Twice now, an economic meltdown in the UK has halted plans to improve a dangerous and outdated stretch of the A23 London-to-Brighton road. Approved recently for a second time, after several expensive public inquiries and much local discussion, this upgrade was one of the first victims of the new government's almost gleeful budgetary axe-wielding. Plans to increase the passenger-carrying capacity of the railway line from Brighton to London, with longer trains, are also threatened.
Does it make sense to stop spending money on the transport system? Has the recession hit the demand for travel? A new report from the International Transport Forum, 'Trends in the Transport Sector 1970-2008', suggests that there has been little decline in the demand for transport. For example, the world's GDP may have fallen by 2.3 per cent in 2009, with Europe's GDP down by 4 per cent, but we continued to ship more stuff around the planet.
"In 2008, the volume of international seaborne trade was estimated by UNCTAD at 32,746 tonne-miles, representing an increase of 4.8 per cent," according to the report. World container traffic increased by only "4 per cent in 2008": a much smaller increase than the previous year's 30 per cent, but an increase all the same. Even in the UK, there was an estimated decline of a mere 1.1 per cent in freight transport between 2007 and 2008.
The report's numbers for rail travel in the UK suggest a year-on-year increase of 4.8 per cent per cent in 'thousand million passenger-kilometres' travelled on the country's trains between 2008 and 2009. This brought the number for 2009 to 50.700 thousand million passenger-kilometres, up from 38.200 thousand million in 2000.
The numbers for the "gross investment in transport infrastructure" show that spending on the UK's railways fell from 8137 million euros in 2007 to 7515 million euros in 2008. Back in 1995, it was a derisory 2415 million euros. There can't be many people who think that the increased spending of recent years has eliminated the backlog of work that needed doing to create a 21st-century railway system.
The numbers for road use paint a similar figure. The 0.9 percent decline in the use of private cars – down from 685 to 679 thousand million passenger-kilometres – is hardly an opportunity to spend less on the road system. The UK spent 6513 million euros of gross investment in road infrastructure in 2008, down from 6974 million euros the year before. The figure for 1995, 5227 million euros, shows just how big the difference was between the fortunes of road and rail.
Given how little the UK put into the railway system in the last quarter of the 20th century, it is easy to see why the trains were literally creaking at the seams. Now, it seems, the new age of rail investment could come to rapid end.
If we are on the verge of decades of stagnating investment in the transport system, rather than a temporary bid to restore the country's finances, we can expect the infrastructure to collapse at an ever accelerating pace. Any long-term decline in investment will also slow down attempts to remove carbon from the transport system. One way to dispel such pessimism would be for the government to reinvest in the railways the cash it raises from the planned sale of the High Speed 1 railway line through Kent.
It looks like we will have to wait for the true horror of the cuts in spending on infrastructure to become clearer. The budget did little more than underline the clash between different priorities. The Chancellor of the Exchequer boasted about not cutting transport projects in the north of England. Nothing wrong with that, but the overcrowded south suffers most from congestion and clapped out trains. Perhaps this is another part of the government's campaign, itself not a bad idea, to encourage people to leave the southeast and move to parts of the country where the infrastructure is not stretched to breaking point. Make the southeast unbearable and people will migrate to places where the transport system works.
related content:
Mixed reaction to Budget transport announcements
Categories: Commentary ,
Comments
All comments
You need to be registered with the IET to leave a comment. Please log in or register as a new user.