Urban Planning

As the national government supports roads and long-distance transportation over smaller-scale needs, localities must become creative with their transportation funding solutions.

Once in every UK parliamentary term (currently fixed at five years), the chancellor of the exchequer, the UK finance minister, publishes a spending review. This is a weighty document detailing which taxes will rise and fall and what every department, from defense to welfare, will spend, to the best estimate, over the term.

The latest review, from Chancellor George Osborne, reveals the national government putting its money into big, national-scale infrastructure projects, even though its messaging emphasizes local governments getting more power for local transport priorities.

From 2000 to 2010, local governments produced Local Transport Plans that attracted five-year funding settlements from Central Government. Since 2010, funding for local transport became more short term and more uncertain as cities and counties had to bid for a share of a reduced pot. Now, they have the opportunity to gain more control over local budgets and more responsibility for key services like transport, but that doesn’t mean more money, particularly if their priorities aren’t road building.

Simply put, budgets for local governments have always been redistributed by formula from the center. These have been and still are shrinking, and in some places are now at half what they were in 2010. The chancellor proposes to change all this and let local governments raise and keep their own taxes. This is a positive development, except Parliament still plans to tell local governments the levels and types of taxes they can raise, as well as the services they legally must provide. Bicycling promotion and revenue-based services like subsidized park-and-ride buses aren’t required, making their funding highly uncertain, whilst budgets for the legally-mandated free, off-peak bus travel for pensioners are also under pressure.

In fact, “buses” are only mentioned in the spending review in the context of buying new buses for London. Walking and pedestrian issues aren’t addressed at all. Cycling is allocated £300 million over the term, but much of this is to fulfil existing commitments in a handful of locations that won a Cycle Ambition City designation towards the end of the last Parliament’s term.

There is £100 million per year for the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, which was distributed by competitive bidding in the last Parliament and funded some excellent mobility projects. Yet this is peanuts compared to the £15 billion to be spent on the Roads Investment Strategy, which “signals the biggest investments in roads since the 1970s.”

I question whether Britain, in the 21st century, should be proud to be spending billions on infrastructure for cars and trucks, compared to short of £1 billion central funding allocated for all the other local transport modes combined. True, the RIS budget will “resurface over 80 percent of the strategic road network,” a laudable goal that can make those motorized private journeys safer and less polluting, but there are also “1,300 miles of additional lanes.” And this extra capacity will attract how much additional traffic?

The other big winner is national rail infrastructure, with over £15 billion for the proposed North-South High Speed Rail extension and £34.5 billion for other rail infrastructure projects, like electrification, new lines, and station upgrades. This support is positive, as are the policy promises to freeze rail fares subject to regulation, introduce flexible season ticketing for part-time commuters, and improve compensation to rail travelers. But all this rail and road infrastructure caters to longer-distance travel, whereas most trips in the UK are local, averaging seven miles. The biggest allocation for local transport is the new road maintenance fund – almost £1 billion per year to fill potholes.

The UK government isn’t putting its money where its mouth is towards local transport solutions. It’s up to local governments to be creative with the new powers they’re being given and whatever money they can scrape together to keep the country walking, cycling and riding the bus in the right direction.

For more details on British transportation spending and decentralization, see the Go-How blog.

Photo: A bicyclist passes a double-decker bus in London (Dylan Passmore, Flickr, Creative Commons).