Podcast transcript: What decarbonising the UK public transport system could look like

Ed Reed

Hello, and welcome to the 10 Point Pod, a special podcast box set from Energy Voice - Out Loud, in which we assess, point by point, the UK government’s plan for a green industrial revolution. We’re drawing this together with expertise from our sponsors for this series, EY, and leaders from across the energy industry.

My name is Ed Reed. I’m an editor at Energy Voice, where we are leading the global energy conversation, and I’m delighted to be joined for this conversation by my co-hosts, Sayeh Ghanbari, EY UK&I Business Consulting Leader, and Chris Boardman, Olympian and Greater Manchester’s Cycling and Walking Commissioner.

Where point four of the government’s 10 point plan was around zero emission vehicles, point five is the other side of this, focusing on green public transport, cycling, and walking. Shifting to zero emission vehicles is not enough. The government plan has said, we must also increase the share of public transport, improving the air we breathe, our mental and physical wellbeing, and helping cut emissions.

The plan put out in November put some pretty big numbers in terms of support. The government said that it would provide £4.2 billion to invest in city public transport, and £5 billion on buses, cycling, and walking. And as part of that plan, the government’s plan calls for at least 4,000 British- built zero emission buses.

On that bus note, I think what we’ve seen in December 2020 was that use fell about 50% year on year, from 2019, and this, of course, reflects the impact of COVID-19 and the resultant lockdowns. Vaccines are now rolling out. I just got my first dose. And we’re starting to emerge out of lockdown. But, will people be willing to get back onto buses and trains?

I think the other thing that I would also note is there are challenges around distribution. Two-thirds of rail journeys start or end in London, with London residents using more than double the national average of rail journeys. Can the government or someone else remedy this inequality? Sayeh, starting with you, what do you see as being the scale of the challenge with green public transport? How far are we from where we need to be?

Sayeh Ghanbari

I think when we talk about green public transport, it’s hugely variable depending on where we are. I think when we compare London to the rest of the country, you get quite a big contrast between public transport usage and private transport usage. And it will be great to hear, in a minute, from Chris around, for example, what’s happening in Manchester.

For me, what I think is really important to consider is, what is an effective way of moving a lot of people around? And public transport is, without a doubt, the most effective way of moving a lot of people around in cities. It’s a bit difficult to visualise this in a podcast, perhaps, but there’s a famous photo from the City of Munster years ago where you see... Imagine the number of people you can fit on a bus and then put the same number of people on bikes. So, say 60 people in a bus, put them on bikes. You get a similar-ish amount of road space taken on.

And then you look at what actually happens in most of our cities today when people take private transport, which is that you’ve pretty much got one person in a car. So, you put the same people in a car, and actually what you get is a huge amount of road space taken on. So, actually, for me, it just shows, when we talk about public transport, we have to really consider what is the most effective way of moving people around? What is the best way of getting people to be effective in going from A to B or A to E.

But also, creating liveable cities that actually our citizens are happy to be in. So I don’t know, Chris, maybe having your views on contrast between somewhere like London, where public transport is not just used a lot, but actually is, without a doubt, the best way to get around, to other cities in the UK.

Chris Boardman

Wow, there’s so much to go at there, isn’t there? The disparity between London and the rest of the country is clear, and it’s now under the microscope. Literally, in the last 24 hours, my boss, Andy Burnham, the re-elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, has said transport is our focus now. And I think the future is actually really good, at last.

The original question, where are we at now, think of it more in terms of a change curve. It’s also called the mourning curve, but basically, when people are hit with a change in life. And the first thing you do is deny. The second thing is blame somebody else, then you blame yourself, then you accept it and then you look at how about change. We’re just at the point of acceptance now, and that’s good.

We’re starting to talk about big change, zero emissions vehicles. Which, in itself, is not true. There are no zero emitting vehicles. You’ve got to make it. Where does the power come from? It comes from somewhere else. So, it’s more efficient ways to moving people, to go back to your point. But now we’re talking about it.

And I think the really important point here, because this is all about social science, if you want people to change, then you’ve got to give me a good reason. And I’m afraid we’re instinctive creatures. We’re not logical. And that’s why we’ve been drowning in evidence for years but still haven’t changed. And that’s okay, once you accept it.

So, to just double back and go to where we are in Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham did a trip in from one of the outer boroughs. Or rather, a trip across from one borough to another in Greater Manchester, and he found that journey took him an hour and a quarter using a bus, now, and cost him £5.30.

Now, you extrapolate that over a commute for 240 days, which, being a geek, that’s exactly what I did, on a piece of paper last night. And I looked at that compared to London. So, it was an hour and a quarter £5.30 in Greater Manchester. In London, that’s in the region of 25 minutes, and the cost is significantly less. I think it’s about £3.90. But I worked it out between the two places, and although the price difference is about £1,000, it’s eight days of commuting difference a year, which is astounding.

And that’s the language we need to talk, if we want people to change. When you were talking about moving people efficiently, the average car journey in Greater Manchester is less than 1 km, which is both embarrassing and really exciting. Just look how little we actually have to change.

So, we’re right in the middle of a fascinating time right now, and decarbonisation is the big story. And the only way we can do that in the timeframe we have, is buses, because you’ve got to be able to move quickly and relatively cheaply, and bikes. And locally enable people to walk. Enable being the operative word as opposed to encourage.

All of that is now on the agenda. And the government paper that you alluded to at the start, which, again, being a geek, I’ve read it, and I’ve read Bus Back Better, and I’ve read Gear Change. We might not agree on a lot of things, myself and the current government, but on these three topics, particularly the transport ones, they are batting it out of the park. And all we have to do is deliver those promises. We don’t have to think of another strategy. It is laid out there. And that’s pretty exciting. And that was quite a long diatribe, so I’ll stop now.

Sayeh Ghanbari

But what’s interesting there, Chris, is there’s so many different angles that we can take the conversation from there. I love your comparison between Manchester and London in terms of both time and cost, because for me, this is actually... When we talk about having a level economy, but also essentially thinking about this as a right. Why is it that the citizens of one city should have poorer access, more expensive transport?

For me, it’s about equal rights, in a way. And actually, the access to affordable transport that can easily take you from the places that you need to go in order to have access to employment and have access to leisure and social and healthcare and so on, that, for me, should be a fundamental human right.

What isn’t a fundamental human right is that you must do this in a private vehicle, particularly travelling some of the short distances that we know that people travel. And that, I think, is part of the language that we need to adopt. And that’s why I love that comparison of the eight days extra, the amount more that you’re out of pocket. We should be challenging these things.

Chris Boardman

Well, I had a look at another piece of paper. I thought, what about if somebody actually rode that journey? And it was eight miles, so it was quite long. Somebody who doesn’t ride a bike, for example, thinks, oh, eight miles. But if, actually, think of it in terms of time, that’s a leisurely 43 minutes ride. And when you compare that to an hour and quarter on a bus...it’s slightly longer than the London journey by public transport, much shorter than the Greater Manchester one.

But, when you look at that... the journey time, wherever you are in the country, it’s still 43 minutes, and the cost of that journey is still zero. So, suddenly you’ve got equity in transport if you provide for that. And not only that, you get the spin off benefits. So, you save £650 pounds a year, if you do three days a week commuting by bike. So, allowing for some rain or a couple of days a week where you couldn’t be bothered, based on an average working year. And you’ve saved 17 days a year travelling. And that’s astounding.

I think if we talk to people in those terms, you also don’t have to pay for a gym, because your exercise is built into your day. You’ve got enough money for a family holiday. And you’ve actually got all that time back. And that’s a language I think people can really get behind, before you even get to carbon emissions and things like that. Which, to be blunt about it, doesn’t really figure in everybody’s daily thinking.

Sayeh Ghanbari

And I think this is why I sometimes... I have to say, when I look at... we talked about this paper. The point four is about electric vehicles, and then point five is about green transport and cycling and walking. And I think we have to acknowledge that there is a real contrast between those two things. Because electric vehicles deal with one thing only, and that’s actually air pollution in the place of use.

Chris Boardman

They deal with a part of one thing only.

Sayeh Ghanbari

Yes, exactly. I’m with you, as well. There is no such thing as zero emissions. You’ve got to consider, actually, the end-to- end lifecycle of this. But also, more importantly, when we talk about transport, we need to consider congestion. We need to consider health outcomes, all the things that you’ve just raised there, Chris.

I have a real problem...it’s interesting to see, this week there’s been some research that’s come out on how quickly we think that electric vehicles will become cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles. Which would further provide access to electric vehicles, but runs the risk of us having a lot more private cars on the road. And that actually is not a sustainable and realistic way of the future of our cities.

Chris Boardman

I think electric cars are...and I’ve said this. It’s slightly melodramatic. Electric cars are one of our biggest dangers right now, because they give us a reason to not change. And then you look at a traffic jam of electric cars, and it looks just the same as the one before. So, as you’ve alluded to, it doesn’t alter that. It doesn’t make us more efficient.

It doesn’t really make us a great deal greener. It doesn’t make us any fitter. But we’re probably going to need more road space or street space, even more, for charging points. Because the majority of the people in the UK don’t have off- road parking. If we don’t reallocate road space, we’ll increase transport inequality.

But where I am a massive fan of electric vehicles is public transport and for deliveries. And I think if we can change the direction very quickly into how we’re talking about electric vehicles, and more specifically which electric vehicles, we can really make it part of the solution, rather than an even bigger part of the problem.

Ed Reed

Can I just ask...?

Chris Boardman

We haven’t really let you have a go at all, have we?

Sayeh Ghanbari

Exactly.

Ed Reed

No, it’s fine. I’m very happy to sit back and leave you to it. I suppose I was just wondering, how do you make that pitch? How do you say, look, historically we’ve relied on cars. It’s part of the culture. That’s how a lot of us live. How do you make that pitch to say don’t just get a zero emission car, whatever that might be. How do you say, move to a bus or a train or a bicycle?

Chris Boardman

I think, going back to the make it relevant to people and the language they talk and talk about the things that they value. That’s the currency we need to discuss things in. And ultimately, if you can’t look out of a car window and see something that you go, oh, I fancy that, then why would you get out of a car? And when you accept that...that is a truth. That’s how we’re built. I will do the easiest thing for me right now, regardless if it’s to my own detriment, because that’s how I’m built.

So, it must be the most attractive thing. It’s got to be easier. It’s got to give me something, maybe save me money, save me time, a little bit of health. That’s an added bonus, to be honest. But if it isn’t those things, why would I get out of the car? And once you accept that, then you’re on the right track.

So, the two standards that we’ve set for anything we build in Greater Manchester are, for cycling it must be usable and want to be used by a competent 12-year-old and their parents would let them. And then, everybody I’m speaking to, from a politician to a parent to one of the kids, they all understand what that means. They’re all imagining the same thing.

And it’s really hard. It’s not an easy standard. It means you have to do all the junctions. Because you make these beautiful paths, and you leave one big junction out, and I’m not using any of it. So, that’s a hard standard and we’ve stuck, now, to that for four years. We’ll have our first 100 km delivered by the end of this year, doing all of the junctions as well.

And for walking our standard is it must be useable and want to be used by a parent pushing a double buggy. Now, if you stick to those two proxies, you’ve covered the disabled. You’ve covered the frail, people who haven’t ridden a bike since childhood, all the people who are currently driving less than 1 km to go to the shops because that’s the easiest solution for them. And they’re not easy standards, but it keeps you pointing in the right direction. Everybody understands what you’re trying to do, and you’re talking about things that people really value.

And if there was one place to start, just to finish off, it would be around schools. Because schools are a big chunk of the journeys in the morning, a big chunk of those short journeys. Children are the one thing we’re prepared to put ourselves out for. And it’s a really hard one to morally argue against. And once you get the area around a school working, even on a trial basis, you can expand and expand from there.

Sayeh Ghanbari

Yes, I think there are some really interesting points there, Chris. The junction one, we’ve all seen those horrid cycle lanes that are sort of, there is a cycle lane and then just as you get to a junction it disappears and you think, what am I going to do here? Just beam myself to the next part of the cycle lane? It’s that level of detail that’s important.

I think my add to that is there’s a lot of things that can be done from a carrot perspective of making people feel like this is the right thing. But actually, I really do believe that there is a bit of stick needed as well, and that we do have to make it harder to get into a car. Almost because, as we are slightly lazy human beings, we all are, right, and by that I mean closing down roads for private vehicles to be able to rat-run, like a lot of the Liverpool neighbourhoods and low traffic neighbourhoods are doing.

We need to remove that option of rat-running. And I also fundamentally believe that we need to charge people for using public infrastructure, i.e., roads, for using private transport. I don’t know that it should be a right to just drive your private vehicle wherever you like. And for that, I genuinely believe in congestion charging and other forms of tolling.

So, I would go with everything you said, Chris, and I would add to it, actually we should be quite tough on this. We should be making it very, very difficult to make the choice of private transport.

Chris Boardman

Well, I, obviously agree. The challenge is how you do that. We’re starting to move towards holistic, and viable holistic policies that are looking at taxation, that are looking at transport, that are looking at way of life. And you put them together and start to package it in a way that’s deliverable.

And the challenge is not where we want to go. I mentioned at the start, drowning in evidence. Nobody disputes that. Decarbonisation, nobody disputes we’ve got to do it. It’s how you actually get to the destination. Take anybody from the UK and plunk them down on a street in the Netherlands or in Denmark and say, which do you prefer? They’ll look around and they’ll see all the kids, more than 50% riding to school every day, and go, this is quite nice.

So, nobody’s got a problem with the destination. It’s how you make that change. And there is an element of, it isn’t really compulsion. It might be slightly political, but you can actually just start to it... The first thing we do is if we say... Well, actually, the first thing to do is create a hierarchy and agree it. People walking are our first priority. People riding bikes are second. People on public transport third, deliveries, private cars last.

And then you legislate and build accordingly, which is precisely what happened in the Netherlands in the 60s and 70s, and why they’ve ended up where they are. So, once you’ve done that, then the reallocation of space has to happen. We need to stop it getting down to the micro level.

So, you’re putting in a cul-de-sac. You’re making this road into a cul-de-sac, and then people are getting all the spurious arguments out there and attacking things. And because of the way it’s being covered in the media, we’re giving existential crisis, which is not hyperbole. It’s true. It’s being discussed and given the same level of importance as significant inconvenience at worst. And that’s got to change. I think the job that we can do is put context back into every conversation.

Finally, on the low traffic neighbourhoods, which are obviously very contentious, the biggest mistake we’ve made in the last few years is we’ve lost control of what a consultation is. It is not a referendum. The question is not, shall we do this? The question is, how do we do it? We are going to change the way the streets are used. Tell us your views on how we best do that.

And we can get that back, but it’s important recognition that people think this is choice. It isn’t. It is not a choice. It’s a question of how we do it. Let’s hear your thoughts.

I generally think it’s a really exciting time one way or another, and last year, of course, gave us an opportunity. We effectively turned off global traffic. It was the biggest consultation that was ever held and ever will be on how we use our streets. And for a myriad of different reasons, be it from I’m bored, I’ve got bored kids, the trams are off at the moment and I’m working shifts, whatever the reason, beautiful weather, it doesn’t matter. When people felt safe, they rode their bike.

And they did it, in our region, 70% up. Bike usage went up by 70% when every other mode went down between 60% and 90%. So that was your referendum. Make people feel safe, and they’ll do it. And hopefully that gives the politicians heart.

Sayeh Ghanbari

Yes. And I think it’s... I live in a low traffic neighbourhood that came in place July last year, almost exactly because the pandemic gave, I suppose, our local politicians almost the right to just do so without that sort of referendum style consultation, as you say. And I also have a school not too far away. And it is amazing. It has made our neighbourhood so much better.

We’re not the only low traffic neighbourhood either. There’s a few around us. And now, the number of people that you see on their bikes with their kids, or with cargo bikes. I have to say, we’ve also now invested in a cargo bike and we’re doing some positive reinforcement with the dog so that he can be happy in the basket in front of us. I’ll have to come back on how that project’s going.

But it’s transformative. It just makes it such a nicer place to live. And the beauty is, they put it in here in our neighbourhood and said, it’s going to be in for 18 months before we even reconsider anything else. And I think that’s a really important way of doing it, because what that means is that it gives people enough time to say, okay, this is what my life could be like.

And another topic I’m very passionate about, completely different, is actually about diversity. I care a lot about diversity in terms of a gender and ethnicity social mobility and so on. And one of the things that frustrates me is when people think that cycling around a city means you’ve got to be male, you’ve got to be white, you’ve got to be very fit, you’ve got to be of a certain age group, and you’ve got to be clad in Lycra on your road bike.

That is not cycling around a city. I should be able to get to work safely, but pretty much in my work clothes and just arrive comfortably, not having to have a shower when I get there because I’ve been racing the streets. That is the life that we all want, isn’t it?

Chris Boardman

Well, I’m glad you mentioned the 18-month period, because I’m a massive fan of trials. Because it’s both a challenge, and it helps people get over fear of the unknown. So, if you say to a shopkeeper, and this happened in New York under Janette Sadik-Khan when she was in charge of transport there. They said, we’re going to put a bike lane in here. We’re going to take out your parking.

And even the businesses who were supportive said, well, I really want this to work, but this is my mortgage here. They said, we’re going to do it for six months, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll rip it out. And they knew full it would work and businesses would get better. The evidence was there. But they needed the people who were involved in that to get over the emotion, over the fear of that unknown. And the fact that it was a trial made the difference. I love that.

What you have, what you’re living in now, for 18 months, is the example that we need. We’re so parochial. That example has to be really, really close to me for me to get it. I have to be able to walk across a few streets and go, it’s quite good, yes. I like this. You put it in Cambridge, not interested. In London, not interested. Certainly not interested about another country.

So, that’s another fact. We’re very parochial. So the more of these examples we can get in, and we take away the fear... And also, challenge. Listen, you’re telling me we’re not even going to try this for a few months? You’re not even prepared to give it a go? That’s a really powerful challenge, and I think that’s a tool that we can leverage even more.

The difficulty with doing it piecemeal is that you will cause changes around the area, certainly in the short term, that aren’t necessarily good. And anybody who simply doesn’t want to change is going to use that as an example. And that’s where political will is absolutely essential.

Sayeh Ghanbari

Yes, that’s absolutely right. Because if I look at congestion on the main roads in and around us now, obviously that’s gone up massively. But, in a way, to me, that’s a short-term pain. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That goes back to the point I was making earlier around those are things that need to happen for people to start making different choices.

Chris Boardman

Well, we’ve been going overdrawn, haven’t we? Over the last ten years, there are now 20 billion more miles being driven outside our homes on our quietest streets, than there were just ten years ago. 20 billion more miles. In Greater Manchester, 1.7 billion extra miles being driven outside our homes, because we haven’t fixed this problem. We’ve just been sweeping it into the side streets, and now we’ve filled up the side streets. We’re saturated.

So, it is going to be painful getting out of that. You cannot keep everybody happy, because people who are driving are going to pay. Even our pavements are now habitually taken over. In Greater Manchester we have a tank parked on a pavement, which I’ve just discovered a few weeks ago. And you can see it on Google Earth because it’s been there for three years, a tank parked on the pavement.

And personally, I’m thinking, that’s actually brilliant, because that is what I need to actually make the case of paid parking. And the police have been round and they’ve examined it, and they’ve said, actually, they have left enough room for people. You can get past there, and it’s not causing an obstruction. So, we don’t actually have the power to move it.

And my director of cycling and walking, Richard Nickson, was telling me this story almost apologetically. He was trying to get the tank moved. I said, no, just let the story unfold. It is what it is, because we need to address it. And if the police cannot move a tank, then that’s great. That’s the story. That highlights the problem that we have. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Sayeh Ghanbari

You couldn’t make it up.

Chris Boardman

No, you couldn’t. And we didn’t even need to, because there it was with all leaves around it, because it hasn’t been moved. And then conversely, a week later, there’s a piece in the news about somebody’s put this tiny shed in their garden to keep bikes, because they want to commute by bike. And they have to take it down because of planning permission. So imagine if they put that shed on the pavement. I bet they would have had to move that too, but not if it’s a tank.

And it sounds a bit pithy, but that’s what you need to cut through. Right now we deal in 30-second attention spans. We deal in headlines. And if they’re the rules, there’s no point in us going, that’s not fair. Look at the evidence. Then play to the rules and it’s all about stories. I’ve stopped now.

Ed Reed

And we’ll take a short break at that point and we’ll come back in just a moment.

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Ed Reed

Brilliant, and welcome back. I suppose maybe we can just take a look at how you go about driving some of that change. How do we get to that point of bringing around change? Is it a political will? Is it a top-down thing? Is it bottom-up? How does it work? Sayeh, maybe you can shed some light on that.

Sayeh Ghanbari

I think it’s quite interesting. Chris mentioned, for example, that people want to think about how it is in our country and not other countries, and I think it’s often easy to look at places at Holland and say, it’s all different over there. But actually, when you look at somewhere like Holland and the history of why they are where they are today, there were key decisions made in the 70s which were all about changing the thinking on transport policies.

And that was kind of citizen movements and political will. A few different things that brought that together, a rapid increase in wealth, a post-war increase in car usage, and what essentially, then, led to a significant number of road deaths. And a huge number of those, I think over 400-something of those, in a year being children under the age of 14. Which led to this citizen movement of don’t kill our children, stop the murder of our children.

You couple that with the oil crisis of the 70s and so on, and actually, the Dutch government essentially, then, took a step back and said, we need a re-think around transport. So, they put in place safe infrastructure around cycling and walking, much to... I love Chris’s tests that he mentioned before about what safe means. And revolutionised what we see in Holland today, which is probably, on average, the most number of miles ridden by bike per person than anywhere else in the world.

So, I go back to what Chris said at the start around we’re in such an exciting time. Now is the time. For me this is really about political will and an opportunity, in the way that Holland had that opportunity in the 70s to say, actually, what do we really think is right about moving people safely and sustainably around our cities? And make decisions that are cognisant of that.

Chris Boardman

Just listening to that intently, I don’t know about you, but you’ve probably been involved with things in your life that have been successful and then you’ve watched them as the media takes hold and it gets massaged and streamlined and you think, that’s not quite how I remember it. And I look back at that period in Holland and think, I just wonder, cynically, how much of that was actually about the oil crisis?

Sayeh Ghanbari

I did add that in.

Chris Boardman

Yes, you did. And you’re thinking, I can add those two things together. And together it was enough to make a change and they stopped demolishing buildings to build bigger roads, and they made a change and it was popular. And that just got me thinking about what, exactly, is political will? What does it mean? And it means that the person in charge has to look at the facts, but most importantly they’ve realised, whether you like it or not, they have to connect with people’s emotions.

And once you’ve connected with people’s emotions and they want to go with you, then you can get them to do the things. But if you beat them over the head with logic, you’re still going to get voted out if it’s not popular. That’s the stark reality. So, it’s another one of those truths that once you accept it, you start to think, okay, how do we make this politically palatable? And you start to talk about those values for people.

And I think that’s the key here, to talk about the outcomes. You mentioned, again, the standards of must be useable by a 12-year-old and a parent pushing a double buggy. That effectively paints a picture of an outcome that people quite fancy. And so, at the very least, my opposition’s gone down and may very well be supportive, to give you that. I might even be willing to give something up.

So, the politicians need to be able to see the outcome here, people are going to like it, and if it’s going to get noisy, I can put up with that for a while, so long as I can, quite quickly, before the next election, frankly, get to a point where they’re okay with it. So, they’re the bits that we actually need to realise and talk to. It’s got to be in a political cycle.

And that’s why things like trains are just not interesting, because they’re a political nightmare. It’s going to take you 30 years to get a decent train to change the train service that really makes a difference. But the first person who says they’re going to do it, they’re going to spend huge amounts of money. There’s going to be land taken. There’s going to be huge amounts of hassle about taking land, and they get all the pain and no upside.

So, there’s no politician, who are also human beings and also go for the easiest path, wanting to support trains, even if they know it’s the answer. What do you do with that? You’ve got to do it in small chunks and you create examples and you get it heading in the right direction.

Low traffic neighbourhoods, for example, we talked about earlier. Possibly the biggest mistake that we made there is package them up into a thing that you could aim at, and do it really quickly, and people feel that they’ve had something taken away. But imagine if we’d done that road by road, hadn’t talked about it, did the same rubbish consultation with a piece of A4 small print paper stuck to a lamppost.

You do it just for this one road where I’m going to create a cul-de-sac and you might get a, oh, I used to come through here. That’s annoying. But it’s not enough to get hundreds and hundreds of people to campaign about it. And then you did another one over there, and then you did another one. And over the space of two years you’ve transformed the whole area. It’s just called traffic management.

But, because we gave it a name and we gave people a reason to resist the change...that’s all the stuff that’s going on in my mind at the moment, because my job is social change. How do I make this the least painful route possible, but not, do we do it? I think that’s something we touched on earlier.

Sayeh Ghanbari

And I think, listening to that, Chris, what it reminds me of is actually transport, which, as you alluded to at the start is quite a geeky subject. It’s for us geeks who are interested in it. But the reality is that to actually get this right and to effect change, it’s so complex. You need to think long-term. You need to think human behaviour. You need to think media. You need to think politics.

And it’s fascinating, actually, when you look at it, how many things need to come together to actually get decent transport policies in place. Which, in themselves should be very boring, technical, geeky things to just get right. But life is never quite that simple, is it?

Chris Boardman

No. And I think who you’re talking to is a key point. Who is the audience? It might be a politician. It might be a councillor. It might be a member of the public. Whoever it might be. It could be the Treasury. And what’s important to them? What’s in their top ten fires? They’re so busy. There’s 100 fires. Which ten are going to kill them first? How am I part of the solution?

Somebody once said to me, it was Isabel Dedring, actually, that used to be the Deputy Mayor of Transport in London, who’s a lot smarter than me. She always gives me really good advice, and she said push on the open doors. It’s just one of those simple things she said. And then I reflect on that and think, what does that actually mean? What are the open doors?

And when you start to think of that, I’ve got this thing in front of me. Health is a massive problem and it’s going to get bigger and bigger, with inactivity being our biggest killer by far. But it’s happened slowly and we’ve got used to it, so it doesn’t make headlines anymore. But it’s costing me huge amounts. You can save money if you do this. So speaking to Treasury thinking, this is a way for you to save money.

You mentioned penalties for using cars and making it harder. Well, if you package it, you’re going to lose £48 billion revenue when we don’t have petrol, soon. That’s huge. How are you going to maintain road infrastructure without £48 billion a year. You are going to have to charge people for using the roads in some way.

I’m not even sure where I’m going with this, to be honest, other than speaking the language of the audience that you’re speaking to, and be answering their problems. Not what you think they should do, what’s important to them and how can you help them do it? And that’s a philosophy that seems to be working out quite well, I think.

Ed Reed

Just picking up on that point about cost, Chris, you started off by talking about the price differential in Manchester versus London, and that seems to speak for a lot of things that you’ve brought up, Sayeh, about equity and allowing people to get around in a way that seems fairer and better for people as a whole. And I wonder, can we change public transportation in the way that we’re talking about at a low cost? Obviously the Treasury would, presumably, like to do things as cheaply as possible. How is that going to work?

Sayeh Ghanbari

I think one of things... can we have public transportation at low and affordable cost? Absolutely. And I think, actually, we’ve proven that and seen that in London for a number of years. One of the things that I think we don’t often think about, or we don’t think about enough in the UK is how we are using the infrastructure that we have.

So, for example, the trains and our buses to an extent. They are extremely busy at certain times of the day, and then they’re run more or less empty for other times of the day. We think about, right, we’ve got to build new and we’ve got to really expand the network. Well, do we? Do we really need to spend that much money in order to make something a little bit more available for about two hours a day?

And in a way, that’s where some of the social change and behaviours and things like Chris talked about come in. Which is, why is it that we can’t actually encourage people to travel at very different times and make much better use of what we have, rather than resorting entirely to building new?

And then, in addition to that comes everything that we’ve talked about here around cycling and walking. Cycling and walking are more or less free endeavours, right, and have other added benefit. And again, if you make it accessible and easy to do those things, then there’s a huge amount of cost that can be saved.

Chris Boardman

I think there’s three bits there for me. Cost, what’s the cost of the status quo? It’s the price that we never measure. It’s the choice that we never consider, the question we never consider. And it has consequences of its own. In Greater Manchester, the way we travel now costs us £3.75 billion a year. So, when you wrap up congestion, pollution, £800 million on KSIs, killed or seriously injured every year, all road accident types. You put all that together, the way we travel now costs £3.75 billion. Can we afford that? And that re-contexts things.

And that leads me on to two really big things. Two terms that we know, GDP and BCR. So, our gross domestic product, is that the best way to measure success? Because if growth is how we measure success and selling things is how we measure success, does that get us the best outcome? All of the information I see every year, charts on where are the happiest cities? Where are the most liveable cities? None of them are the highest GDP. But that’s where people want to be. Shouldn’t that be the aim?

And that’s obviously a massive question. But, to bring it back down to transport, and I’ve had this discussion recently with DFT, our benefit-cost ratio. We have a BCR, benefit-cost ratio, for everything that we build. One of the most important factors is journey time saved. You have quantified how much your time is worth, and we talked about that earlier and the fact that I’m being penalised in Greater Manchester for an eight mile journey eight days a year more than somebody in London. You put it like that, it’s horrific.

But we have journey time saved, and that gets you to, building Black Cat Junction, just outside Bedford, effectively a big roundabout, is costing £1.4 billion, but we’ve really balked at committing £1.4 billion a year, for the entire country, to build a cycling infrastructure. Because it’s weighted one element and hasn’t taken into account the cost of making using a car easier.

So, there’s a couple of things in the works, there, if you like, particularly the BCR. If you actually change that equation, then it would spit out a whole different answer. Now I’ve got super geeky and into the world of transport and have started to realise why we’re making decisions that are illogical. Because I’m not really interesting in cycling and walking. That’s not my thing. I’m really interested in logic and what is the best bang for your buck return for moving people?

And I can guarantee you the only sensible conclusion you can come to is cycling and walking. That gives me my best return by far. But somehow it’s being missed, and that’s because our benefit-cost ratio for investment is badly skewed and doesn’t take into account all of the downsides to moving around in private vehicles.

Sayeh Ghanbari

I agree with you. I think that’s an archaic measure that we still live with, and there’s no doubt that it’s one of the things that needs to be looked at as changing it. It’s a bit like saying, here’s ten different factors, but please ignore nine, and we only care about one. And then assume that that will give you the whole answer. Well, it’s not.

I also think, Chris, we should do a separate podcast on politics on a different time, because I think I could chat about your GDP point for quite some time, and where capitalism leads you to not always the best decisions about healthy lives. But that’s a separate point.

I think one of the things we also haven’t talked about at all is the use of technology, actually. And that’s both big innovations, but also small uses of data and things. The big innovations, I look at things like Hyperloop and things, and think, what’s the problem it’s actually trying to solve. You look at a country like Japan, and it’s got an amazing high speed train network. You can get around the country really super easily. So, are we investing massively in something that sort of does what we’ve got? Okay, I know it goes faster and so on.

But I sit back, to your point about logic, what are we trying to solve here? What is the problem we’re trying to solve, and do we have things that are more or less good enough for what we need it to do already? I don’t know what you think about that.

But then, I think the other interesting thing is around uses of data in travelling day-to-day, and how much more that encourages... I look at something like the app like Citymapper, and how much it allows me to move from city to city in cities I don’t know, and actually encourages me to use public transport. Because actually, I don’t need to go into a new city and go, right, okay. What do I need to learn about the network, i.e., whether it’s buses, trams, whether it’s an underground system or something else. And then having to learn how to make my connections.

And that small little thing can actually help you make better choices around how to move around. I think that’s another place where technology actually can be really helpful, but maybe that doesn’t get as much media attention as a big Hyperloop.

Chris Boardman

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Often the answers are tiny. You’re seeing a sea of information and ideas and potentials, and you land on one thing. And I’m always scanning for them. I watched Andy Burnham’s journey yesterday, and I’m looking through and thinking, hang on. That’s eight days a year. And then suddenly I’ve actually got people’s attention when they go, what?

And I think you’ve hit on an app that has been, this is your ha’porth of tar. This is the thing that gets people to change. Because if you use yourself as your own straw poll, which you’re essentially just talking about, then it’s a great place to start. Do I get buses? No. Why don’t I get buses? What would make me get a bus? And that’s why I was getting quite excited about a government paper which is something I never thought I would do in my life, when I read Bus Back Better. My God, how far I have fallen. Even the title is awful.

But in there, it recognised that people will use buses when they don’t have to think about what the timing is. They turn up and there’s going to be one along in the next five to six minutes. And it recognises that if we want people to change, we’ve got to give them something that’s better than what they have now, which is sitting in a traffic jam. And then give them a reason to try different.

So, for example, you mentioned an app. That’s just the tool. We are now living in phones. There’s an article yesterday out saying that this is now part of our life. It isn’t something we use. It’s actually part of our life, the amount of time we spend looking at it. And if you accept that, then it’s a case, what can we do with it? So, if I can type in where I want to go and it tells me really easily, go and get this bus and it’s going to take you this much time. And I can see at a glance. If it’s actually quicker than other routes, that’s easier for me. That’s good for me. I’m interested.

And maybe we have to do something radical in the first year of getting people to change habits, to make it free. What is it that would make you try something different, and the person who’s providing that product says, actually, I know that if I can get people to try this, they’re going to like it? Make it free. And we did it in Great Manchester for under-16-year-olds. They have an R pass, and gave them free travel, public transport, and massive uptake.

It was transport equality, and people tried it because it was free. It’s my intention when we bring bike hire online to do the same thing, to get people to try something different. So, there’s an awful lot. I wouldn’t dismiss these small things. They might be technically small, but they’re massive in terms of psychology.

Sayeh Ghanbari

And I think another small thing, getting really into the geeky detail, is around ticketing and payment, actually.

Chris Boardman

Yes.

Sayeh Ghanbari

It’s such a small thing, but one of the things that makes people go, actually, I’m not sure whether I’m going to take public transport or whether I’m going to use a bike hire scheme or something like that is just how easy it is to access it. And actually, I think that’s another great thing in London, for example. You actually don’t need an oyster card or anything anymore, right?

You can pay with most things on your phone because you can just use one of the payment apps on your phone, or you can also use a contactless credit card. But it just makes it so much more accessible to a broad range of people. Whether it’s your regular commuter or whether it’s someone who just wants to do a quick journey, or whether it’s a visitor or anything else.

And that’s one of the things that again, small things that make such a big difference. If I’m coming to Manchester, if I don’t have to go and buy a ticket somewhere or anything else, and I can just pop on a bus and pay for it, then that might make me more inclined to do that. If I’m just coming from the train and I’m about to go somewhere and I think, you know what? I’ll just take a cab because it’s just the one time and so on. It will make it so much easier if I know I can pay and I know I can find my way around.

Ed Reed

Fantastic. I think there’s so much more we can talk about. Maybe I can just ask you both to sum up quickly. Let’s start with you, Sayeh, What do you think, in summary?

Sayeh Ghanbari

It’s really quite hard to summarise the range of things that we’ve been talking about. I think, if there were a few things I would pull out, it’s really about the complexity of the matters that surround transport in general, whether it’s private transport, public transport, active travel, private vehicles, etc. But really, I think, as we’ve said, it’s a really exciting time to make some changes that will benefit us, all our citizens, and make our lives better. And what we just need in the short term is a bit of courage of conviction to really make that happen.

Chris Boardman

I think I benefited from a little time to think, there, so thanks very much for that. I’m going to start with two observations and two points. Everything we’ve been talking about for the last hour is culture change. You can almost forget transport. It’s culture change, and fast culture change. Two things that we hate, and I think we need to recognise that.

And the fact that for years and years we talked about logic. Logic is like the foundation of the house in that you have to have it before you build anything. No one buys a house because it’s got great foundations. Nobody even wants to talk about the foundation. They’re not interested in the foundations. They’re interested in what the house gives them. That’s really important.

That says we have to speak to people’s emotions and what matters to them. So, what we build, whatever we do next, whatever we want people to do, it must be easier or more beneficial than what I’m doing now, if you want me to change. And that’s key. That’s a key yardstick to measure every decision against. And, more technical internally, change benefit cost ratio, to give you the outcome that you want, the end result that you want. Because right now, it doesn’t. It locks you into the status quo.

Ed Reed

Fantastic. Well, thank you both so much for sharing your thoughts. It’s been really a rollercoaster of a ride, and I’m extremely glad I just sat back and listened to you both talk. It’s been really great. The best point for an interviewer is when I had to say nothing. Fantastic.

I’d like to say to our listeners, please let us know your thoughts on this topic through our social media channels. Or you can email us at outloud@energyvoice.com. And if you want to be part of the conversation and share your story with the energy industry, you can also email outloud@energyvoice.com, too.

You may already know that every week the Energy Voice team get together to highlight important stories from the world of energy in our regular podcast episodes. If you’re not already, please do subscribe, free, to Energy Voice - Out Loud in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, to get this essential briefing every Friday. We’ll be digging through the rest of the 10 Point Plan over this year, leading up to COP26. So, do, please, look out for those.

Continuing our theme of transportation, next month we’ll be talking about jet zero and green shipping. But for this, the fifth episode of the 10 Point Pod, I’ve been Ed Reed. Thank you for listening.

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