Public space

mySociety.org have some cool maps showing travel times for central London. All maps show travel times to the the Department for Transport (DfT) office in central London.

This one shows areas where going by bike beats public transport if you need to get to the DfT office (note that all the areas that are not in grey are the ones where the bicycle is faster):

Some rights reserved (based on OpenStreetMap)

This is not surprising and matches my experience. It is still impressive, especially to see how far the area extends. I’d add two caveats, though.

Don’t misread the map as presumably saying that all the trips within the shown area are faster by bike. Remember that we are talking about trips to the DfT office, shown in the centre. Additionally, even if you take other trips in central London of about the same distance, if your trip just happens to conveniently start and end at a directly connected tube station, the tube would win hands down.

I’d also like to know the cyclist’s speed that was the basis for the calculation. I’m able to go pretty fast (as far as traffic allows it), but I’ve found the times given by the DfT’s own Journey Planner when selecting the “cycle only” option to be wildly optimistic.

Still, I can confirm that from Hackney (where I live) to basically any location in central London I’m on average faster by bike. I’ve actually done quite a few involuntary experiments when I was with someone who didn’t have a bike and we needed to do the same trip. In the best case, when the bikeless person got lucky and caught all buses without a wait, we arrived at about the same time. In most cases, I was between ten and twenty minutes faster. In one case, I was an hour ahead (I don’t remember exactly what that was — some extreme situation like a bus line not running at all, I guess. In all fairness, the equivalent scenario for this would be having a puncture on a bike. I often don’t carry a repair kit.)

Spotted near Fleet Street, London, on the same evening.

The Economist of 6th December, 2007 (full story, requires login) writes about U.S. subsidies for ethanol:

In other words, the demands of America’s ethanol programme alone account for over half the world’s unmet need for cereals. Without that programme, food prices would not be rising anything like as quickly as they have been. According to the World Bank, the grain needed to fill up an SUV would feed a person for a year.

Yet another example how the state panders to people who choose to drive motorized vehicles by paying for the damage they cause (in this case, paying farmers cash to get drivers to switch away from petrol). Why not tack on an extra tax on petrol if the state now believes its use to have more negative consequences than previously known? Car drivers will say, “but I don’t choose to drive, I have to – I live in the middle of nowhere and have to work in the city.” They forget that they choose to live in the middle of nowhere, to have a big house and be surrounded by pretty countryside. They reap the benefit, they should pay for the cost.

I choose to live in a city (London) where I can reach everything by bike. No-one subsidizes my rent payments.

How’s this for an innovative, low-cost DIY traffic calming measure? A stretch of rope laid across the street:

Our Man in Tirana posted this in July and noted that cars “almost always slow to a crawl when approaching” it.

There’s a whole collection of community initiatives to take traffic calming into their own hands at the International Home of Roadwitching, most notably the works of the Beech Croft Residents’ Association in cooperation with Sustrans. Here are a few I found particularly interesting:

Cars parked diagonally so they “stare” down cars entering the street, additionally creating an irregular zigzag contour (while in reality leaving a wide enough strip of the carriageway open for cars to pass):

Paintwork that extends across the whole street and both pavements to blur the distinction between pavement and carriageway:

Onstreet cycle parking:

The latter is great because it could also solve a common problem in London: There are often not enough Sheffield stands to lock your bike up, but putting them in on the pavement would make the already narrow pavement untolerably crowded for pedestrians (especially wheelchair users, people with baby buggies etc). I think it would be more than justified to sacrifice a minimal amount of car parking space: I bet you could easily fit Sheffield stands for at least six bicycles in the parking space of just one car.

Notably, all these DIY traffic calming measures work by introducing unexpected elements into an environment that has become so predictable for drivers that they perceive no danger and hence drive too fast. The unexpected elements create uncertainty and ambiguity, and the hope is that this increases drivers’ perception of danger, which in turn will make them take action to reduce that danger, namely by driving more slowly. As such, this concept has much in common with the Shared space/ Naked Streetsconcept that is currently gaining popularity across Europe and thankfully slowly taking over from the mentality of the 60’s trough 80’s that relied on segregation, such as pedestrian barriers.

However, I’d be very interested how long-lasting the effect is. Do the cars in Tirana still slow down to a crawl months after the rope has been laid across the street (assuming it’s still there)? How long until drivers get used to, and immune to, a row of cars “staring them down” when they enter the Beech Croft steet?

Maybe then the residents will have to resort to more drastic measures, such as this guy:

The New Statesman had an article (in August) criticising the New Approach to Appraisal (Nata) rules for road building in the UK. Basically, Nata is a cost-benefit analysis framework for assessing proposals of road building projects, introduced by Labour in 1998.

The author comes down hard against Nata. He’s right in that some of the estimates seem not very plausible, such as a barrel of oil to cost $35 in 2025.

Other examples are difficult to appraise given the limited information in the article:

Take section 3.5.1[1] of the Nata rules. This awards extra points to schemes that generate more traffic because more cars and lorries on the road mean more fuel sales - and hence more tax revenue for the government. By contrast, public transport schemes, which take motor vehicles off the road and so reduce fuel sales and tax revenue, have points deducted.

More tax revenue for the government is indeed a good thing, so on its own this rule is not necessarily a problem. But is there a rule that looks at the adverse effects of increased motor traffic? Noise, pollution, and risk emanating from motor traffic result in a loss of livable public space to everyone outside of cars (including drivers while they are not driving). Is there a rule that looks at the benefits of more public transport, such as decreased necessity for people to buy and maintain cars at great cost, decreased drunk driving, and so on? Tax revenue is not a goal in itself, it is a goal because the state can use it to fulfil other goals, that is buy things that are good for its citizens. A solution that fulfils these goals directly might well be preferable.

Sometimes the Nata rules neglect a potential change in behaviour altogether. For example, a proposal gets credit if it is predicted to shorten journey times:

Every minute saved for a car driver is valued at 44p […]

[…]

A minute saved on a cyclist’s travel time, for example, isn’t worth 44p but just 28p. A bus-user’s time is valued at 33p a minute. The implicit assumption is that cyclists and bus-users make less contribution to the economy than car drivers.

Again, on its own this assumption may well be justified. It is plausible that currently, on average, cyclists are in a lower income bracket than car drivers, and if you value economic contribution in terms of revenue, the time of someone who earns more is more precious. The first problem is of course that the money generated in an economy isn’t everything. Some jobs are widely recognised to be underpaid compared to what they are actually worth to society (caring for infirm patients, or raising children). But in addition, the assessment seems to be based entirely on the status quo, without any regard for the possibility of change. However, as more people take up cycling, the difference in contribution to the economy between drivers and cyclists is likely to shrink. And of course, how many people take up cycling is in no small measure influenced by decisions about road building proposals.

Cost-benefit analysis is especially controversial when monetary value has to be assigned to goods that are not usually thought of as being part of the economy, such as clean air or the beauty of a landscape. Have a look at this excerpt from the article:

Nata assessments have also always avoided costing the most damaging aspects of new roads, such as the impact on landscapes, noise and pollution and, of course, carbon emissions. This means that, even though a road might be an environmental disaster, there are no estimated cash costs to be set against the claimed economic benefits. Instead the planners give a qualitative assessment, using terms such as “moderate”, “severe” or, worst of all, “very large adverse”.

These qualitative judgements have in the past been enough to frustrate the road builders. Alistair Darling rejected “improvements” to the A303 that would have carved a new road through the Blackdown Hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty on the Devon-Somerset borders, after seeing in the Nata assessment that it would have a “seriously adverse” impact. He apparently did not want to be the minister who overruled such a negative assessment.

It should be no surprise that ever since that decision was taken, Treasury and DfT [Department for Transport] officials have been working to get rid of such “emotional” analyses by designing a system to assign monetary values to landscapes, tranquillity and biodiversity. The ostensible aim is to make the system more “objective” and number-based - but the crucial issue is what values are assigned to qualities that are inherently priceless. How much might the last dormouse in Wiltshire be worth? Soon Labour’s minions may be able to tell you.

Note how in the first paragraph, the author seems to criticise lack of inclusion of “non-monetary” costs in the formal part of the Nata assessment, while by the last paragraph, he casts precisely that inclusion in a negative light.

Many people have a visceral reaction against a formal market valuation of some goods, goods that are not usually traded in a market. Of course, the problem is, what is the alternative? Personally, I’m not sure that a purely qualitative judgment is necessarily better. In the example of the A303 it resulted in a decision after the author’s taste, but that is no guarantee that it will do so in the future. What if some planners categorise environmental damage as “negligible” where most residents would disagree?

Of course, the devil is in the detail. In CBA, value is usually assigned to any good, even clean air or natural beauty, by asking people about their willingness to pay (WTP) for the good. This can be problematic, for example if the value elicited from a poor person and that elicited from a rich person get compared directly, in currency terms. A poor person stating that they would pay £ 10 and a rich person stating that they would pay £ 100 can well be manifestations of the same underlying emotional value held by each of them for the good in question — should the rich person’s value enter the equation as 10 times greater than the poor person’s? However, there are alternatives. WTP can be measured as percentage of income, for example, or currency units can be weighted.

In general, I think it is better to try to make an explicit quantitative assessment of such values than to rely on the intuition of a small panel. However, some of people’s intuition against such quantitative assessments may reflect that the quantitative process, while more open and objective to experts, is less accessible and open to criticism by laymen than a one-off, verbal assessment such as “considerable damage” or “negligible”. The latter is immediately visible and understandable, and can be openly criticised by anyone using everyday language. A formal WTP assessment will be shrouded in a report, disguised in numbers, and resting on many implicit assumptions and hidden decisions about methodology (such as WTP in currency vs percentage of income), and understanding and criticising it would require research and more formal expression of criticism. What would such a perceived (or real) difference in accessibility to criticism mean? I’d argue that translating it into a rejection of a formal quantitative method would be shortsighted, and that we could instead strive to make the quantitative process more rigorous and more easily accessible even to laypeople.

But even if we elicit the value with perfectly sound methodology, many people will remain uneasy because they think that some values are absolute and should not be traded off under any circumstances. Of course, this is bogus. If extinction of the last Wiltshire dormouse would mean revenue for the treasury of billions of pounds, and the NHS could use that money to find a cancer vaccine, wouldn’t that have been worth the money? When people refuse to trade off some values (nature, beauty) against money, they may neglect that that money could fulfil other goals of the same emotional and “moral” significance.