THE ENVIRONMENT

London: arithmetic of devastation

DAVID WIGGINS

rdens and beyond the most beautiful £2,000 million.

Two hundred and five years later, and really the council's last offensive. am( Wiggins is professor of philosophy First, the cost. According to an indepen- t Bedford College, London University. dent group of economists and other pro- fessionals whose report will be published is one of the loveliest prospects in the next month, the real eventual cost of what orld. Wherever I look I see nothing but the ctc Study proposes will not be less than oases.' This is not the Gt.c Development Second, these economists and Douglas Ian's chosen style of enthusiasm about Jay's action group agree in putting the

hat is now called environment, still less number of people to be physically displaced

e manner of the recently published Part at some 60,000, only 10 per cent of them I of the otc's London Transportation living in housing officially designated 'poor'.

nay (where this word is reserved for such Third, the Transportation Study does not ntexts as 'intolerable environment', which even attempt to show that the proposals most invariably means 'effects of traffic will solve the problems which will arise

ingestion'). The writer was Leopold Mozart after 1981. We are discouraged from

the occasion his first sight of London. speculating whether this 'investment' is en outside Chelsea where Leopold and Fourth—and this is the only fact the olfgang Amadeus stayed, there are still GLC has made readily accessible—the plans ces in London which a foreign visitor have nothing to do with population increase the city might find worthy of some degree (of which there will be little) but were comparable admiration—in Greenwich, adopted in the light of the prediction that ackheath Village, Barnes, Holland Park, by 1981 the proportion of London house- ddington, Belsize Park, Hampstead, Chalk holds which own cars will have risen from Tin, Camden Town, Islington, Canonbury, the present 40 per cent to 70 per cent. The • I to mention Eltham, Streatham Vale satisfaction or 'consumer surplus' which d Wanstead Park. These, with Cheyne will accrue to them from motorway con-

'alk and good nineteenth century haasing structions will outweigh both the incon-

tates of Battersea and Clapham, are only venience suffered by those who are dis- me of the pleasantly habitable places placed and rehoused, the noise experienced

rough which London's ringways with by those who continue to live nearby, and

rs and other dependencies are to be One day last month, the day the London

readed, elevated or bulldozed. transport fares went up, I fell to wondering

Some of the work is already done. The whether this 70 per cent was a prediction,

',astations of Shepherd's Bush and an objective, or a target of the ct..c's. A

ctoria Park, Hackney, have cured the journey I make in central London, which san classes there of any illusions about had cost Is before, now cost Is 6d. In at is intended. And the process will summer 1968 it had only cost 9d. How ntinue, it seems, unless Londoners pro- many passengers does a 100 per cent fares t against the plans on other grounds than rise lose and convert to car travel? The enity or sentiment. question appealed to a friend of mine, who likes statistics and assures me that at present car registrations are far short of the Gt.c's predicted rate. This is what he discovered.

The 9 per cent increase of last autumn lost London Transport three to four per cent of its passengers. It followed a period, 1966- 1967. when fares were frozen and virtually no passengers had been lost. An earlier and more modest fares increase mentioned by London Transport in its 1966 report was thought by the board itself to have lost between I per cent and 2 per cent. What then will be the effect of this September's fare increase? When my friend rang up London Transport and asked them what they believed, the official to whom he talked was sympathetic and also rather quick on the uptake. But he could not disclose the official estimate of passenger loss. It had gone to the National Board for Prices and Incomes and that board had not, in approving the increase in fares, revealed London Transport's estimate of passenger loss: but why not try to work it out back- wards from the £7.9 million the GLC hope to gain by the increase? (If no passengers were to be lost the proceeds would have to be appreciably larger.) My friend calculated, hazarded a guess of 5 per cent passengers lost, and was not contradicted.

Presumably no undertaking deliberately schemes to put itself out of business at a rate of nearly 10 per cent in every eleven months, even if it is exempt from speculating about the cost (many times an annual deficit of £10 million) of finding extra space for cars for the passengers it sheds. London Transport's actions have been forced on to it by the Ministry of Transport, which promises as much capital as it can get for motorway construction but still shrinks from the idea of earmarking much motor taxation for subsidies to public transport to relieve congestion, and by the Gtr, whose insistence that London Transport break even and maintain a £2 million reserve from passen- ger receipts is unparalleled in any European city.

Nor has the GLC been left in ignorance that fare increases would accelerate the vicious spiral of fewer passengers—poorer receipts -cuts in services----fewer passengers again, which has already brought public transport to its knees in London and stretched the patience of its passengers to breaking point. Meanwhile the fare increase itself can only aggravate London Transport's real difficulty if, as seems to be the case, the congestion which cars inflict on buses is already the principal cause of deficit. (Underground railways, which escape congestion, now subsidise the buses to the tune of an operating surplus of £500,000 in 1968-69.1

I conclude that if car ownership leaps from 40 to 70 households in every 100 that will be largely because the Gtc itself is inter- vening actively to bring this about. Planning for future demand is sometimes called 'trend planning'. It could equally well be called 'planning a trend'. The fact is that there is no truth yet about what people will want in 1981 and after. Some of them are infants, others are unborn. It is dubious that even the adults have yet decided. And if they have, they may think £2,000 million could be better spent on hospitals or primary and secondary education or housing, all of which are desperately short of capital. Buying a car is not a vote between these ends.

The ideal of strict commercial viability for public transport is still more or less a political orthodoxy, but when one looks at its effects it is not the hard-nosed doctrine it

seems. Nationalised industries are expected to test their investment projects against a test discount rate of a 10 per cent annual return on capital; and 10 per cent simple interest on motorway constructions of £2,000 million is £200 million per annum. We tried some more home-made calculations. The combined passenger deficits of London Transport and British Rail in the London area cannot be much more than £15 million per annum. Their combined passenger receipts are much less than £200 million a year. Home-made calculations prompted a home-made idea. If £2,000 million is on offer you could make public transport in London free for ever on the interest. Or if less than £2,000 million were on offer why not (more sensibly) make public transport free off-peak? Or charge a minimal fare? By any method of computation any of these would be cheaper than the motorway.

My statistically minded friend intervened here. This way of making the point under- states the case. Unlike a capital outlay of £2,000 million, a subsidy is only a transfer of wealth from one pocket to another. If the transport systems continue to operate anyway then subsidising them has no real resource cost at all. The community as a whole does not spend anything more on transport as a result of the subsidy, which simply encourages the maximum use of an existing asset. This it would do not by harassing the motorist, as the GLC has now disclosed it intends in any case, but by offering him something else, free, to see if he wants it. Who would not prefer the carrot to the stock?

At this point I looked again at the Transportation Study. It claims that public transport in London is already 'extensive' and 'efficient' and therefore cannot attract substantially more people from the roads than it already does. It may look like that from the consultants' offices or from New Haven, Connecticut, but any live passenger fresh from a twenty minute wait for his bus or train would find this a laughable assertion. Here London Transport's com- prehension of the situation has gaps in it. They recently withdrew the 98b bus service. A private operator now runs it at a profit by providing and keeping to a timetable. Does anybody really know anything at all about passengers, or what use they would make of better night services, shared taxis in Mexico City style, or of the services which could be quickly and cheaply instituted on London's extensive network of unused surface railways? Still less can anybody guess at the potentialities of free or cheap public transport. Do they know anything about the bicyclists whom danger and noise are so rapidly pushing off the roads? If there were reserved routes for them would they like to come back? Would there be more? How can one tell?

All you can do with these things is to try them—quickly. Engaging consultants at a cost of near fl million to toy with com- puters for seven years and extrapolate from the past while the present goes hang is no answer to these questions. Any council which cared for London as a historic and living city would long since have had the imagination to ascertain the effects of new public transport policies empirically, by experiment, and heeded the reception accorded them by its citizens, before pro- posing to devastate London, and uproot Londoners, so expensively. 12,000 million will certainly be a candidate for the largest sum of money ever spent in pursuit of an almost completely circular argument.