48 hours with UK transport practitioners: here’s what I learned 🇬🇧 🚌 🚲 🚈
I recently attended the Transport Practitioners Meeting, a conference focused on the topics and needs for transportation (transport) planners across the United Kingdom. It was an opportunity for me to learn about transportation (transport) in the UK which has unique characteristics and some similarities to how we deliver public transit here in the US. It was a brief visit, so I’m not ready to say there are recommendations, but wanted to share my observations and my European or North American connections can chime in with their thoughts / corrections.
Public transit is incredibly messy
Not literally. On the contrary, the buses and trains I experienced were incredibly clean, but the organization and how transit planning is structured and delivered is quite messy (or complicated, for a more polite term).
For those who have traveled to London, TfL appears quite unified. Strong brand and relatively seamless inter-operability between modes. However, in the UK, this centralized control of planning and privatized delivery of service is unique. The UK has a few different way public transportation is planned and operated. TfL’s example (franchise model) is one method with others being far less centralized. On the other end, some cities in the UK have completely privatized services, including planning (deregulated model). In practice, this means that when and where transit is delivered is 100% reliant on a private company being able to make a profit. Thus, transit may exist at high quality where there is a market and there may even being competing services. As a middle ground, some cities rely on private operators to deliver the majority of transit services but a local government may step-in to provide “subsidized service.” This would be provided in areas that otherwise could not support profitable service.
So how did this work and how does it work today?
Bus operators in America often struggle to hit 25% farebox recovery, so what’s happening in the UK? I have a few hypotheses. First, land use and the built environment in the UK is more likely to enable transit to succeed. With older, less car-centric cities, transit naturally is a more competitive and attractive mobility option. Second, when operators are allowed to selectively pick markets to serve, without explicit goals around community access, it is easier to select profitable routes and forgo those that would otherwise lose money. There are likely many other factors as well!
Given the high proportion of privately operated transit, I made a few observations. In terms of positives, on-board technology and the general on-board customer experience were high. Contactless payment was everywhere, wifi and power were widely available, and services are strongly marketed and branded. On the flipside, understanding a city’s transit network could be extremely confusing given the potential for multiple operators on a corridor and the general on-board service experience could vary widely.
The messiness has implications
The national variation in how transit is delivered has implications. It limits the ability to set national policies, funding, and goals around what transit can do and how its delivered. Public transit potentially is a major lever in achieving city goals. To have limited control seems to be missing a major opportunity. Further, it impacts the private sector who then lacks certainty around the future of public transit and its direction. Without certainty, there is little incenvtive to innovate, invest, or take risks to improve the industry.
With the recent Bus Services Act, a mayor now holds the decision making power over their transit government model. However, it is highly political. As an example, local officials may be resistant to re-asserting control over transit as it could appear to be expanding government control over the private sector. Private operators also have a vested interest in maintaining their control.
An urgency to adapt and change
In the US, a combination of ridership declines, demographic shifts, and an incoming wave of new mobility providers have really pushed the industry to consider how it needs to adapt. In the UK, there seems to be a similar urgency around the necessity of change. Consistent issues included evolving technology (autonomous vehicles, Uber surprisingly did not come up often) and a changing demographic of riders. Similar to the US, biking has also been on the rise, driving the need to reallocate space to improve safety and encourage more riders. This has been accelerated with recent introduction of dockless bikeshare providers across the country.
There were also some differences. I found several sessions that were squarely focused on the practice of transportation planning and an admission that the industry has lacked certain skills to be truly effective. One presenter went so far to call out the “lack of political influence” and “lack of appreciation of our worth” of transport planners in the UK. To combat this, future transport planners need to focus on both technical and soft skills. Soft skills meaning able to communicate in a way that the public understands and can relate. Otherwise, politicians would continue to walk over the insights and recommendations of transport planners, further undermining the legitimacy of the practice.
Will the future mobility players run rampant?
In addition to public transit, the conference did touch on other aspects of transportation: modeling, street design, autonomous vehicles, urban freight. I attended a session focused on bikeshare across the UK. One thing that stood out to me is the lack of power and control that most UK cities have over bikeshare operations. Along the same culture of privatization, many cities had no regulatory authority over bikeshare, with exception of impounding, a very expensive policy. Given this reality, it made me wonder how many UK cities will deal with the potential incoming wave new lightweight mobility devices, such as e-bikes, e-scooters, and small freight delivery devices? It’s still unclear to me if any cities have setup similar guidelines to Seattle or Los Angeles. We’ll see.
Notable quoteables
Finally, conferences always present a few fantastic quotes, photos, or concepts. I wanted to share a few of the highlights that I overheard.
You can find the full thread at #2018TPM.
