9
As I settled in for the congenial ferry ride from the Hook of Holland back to Harwich, I couldn’t stop thinking about just how indescribably great Amsterdam’s cycle network was – all 400km of it. How did such a thing of wonder come to be? Ensconced in a booth on Stena’s onboard restaurant, I paused in my inhalation of a generous slab of veggie lasagne to look up more stats on this sublime cyclists’ paradise. According to the tourist board, it only exists as a result of a ‘hard-won combination of urban planning, government spending and people power’.1 So why hadn’t the same thing been done in the UK? And not just with regards to cycling culture – why did our overarching infrastructure seem to hold us back in terms of building a truly comprehensive transport network of buses, trains, trams and, yes, fabulous bike lanes? And alongside that, running in perfect tandem, why were there still government policies – decisions made by the most powerful public servants in the land – that overwhelmingly benefited the aviation industry, continuing to incentivise flying to the point where Edinburgh–London flights are five times cheaper than getting the train?2
It was time to find out what needed to change closer to home – and how we as travellers could add our voice to the conversation and campaign for better.
This will come as no surprise to anyone who regularly uses the rail network of Britain, but it has some … shall we say … deficiencies. It is a strange beast, shaped by the privatisation and deregulation of the 1990s. When Conservative Prime Minister John Major took a sledgehammer to the nationalised railways under the Railways Act 1993, selling different bits to the highest bidder – like a macabre auction of body parts – travellers were promised that competition would lead to cheaper fares and a more efficient system. Instead, we were left with an unruly, oft-unjoined-up system of train franchises run by different businesses. There is frequently little cohesion on timetables or price.
As with so many well-intentioned plans in life, the system that sprung up in place of a publicly owned overarching transport network has proved a fairly disastrous experiment – as was proven in 2020 and 2021, when the government was forced to step in and take back control of the Northern, LNER and Southeastern franchises.
While the franchise system did bring with it innovation in the form of a complex, dynamic pricing system, resulting in incredibly cheap fares if you had the foresight to book weeks ahead of time – in 2019, BBC Reality Check found that the UK had the second-cheapest rail travel in Europe if tickets were booked one month in advance – it also saw Britain’s train tickets become the most expensive in Europe when bought on the day.3
Not only did all this lead to the death of spontaneous, non-essential domestic train travel, it also left travellers bewildered by the pricing system, ever in flux, different depending on when you booked and which operator you booked with.
‘I hate dynamic pricing – I find it incredibly stressful,’ Ellie Harris, founder of Bring Back British Rail, tells me. ‘I live in Glasgow and work in Dundee – and the only way to do that commute affordably is to book months in advance.’ She set up her campaign group back in 2009 in response to her own frustrations as a commuter using a rail network that she believed was in no way fit for purpose:
I was travelling long distances across England and Scotland for work and experienced so many problems: delays, a lack of cooperation between different private train companies, expensive tickets. I thought it was ridiculous that no one was talking about putting railways back into public ownership. It was common sense-driven rather than ideological – if you want a cohesive, efficient network, it makes sense to bring it under one body, and to ensure it serves customers rather than being a means of creating profits for private companies.
The idea has gained real traction over the past decade; alongside the 100,000 members who have joined the Bring Back British Rail Facebook page to add their voice to the clamour, renationalising the railways was a cornerstone of the Labour Party’s 2015 manifesto, and consistently polls as being a popular idea with voters.4 Meanwhile, as previously mentioned, some franchises are already being stripped from private rail operators and brought ‘in-house’, under the remit of the Department for Transport instead. In many ways, what Ellie has been calling for has already come to pass.
‘Franchising is dead – if it wasn’t before, it is now after Southeastern,’ says Norman Baker, adviser to the chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, set up in 2000 to lobby for sustainable transport for all communities for social, environmental and economic reasons:
The railway is effectively renationalised anyway. It was renationalised under the coalition government; the Department for Transport effectively controls everything. In that context, I’m not quite sure what ‘renationalisation’ means. And when Great British Railways comes along, it will be even more under government control.
This is the next big step forward: Great British Railways (GBR), a planned state-owned public body that will oversee rail transport in Britain from 2023, replacing Network Rail and essentially kicking the now-defunct franchising system to the curb.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, announced in 2021 that rail would be driven by the ‘guiding mind’ principle – a reform that sees one organisation oversee and coordinate everything, set service standards and create a cohesive, coherent network. But even this doesn’t go far enough, according to Ellie.
‘It’s not just about railways,’ she says. ‘We need a fully integrated public transport network that takes in trains, buses, cycle hire, active travel – across all different modes.’ Good examples are Switzerland and the Zürich region. Even if you live in a tiny village, you are guaranteed in law certain service standards – a bus every hour, seven days a week. ‘They put that in law in the 1980s at the same time that we were destroying our bus network through deregulation,’ says Ellie. Not only are buses guaranteed, but they also take you to the nearest train station, where you’ll have a brief, perfectly timed interchange to catch the train to Zürich.
Munich, too, has a public transport slogan that we can only dream of here in Blighty: ‘one network, one timetable, one ticket’. In most German cities, including Hamburg and Berlin, public transport is run by one transport association that integrates all the various modes – S-Bahn, U-Bahn, trams, buses – into one network.
‘It’s not just about planning bus routes, it’s about how it all fits together,’ says Ellie. ‘Buses filling the gaps to get people to the nearest train stations as quickly as possible.’
It sounds like a beautiful utopia. But why does all this matter in relation to aviation? Well, because flights are just one part of the transport picture – it all fits together. If you had a fully functioning, efficient, joined-up and, crucially, affordable network, we’d be able to decarbonise the transport sector as a whole – which contributed the biggest proportion of the UK’s overall carbon emissions in 2020 – much more quickly and easily.5 We’d likely see a rise in domestic tourism as people could better access different parts of the country for less money. People would be more easily convinced to leave their cars at home. And, most importantly, you’d see a dramatic decline in people flying within the UK. At present, domestic flights are often significantly cheaper than the alternatives – which is a big problem at a juncture when we’re supposed to be reducing emissions across the board. This price gap looks set to get worse, too; the UK government saw the 2021 Budget as the perfect opportunity to announce it was cutting air passenger duty (APD), the only tax on aviation, on domestic flights from 2023, further disincentivising the use of public transport.
Ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26), which was hosted in Glasgow in November that year, Dann Mitchell, a professor of climate science at Bristol University, summed up the issue in this tweet:
Booking my travel for COP26 – £330 (16hrs) for a return on the train. £46 (2hrs) for a return on the airplane. Really not an ideal situation given the main COP agenda is how we reach Net Zero. I’ll be sure to mention this to every UK politician I bump into there.
Ellie adds:
It’s from an environmental perspective more than anything that we need to price transport fairly, taking into account the carbon impact. It seems an absolute no-brainer that that’s got to happen. During the pandemic, while governments were offering bail-outs to the aviation sector, in other countries they had conditions attached to that, requiring airlines to make certain emissions reduction commitments. But there was nothing like that in the UK.
France is the most prominent example: Air France, the national carrier, received €7 billion of taxpayers’ money but with ‘climate conditions’ attached, including slashing its domestic flights.
Meanwhile, in the UK, rail services were being cut, at odds with the ‘build back better’ stance that should have been governing decisions, Ellie argues. She’s convinced fares will go up as a result.
Norman agrees that ‘the price is wrong’ for the UK’s public transport: ‘If you look at the last ten years, bus prices went up 77 per cent in real terms, rail went up 36 per cent, and motoring just 9 per cent,’ he says. ‘We think there needs to be a better relationship between the carbon emitted and the price of transport.’
So what would be a fair price for transport? Better Transport launched a campaign in 2021 calling for a complete overhaul of the fares system to make rail travel more affordable, more attractive and easier. It included a fares freeze for 2022; extended pay-as-you-go travel options outside London, in cities like Manchester and Birmingham; fairer single-ticket pricing (so that a single isn’t basically the same price as a return, always a kick in the teeth); and the end of the peak/off-peak cliff edge that sees trains run half-empty at 9 a.m. and jam-packed fifteen minutes later as travellers avoid the rush-hour price spike.
Meanwhile, Ellie says that train fares need to be ‘slashed in half at least, if not more. It needs to be significantly cheaper than flying. And all local transport needs to be free, too.’
By this she means local bus, train and tram networks – a measure that has already been adopted in more than a hundred towns and cities worldwide, including the Estonian capital of Tallinn and the entirety of Luxembourg. It’s bold moves like this that will actually convince travellers to get out of their cars and transition to greener ways of getting around.
Norman Baker says:
You can’t fault the government’s ambitions – they’re very radical. They’ve learned to say the right things. But what you can fault is the failure to implement them. If we’re serious about climate change, we need to act NOW. And if you’re serious about that, the government needs to be getting people onto public transport. Electric vehicles are all well and good, but getting people to switch to public transport is the quickest way to decarbonise.
How did things go so wrong?
Britain has seen a steady and relentless decline in its public transport network since the middle of the twentieth century. First, local tram networks were destroyed everywhere except Blackpool; then came the infamous 1963 Beeching Report, which recommended that great swathes of the rail network – 2,363 stations and some 5,000 miles (around 8000km) of railway lines – should simply be scrapped as not enough people were using them, destroying the previous holistic connectivity enjoyed by rural communities; then came the deregulation of the UK’s bus network in 1985; and, finally, the wholesale privatisation of our trains in the 1990s.
What’s so devastating about all of this is that not only did it not benefit the traveller in terms of service, it also wasn’t a successful cash cow either. In 1989, the cost of British Rail was low for the taxpayer because it was run incredibly efficiently, according to Bring Back British Rail. It costs three times as much to subsidise the network now that it’s privatised ‘because it’s so inefficient’, their report claims.
Meanwhile, the former UN special rapporteur Philip Alston released a report about the UK’s bus network in the summer of 2021, in which he called it a ‘35-year masterclass in how not to run a bus service’.6 According to Ellie, campaigners in other countries routinely use the UK as the cautionary tale when arguing against the deregulation of their own networks: ‘Campaigners always point to Britain and say, “look at the mess”.’ Ouch.
Alongside all of this, Britons were being encouraged at every turn to travel by car. ‘We’ve had decades of car-orientated planning and development, decades of cultural discourse positioning private cars as the “future” and a symbol of status and representative of independence – and the same thing could be said of flying,’ says Jools Townsend, chief executive of the Community Rail Network. Set up in the 1990s as the rail network was being changed beyond all recognition through privatisation, it’s a grassroots movement driven and run by local communities, encouraging people to engage with their local stations and railways and to get more out of them. ‘I think car use in particular has become so ingrained and embedded in people’s way of thinking and lifestyles that, for a lot of people, public transport use has become a whole other world,’ she says. ‘Lots of children we work with have never even been on a train.’
It didn’t have to be this way; at the same time as we were building thousands of kilometres of motorways in the 1970s and ’80s, France and Japan were building high-speed rail networks. Three decades on, we’re still talking about HS2 here in the UK.
It’s not too late to change things but it does require a radical overhaul. ‘We didn’t realise back then how important the public transport network would be in meeting climate targets,’ says Ellie. ‘Transport is the biggest cause of emissions in the UK – it needs our urgent attention, and we can’t reduce our carbon output without taking control of the network and making it work.’
And there are positive signs. As well as the Great British Railways development – the biggest shake-up in decades – Grant Shapps vowed to undo some of the worst of the Beeching cuts legacy. In February 2021, he tweeted:
On This Day in 1965: Beeching published his 2nd report on the state of the railways. Beeching’s reports led to the closure of 2,128 stations. Fifty-six years later, this government has committed to reversing Beeching’s axe to re-connect towns and villages across the country by rail.
Part of the government’s £500 million Restoring Your Railway Programme, the first ‘Beeching’ reversal was put into practice when the restored Dartmoor line between Okehampton and Exeter was reopened in November 2021 after languishing for fifty years.7 An investment of £34 million has also been pledged to rapidly progress plans to reopen the Northumberland line, which closed to passengers in 1964, while £100,000 of funding has been set aside for a feasibility study on reinstating the Fleetwood–Poulton line.8
An easy ride for aviation
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: aviation currently gets a ridiculously easy ride, both in the UK and elsewhere.
It doesn’t pay any tax on kerosene (aviation fuel); it doesn’t pay any VAT on tickets; and the one tax it does pay in the UK, APD, was frozen for domestic flights for two tax years in March 2021, and will be cut to zero from April 2023. If you’ve ever pondered how it’s possible to buy a ticket from London to Budapest for less than two coffees from Starbucks, this is why. It means airlines – particularly budget carriers – are able to offer insanely cheap fares in order to fill seats. Ryanair and other low-cost carriers’ business models are based on filling as many seats as possible on every flight (known as a high load factor), selling tickets as cheaply as necessary in order to achieve this.
No other mode of transport gets this kind of tax break, by the way. Trains, buses, cars – all pay tax on their fuel. It’s an outdated hangover from the Chicago Convention 1947, the piece of legislation that first established the set of rules that still governs international air travel today. It’s since been updated eight times, the last revision being in 2006, but much of it has remained the same, including Article 24:
Aircraft flying to, from or across, the territory of a state shall be admitted temporarily free of duty. Fuel, oil, spare parts, regular equipment and aircraft stores retained on board are also exempted from customs duty, inspection fees or similar charges.
Hence the tax break. Professor James Higham, a leading academic in the field of sustainable tourism from New Zealand’s University of Otago, says:
It’s absolutely outrageous – disgusting even – that we are still subsidising the least sustainable form of transport. We think around 90 per cent of humanity has never set foot on a plane; the vast majority of humans have never flown. So how can it be fair that aviation is still being subsidised?
It’s why campaigners’ major focus is on taxing aviation fairly, rather than introducing mandatory cuts or quotas for flights – they argue that if the industry was properly taxed, the price of flying would go up to better reflect its carbon impact, and people would naturally fly less as a consequence.
Identifying the way in which aviation policies contribute to the broader picture of how we choose to get around, Better Transport launched a campaign in October 2021 calling for several measures to reduce domestic flights and encourage rail travel for journeys within the UK instead.
They argued that domestic flights where the journey can be completed by train in five hours or less should be banned; that cheaper rail fares should be introduced to compete with domestic air travel; that there should be mandatory emissions labelling on plane tickets; and that a frequent-flyer levy for anyone taking more than three international flights a year should be instated. Other demands included the shelving of airport expansion until ‘net zero’ flights are possible and the continuance of APD, which airlines have called on the government to shelve.
‘Cheap domestic flights might seem a good deal when you buy them, but they are a climate disaster, generating seven times more harmful greenhouse emissions than the equivalent train journey,’ said Campaign for Better Transport Chief Executive Paul Tuohy in 2021:
Making the train cheaper will boost passenger numbers and help reduce emissions from aviation, but any cut to APD – coupled with a rise in rail fares in January – will send the wrong message about how the government wants people to travel and mean more people choosing to fly. The government has led the way with bold climate ambitions, now it needs to take similarly bold actions to make those ambitions a reality.
The suggestions outlined are closely mirrored by other campaigns operating in this space, although sometimes the methodology behind figuring out who should foot the bill for aviation’s climate impact varies. It’s a complex issue, says Cait Hewitt, policy director for the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF), a UK-based organisation campaigning for aviation’s impacts on people and the environment to be brought within sustainable limits:
There’s no one magic answer. Above all else, it’s about ending the special treatment aviation has had over the years. That comes both from Labour and the Conservatives – there are bits in the Tory ideology that lend themselves to not wanting to tell people what to do, that people should be free to fly; they’re loath to even intervene in local airport planning decisions. And on the Left, there’s really strong pressure from the unions that unless aviation grows, people will lose their jobs – plus there’s also the idea that we need to increase access to flying for people on lower incomes. There’s a standard of living expectation attached, so it’s difficult for Labour to come up with a clear narrative on aviation and the climate.
This is what has led to the industry benefiting from so many tax breaks and falling through the net on all kinds of climate policies over the years. AEF advocates similar policy changes to Better Transport: ending airport expansion, taxing kerosene, and refocusing tourism policy around domestic travel and near international destinations that can be reached sustainably. Cait adds:
We think there’s a case for APD to stay, not as an environmental levy but to ensure that aviation makes a basic contribution to society – because there’s currently no VAT on flights – as well as introducing additional climate levies alongside it.
Setting an actual emissions trajectory, too, to net zero would be hugely helpful in terms of focusing on near-term action and policy and holding the industry to account:
The UK government just looks at 2050; and a lot of its projections are all very techno-optimistic. Whereas Transport Scotland commissioned a report9 about decarbonising all of Scotland’s transport that found it’s much more useful to look at 2030.
If you zone in on the 2030 timeframe instead, transport emissions need to be cut in half by then – which just isn’t possible without meaningful reduction in aviation emissions. AEF also supports the idea of some sort of frequent-flyer levy – ‘polluters should pay’ – with the money funding decarbonising other areas of the transport sector.
Climate charity Possible has focused much of its attention on the need for a frequent-flyer levy with its Free Ride campaign – but, crucially, one that doesn’t unfairly squeeze those on lower incomes. Alethea Warrington, the charity’s campaigns manager who leads on aviation work, says:
Free Ride started as a way to demand flight reduction in a progressive way – because the link between how many flights people take in a year and their incomes is inherently connected. The stat that says 15 per cent of people [in the UK] take 70 per cent of flights each year gave scope to reduce flights and emissions without penalising those who only take one flight a year. If you try to manage aviation demand just with flat rate taxes – on kerosene, for example – that would have a regressive impact and would mean that those who fly least would be impacted most.
Policies need to be seen as fair and as targeting people who are causing most of the problem: i.e., wealthy travellers with more disposable income.
In its report ‘A Frequent Flyer Levy: Sharing Aviation’s Carbon Budget in a Net Zero World’, Possible advocates for an incremental tax on flying, starting at zero for the first flight, but increasing for every subsequent flight taken within a year.10 It’s modelled using the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) fairly generous calculation that, to meet the net-zero 2050 goal and stay in line with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, aviation demand in 2050 cannot exceed a 25 per cent increase over 2018 levels. (Even with this limit in place, aviation would constitute the largest source of UK emissions in 2050 and consume 36 per cent of the available carbon budget – arguably not a fantastic state of affairs.)
Under the report’s proposals, modelling suggests that the 20 per cent of the UK population with the highest income would reduce their flights significantly (by around 30 per cent) with the levy in place compared to a world of unconstrained growth. At the same time, the lowest-income 20 per cent, who currently fly five times less frequently than the richest 20 per cent, would be able to take just as many flights as they would if there was unconstrained growth. By comparison, when Possible looked at what would happen if APD increased instead, the opposite was true: as all tickets increase in price, it would be the lowest-income segment of the population who would reduce their flights the most (minus19 per cent), while the top quintile would reduce their flights the least (minus 13 per cent). In terms of direct-tax impact, on average, the lowest-income 20 per cent of the population would cough up just £7.75 a year if frequent-flyer payments were introduced, while a far higher share of the tax burden would fall on the country’s richest people, with the highest-income 20 per cent paying on average £165.85 per year. It’s a compelling argument.
Another example of why a frequent-flyer levy would beat fixed-rate taxes can be found in Australia. It previously implemented a carbon tax for aviation – which had precisely no effect on the number of domestic flight miles taken between 2012 and 2014, according to a paper by Professor Higham. ‘The market was so competitive, airlines effectively swallowed the tax and didn’t pass it onto the consumer.’ Within two years of being introduced, the tax was shelved.
It shouldn’t stop other measures being taken in tandem with imposing a levy though, clarifies Alethea:
Someone filling up their car with petrol is taxed but someone taking a flight isn’t. The EU has proposed starting to tax kerosene – we wouldn’t be an outlier if we introduced that. And plane tickets are currently exempt from base VAT; those tax exemptions should be addressed too.
The EU announced it would be looking to end jet fuel’s tax exemption, and instead drive airlines to use cleaner, low-carbon fuels, as part of its Fit for 55 plan. It’s a good step forward, but to get around the pesky Chicago Convention the reforms will only apply to fuel used on private and commercial flights within Europe, exempting 60 per cent of fuel sales, according to the European Federation for Transport and Environment.
As to what the money from taxation could be used for, there are various ideas, including investing in low-carbon transport alternatives and supporting people working in the aviation sector to retrain and change industries. (There’s even a separate campaign group, Safe Landing, made up of aviation industry workers who are calling for a ‘just transition’ for those with jobs in the sector.)
Although the UK government has been making an awful lot of noise about their commitment to hitting carbon emissions targets, it can feel like an uphill struggle at times when it comes to flying. Speaking ahead of a key UN climate conference in 2021, Rachel Maclean – the minister in charge of government policy on the future of transport and decarbonisation – said flying was one of the things that ‘make life worth living’ and that the government would not place any restrictions on it and had no plans to try to reduce demand for flights. Yes, you read that correctly – the minister in charge of transport decarbonisation is basically a cheerleader for unconstrained aviation growth. She went one step further and argued that people needed to continue to fly for airlines to decarbonise:
These are commercial decisions that are led by the industry. I think the broader point that I’ve made is that actually we need the aviation sector to be successful, so that it can invest in those technologies that we know will drive towards technological solutions.
Whether it’s SAF [sustainable aviation fuel], or whether it’s electric or hydrogen aviation aircraft: these are technologically feasible solutions, they do exist, we’ve got these planes that fly already, supported by government investments, clearly they are at very early stages but if the sector lacks confidence in its future, it will not be backed by its shareholders, it will not place those big bets.
Scientists and campaigners responded with incredulity. ‘It’s like advocating donuts as the confidence boost you need to make yourself go to the gym,’ said Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, at the time:
All of the technological silver bullets which the government are relying on have severe limitations due to their cost, availability or weight, which means we can’t have any confidence that they can do more than decarbonise a very small part of our flying. This is why the Committee on Climate Change, and the Airports Commission, insisted that demand constraint was essential for aviation to meet our carbon targets.
AEF’s Cait agrees: ‘The government is in denial about the reality of the situation. Airlines have had years to do something about their emissions before the pandemic, and they never have – the idea that they’ll change if we keep flying is ludicrous.’
Alethea from Possible says that while the government talks a good game, it’s still ‘running in the opposite direction’ in terms of policies:
If you look at the Department for Transport, they’re very resistant to even moderate changes asked for by the CCC. They’re saying they don’t want to inhibit demand – they’re still not accepting that we will need any limit on growth. That’s because of the techno-fixes: things that don’t exist yet, or are problematic for various reasons [we’ll look at this in chapter 11].
The irony is that the government is out of step with public opinion on this one. People in the UK are generally supportive of curbing flights via raising the price, particularly through a frequent-flyer tax. In October 2021, 89 per cent of people said they supported these measures in order to tackle the climate crisis, according to the biggest analysis of policy preferences ever published.
More than 21,000 Britons were surveyed on which policies they preferred in order to meet the UK government’s carbon emissions targets for 2030 in a poll by WWF and thinktank Demos – flight levies were one of the top-five options.11 A frequent-flyer levy could be more than just a climate winner; it could be a vote winner too. Future governments, take note.
The case for a cycling utopia
As you may have already gleaned from reports of my Amsterdam travels, boy, do I love to ride my bicycle. Even in London, which saw an increase in deaths and serious injuries for cyclists during the pandemic (six cyclists were killed in 2020, up from five in 2019, while the number suffering serious injury increased from 773 to 862), I absolutely love travelling on two wheels.12 I am deeply infatuated with my own bike – I mean, she’s objectively a real looker, all pale blue-green frame and purple wheel arches – and often try to evangelise others. I preach on the wonders of the wind in one’s hair (OK, helmet); the joy of feeling the sun on your face instead of being crammed inside the airless Underground; and the very attractive cash incentive that comes with not having to pay out an extortionate amount for transport on a daily basis. But even with my well-honed sales pitch, the majority of the time I’m met by fearful eyes and the words, ‘No, thank you. I don’t want to die.’
It’s one of the biggest factors holding back potential cycling converts, and is the natural consequence of an infrastructure that has historically put cars and drivers first, according to Roger Geffen, policy director for Cycling UK, a charitable membership organisation supporting cyclists and promoting bicycle use:
Historically, the UK has been relatively backward. We’re still a long way behind Europe’s leading nations: Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Some of it goes right back to the 1930s, when the County Surveyors’ Society was deeply impressed by the German autobahns of the Nazi era. Cycle tracks were being provided, not to benefit cyclists, but to get cyclists out of the way of motor vehicles. That’s what creates the distinction between countries that have really good infrastructure and what we’ve got. It’s taken a long time to convey to road engineers the difference between the kind of cycle tracks we want and the ones we’ve previously been provided with; they’ve pleased nobody.
One of the biggest problems is junctions, where the majority of accidents happen – a whopping 74 per cent.13 Roger says:
You need good solutions at junctions. The Dutch have much better solutions. It’s not just different road design, but different traffic rules. There’s an assumption that any vehicle will give way to any cyclist or walker heading straight ahead at a junction – that’s something that the UK is currently considering. It means that the highway code would be backed up by road design, and vice versa.
Prior to 2022, there were a mind-boggling fourteen different rules in the Highway Code meant to deter drivers from overtaking, cutting in and running into pedestrians and cyclists crossing side-road junctions – but there was no clear, overarching rule on giving way. It’s one of the reasons cycle lanes disappear at junctions, even though this is where cyclists need the most protection. Most European countries, meanwhile, have something that’s referred to as a ‘universal priority rule’, where whoever is turning into a junction has to give priority to anyone going straight ahead.
Finally, after campaigning by organisations like Cycling UK, wholesale changes to the Highway Code were introduced on 29 January 2022. One of four key updates, designed to make roads safer and reduce deaths, is a new ‘hierarchy of road users’. Those in charge of vehicles that can cause the greatest harm in the event of a collision (motor vehicles) have the greatest responsibility to take care and reduce the danger they pose to others. At the top of the hierarchy are those most at risk in a collision (pedestrians – particularly children, the elderly and people with disabilities) followed by the next most at risk cohort (cyclists and horse riders).
Drivers are also advised to leave a bigger space when overtaking cyclists. But the big change – the one that Roger was most hopeful about when I spoke to him in 2021 – is one overriding rule for junctions. If you’re turning at a junction, you have to give way to people going straight ahead. It means a driver turning left has to give way to anyone walking or cycling on the left, and not cut across them. Simple.
‘That will make it much more possible for British road engineers to design junctions that prioritise cyclist safety,’ says Roger. It is indeed a game-changer – but it’s not the only thing that needs to be implemented. ‘The crucial thing is to normalise the principle that there will be protected cycle facilities alongside any road that carries high-speed or busy traffic,’ he argues. He sets it out thus: on any fast or very busy road there should be protected cycle paths. So on 30mph urban streets, plastic bollards are adequate – but alongside 60 or 70mph roads you’d have a verge or hedge to protect cyclists from high gusts of wind.
Safety would undoubtedly go a long way to convincing more people to try out the bike life, but social and cultural barriers still prevail. Roger says of cycling infrastructure:
The whole thing is not as simple as ‘build it and they will come’. You get so far with that – you attract the more affluent, health-conscious demographic. But the people who could most benefit for health and other reasons are often the least likely to take it up because they think it’s not for them.
Women are less likely to try cycling than men; older people less likely than younger; black and minority ethnic groups less likely than their white peers; those with disabilities less likely than those who are able-bodied. Thankfully, there are a whole heap of initiatives that attempt to engage with these various demographics and convince them that hopping on a bike is for people like them. ‘You need to give people the opportunity to try it,’ says Roger, ‘preferably in a group of people similar to themselves – you make it an enjoyable group activity, and that can be very good at maximising health and social inclusion.’ Cycling UK runs numerous projects like this and the results ‘can be lifechanging’ – particularly for those with mental health conditions.
In a strange twist of fate, the pandemic spurred on the adoption of cycling for many Brits who’d never tried it before – and, in turn, was a catalyst for pushing improving biking infrastructure up the political agenda. With public transport reserved for essential journeys and only one hour of exercise permitted each day during lockdowns, people for whom travelling on two wheels had previously been anathema thought, hey, why not give it a whirl? It offered freedom and, crucially, transport that was socially distanced, out in the open air. The lack of cars helped cyclists feel safe, able to take back roads formerly dominated by drivers. Families started cycling on quiet streets; we saw pop-up bike lanes appearing around cities. Roger adds:
That momentum really happened in response to Covid. But a lot of the discussion about the Covid crisis also became connected to helping tackle the climate crisis. There’s been such a growth in recognition of the severity of the climate emergency in the last eighteen months – and that will be a far more lasting factor I suspect.
‘Momentum’ seems to be the key word across the board for the potential coming changes to aviation, public transport and cycling infrastructure. Speaking to experts working in these fields, it really does feel like we’ve reached an exciting tipping point where a disruption to the transport status quo is not just desirable, but inevitable. But there’s no room for complacency – now’s the point at which we need to keep the pressure on to ensure these issues remain at the very top of the agenda.
What can we do?
Plenty, as it turns out. From changing your own behaviour to joining local grassroots campaigns, here are the experts’ best tips for becoming part of the growing movement demanding a low-carbon transport system that’s fit for purpose.
Use public transport more
Keeping the ‘use it or lose it’ mantra in our minds, it’s important that we make an effort to jump on a train or bus where we can if we want public transport to become a political priority. I know it’s tough, but if we are in a position where we can conceivably leave the car at home or pay a bit (OK, perhaps a lot) more to travel by rail instead of air to reach domestic locations that are further afield, we should do it.
‘It is important to use the public transport system we have, no matter how bad it is,’ says Bring Back British Rail’s Ellie. ‘I dream of the day when public transport is a joy to use. But we need to keep fighting in the meantime.’
The Campaign for Better Transport’s Norman Baker agrees:
People need to literally vote with their feet – walk, cycle, take the train or the bus. And keep raising these questions – why is it more expensive to take the train than to fly? The more it’s raised, the more pressure the government will face to change it.
Fly less
Of course I’d say that, eh? But your own behaviour is a powerful thing – not always because of the difference you make with your individual actions, but because of the impact those decisions have on influencing the other people in your life and wider social network.
‘It’s quite powerful for people to stop flying,’ says AEF’s Cait. ‘Individual action can have a ripple effect that starts a public conversation, and obviously we saw that around the flight shame movement. It was about individual change, not about judging others.’
She cites a study by PhD Researcher in Environmental Leadership Steve Westlake that looked at the impact it has when one person tells friends and family they’re giving up flying for climate reasons.14 In a survey he conducted in 2018, he found that half of the respondents who knew someone who had given up flying because of climate change said they flew less because of their example. Cait adds:
It has quite a significant effect, in terms of other people scaling back their own flying. Our focus has always been policy – but any government is only ever going to do what they think the public expects of them to some degree. I can say from experience, you can tell the government and civil service as much as you want that their policies don’t add up, but if they’re not feeling that pressure from the public, they will not be interested.
Contrary to popular belief, the tipping point for an idea to gain traction is much lower than people think – scientists have found that when just 10 per cent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will be adopted by the majority of society.15 Making the decision to stop flying or cut back, therefore – and, of course, telling other people that we’re doing it and why – can have a much more wide-reaching impact than we might have realised.
Get political
With any of these ideas being put forward – more affordable public transport, fairer taxation on aviation and an end to airport expansion, better cycle paths and road rules that prioritise cyclist safety – you can add your voice to the call for improvements by writing to your local MP. It’s something that has fallen out of fashion for younger people (I don’t claim to be particularly youthful, but I also can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter that wasn’t a Christmas thank you note to my gran), but it’s also one of the most effective tools when it comes to demanding change as a civilian. Your MP is there to represent you, their constituent – but it’s up to you to let them know which issues matter most.
Join a group or volunteer
There are plenty of ways we can become part of the movement while getting more involved in our local communities, a ‘two birds, one stone’ approach whose benefits are further reaching than just improving the transport system.
Community Rail is an umbrella organisation underneath which sit seventy-four community rail partnerships around Britain, and well over 1,000 ‘station friends’ groups. It’s very much grassroots work, led by 10,000 volunteers around the country who are committed to making their local train stations nicer places to be.
‘We don’t tell our members what to do, we encourage them to be led by specific local needs,’ says Chief Executive Jules Townsend. ‘Our team are very happy to speak to people and advise them and share best practice, though.’ There are community gardening groups, events for locals, special ‘bucket and spade’ trains taking families to the seaside on cheap fares. A big focus during the pandemic was around community wellbeing, with the station being a focal point around which local residents could gather. See what’s going on at your local station: communityrail.org.uk.
Cycling UK also has various national and local campaigns to get involved with. ‘There are all sorts of roles available,’ says Roger. ‘Some people want to focus on national lobbying and advocacy, some want to improve their local neighbourhoods. There’s something for everyone.’
Sign up to a campaign group
All the campaigns mentioned in this chapter have ways you can engage with them, typically by signing up as a member. The more members they have, the more lobbying power they have. You can sign up to the Bring Back British Rail campaign at bringbackbritishrail.org; you can support Better Transport’s campaign at bettertransport.org.uk; you can become an AEF member and support its work calling for policy change at aef.org.uk; you can find out more and donate to Possible’s Free Ride campaign demanding a frequent-flyer levy at afreeride.org; and you can join Cycling UK as a member and help to lobby for change at a local level through its cycling advocacy network at cyclinguk.org.