Don't forget the wiring
The Wales Transport Strategy published in 2021 put modal shift at the heart of our policies. For the first time, we’ve set a target on increasing the number of trips made by sustainable modes of transport from 32% to 45% by 2040.
Grand declarations are important to signal system change. However, as we've seen in the past, transport strategies often say all the right things in the narrative but the delivery mechanisms are programmed to deliver business-as-usual.
In spite of the new targets the bible for highway engineers, the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges, still prioritises traffic flow; the bible for economists and finance officials, the UK Treasury Green Book, still insists on monetising notional journey time savings when it comes to transport investments; rather than reduce speeds to save lives, orthodoxy suggests we upgrade highway design to increase capacity and allow faster speeds under the guise of road safety.
Unless the system wiring is reconfigured to deliver different outcomes the declarations will just be empty rhetoric.
Having set the direction you can’t assume that the civil service will simply ‘take it from here’. Traditional approaches will reassert themselves at every point in the decision-making and implementation process, and so there needs to be multiple gateways set to test that the new thinking and doing is taking hold. It is not exciting or headline grabbing but getting deep into the ‘wiring’ is critical to embedding change, and here we made some significant strides.
Maintenance
Alongside the Roads Review Panel report and the new tests for road building, we also simultaneously published another report I had commissioned into the way we approach road maintenance. I had become concerned that the capital maintenance programme had become another way of increasing road capacity which went without challenge.
As well as a pipeline of new road schemes being pushed through the system ‘induced demand’ is also fuelled by highway ‘improvements’ being developed under the guise of road maintenance schemes.
Projects to ‘upgrade’ sections of road often include ‘junction capacity enhancements’, lane widening or other measures to ‘enhance traffic flow’. Such Major Asset Renewal (MAR) is dressed in language that presents schemes as initiatives to boost economic activity. These capacity uplifts also contribute to induced demand by making car-use a more attractive and favourable option.
Collison blackspots were often identified as areas where new grade-separated junctions were needed, and other engineering measures, rather than to look first at reducing the speed limit. A different approach would not only free up funding for essential maintenance, deliver quicker results and would also involve significantly lower amounts of embedded carbon.
These schemes in the UK are usually generated by highway ‘agents’, arms-length delivery bodies empowered to keep traffic moving, and proceed through the system as technical projects that are rarely looked at in the aggregate.
I set up a three-person review team to ‘kick the tyres’, under former Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation president, Matthew Lugg, of the approach to maintenance.
The state of the highways as an asset across the UK is deteriorating as day-to-day maintenance has been neglected in favour of building new road schemes. The pressure from extreme weather is beginning to raise awareness of the need for climate adaptation approaches, and the aggravating presence of ‘potholes’ is generating political interest.
The Lugg Review found that essential maintenance was being lost in a focus on packaging schemes together in a ‘corridor approach’. Whilst seizing the opportunity to perform a series of jobs together to achieve economies of scale had a seductive logic, in practice this approach was being used to jimmy-in capacity ‘upgrades’ and ‘enhancements’. The consequence of this was to often over-engineer and gold-plate schemes rather than just fix the issue at hand. The aggregated schemes were often not fundable which left the issues that had been originally identified as needing attention to continue to deteriorate. Meanwhile the resultant backlog of Major Asset Renewal schemes were used to justify greater spending for maintenance projects, when in fact some of the pipeline was being jammed up with projects that went may beyond necessary maintenance.
The report said with a degree of knowing understatement: ‘Consideration of the programme elements put forward by asset managers should recognise the potential for them to be influenced by the desire to retain budgets and workload for their areas of responsibility.’
The review recommended an inversion of the prevailing logic. The Welsh Government agreed, and its response said that in “future Asset Management Programme will not assume like-for-like replacement of infrastructure. Instead, asset renewal will be treated as an opportunity to reconsider the underlying purpose of the road in question, taking into account the Wales Transport Strategy and the four road-building tests set out in the Welsh Government’s response to the Roads Review. For example, it may be possible to reduce the costs of asset renewal by reducing the speed or capacity of the road. In turn, this may free up resources to invest in more sustainable transport infrastructure”.
The new Government approach stressed the need to:
● Primarily invest in routine and capital maintenance to ensure the trunk road networkis safe and serviceable;
● Maintenance work will maximise every opportunity to deliver modal shift, provide a net benefit for biodiversity, minimise pollution and apply the carbon reduction hierarchy when maintaining and operating the SRN.
● The future Asset Management Programme will not assume like-for-like replacement of infrastructure. For example, it may be possible to reduce the costs of asset renewal by reducing the speed or capacity of the road.
The Welsh Government is now adopting a prioritisation
framework that takes account of safety, climate change and modal shift. This
ensures our road maintenance budget supports our broader transport strategy.
Appraisal
A further significant piece of re-wiring has been working its way through the system since the early development of the Wales Transport Strategy, Llwybyr Newydd, has been a reform of the way new transport schemes are assessed.
This really does seem like a nerdy topic other than to those transport professionals and treasury officials directly engaged in it (and even to some of them). But it is at this granular level that some of the key decisions are informed, and far from being a dry technocratic process the choices made are based on a highly political set of criteria that are a reflection of the values we choose to prioritise. However, because of its deliberate opacity and the lack of interest from most policy-makers at this level of detail the values that guide future choices tend to reflect the status quo. That is to say, there is a car bias.
We have revised the Welsh Transport Appraisal Guidance (WelTAG) framework to bring the development and appraisal of new projects into line with the Wales Transport Strategy, Llwybr Newydd. Instead of calculating costs and benefits in monetary terms, WelTAG 2022 designs well-being and decarbonisation into the project from the outset, using a new ‘integrated well-being appraisal framework’.
All projects, policies and programmes must be supported by a business case that shows how they will deliver value-for-money against five criteria:
1. Strategic fit: does the programme or project meet the priorities in the Wales Transport Strategy?
2. Wellbeing: does the programme or
project deliver well-being benefits set out in the Wales Transport Strategy
including targets on modal shift?
3. Affordability: is the programme
or project affordable in terms of its short term and long-term costs?
4. Deliverability:
can the programme or project be effectively and efficiently delivered?
5. Management:
will any risks be properly managed?
The Guidance says “Unless a project, programme or policy
meets the first two criteria, it will not be considered for further
development, funding or support”.
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE! The Welsh appraisal guidance now says “The HM Treasury Green Book and the Welsh Government's Chief Economist have made clear that something cannot be considered value for money if it runs counter to government policy aims. Therefore, a programme, policy or project cannot be said to deliver value for money in Wales unless it meets our priorities for transport set out in the Wales Transport Strategy and Net Zero Wales”
A significant part of the reform is the treatment of benefit-cost ratios (BCR), which traditionally has attached great importance to putting a monetary value to notional journey time savings from new schemes. A scheme that is said to save 1 minute on an average car journey is then assigned a value to the economy of how that minute will boost productivity, it is multiplied by the number of people who will drive that stretch every day, and multiplied again by the 30 to cover the number of years the scheme is expected to deliver over. This tendentious figure is then given almost sacred status in government decision making, or in any planning enquiry, for the value the scheme will provide for the economy. A finger in the air becomes an economic fact.
This approach has been increasingly challenged by academics as producing a distorted analysis favouring traditional road schemes.
The new WelTAG presents a profound challenge to this approach. It says that journey time savings for private car users will not be considered as a ‘benefit’ as this does not support the priorities and ambitions of the Wales Transport Strategy.
The new WelTAG also says that benefit-cost ratios may not be necessary for smaller schemes, and for larger ones should be calculated with and without travel-time saving as a benefit. Where monetised time savings are felt to be necessary they should be separated out to show the distribution of them (for example 0-2 minutes, 2-5 minutes and 5 minutes plus). This will highlight that most road schemes are reliant on small journey (or very small) time savings, which should allow more rounded judgements to be made and create a more level playing field of sustainable transport options.
This piece of re-wiring has the potential to shift the axis
of transport economics.
Guidance
Highway schemes that are proportionate and contribute to a multi-modal solution have a future, but old-school schemes that prioritise ‘movement’ and capacity-increases above all else need ongoing challenge.
Let’s not kid ourselves, the shelves of Council offices are groaning under the weight of decades-old reports detailing such highways schemes, waiting for their moment to spring back into life. The Roads Review process has sent many to the deep achieve, but plenty will linger in hope of a change of heart. Even though the policy framework may have changed people who have been trained and conditioned for decades in one approach will not easily switch to another.
We may have entrenched the Sustainable Transport Hierarchy in the transport and land-use strategies and guidance, and in the scheme appraisal criteria. But that still doesn’t mean it is going to be adopted in real-world decision making. It’s people that will ultimately decide what to do. Appraisals processes can be gamed, weightings skewed, consultation processes manipulated. As the management expert Peter Drucker rightly observed “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Unless we change the culture of transport users and professionals we will only change at the margins.
So how do you change the culture? Well, it will take time to
train and condition people in a different approach. For a new culture to take
hold will rely on a range of supporting measures to reinforce the new thinking.
Strategies, plans and targets that are interlocking will provide a strong
underpinning framework to support change. But this must be backed by consistent
decisions that reward schemes that are in-line with the new direction; and, crucially,
refuse funding for schemes that are not.
One of the changes we made was to the detailed guidance document issued to Local Authorities when developing their Regional Transport Plans (RTPs). Under reforms to our local government system Councils in Wales are now required to work together as ‘Corporate Joint Committees’ in regional clusters to publish a transport strategy. The guidance informing these strategies requires them to follow the objectives in the high-level national strategy, Llwybr Newydd, and be ‘firmly focused on achieving modal shift’ in drawing up their regional plans.
Rather than starting off from the assumption that the answer to a transport problem is a new road, the new guidance requires regional teams to take a step-back.
Cuts in capacity have encouraged bad habits of not just outsourcing implementation work to commercial consultants, but sub-contracting the thinking too. We are encouraging local government clusters to focus on first principles in trying to solve the transport problem at hand rather than rush to the old highways manuals.
Disrupting this point in the process is critical to re-wiring the system.
Instead of automatically asking consultants to produce long
(and little read) reports when it has been agreed to go about tackling a transport
problem, the guidance asks in-house transport and development planners to work
through a simple check-list.
By not assuming the automatic answer to a transport problem is a new road the process builds in a challenge to instinctive practice, and opens up the opportunity to consider multi-modal options.
Under the previous process alternatives to roads-based solutions were also considered at an early stage, but as the assessments of the 50 schemes conducted by the Roads Review Panel demonstrated, the non-road options were always dropped a few steps into the process - in part because the process tended to be owned by the ‘highways’ team, and they were able to draw upon a toolkit of (roads based) measures, whereas the non-road options that were highlighted in theory were much harder to marshal, and therefore easier to rule out on practical grounds.
The emphasis now is on co-design to apply the multi-modal principles and targets of the national strategy at a regional level: Local government teams working alongside Regional Network Planning Teams hosted within Transport for Wales (TfW) and the Welsh Government (in its role as Trunk Road Authority for Wales) to provide capacity and capability across a broader range of transport modes. And then at a regional level the alignment of strategic planning for housing and land-use with regional transport planning.
It is all neat and logical in theory but will only be as good as the follow-up of course. It would be naive to think that some local authorities will not seek to reverse-engineer long-favoured projects into the new framework – officers from Cardiff Council quickly tried to persuade me that long cherished plans for a Eastern by-pass in the capital were part of whey they called ‘modal choice’ which they saw as being in keeping with the new Roads Policy (Spoiler alert, it is not). The Welsh Government needs to be firm on these points less our ‘new path’ goes the way of all the others.
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