Good news for carfree choosers - in London, Manchester, Liverpool…and Brighton

The Campaign for Better Transport has produced its report on the best places in the UK to be carfree. The Car Dependency Scorecard 2014 shows that London, Manchester, Liverpool…and Brighton are the most carfree friendly cities in the UK. Tough luck if you live in Peterborough, Colchester or Milton Keynes, designated as the hardest places in England to live if you don't have access to a car.

This is important because, to quote the CfBT,

“the way people travel is affected by what councils and the Government do, and if it’s made easier to use public transport and to walk and cycle, at least some people now stuck in their cars will change. If action isn’t taken, people become car dependent – those with cars use them more, because they feel they have no choice, and those without cars get isolated and excluded.”



Picture shows city-by-city rankings. Full report here.

Off The Buses: Roger French Retiring From Brighton Buses

One of the reasons why it’s easier to be carfree in Brighton and Hove is that the bus service is so good. So it was sad to hear that Roger French is retiring from the top job at Brighton and Hove Bus Company in March 2013. Roger will be a hard act to follow. As the recent report from Campaign For Better Transport noted, Brighton and Hove ranked highest in the UK for public transport. As the report says, “Weekly bus fares could be lower, but the introduction of a smartcard is welcome. Public transport accessibility to the city centre could be improved, but on the whole key services are relatively easy to get to.” Rarely in the UK, the numbers of passengers on the buses has been going up every year for at least a decade.

Roger French has worked for the bus company since 1985, and was made an OBE for services to public transport in 2005. The company, in partnership with the local authority in Brighton and Hove, has been an early adopter of real time information services for passengers, talking buses and many other innovations – evidenced by the fact that they managed to grab the www.buses.co.uk domain name for the company. Roger French, and Brighton and Hove Buses, have won many awards, so local bus users will be paying careful attention to what happens next. Meanwhile, as the tribute on the website of Brighton’s Economic Partnership notes, Roger French is “a man of remarkable integrity, endeavour and achievement; we will not see his like again. The city salutes him.” (photo from Omnibussoc.org)

The Carfree Place To Be: Brighton and Hove

The Campaign For Better Transport has ranked Brighton as the second-best place in the UK to be carfree (London came first because of all that spending on Olympics infrastructure spending. The CFBT research was published last week as a Car Dependency Scorecard examining how dependent we are on cars, using data from 19 different sources to rank 26 cities. The CFBT notes that London, Brighton and Nottingham were the top three in 2011 and 2012, but Brighton swapped place with Nottingham due to investment in transport and, in general, forward-looking travel plans. However, the news isn’t as good if you want to go carfree and live in Colchester, Peterborough or Wigan, which were at the bottom of the table – scoring poor accessibility to key services and high numbers using cars to commute to work. Interestingly, the CFBT also notes, as this blog has often commented, that “all the UK cities measured compared badly to our European neighbours on transport provision. UK cities performed badly due to poor air quality, high levels of congestion and, with the exception of Cardiff, the high cost of public transport.”

We can’t all live in London, Brighton or Nottingham, so what’s the message if you want to be carfree? Give up your car anyway – the financial and health benefits are so persuasive that there’s no need to wait for transport planners to catch up: instead, they should start to see the CFBT’s top cities as a benchmark for the rest of the UK.

D2D: Door to Door Journeys Without A Car

Interesting report published last month on “Door toDoor Journeys” (a.k.a. “D2D” Journeys) by the Campaign for Better Transport. UK users of public transport know that the dream of integrated transport remains some way off. The report gives examples of good and bad practice, and the findings should be required reading for every politician, planner and environmentalist. As the Campaign for Better Transport says, if public transport is to be a real and attractive alternative to cars, it needs to offer the same kind of door-to-door service that cars do. “This is not impossible, as experience in some parts of the UK and in many other countries shows.” The report highlights four main elements that are needed to integrate transport. These are:

• Giving people good information before and during their journeys
• Making sure that the interchanges between different public transport services don't act as a barrier (and that walking and cycling access and facilities are good)
• Getting transport services to connect with each other
• Having tickets that allow services to join up in a simple and transparent way

My experience is that, compared with many other European countries, the UK doesn’t score well on many of these criteria: Brighton and Hove is good, but, for the UK, still exceptional. Here we have: real time information from the bus company; main interchanges which are broadly ok; some transport services which connect – and some that don’t; and some tickets that allow joined-up services, mainly between the bus company and the train operators: infuriatingly, there is no interoperability of tickets between our two main bus operators, Brighton and Hove Bus Company and Stagecoach. What is even worse is that there used to be – until Stagecoach (allegedly) pulled the plug on the deal. You can get the full version of the report (2.3 Mb) here.