Lewes Road transport scheme wins another award for Brighton and Hove. But what about Valley Gardens?

Good to see that the Lewes Road scheme keeps collecting awards, the latest being the Excellence in Cycling and Walking category at the National Transport Awards. The Lewes Road scheme, which links Brighton city centre with destinations along Lewes Road, has provided better connectivity for cyclists and walkers, and also provides improvements to speed buses along the way. The £6.4 million project saw nearly three miles of dual carriageway changed into a single carriageway with a new bus lane, widened cycle lane, and revamped bus stops and traffic signals. All of which makes it much easier to travel between the centre of Brighton, the universities, the American Express Community Stadium and Stanmer Park, as well as residential areas.

  

What is amazing is the amount of fuss caused by such schemes when they are being planned and installed. Travelling (by bus) along the Lewes Road in the peaks last week, I’d observe that everything seems to be working pretty smoothly. It is hard to believe the brouhaha about the Lewes Road  scheme, which some seemed to think presaged the end of the world as we know it. But, as the endowment effect,inertia bias and the status quo bias from behavioural economics show, people hate to have things taken away from them – even when what replaces it is better.

Before: Lewes Road at the Vogue Gyratory - note cyclists

The Lewes Road scheme is one of a number of sustainable transport improvements around Brighton and Hove, which have included investing in better bus services, installing cycle contraflows and 20mph zones, as well as upgrading public spaces. These schemes, designed to change people’s transport behaviour by making it easier to take low-carbon options, have featured in a recent approving blog post by a staffer at the ClimateChange Committee. The post notes that, against a worrying national trend towards increasing carbon emissions from transport, developments in our city like the Lewes Road scheme and others,  

“make walking, cycling and taking the bus a much more attractive option. Car ownership in Brighton is currently the lowest in South East England, cycling to work doubled between 2001 and 2011, as did the number of bus journeys between 1993 and 2013.”

With the change in administration that took place in May 2015, and the switch to a Labour-controlled council, another long awaited scheme, for Valley Gardens, has been put on hold pending further work on traffic modelling. Let’s hope that this doesn’t mean that the long overdue improvements to the City’s main gateway, from St. Peter’s Church to the Palace Pier, has been kicked into the long grass, never to be seen again. Because if it has, it’s the worst possible news for pedestrians and cyclists, and anyone one else who believes that Valley Gardens deserves a better fate than being a congested and fume-laded traffic corridor, a river of vehicles which currently divides our city.

New Year’s Resolutions and Behavioural Economics

31^st December, the date when we undertake to be better people in the year ahead, normally by promising ourselves that we’ll spend less money, get fitter, lose weight, be more relaxed….eat fewer biscuits.

For the 80% of us who live in urban areas, there’s one New Year’s Resolution that will help achieve all of these: give up owning a car. Can behavioural economics help us stick to our resolutions? First, behavioural economics shows that we are loss-averse: so it’s better to re-frame a decision not in terms of what’s being “lost” (the car), but as what’s being gained (money, fitness, being thinner). Re-framing a loss as a gain makes it much more attractive. Second, humans succumb to the status quo bias, tending to go with the default: if there’s a car parked outside, despite our resolution to walk, we’ll give into temptation and take to four wheels for the next short journey. And thirdly, everyone knows that resolutions are easy to make but hard to stick with – behavioural economists know that a “commitment device” will help the process. For example, one way of not giving into the temptation to splurge on credit cards is to cut them up or hide them. Similarly, it’s a lot easier to eat fewer biscuits if there are none at home. So maybe there’s only one sure-fire way to beat the temptation to get into your car: don’t have one parked outside. Happy 2013!  

(Photo of Jammy Dodger from www.tangosquad.com)