Future scenarios and strategic choices - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 404

24 Future scenarios and strategic choices
24.1 Introduction
Transport policy and planning in Britain over the last ten years has been a period
of intense activity. Many individual changes have been positive but viewed from a
broader perspective the improvements delivered have been patchy and strategically
it has been ineffective. As we noted in Chapter 3 except for greater use of rail we are
as car dependent a nation as we were a decade ago. The overall volume of motorised
traffic has increased by a fifth and the volume of CO 2 emissions from surface transport
has risen by about 8%.
A great deal of the activity can therefore be likened to rearranging the deckchairs
on the doomed ocean liner. Despite the warning signals received during the 1990s
(from the New Realism Report, from the anti-roads campaigners, and from the
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution) DfT's overall course has only been
marginally adjusted (to plan for somewhat reduced increases in road traffic) rather
than fundamentally redirected.
The strategic failure has characterised not only the content of policy but the
incoherent manner in which it has been developed and executed overall. We have
commented at several points in this topic about the practice of policy layering - the
frequent superimposition of new policies rather than constructive review of 'old'
ones. This creates confusion in both substance and practice as mutually incompatible
policies continue to sit alongside (or above and below) one another and as practitioners
struggle to catch up with the latest repositioning.
Phil Goodwin - the main protagonist of the New Realism - has made a similar
observation. Speaking in March 2008 he said:
What we've had is a decade of J-turns. A J-turn is an uncompleted U-turn. There
is no coherence - there is a series of statements, each of which pleases or displeases
one or other group of stakeholders but no feeling that there is an overarching
vision in our most senior elected leaders and advisers which is any more profound
than anybody in this room and possible a lot less so. And that's uncomfortable.
(Lecture to Transport Planning Society, reported in LTT 489)
Amidst this vacuum the Treasury has taken the initiative in mounting a series of
studies of longer term issues which have effectively set the context within which the
Department is now reviewing its own strategy. The introduction of serious analysis is
welcome although the limitations of its perspective are disturbing. In this chapter we