Here are five key takeaways, based on an initial run through, of what the Transport Decarbonisation Plan means for urban transport.

1. It accelerates the shift in tone and emphasis in urban transport policy and delivery towards active travel and public transport and makes moves to lock this in (in a quantifiable way) through resuscitating previously out of favour Local Transport Plans (LTPs) as the vehicle for doing so. So ‘LTPs will…need to set out how local areas will deliver ambitious quantifiable carbon reductions in transport.’ This will be part of a wider pincer movement through consolidation of local transport funding. Importantly, the plan states: ‘For future local transport funding, we will transition to a state where this is conditional on local areas being able to demonstrate how they will reduce emissions over a portfolio of transport investments through LTPs, which will become a focus of engagement between central and local government about future funding.’   A further element underpinning this will be a green shift in the guidance and rules on how schemes are appraised. Particularly interesting is that it signals a desire to  move away from a ‘predict and provide’ approach to transport planning towards planning that starts from the outcomes communities want to achieve and providing the transport solutions to deliver those (‘vision and validate’). This would be a ‘revolution in the head’ for transport planning if it’s followed through on.

2. The ambitions for world class cycling infrastructure everywhere and a big shift to bus (with more, cheaper and greener services everywhere) are what we want too. The Government has also put money behind the bar for more spending on both (£5 billion in total). This sounds a lot and is a lot. But given the scale of the ambition it won’t be enough – especially on bus where the starting point is declining patronage and services and high fares. So all eyes on the multi-year spending review in the Autumn. If DfT loses out to other Gov departments, and if local transport loses out to other parts of the DfT (as it did in the last spending review) then buses and active travel provision can still improve but not at the pace or scale necessary to meet the objectives of the TDP.

3. Tech optimism and tech fixes are preferred to hard decisions. We can have our cake (more travel, more roads and more flights) and eat it too (by decarbonising everything that moves). For urban transport one hard decision that is dodged is around the relative cost of motoring and public transport. The cold hard stats show the relative cost of public transport has been rising fast compared with the cost of motoring in recent years. Although there is talk in the Plan about cheaper bus fares, there is only a brief veiled reference on the other side of the equation – vehicle taxation – where it says: ‘we will need to ensure that the tax system encourages the uptake of EVs and that revenue from motoring taxes keeps pace with this change, to ensure we can continue to fund the first-class public services and infrastructure that people and families across the UK expect.’ Of course it is also right that we do press ahead and at pace on the decarbonisation of urban vehicle fleets – and solid progress is being made. However, it’s disappointing that the approach to decarbonising vehicle fleets is still modally divided, focussed on the vehicles rather than how we get sufficient green energy to where it needs to be to power those vehicles. It also doesn’t recognise sufficiently that if all urban vehicles (buses, vans, fire engines, cars) are to be zero emission – and therefore have access to the green power they need – then city regions need to be at the top table when decisions are being made about how to make all this happen.

4. The bloated £27bn national roads programme which is set to pump more and more traffic into urban areas looks increasingly vulnerable. Gone is all the macho rhetoric about ‘biggest road building programme since the Romans’ and in comes ‘nothing to see here’ – it’s all about enhancements, renewals, tree planting and cycle lanes. The TDP says there will be a review but is cagey on the detail. It could and should be the beginning of a more common sense approach to the use of the £27 billion in a climate crisis.

5. The car is king in terms of journey share but in the UK occupancy rates are low. So the maths says if you increase car occupancy, even by a small percentage, you can make a significant cut in carbon emissions. The TDP signals that it gets this and that more needs to be done to make this happen but recognises that more thinking needs to be done on how. The TDP could be the start of a process of bringing vehicle sharing from the margins to a more central position in transport policy which is positive. However it misses a trick on this (and more widely on other topics in the Plan including decarbonisation of urban vehicle fleets) on how the public sector (education, healthcare, local government and so on) could be taking more of a lead. After all this is a lever that the Government should more easily be able to pull.

All in all, the TDP should perhaps be seen as the latest stage (and a consolidation of recent progress) of a journey for greening urban transport policy which had been long overdue, but remarkably rapid once it got underway. For example, it’s hard to believe now but a decade ago cycling was at the far margins of urban transport policy and investment priorities. It couldn’t have been any more fringe. But now it’s front and centre.

The TDP also sets the stage for the tougher decisions that are still to come – most notably on taxation and pricing of travel, and on how the totality of available transport funding is prioritised.

Jonathan Bray is Director at Urban Transport Group

15 July 2021