predicting modal change ...

The third and final part of this article will inevitably be a prediction, so is almost certain to be wrong, at least in degree! But there are some things that we do know!

Oil is a finite resource. We have almost certainly reached the point of Peak Oil, when half of the oil that will EVER be found (at least for another 150 million years!) has been used. But that is of course the easy oil! The remaining half will be much harder to find and extract, and will clearly be much more expensive!

The climate is in a state of change. The last few climate sceptics seem to have now come round and there is now no doubt the the earth is warming up fast, and that at least part of this is due to our activities. Whilst it's hard to say exactly what the effects of a rapidly warming Earth will be, it is easier to say what needs to be done to bring this under control. The most important thing is that we stop using fossil fuels - ie coal, gas and oil - and switch to an economy that uses renewables. This can include solar power, wind power, hydro electric, wave, wood, biofuels and nuclear (although the last two have inherent problems and nuclear is only semi-renewable). Another side of the energy equation requires that we reduce energy use.

Moving to transport the road network has inherent and fatal flaws. The first is that its vehicles rely on fossil fuels almost exclusively. And all road vehicles apart from trolleybuses require vehicles to carry their own fuel, reducing their efficiency even further. Roads themselves need huge amounts of oil for their surfaces. Few people would argue that the car culture has been beneficial for the environment, health or for our towns, cities and villages. Basically it was a cheap fix that could only last whilst cheap energy was available. No one will mourn its passing.

All of this brings us to the absolute essential aspects of the inevitable transport modal shift that is almost upon us. Our future transport needs to be energy efficient - trains and trams are VASTLY more efficient than any transport mode that uses rubber tyres on hard surfaces. There is simply too much friction to make energy use optimal, whereas steel wheels on steel rails have very low friction. The need to carry fuel, whether it's diesel, petrol or batteries reduces the efficiency even further. Cars and lorries really don't have any other option - the road/car culture ONLY arose because of extremely cheap finite fuel. Forget arguments about flexibility - this is a red herring. Public transport would be totally flexible if it were universal, cheap and ran 24 hours a day.

Think about the way the British railway network was all but destroyed in little over ten years - and this was NOTHING to do with fuel efficiency or availability. The roads will simply not have anything to fall back on. The whole thing could collapse in a matter of months! Forget electric cars - our generating capacity is already in decline, and there certainly won't be cheap electricity to charge up cars! We can expect rolling power cuts within ten years, just to keep our current infrastructure going. In the last quarter less than 200 electric cars were sold in the UK, despite a grant of £5000 and free charging points! They are just a rather sad attempt to keep the car culture going and are doomed to failure.

A million people have given up driving in the last year due to apparent 'high petrol costs'. This is laughable as fuel is still amazingly cheap, and will probably remain that way for another five years or so. But if this keeps up soon the tax take from motoring will inevitably reduce the budget for road repairs, resulting in poorer road surfaces and a virtuous circle where people give up driving due to cost and the poor state of the roads, road use falls further, tax takes decline and fuel duty and road tax etc skyrocket, forcing more and more off the roads ...

And this is of course where we come in. There is a perfect transport system for the future. It can reach every town and village, every factory and farm and market, can have numerous different fuel delivery systems, can use many different fuel sources, can exactly match the needs of its users, can be fast (where required), convenient, flexible and profitable.

It doesn't need some new exotic fuel source, technology that hasn't been invented yet, and most of the infrastructure is already in place (or its remains are!) It is a safe and secure system, it can carry freight, passengers, animals, raw materials, parcels and a host of other things. There is in fact NOTHING railways and tramways can't do. So why are we waiting?

The days of misallocation of economic resources should be over. We need a modern and energy efficient and flexible transport system for the future, now all we need is the community and political will to get things moving. Dumping nostagia for the car is the first step, the second is to get things moving on your doorstep. The future is right here.

modal shift part 2

It's not easy for me to get into a 1960s mind set. I was around at the time of course, but hardly engaging with the big outside world!

But in retrospect it looked like the 60s, and the attitude to rail, was 'it's finished. It has no future role, except perhaps to run commuters into were applied to roads serving smaller places. Even the lines that survived the Beeching cuts were run down - stations were closed or staffing reduced, buffets closed, lines were singled, the whole network began to look run down. It was almost as if the railways wanted passengers to desert them! Freight was switching from efficient and fast rail to inefficient and much slower roads.

In fact EVERYTHING was expected to use the roads. It really was as if oil would last forever. Extra lorries and buses flooded on to the roads as the parallel railways were closed, cyclists were expected to brave the traffic, you'd still find horse and carts, tractors, mobility scooters, milk floats - everything was thrown onto the roads.

You had ridiculous scenes like the congested A33 running alongside a closed cross country railway that should have been carrying most of the freight and many of the car drivers. A few railways were still closing as late as the 1980s.

The seventies were probably the most dour and depressing years for the railways, and oddly most people who don't use the railways seem to think they are still like that! You still get jokes about British Rail sandwiches for example.

And what of the roads? They have just got busier and busier, though they seem to be spluttering a bit now. Apparently a million people have given up driving in the last year - the reason 'high fuel costs'! Don't make me laugh, fuel is still ridiculously cheap. It will be 5 to 10 times as expensive in ten to twenty years' time. But something must be afoot, because it's no small decision to give up driving, however much most of us would love to. There are still far too many places unreachable by rail or even bus today. It's like a drawing in happening across the board, people are worrying about the cost of driving - they are going to be in for such a huge shock over the coming years! This is just the very beginning. The high cost of insurance makes it almost impossible for young people to be able to drive - driving test applications have fallen by 19% in the last year.

We are building a demographic that will probably never drive, but so far we're doing very little to put in process transport infrastructure that will enable them to get around cheaply and safely. That'll be the subject of the third and final part of this article!

the mechanics of modal shift

I'm going to attempt a bit of an overview of this subject, hopefully published over the next 3 to 4 days!

The mechanics of modal shift part one

Modal shift in transport has quite a history. From the horse to the horse and carriage through the growth of canals, then railways, then the use of roads and aircraft. Most of the change has been over the last two centuries, and has quite clearly been powered by the easy availablity of first coal, then oil.

Early attempts at adopting the steam locomotive for road use were failures because roads simply weren't good enough. But steam locomotives were perfect for railways, and the rail network quickly expanded, killing off a lot of the canal trade in the process. This was the first big modal shift of the industrial era.

The discovery of oil (or rediscovery to be precise) quickly led to the creation of the internal combustion engine. As more cars were produced the road network was modernised, creating a virtuous circle of development. Eventually the car challenged the railways, at least for part of the share of traffic, particularly passenger travel and some of the fiddly freight traffic.

Despite the railways' fantastic contribution during world war two post-war governments in the UK began to favour road over rail, partly because of the huge cost of restoring the rail network after war damage and wear and tear which arose from the very heavy wartime traffic. The railways were nationalized on 1 January 1948, releasing the Big Four companies from the obligation of investment.

All the time this was happening more and more oil was being discovered, petrol was generally cheap and used as if it was an infinite resource. Investment decisions on creation of new transport infrastructure seemed to also imagine that cheap oil would last forever, again as if it was an infinite resource. Motorways were constructed and railways began to be closed in a wholesale manner, particularly after the Beeching Report was published in 1963. The Beeching Report was fatally flawed in two ways, it treated railways differently from roads, requiring railways to be 'economically viable' whereas roads, no matter how remote and little used they were, were treated as a social necessity, with no need to be economically viable. The second big error was to not take into account the limited lifespan of oil. Whilst the railways were now using oil to fuel its new diesel locomotives, replacing steam that used home mined (but equally finite) coal, railways were not tied to one energy source or one delivery system the way roads were.

The effect of the Beeching Report was the wholesale destruction of the rail network, not just through closure of lines (including the S&D) but the closure of hundreds of stations on lines that stayed open and the diversion of freight from rail to road.