How will we travel in the cities of the future? Ros Dodd finds out from Professor Miles Tight.
Imagine a city, 16 years from now, where half of all trips around town are by foot or bike, where there are cycle paths on almost every street and where pedestrians and cyclists have more rights of way over cars.
Pie in the sky? In fact, there are already cities like this – but elsewhere in Europe, not in Britain.
The UK remains in thrall to the motorcar and recent efforts to promote cycling as a transport mode of choice have not made the hoped-for changes.
But Miles Tight, Professor of Transport, Energy and Environment in the School of Civil Engineering, is cautiously optimistic that a drive towards walking - and bicycleled cities is not beyond the realms of imagination. From extensive research he is doing, it seems an increasing numberof people think the same way.
‘We are trying to move away from thinking about incremental change and, instead, are thinking about longer-term futures, particularly in the context of walking and cycling,’ he explains. ‘We have just come to the end of a three-year project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), called Visions 2030, in which we thought about what those two modes could do in terms of providing for urban transportation in the UK. We decided to clear the decks and think outside the box.’
Combined with academic expertise in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders – from local authority planners to families – Miles and his colleagues are building up evidence -based models for making ‘active travel’ the rule rather than the exception, which would benefit the environment and public health.
‘If we build machines to fly around the world, I’m sure we can come up with ways of making it easier for people to walk,’ says Miles, who has been researching safety, equity and sustainability of travel for more than 30 years.
The multi-disciplinary, multi-university research team behind Visions 2030 came up with three scenarios, which they presented to a range of experts and the public at ‘road shows’ all around Britain. The responses were positive, says Miles. ‘I haven’t had any eggs thrown at me yet!’
The first vision was the European best practice model. This supposes all urban areas in the UK, from big cities like Birmingham to small towns, meet the best standards that exist in Europe: a substantial increase in walking and especially cycling; halving current car use and roughly doubling public transport use.
‘Basically, our argument was: these places exist – Copenhagen, Zurich and many Dutch cities. Yet in the UK, apart from, to an extent, Cambridge, York and Oxford, we have no cities like this. In some parts of the UK, such as much of Wales and Scotland, there is very little non-leisure cycling.’
Vision number two was more radical. ‘We said, “let’s imagine a future where walking and cycling account for about 60 per cent of urban travel. Public transport would improve dramatically and car use would drop to five per cent of trips”. While VisionOne could essentially be done within the context of our current society, this second vision would need major changes in the values and norms of society.’
The third vision was more radical still. ‘It’s slightly different in the sense that it makes the assumption that something unpleasant has happened between now and 2030, such as conflict or a major fuel crisis, and change has been forced upon us so that 80 per cent of urban journeys are made by walking or cycling; there’s a reduction in public transport because of a lack of fuel and car use accounts for only five per cent of journeys. The argument there is that we would invest in technology to help us walk and cycle. For example, you would have battery-powered bicycles.’
The researchers then turned their attention to the pathways that would be needed to make the visions a reality – something they are still working on.
At workshops held in several UK towns and cities, local authority and local transport stakeholders were asked to think outside the usual constraints of their roles. They were presented with details of VisionOne, asked to imagine it was their urban area in 2030 and then given the task of explaining how they had achieved it.
‘They didn’t all manage it,’ says Miles, ‘but the interesting thing was that people were willing to take part and were happy to think beyond the normal constraints of their jobs. On the whole, people came up with coherent plans, which we have put together as a publication. Our argument is that if you don’t think about the possibility of very different transport futures in our urban areas, then the only real certainty is that you will not achieve them.’
Miles is now heading a five-year project – again funded by the EPSRC – called STEP-CHANGE (Sustainable Transport Evidence and modelling Paradigms: Cohort Household Analysis to support New Goals in Engineering design) to look at the evidence for bringing about changes in transportation. His team is studying cities that have brought about such changes already and what they did to achieve the changes. Good examples include Copenhagen with its cycling, Bogota in Colombia, which has a bus rapid transit system, and London with the congestion charge and desire to increase levels of cycling.
Miles is also involved in conducting a long-term qualitative survey among 250 people in Leeds and Manchester to find out more about how transport change happens and the effects this has on people’s lives – and already it’s thrown up some interesting results.
‘We’re talking to them roughly annually over four years and asking them about how transport has changed in their lives, individually and as a family. One of the interesting things is the increasing dependence on flying for social and holiday transport. The other is the effect of illness. All families go through periods of ill health and it changes the need for transport and creates difficult challenges.’
What, then, needs to be done to make transport in Coventry more like Copenhagen and Birmingham more like Berlin?
‘One of the things we need to do is to make tools available to planners to create change,’ says Miles, who was a consultant on the University’s recently published Policy Commission report Future Urban Living, which included as one of its recommendations the upgrading of planners’ roles. ‘At the moment, planning tools very much promote the status quo. We need to develop tools that support planners in making more significant changes to our transport systems.’
So what of Miles’s own vision for 2030?
‘I’m a bit of an extremist, so I would probably like Vision Two, but I’d be quite happy to live in a Dutch-style city,’ he says. ‘I would like to live in a place where it is the norm for people to cycle to the local shop to buy a tub of margarine; where it’s the norm for kids to walk or cycle to school in relative safety; where cars and associated infrastructure don’t dominate the urban landscape. It would be a much calmer environment – one that is cleaner, safer and has less of an impact on the global environment. It would just be a nicer place.’