct transport objectives which have been dealt with in transport studies. To the extent that the recent sub-regional land use transport studies have considered both land use and transport at the same time it could be thought that they have used transport as one of the variables in their other policies. However the transport element of the plans have generally only been considered in terms of transport objectives. These objectives can be summarised as; to find the most economical provision of sufficient capacity to satisfy all demands for transport.
In evidence given to the House of Commons Expenditure Committee (1972), Professor Gwilliam outlined three main types of objectives, relating to efficiency, equity and environmental impact. To these might be added three more types of objectives, relating to accessibility, desirable resultant land use pattern and flexibility. Gwilliam went on to state that "the present state of the art appears to be that there has been developed an economic evaluation procedure for urban transport investment projects which can, potentially, rank projects sensibly on efficiency grounds, but ....." (House of Commons 1972 Vol. II p.279) that it does not cover the objectives relating to equity and environmental impact. Neither does it cover those objectives relating to accessibility, desirable resultant land use patterns or flexibility.
Severe criticisms can be made about the transport policies which are used in the formulation of transport plans (many of these are made in Plowden (1973)). The common objective of these plans is that of "..... trying to find out how the demand for transport can be met for the least possible consumption of scarce resources, or seeking to discover how traffic (which term can be taken to cover both passengers and goods), should be allocated between road, rail and waterway, if it is to be carried for the lowest cost ....."[1] . This is fine as far as it goes, however the demand for transport is then considered to be independent of the amount of provision which is made for it. If there is expected to be an increase in the volume of traffic, it is supposed that severe congestion will result, because the increasing congestion will not deter further traffic generation, with very serious economic penalties resultant upon the congestion. This has led to the "all demands must be met" syndrome. The implication of such a policy is that provision must be made for all supposedly inevitable increases, without regard to the cost of making such provision, and without evaluating the benefit or even desirability of such increases in traffic.
As well as not questioning the desirability of more traffic, there has also been an imbalance between the provision and further expansion of different modes of transport. There have been three underlying causes of this imbalance. Firstly the relative prices of different modes of transport have not reflected their relative marginal costs which has led to an inefficient distribution of traffic between modes. More specifically the marginal cost to the consumer of public transport and rail transport has been the same as its average cost, whereas the marginal cost to the consumer of private transport and road transport has been the actual marginal cost of its provision. This has produced a bias towards roads and private transport.
Secondly, the structure of grants for transport from central government has in the past been far from logical. There have been, and still are, separate grants at different rates for different types of transport. The structure of transport grants is at present being changed in England. An outline of the new structure is given in Department of the Environment (1973). No change has yet been announced for Scotland.
Since the 1968 Transport Act "departmental" roads have been financed entirely by Central Government and "principal" roads have received 75 per cent grant. There have been up to 75 per cent grants for public transport infrastructure. This has been major rail projects, busway construction, railway rolling stock, resignalling schemes, improved systems of train control, automatic fare collection and capital expenditure on buses. Station improvements have received up to 50 per cent grant and bus stations up to 25 per cent. There are also grants for unremunerative rail and rural bus services.
In evidence given to the House of Commons Expenditure Committee (1972) C.D. Foster found "..... at least four principles at work, all of them breached in their observance:-
In his evidence he concluded that the present grant system "..... biases the financial implications of various choices made by Local Authorities in ways which do not obviously serve public ends and may therefore be a misallocation of resources" (House of Commons 1972 Vol. II. p.265). In fact the present grant structure tends to encourage Local Authorities to adopt capital intensive schemes in their transport plans.
Finally there have been several bodies with separate responsibilities for transport provision at the local level.
This has all led to no overall control at local level, and, where comprehensive plans have existed, no overall implementation. There has also been a tendency for local authorities to form a biased transport policy because of the different rates of grant.
[1] From a description of the transport problem in Sharp (1965).
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