To most, traffic is little more than an inconvenience.

It can, however, have a significant

impact on cities and their economies.

Congestion has an obvious negative impact – you only have to look at a city like Cairo
to see that. The Egyptian capital has 20 million people, two million cars, 23,600 miles of
road and huge traffic problem. The congestion is so bad that many people socialise
through open windows, trading insults, cigarettes and small talk. Traffic laws are ignored
and drivers do as they please – with some pretty disastrous consequences.
Ambulances get blocked, pedestrians are killed and there are lots of multi car pile-ups,
especially on the city’s ring road, which was originally built to ease congestion but is
now as manic as the city’s other routes.

A World Bank study on Cairo’s traffic problem in 2010 revealed that the annual cost of
traffic in the greater metropolitan area was about 50 billion Egyptian pounds – four
percent of Egypt’s entire GDP. Compared to Jakarta, which is as densely populated as
the Egyptian capital and famous for its traffic but only loses 0.6% of Indonesia’s GDP to
traffic costs.

It’s not the same story worldwide however – many American cities with the worst
congestion also have the largest economies. If nothing else, a lot of traffic is a sign that
a lot of people have jobs to get to. For example, during the US government shutdown of
2013, congestion in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington noticeably declined.

As John Norquist notes, “Congestion is a bit like cholesterol – if you don’t have any you
die. And like cholesterol, there’s a good kind and a bad kind.”

In a study of the economic effects of traffic, Matthias Sweet found that higher levels of
congestion are initially associated with faster economic growth. But, above a certain
threshold congestion starts to become a drag on growth. It seems that job growth slows
when congestion gets to be worse than about 35 to 37 hours of delay per commuter per
year (or about four and a half minutes per one way trip).

Congestion is a bit like cholesterol – if you don’t have any you die.
“The thresholds make things very complicated,” Sweet admits. “It means that
congestion in some cities is more good than bad. And in other cities, it’s more bad than
good.”

Sweet says that his estimates are “as close to casual as you can imagine”. So, for
uncongested cities a bit more congestion might actually be beneficial to their
economies. This is because sometimes the cost of alleviating congestion is higher than
the cost of congestion itself.

For example, a city that has little congestion would be wasting taxpayer money building
new lanes of highway. Until it reaches Sweet’s tipping point it does not make sense to
spend resources trying to fix it. As Sweet says, paving unnecessary highways does
more harm than good to the economy.
However, once you reach the point above the four and a half minute threshold, it starts
to affect the quality of life of the people commuting. Workers having to spend longer
getting to work every day are gong to want higher wages to compensate, or they’ll look
for another job. And if congestion makes it harder to match the right workers to the best
jobs, that’s economically inefficient too.
The good news from Sweet’s study is that he found no level of congestion so high that it
completely halted a region’s job growth. The other variables that he controlled for –
other transportation infrastructure, demographics, even how efficient the local
government was – matter too much. There would have to be significant issues on all of
those fronts to really stall economic growth – Sweet uses Detroit as an example of this.

“They have a perfect storm of a lot of things going on right now,” he says. “In the study
time frame, they were the only region that had any kind of sustained job losses, but that
also exceeded these congestion diseconomy levels. But I don’t think you could argue
that congestion in itself caused Detroit’s problems

Our relationship to traffic is pretty simple: We hate it. We also loathe its awful-sounding
synonyms, congestion and gridlock.

"Without failure, people find it a tremendous inconvenience," says Matthias Sweet, a researcher
at the McMaster Institute for Transportation and Logistics at McMaster University. "I’ve never
talked to anybody over a dinner table conversation, or making it late to a meeting, saying 'boy,
I’m glad I got stuck in traffic.'"

Yet traffic's relationship to the economy of whole metro regions is much more complicated, so
much so that researchers haven't entirely explained it. Congestion makes people late to work.
It stresses us out before we even get there. Deliveries can't arrive on time. All that gas costs
money. But many of the American cities with the worst congestion also have the largest
economies. And, to a certain extent, congestion is a sign that an awful lot of people have jobs to
get to, which is indisputably a good thing. (Case in point: During the government shutdown,
congestion in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington noticeably declined, a bittersweet
benefit for the region.)

Sweet likes to explain this convoluted relationship between congestion and economic growth
with an analogy from the oft-analogized film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

"We all know that it’s pretty ugly out there when you’re stuck in gridlock, but we have reasons
to believe that there might be parts of congestion that are all three of those," he says. "Congestion
may be good in that it’s an indicator of active and vibrant urban places. Congestion might be bad
in so far as it means that access is impeded, freight deliveries aren’t able to to happen on time,
and people are hating life."

Congestion, in some cities, is more good than bad. And in other cities, it’s more bad than good.

The tricky part is separating out the good from the bad, a calculation that Sweet has attempted
in a paper recently published online by the journal Urban Studies.

Often, we look at the first-order costs of congestion, like the monetary value of the time spent
sitting in traffic. Sweet has tried to look instead at some of the larger, second-order costs in
regional job growth and productivity. Sure, traffic is bad for you while you're sitting in it. But
how – and when – is it also bad for the economy?

Sweet took data from 88 of the most congested metro areas in the U.S. between 1993-2008,
drawing on measures of congestion from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (yes, he's
aware that TTI's methodology is often criticized, but he considers their data the best available).
He looked at both a measure of travel delay (in the average annual hours of delay per auto
commuter) and travel capacity (in the average daily traffic per freeway lane throughout an entire
metro network).

Using data from sources like the Census Bureau and Federal Transit Administration, he also tried
to control for other factors that might impact economic growth, like the skill and education of the
local labor force, the reach of its transit infrastructure, or the density of jobs. This means that a
city like Atlanta, for instance, might be economically hindered by freeway
congestion, andmeager transit service, and the spatial disconnect between jobs and workers. But
Sweet's model tries as much as possible to isolate the impact of the congestion.

His results, which are a bit counter-intuitive, suggest that higher levels of congestion are initially
associated with faster economic growth. But, above a certain threshold, congestion starts to
become a drag on growth. Specifically, congestion seems to slow job growth when it gets to be
worse than about 35 to 37 hours of delay per commuter per year (or about four-and-a-half
minutes per one-way trip, relative to free-flowing traffic). A similar threshold exists when the
entire road network gets too saturated throughout the course of the day (for transpo wonks, that's
at about 11,000 ADT per lane).

"The thresholds make things very complicated," Sweet says. "It means that congestion, in some
cities, is more good than bad. And in other cities, it’s more bad than good."

Sweet says his estimates are "as close to causal as you can imagine." That means, for
uncongested cities, that a little more congestion might actually be good for their economies. But
why would that be? Sometimes the cost of alleviating congestion is higher than the cost of the
congestion itself. A city that has only a little bit of traffic would be wasting taxpayer money
paving new lanes of highway. Until congestion reaches Sweet's tipping point, it's economically
inefficient to spend resources trying to fix it. Pave new unnecessary highways, Sweet says, and
you do more harm than good to the economy.

Above that four-and-a-half-minute threshold, however, something else happens: The quality of
life of people making those commutes starts to decline. Now, if you have to spend a miserable
hour or two five days a week just getting to work, you're either going to require higher wages to
compensate you, or you're going to look for another job. And if congestion makes it harder to
match the right workers to the best jobs, that's economically inefficient, too.

The good news in all of this is that Sweet found no level of congestion so awful that it entirely
halts a region's job growth. All of those other variables that he controlled for – the other
transportation infrastructure, the demographics, even the efficiency of the local government –
matter too much. You'd need an unholy mix of disadvantages on all of those fronts to really stall
economic growth.

"Detroit is a great example," Sweet says. "They have a perfect storm of a lot of things going on
right now. In the study time frame, they were the only region that had any kind of sustained job
losses, but that also exceeded these congestion diseconomy levels. But I don’t think you could
argue that congestion in itself caused Detroit’s problems.

OVERVIEW OF HISTORY DISCIPLINE

Throughout the world, studying history is an essential element of a good liberal arts
education. Knowledge of history is indispensable to understanding who we are and
where we fit in the world.

As a discipline, history is the study of the past. In other words, historians study and
interpret the past. In order to do this, they must find evidence about the past, ask
questions of that evidence, and come up with explanations that make sense of what the
evidence says about the peoples, events, places, and time periods under consideration.
Because it is impossible for a single historian to study the history of all peoples, events,
places, and time periods, historians develop specialties within the discipline. Historians
may study the history of particular groups of people (e.g. women's history or African-
American history), they may study particular events (e.g. history of the Vietnam War or
the Crusades), they may study the history of a single country or region (e.g. Pacific
Northwest history or Chinese history), or they may confine their interest to a limited time
period (e.g. early American history or Medieval history).

In addition to limiting the scope of their historical study, historians also take different
approaches to their inquiries. For example, they may decide to look at the cultural or
social relationships between the people they are studying, at the intellectual or religious
debates within a particular society or group, at the political or economic history of a
country or region, or at the history of the environment or science and technology during
a pivotal time frame. Because different historians take different approaches to their
research and writing, and because individual historians bring different perspectives and
different questions to their work, historical interpretations are constantly changing and
evolving.

The study of history is therefore dynamic and forever new. Far from being the study of
facts and dates, understanding history means understanding how to read and interpret
the past. It is through reading and interpreting our various pasts that we can know and
understand the present and the future

Difference between of Polsci and Anthropology

Both fall under the rubric of Social Science. However, Anthropology is a broader subject
and is also a natural science and a humanity. Political science can be assumed under
Anthropology when we are studying the political systems of other socio-cultural
systems. Anthropology covers the full spectrum of human existence and evolution, from
the emergence of Homo Sapien through the evolution of a global system, It covers the
physical, psychological, social and cultural dimensions of the individual as a particular
biological species to a unique species that has evolved to control the planet.
Anthropology is both objective and subjective. Professional anthropologists tend to be
culturally relativistic, and play both the role of the observer and participant in an
attempt to understand those they study.

Political science is focused on human societies only. It is interested in the relationship

between power groups, how power is allocated and distributed in a society (domestic)
and between societies in contact (international). The central question in the applied
domain is “policy”. How do different policies compare? What are the potential or real
effects upon power groups and their interests? Etc.

Political science is more closely related to the study of advanced industrialized societies.
It arose from an earlier interest in political philosophy. Political science attempts to be
objective. The professional studies what people do and how their actions affect the
policies of government and power centers.

Political philosophy tends to be subjective and attempts to explain why certain political
approaches are “better” or “worse” than others. Political scientist attempt to be
objective, but because they are cultural beings, they may also be partisan in their
professional role

Anthropological studies have paid too little attention to the everyday experience of
traffic, a fact all the more striking given the central place that traffic has come to occupy
in urban life worldwide. I submit that the daily experience of traffic is a critical and
underutilised medium for examining social inequality in a global, urban social order. My
analysis invokes the spectrum of inequalities in relation to traffic in Istanbul, mapping
both the hierarchies born out in paradigmatic traffic situations and certain extremes –
those barred or excused from participating in the traffic scene. I argue that traffic
congestion constitutes a unique zone in which cross-class encounters take place. This
analytical focus on the daily experience of traffic demonstrates that urban inequality is
produced not only through segregated social spaces, but also on the move

Introduction Roadway traffic is a social field distinct from the sedentary environs through which
it passes. It has a setting, with boundaries, rules, and rights of access, whose definition and
clarity vary from culture to culture. The pathways and stations of its members are an outcome
of the physical constraint and opportunity of roadway and vehicle, rules, idiosyncratic features
of capability, judgement, and fearlessness, and consummate values fulfilled through the driving
process. Furthermore, traffic is interactive, involving most crucially the mutual communication
and interpretation of intent. While we in the United States tend toward a rule-abiding program
of privatized driving, with road instructions encoded in road stripes, signs, and signals and
concretized in buffers, barriers, and guardrails, traffic in India is pre-eminently interactive and
reactive. It is not surprising that Anthony Wallace (1972), in an early article in the
anthropological literature on American automotive driving, focuses on the standard driving
rules, technical driving operations, and the route-analyzing his problem
Culture in Anthropological Perspective
According to the defnition given by E.B Taylor culture has been portrayed as asocial
heritage as the gi t o society to an individual. Malinowski pointed out thatthe social heritage
has both material and non-material aspects to it. Marettdefnes culture as
communicable intelligence. edfeld defned it as the
sumt o t a l o c o n v e n t i o n a l m e a n i n g s e m b o d i e d i n a r t i a c t s ! s o c i a l s t r
u c t u r e a n d symbols. This is an idealistic view o culture which stems rom a
recognition o the all important role which symbols play in the communication and
ac"uisitiono knowledge. u t h B e n e d i c t p r o p a g a t e s t h e o r m a l i s t i c ! a e s t h
etic view point o culture.According to this view culture is not so
m u c h t o b e c o n c e i v e d i n t e r m s o content o social li e as in terms o
its ormal ordering and organi#ation. uthBenedict considers the pattern o culture not
its
content.$ o r M a l i n o w s k i c u l t u r e s t a n d s or a total way o li e wh
ich secures o r a n individual the satis action o his biopsychic drives
and the ulflment o otherwants and cravings and ultimately invests him with
reedom. adcli%e Brown regards culture as cultivation! the process o transmitting
andac"uiring traditions as a result o which society is
perpetuated.& o c i o l o g y a n d a n t h r o p o l o g y i n v o l v e t h e s y s t e m a t i c s t u d y o
s o c i a l l i e a n d culture in order to understand the causes and conse"uences o
human action.&ociologists and anthropologists study the structure and processes
o traditionalcultures and modern! industrial societies in both 'estern and non-
'esterncultures. They e(amine how culture! social structures )groups! organi#ations
andcommunities* and social institutions ) amily! education! religion! etc.* a%
ecthuman attitudes! actions and li e-chances.&ociology and Anthropology &ociology and
anthropology combine scientifc and humanistic perspectives inthe study o society. +rawing
upon various theoretical perspectives!
sociologistsa n d a n t h r o p o l o g i s t s s t u d y s u c h a r e a s a s c u l t u r e ! s o c i a l i # a t i o
n ! d e v i a n c e ! ine"uality! health and illness! amily patterns! social change and race and
ethnicrelations. ,ombining theoretical perspectives with empirical research allo
wsstudents an opportunity to develop new insights and a di%erent perspective ontheir
lives and to understand everyday social li e as a combination o both stablepatterns o interaction
and ubi"uitous sources o social
change. The sociology curriculum prepares the student or both academic and appliedre
search careers in sociology and anthropology. t o%ers an essential liberal
artsbackground or many careers and pro essions! including
public service andadministration! communications and public relations! law! business!
medicine! ournalism! arts management! environmental
science! and other pro essions. naddition to o%ering a ma or in sociology! the
department also o%ers a minor insociology. Beyond the department itsel ! the aculty are
centrally involved in theblack studies! women/s studies! environmental studies! and international
studiesprograms.0ur aim is to provide students with communicative and interpretative
skills thatwill allow them to understand the meaning and conse"uences o human
actionsa n d r e l a t i o n s h i p s i n s o c i e t y . & t u d e n t w i l l l e a r n t o u
s e t h e o r e t i c a l a n d methodological tools to analy#e culture! human behavior!
and social institutions

polsci

Transportation projects, once a bipartisan beacon on

the stormy political seas, have become torn by ideology
in recent years. It's now common to presume that
Republicans favor roads and Democrats favor rails. The
source of this divide can be debated—maybe it's that
liberals control rail-rich cities and conservatives hold
road-dependent rural areas, or maybe it's the lack of
a unified federal program like the Interstate Highway
System—but the party lines have emerged clearly in
the public conscience.
wisdom of transportation politics in some surprising and mysterious ways. In our poll,
Democrats were significantly more likely than Republicans to think new roads would have a
"major impact" on traffic congestion; in fact, liberals favored every infrastructure investment
more than conservatives did.

We'll get to those figures in a moment. First, it's necessary to establish that both parties find
traffic congestion to be similarly frustrating.

Across our entire sample—for respondents living in a city, suburb, or rural area alike—a
combined 55 percent of Republicans (or GOP leaners) found traffic to be a big or small problem
where they lived, right on par with the 51 percent of Democrats (or liberal leaners) who said the
same. Among respondents living in cities, the figures were higher (as to be expected without
rural respondents in the mix) but still comparable: 65 percent of Republicans (or leans) felt
congestion was a big or small problem, to 60 percent of Democrats (or leans)

.
Neither of these modest gaps are statistically significant. In other words, a majority of
respondents from both parties (and, in cities, a three-fifths majority) believe traffic congestion is
a problem. Where they differ dramatically is how to address it.

When asked whether building more roads or adding more lanes would improve traffic
conditions, it was Democrats who agreed most strongly—not Republicans, as the transport
policy stereotypes suggest. In the whole poll sample, about 70 percent of Democrats (or leans)
felt roads would have either a major or minor impact on congestion, a significantly higher share
than the 63 percent of Republicans (or leans) who felt the same. Within cities the difference was
also significant: 79 percent of liberals (or leans) believed roads would have a major or minor
impact, to 68 percent of conservatives (or leans).

And consider just the respondents who felt roads would have a "major" impact on traffic. Here,
too, Democrats emerged as the stronger advocate. Focusing on respondents who lived in cities,
the poll found that 52 percent of Democrats (or leans) agreed with that assessment, compared
with just 37 percent of Republicans (or leans)—another statistically significant difference.

So that happened. But the world isn't completely upside-down: Democrats also felt more
strongly that improving transit (either bus or rail service) would relieve congestion. Across the
entire sample, 72 percent of Democrats or leans said upgrading public transportation would have
a major or minor impact on traffic, significantly more than the 58 percent of Republicans (or
leans) who said the same. Within cities it was a similar story: 78 percent of liberals thought
transit would have a major or minor traffic impact, to 62 percent of conservatives.

While these responses are more in line with expectations, they still refuse a rigid alignment with
popular beliefs. After all, a majority of Republican respondents, both in the city-only and overall
samples, felt that public transit could have some impact on congestion. And focusing on
respondents who felt transit would have a "major" impact, we also get a small shock: only 47
percent of urban Democrats (or leans) agreed that was the case—not even a majority (though
significantly more than the 26 percent of Republicans who felt likewise).

The party trends established for road and transit improvements largely held true for other
potential traffic solutions. Among urban respondents, 71 percent of Democrats (or leans) felt
more bike lanes would have a major or minor impact on traffic, compared with 59 percent of
Republicans (or leans). About 78 percent of urban Democrats felt more sidewalks would do the
trick, to 66 percent of urban Republicans. Urban liberals also felt telecommuting would have a
bigger impact than urban conservatives did—76 percent said it would be major or minor, to 69
percent (though this gap, unlike that of bikes and sidewalks, was not significant).
Reducing Traffic Congestion and
Pollution in Urban Areas
Smarter Cambridge Transport

12 December 2016

28 min read

Submission to the UK Government Urban Congestion Inquiry

A version of this paper was submitted by Smarter Cambridge Transport to the House of
Commons Transport Committee’s Urban Congestion Inquiry in January 2017. A printable PDF
version with information about Smarter Cambridge Transport is available here.

Executive Summary
We present here some ideas for reducing congestion and pollution in urban areas, developed in
the context of the Greater Cambridge area (roughly Cambridge city and South Cambridgeshire
district) but applicable in other areas in the UK and worldwide. The area is typical of many UK
towns and cities. It has an urban population under 150,000, surrounded by a dispersed rural
population.

Congestion-reduction measures can be thought of as falling into two

categories: temporaryand virtuous.

Temporary measures free up road capacity that is soon filled by induced demand: people adapt
their lifestyles to prevailing road conditions. Such measures are therefore worth pursuing only if
they either buy time or lay the foundations for more radical interventions. We take a quick look
at measures in this category that should not be considered as solutions – at least not in isolation.

Virtuous measures start a feedback loop that induces more and more people to make a modal
shift away from driving. Making a bus service more convenient or cheaper will increase
patronage, which means that the service can be run more frequently and for longer hours, making
it convenient and attractive to more people. These are the changes transport policy must support.

Interventions to reduce traffic congestion

Modern, sophisticated initiatives better than typical ‘big ideas’ include:

 Optimise traffic-light management

  Use CCTV to monitor road conditions
 Enforce existing road traffic laws
 Improve perceptions of buses
 Extend residents’ parking zones
 Charge for workplace parking
 Improve cycling infrastructure
 Improve bus services
 Develop and refine park-and-ride
 Use Inbound Flow Control
 Rationalise distribution and deliveries
 Existing rail network
 Light rail
 Strategic Road Network resilience
 Road pricing
As can be seen, these begin with interventions requiring only a low level of capital investment,
before moving on to those which require an increasing degree of public and/or private sector
investment. We will look at each in turn, before finishing by looking at the role of transport in
health and welfare and providing some concluding thoughts.

The one-hit solution

It’s often suggested that congestion may be solved with one big idea, such as:

 Widen roads
 Narrow roads
 Add bus lanes
 Remove bus lanes
 Build tunnels
 Build a new ring road
 Build a light rail network
 Switch off traffic lights
 Ban cycling
 Ban cars from city centres
 Close through-routes to private vehicles
 Close car parks
 Build more car parks
 Build more park-and-rides
 Make buses free
 Make park-and-ride free
 Introduce a congestion charge/road pricing
None of these can deliver a complete solution, and most of them provide only temporary relief
until induced demand fills up the road space once more. Road pricing (which we cover later) is
the nearest to a one-hit solution, but it still needs to be paired with big improvements to public
and active transport options.

Heavy-engineering measures, such as bus lanes, street-running trams, and tunnelling, can attract
support from politicians, mindful of their legacy. But such projects typically require years of
highly disruptive work, destroy fragile streetscapes, and undermine the viability of other public
transport options. Widening a road to add a bus lane makes it more difficult for pedestrians to
cross, and may compromise the quality of cycling infrastructure that can be accommodated. A
tram line or park-and-ride can cannibalise patronage of rural bus services. Business cases need to
be built up carefully, and only after ‘softer’ measures have been implemented, or at least
modelled in detail.

For those who believe that cycling causes congestion, the Cambridge Cycling Campaign has a
mischievous suggestion: let’s have a no-cycle day! Experience is much more persuasive than
theory.

We need only look to cities in Europe that manage congestion effectively, such as Copenhagen,
Freiburg and Groningen: they employ a wide range of complementary measures, carefully
balancing the needs of residents, commuters, businesses, visitors and tourists.

Low capital investment

1. Optimise traffic-light management
Urban Traffic Management Control (UTMC) systems such as SCOOT can be very effective in
maximising road capacity by varying the timing of traffic lights to match demand in real time.
When lights are all co-ordinated responsively to demand, incidences of ‘blocking back’ (vehicles
stuck in junctions) leading to gridlock can be minimised. Traffic planners can also prepare and
model programs to cope with specific scenarios (such as an incident on an arterial road), which
can then be loaded into the UTMC immediately they’re needed.

UTMC can help prioritise buses by synchronising light phases to the movements of buses.
Modern systems can even see whether a bus is running on or behind schedule, and vary the
amount of priority it gives accordingly (e.g. by limiting green time from cross roads).

The non-linearity of the relationship between traffic ‘flow’ and ‘delay’ means that relatively
small reductions in flow (say 10-15%) can result in very large reductions in congestion. In
Cambridge this is experienced as a ’half term effect’: flow reductions of under 15% during
school holidays lead to an almost congestion-free peak hour.
2. Use CCTV to monitor road conditions
Use of CCTV at junctions allows traffic managers to see breakdowns, collisions and other causes
of congestion. Combined with good communication systems with Highways England, the police
and major road users (such as airports, train stations, retail parks), this can ensure traffic
managers receive advance warning of issues that will impact their network.

Any CCTV equipment installed should comply with the minimum standards required to support
legal enforcement.

3. Enforce existing road traffic laws

Illegal parking, waiting, loading/unloading obstructs traffic flow, reduces capacity at junctions,
holds up buses, and increases danger to those walking or cycling. Blocking junctions, which is
illegal where there’s a yellow box, can cause gridlock across a wide area of the road network.

Driving at an inappropriate speed, jumping red lights, or driving through restricted areas all
contribute to fatalities, injuries and an unwillingness for people to walk or cycle, or to allow their
children to do so unaccompanied.

There is currently an acceptance that it’s OK for delivery vehicles to park up on the pavement
outside a shop, even when there’s a safer alternative. The convenience of the delivery driver
outweighs convenience and safety of pedestrians, wheelchair users and those with infant buggies.

The government is currently reviewing the law around pavement parking. It may decide to
extend to the rest of the country the ban that exists in London, but that will still require
enforcement. Penalty Charge Notices currently given for illegal unloading are seen simply as a
cost of doing business, so perhaps an escalating penalty for repeat offences should be considered.

Enablement of Part 6 of the Traffic Management Act 2004 would allow civil enforcement of a
wide range of minor moving vehicle offences, which currently the police have neither the
resources nor incentives to enforce.

Government and local authorities need to ‘sell’ enforcement as a positive effort to help
responsible road users, and not as a ‘war on motorists’.

4. Improve perceptions of buses

There is a perception (partly class-related) that trams are more attractive than buses. Rather than
pander to this bias – potentially at huge expense – it makes sense to examine why the perception
exists. Some of the commonly-cited objections are:
  Pollution from diesel engines is a danger to health, and the smell and noise is offensive.
All-electric buses, with quiet, battery-powered motors, will be commonplace within a decade, so
this advantage of trams will diminish.
 Tickets are typically purchased before boarding a tram, or there is contactless payment.
Transport for London has proven there is no reason for buses to be different.
 Trams typically have multi-door boarding.
Two- and three-door bus models are available, bus operators tend to prefer single-door buses
because they have higher seating capacity and it’s easier to prevent fare dodging. The advantage
of having more doors, especially once ticketing is streamlined, is that dwell times can be greatly
reduced, allowing buses to run more frequently, increasing the hourly capacity, for only a small
increase in overhead.
 Tram routes are easier to understand and find.
Consistent, clear maps and signage, real-time passenger information displays, and online apps,
like CityMapper, can make bus travel much more accessible. Naming routes can help too.
 The ride quality is smoother on trams, making it more comfortable and easier to read and work
on a laptop/tablet.
The ride quality of a bus is largely determined by the quality of the road: roads on bus routes
could be rebuilt to the same standards as a tramway, reducing wear and tear and improving the
fuel economy for all vehicles.
 The design and décor of trams is often seen to be more attractive.
The challenge is for bus manufacturers to up their game!
 Bus windows often stream with condensation in the winter.
Buses should be fitted with a heat-recovery ventilation system, which extracts warm moist air and
transfers the heat to cool, dry air drawn in from outside.
 Buses often pick up more dirt from the road in wet weather.
This can be addressed by running buses through a washer during off-peak periods.
Requiring bus drivers to collect fares, verify tickets and passes, account for all money taken, and
spot fare dodgers adds considerable stress to their job, and increases the dwell time at stops.
Instead, operators should employ specialist revenue protection officers with powers to impose
on-the-spot fines. CCTV on board buses provides a means to spot and target repeat offenders.

5. Extend residents’ parking zones

In most towns and cities, only streets in the centre have comprehensive parking controls,
typically including a mix of residents’ parking and pay-and-display or limited-wait bays.
Congestion, high parking charges and increasing fares on public transport are encouraging more
and more people to drive and park outside controlled parking zones. They then walk, or
sometimes cycle, the rest of the way.

This is exacerbating congestion and pollution in cities as more commuters drive around looking
for parking spaces. This in turn makes walking and cycling less pleasant and safe for residents. It
also leaves no space for visitors (including those providing health and personal care services) to
park, and for delivery vehicles to stop safely.

The answer is to extend parking controls much further out from the centre of the city in a co-
ordinated way. Adding new residents’ parking zones in a piecemeal fashion simply pushes
problems to a new area. By co-ordinating the expansion it’s possible to have one-hour residents’
parking zones, which can be patrolled by one or two civil enforcement officers. A patrol route
can be designed through consecutive one-hour restrictions: 10-11am in one area, 11-noon in the
next, noon-1pm in the next, and so on. Combined with ANPR (automatic number plate
recognition) technology, enforcement can be quick and cheap.

The challenge with introducing new parking controls is political: to gain support from those who
see themselves facing additional costs and inconvenience rather than benefits. The steps to
gaining popular buy-in are:

 Collect data on commuter parking and its impacts

 Identify local problems that parking controls can solve and include these at an early stage in
scheme proposals
 Minimise costs to residents through efficient enforcement using appropriate technology, such as
virtual permits
 Offer a trial (using experimental traffic regulation orders) of controversial aspects of a scheme.
Undertake in advance to remove or change the scheme if there is less than 50% support shown in
a consultation held after, say, nine months.
As part of a general review of parking allocation, space should be allocated for short-stay
parking for visitors and loading bays for deliveries.

6. Charge for workplace parking

Free parking at employment sites attracts traffic and therefore contributes indirectly to
congestion. Nottingham has led the way in introducing a workplace parking levy (WPL). The
effect on congestion is relatively small, but significant. More importantly it incentivises
employers to help their employees find alternative ways to get to work. Measures may include:

 Re-allocate car parking for cycle parking

 Set up or join a car-share scheme
 Pay for taxis as a back-up when car-sharing does not work out
 Provide financial assistance (e.g. loans) to buy train or bus season tickets
 Build a changing room and showers
 Assist with subsidising public bus services to extend the hours of operation
 Where there is no (nearly) suitable public bus service, run a works bus.
WPL also incentivises employers to re-evaluate their land use. There are clear economic and
environmental benefits to be had from businesses releasing city land currently used for parking
and developing it instead for new offices or housing.

WPL is politically easier to introduce than a congestion charge and can provide local authorities
with a revenue stream to invest in public and active transport options.
Medium capital investment
7. Improve cycling infrastructure
“Build it and they will come” is as true of cycle paths as of roads – as long as they provide a
continuous connection between places that people want to travel between, without dangerous
junctions or road crossings.

The keys to good design that is attractive to people of all ages and abilities are:

 Build protected cycle lanes, with as much separation as possible from busy roads and, where
possible, from pedestrians
 Design segregated crossings at busy junctions, where potential conflicts between cars, cycles and
pedestrians are reduced to a minimum
 Introduce the Turning the Corner simplification of the Highway Code and underlying law
(essentially, turning vehicles and cycles must give way to all cars, cycles and pedestrians
proceeding straight on), as proposed by British Cycling, the AA and RAC Foundation
 Create and sign cut-throughs to create networks of quiet routes that connect up residential areas,
schools, libraries, shops and other amenities
 Remove physical obstacles, especially if they require people to dismount. Research by academic
Rachel Aldred has found that many people with impaired mobility get around on bicycles and
tricycles but are unable to negotiate steps.

8. Improve bus services

Buses are seeing a sustained reduction in patronage since 2008. There is a vicious circle of
subsidy withdrawal leading to service reductions, which make services less convenient, so
patronage falls, requiring further reductions in service.

Bus operators try to make their services commercially viable by designing circuitous routes that
pass close to as many houses as possible. This can make a 5 mile trip take the best part of an
hour, which is particularly unattractive to commuters.

The answer, at least at peak times, is to run express services that follow a direct route with
widely-spaced stops, more like a train service. Those stops would include the travel hubs
discussed below in section 9.

At off-peak times, there needs to be more flexibility about how buses are routed for greater
efficiency. For instance, on routes served by P&R and rural services, the rural service could
replace some of the P&R services by calling in en route.

Interchanging
A single rural bus service can serve only a small minority of people whose journeys happens to
begin and end close to the bus route. Interchanging to other services is essential to making public
transport work for more people. The travel hubs described above can provide an interchange
between express and traditional rural, stopping services (which become, in effect, feeder
services).

Within cities, transport planners need to design bus routes around facilitating interchanging. The
typical model is hub-and-spoke: all buses come into a central bus station, where passengers can
change to another bus. Often though, this central location is highly congested, with little scope
for building new bus priority measures.

Another model is ring-and-spoke, where buses circulate around an inner ring road. This
effectively makes it one big hub: you can hop off anywhere and catch a bus headed to any other
part of the city. Oldenburg in Germany uses this model.

Works buses

Where a company puts on a works bus service, this will often compete with and undermine the
viability of public services. Therefore it is far preferable (and probably cheaper) for the company
instead to subsidise public services for the hours or frequency needed to make it serviceable for
their workers. Hopefully the Bus Services Bill will make this kind of arrangement easier to
organise.

9. Develop and refine park-and-ride

Park-and-ride (P&R) is now an accepted traffic management tool. However research has
identified two unwanted side effects:

 Competition with rural bus services, where people who have a car prefer to use P&R rather than a
rural bus service. (The ‘abstraction’ rate of people switching from rural bus and train services was
about 20% at one Cambridge P&R site.) This almost inevitably leads to a reduction in rural bus
services, hurting those (disproportionately disadvantaged) people who depend on them
 As P&Rs become more popular, congestion occurs on the approach roads, delaying buses and
other traffic (including vehicles not heading for the city).
The model needs refining, in part by catering differently to local and longer-distance traffic.

Those travelling from the local area would be served best by rapid bus services from close to
home. To make this work, buses need to run more like trains or coaches. Rather than calling at
multiple road-side stops, buses need to call at one, well-connected travel hub in each rural centre
along the route.

Those travelling from further afield will continue to be served best by P&R. They are unlikely to
be tempted to abandon their cars far away from the city so sites need to be located close to the
city edge. But, in order to minimise congestion, sites also need to be located closed to exits from
the strategic road network, with dedicated lanes to funnel cars rapidly into the P&R.

Travel hubs

Travel hubs in rural centres should be well-connected to the surrounding homes and amenities by
foot- and cycleways. Local buses (where these are commercially viable) and community
transport should provide links to the wider area.

A large car park would be neither desirable nor necessary at most such hubs: many busy train
stations have little parking provision, with most people walking, cycling or being dropped off.
But what space is allocated for cars could be used for communal events, such as a farmers’
market, craft fair, and by providers of mobile community services (e.g. county library, NHS
health screening, police and fire service contact points, and CAB advice centres).

Parking costs

In order to incentivise use of public transport, there needs to be a hierarchy of cost to travel into
the city, where it is (typically) most expensive to drive and park in the centre, less expensive to
drive and use P&R, and even less expensive to take a bus from close to home.

The cost of building and maintaining P&R sites are substantial and should be borne by users
rather than local taxpayers. Public money should be used to subsidise public transport, which is
available to everyone, rather than parking, which is available only to those who are able to drive
and can afford a car.

10. Use Inbound Flow control

Inbound Flow Control (our term for ‘gating’ or ‘queue relocation’) is a powerful technique for
managing morning peak traffic flows efficiently, and for providing bus priority without the need
to build bus lanes right into a city.

The idea is that some of the traffic that would normally sit in a queue somewhere in the city is
held back temporarily at the edge. Here there is typically land of relatively low environmental or
heritage value that may be used to widen the road to queue traffic and provide a bypass lane for
buses (and emergency services and potentially other authorised vehicles).

Clear signage in advance of the queuing area should inform drivers of expected queuing times
and direct them to the nearest park-and-ride.

Vehicles are released from the ‘gate’ at a rate that matches the road’s outflow rate, i.e. the rate at
which vehicles are able to disperse. This ensures that all traffic flows freely beyond the gate.
This obviates the need for bus lanes, and improves journey times for all road users.
11. Rationalise distribution and deliveries
Efforts to reduce car traffic in cities are being undone by growth in commercial traffic. The
largest growth in traffic in cities is in LGVs (up 13.5% from 2012 to 2015) used to deliver goods
and groceries ordered online to homes, and just-in-time deliveries to stores.

The solution is to use consolidation and redistribution depots and many fewer vehicles making
the ‘last mile’ deliveries and collections in the city. This is the General Post Office model pre-
deregulation.

City authorities should look to encourage companies wishing to set up and run the depots, and
find ways to incentivise logistics companies to start using them. They should also explore ways
to restrict the number of delivery companies operating in the city, perhaps by creating access
restrictions for “authorised vehicles only”, and setting fees and conditions for gaining access
licence. In this way, authorities can also incentivise use of low-emission vehicles.

Once depots and ‘last mile’ delivery firms are established, the cost savings will themselves be a
strong incentive, so local authorities will be able to step back.

Cambridge is one of the few cities to have an established and successful cycle logistics business
delivering small packets and parcels from a depot close to a junction on the A14.

Changes in legislation that permit the use of larger electric-assist cargo bikes have helped. Local
authorities can also help by ensuring that cycle routes are sufficiently wide to accommodate
cargo bikes, starting with a review of gates, pinch points and other paraphernalia that does less
for safety than was once believed.

High capital investment

12. Existing rail network
There is considerable potential in the existing heavy rail network to run metro-style services in
cities like Cambridge. Rail is a true mass transit mode, able to move many thousands of people
an hour efficiently. Where rail infrastructure exists already, and could serve sizeable new
populations, the business case can be strong for adding stations, and for increasing line capacity
where this limits provision of more frequent, local services.

Parking at stations

In most cities, train stations are at the centre of a highly congested road network. It therefore
makes sense to gradually reduce the number of car parking spaces provided, reducing congestion
and freeing up some of the most valuable land for development.
Providing high quality, secure cycle parking and short-term bike hire services at stations reduces
the need for car parking and the volume of private and hire car traffic accessing the station.

Stations outside cities and close to the strategic road network make ideal locations for park-and-
ride or parkway stations. These can then serve a wider rural population that would otherwise
drive into the city.

13. Light rail

Light rail can be popular and politically attractive, but the cost is high and in most cases
improving bus services will be have a greater benefit than installing street-running trams.

 Installation of the rails and power supply (either overhead lines or inductive loops below the road
surface) is very expensive and highly disruptive
 In existing urban areas, the space required will typically compromise the space available for other
transport modes, including walking and cycling
 People travelling from beyond the tram network will still have to take a bus, and possibly change
to the tram en route
 Rail has to avoid steep gradients and sharp bends, ruling out routes that buses can manage
perfectly well
 Rail-based transport cannot adapt to temporary disruptions, e.g. road works, traffic incidents,
street-based events
 Tram lines are a hazard to people cycling.
Rail-based transport is appropriate where:

 There is a need to move large volumes of people (in the order of 10,000 per hour) between major
centres (e.g. a transport hub and the city centre)
 It is possible to fully-segregate the line to enable services to run fast, reliability and safely
 There is a large new development, which can be designed around the transport infrastructure.

14. Strategic Road Network resilience

Incidents and works on the strategic road network often cause large volumes of traffic to divert
onto city and village roads, creating long delays for local traffic, including bus services.
Highways England should make it a higher priority to make the strategic road network more
resilient, i.e. better able to adapt to partial or complete closure of a road.

The benefits of investment in junctions to improve connectivity should be measured in terms

both of reducing journey times and delays on the strategic road network, and also on reducing
congestion and delays that spill over onto the local road network.

Around Cambridge there is a triangle of dual carriageway roads: M11, A14 and A11. In theory,
if one side of the triangle is blocked, traffic could be diverted around the other two sides,
minimising delays on the local road network. To make theory a practical reality, the junctions at
each end of the A11 require additional connections, to the M11 north, and A14 west.

The Girton Interchange, where the A14, M11 and A428 meet, also offers limited connectivity.
This results in congestion on local roads: through traffic must use a local road (A1303) to move
between the A428 and M11; and traffic coming from the east destined for the north-west of
Cambridge must leave the A14 early and drive through the north of the city. Additional
connectivity at the Girton Interchange would reduce traffic and congestion on local roads, both
by reducing diversions of traffic onto local roads, and by enabling the creation of a park-and-ride
site at a near perfect location (see Point 9 above).

15. Road pricing

There is no doubt that road pricing can work: in Singapore, for instance, a network of ‘gates’ that
charge a toll that varies in relation to demand successfully keeps a lid on congestion. But there is
a complex debate to be had around designing and implementing road pricing: the social, political
and technical challenges are huge and will take years to resolve. That process needs to start now.

Part of the urgency stems from the fact that government stands to lose in the region of £30bn of
revenue from fuel duty and VAT: electricity, currently VATable at 5%, is replacing petrol and
diesel as the fuel for motor vehicles. That transition will reach a tipping point almost certainly
within the next five years, when the total cost of ownership of all-electric vehicles will be lower
than for petrol/diesel vehicles. From that point on, almost all cars sold will be all-electric.

The most obvious parallel is with cameras: the transition from film to digital started slowly and
reached a tipping point in the 2000s, after which film camera sales fell rapidly.

There will be strong pressure to scrap the petrol and diesel vehicles already on the road when we
take seriously the health costs of the harmful pollution they cause. The WHO estimates that
40,000 deaths per year are attributable to pollution (which compares with 1,800 in road
collisions). So the decline in the fuel duty revenue could be precipitous once it starts to
accelerate.

Fuel duty is aligned to energy consumption and therefore roughly to distance travelled and use of
infrastructure. At its most basic, road pricing can emulate this. By varying charges by time of
day, road pricing can reduce congestion. But the opportunity is much bigger than that: it is to
design a tax that is also socially progressive.

A system based only on ability or willingness to pay would be regressive. Even if income from
road pricing is invested in improving public transport, there will always be gaps leaving many
people with no option but to drive, owing to personal circumstances or the nature of their work.
Many socially valuable services are provided by people who are paid minimal wages, e.g. health
and social care workers, or whose services need to be affordable by the low paid, e.g. boiler
servicing and food delivery for the home-bound. In our view, road pricing needs to be designed,
with wide public consultation, to take into account:

 Physical cost (building, repairing and renewing roads and associated infrastructure)
 Environmental cost (pollution, noise, vibration caused)
 Social cost (e.g. in contributing to congestion, delaying other drivers)
 Social benefit the driver is providing (e.g. a health worker)
 The driver’s need to use a vehicle (e.g. health-related or no access to public transport)
 Commercial benefit derived from driving, especially at peak times
There will also need to be a debate around the infrastructure needed. There’s the monitoring
system: should we fit every vehicle with a ‘smart meter’ that communicates with a central
system, or install a network of ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) cameras? And
there’s the billing system: should this be centralised and run by government, or de-centralised
and run by private companies or local authorities?

If the system is not centralised (perhaps because of privacy concerns), then there must at least be
nationally-agreed standards to ensure a seamless experience for drivers. And if it is centralised,
local authorities must be able to set local premiums to manage localised demand and raise
income (much in the way that parish, city and district councils can set their own Council Tax
precept). Councils could also consider rebating national road pricing fees where they want to
encourage regeneration of deprived areas.

Health and welfare

There needs to be much greater consideration given to the health aspects of transport. Reducing
obesity and improving mental health requires for most people requires building more physical
activity into their daily routines. That means walking and cycling must be attractive, convenient
and safe for many more people.

The grave danger to health of being exposed to pollution, especially from diesel engines, is only
now becoming apparent. We must prioritise reducing people’s exposure by reducing congestion,
traffic volumes and incentivising the transition to zero-emissions vehicles.

Planting trees between highways and homes has been shown to reduce the amount of pollution
people are exposed to in their homes. It is also linked with greater willingness to walk and
improved mental health.

Social isolation is a major concern for those who cannot drive or afford a car: the elderly,
disabled, poor and unemployed. It is generally recognised that public (or community) transport is
a lifeline for them to maintain existing relationships. But there is a much wider benefit for
everyone in walking, cycling, and taking public transport, in that it provides many more
opportunities for social interaction than driving. Good public realm for walking and cycling, and
public transport that works for everyone make communities stronger and more cohesive.
Concluding thoughts
The name of the game is ‘modal shift’. Long-term reductions in congestion require people to
switch to more sustainable, space-efficient modes of transport: walking, cycling, buses, trams
and trains. Though some relief may be gained from increasing the efficiency and capacity of the
road network, this will always be short-term: the iron law of induced demand will see to that.
People will simply adapt to prevailing road conditions, choosing whichever route is quickest, and
increasing driving distances as road speeds increase.

To achieve modal shift in towns and cities we need to invest in improving sustainable transport
modes and, at the same time, reduce capacity, access and convenience of urban road networks
for motor vehicles. This requires a revolution in transport planning: no longer can the motor
vehicle be king of the city. We must design urban roads and streets to be attractive and
convenient places to walk, cycle and use public transport. Where compromise is necessary,
because of lack of space or safety concerns, it is motor vehicles that must give way: diverted
away from sensitive streets or slowed down.

For this not to be portrayed as a “war on motorists”, we must find ways to filter motor vehicles
so as to deter people from driving who have alternatives, but without severely inconveniencing
those who, for personal or business reasons, have no alternative. Transport professionals must
adjust the way they refer to people, not as ‘motorists’ or ‘cyclists’, but as people who drive,
cycle, walk, take a bus, etc. Change is not a zero-sum game: someone’s gain is not necessarily
someone else’s loss: we all stand to gain from having more travel options.

Government and local authorities need to invest in developing and articulating a positive vision
of what low-car cities will look like. It is essential that they involve urban and landscape
designers from the outset, and not bring them in at the end of engineering-led schemes merely to
‘add lipstick’.