Lynn Sloman, Transport for Quality of Life: Alternatives to cars

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Sarah: So our final speaker in this half of the panel is Lynn Sloman from Transport for Quality of Life, Lynn.

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Lynn Sloman: Thank you. Okay, so I'm going to be talking about alternatives to cars for surface transport and really focusing on three questions. First of all, how could we make buses and trams, and trains much more attractive? Second, could particularly more cycling lead to less car use. And third, how does the planning system affect how we travel?

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So let's start with that first question. How could we make buses, trams, and trains much more attractive? And I want to show you some real-world examples from Munich and Zurich and Dunkirk. So in Munich city region, so that's the city and the region that surrounds it of smaller towns and rural areas, buses and trains and trams are all coordinated by a public transport governing body which is called in German Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund. And that public transport governing body makes sure that all of those services are related to each other and connect with each other and the motto which you can see on the side of the the Weekly bus there but translated into English at the bottom is: one network, one timetable, one ticket. And so the whole system is very well coordinated.

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In Zurich city region, they also have this public transport governing body Verkehrsverbund that coordinates everything between buses and trams and trains. But on top of that, they have public transport service frequency standards, which are enshrined in law. And I'll show you what those standards look like in just a moment. But just to sort of place us, they're Switzerland, and the orange area is the Zurich city region, the city and its surrounding region. And you can see the next biggest town after Zurich is Winterthur and there's a place called Buch am Irchel right up at the top there, which we're going to look at in a moment, which is a tiny little village, to show the effect of these public transport standards. So this is what the Public Transport Service standards in Zurich city region look like. If you live in a settlement with at least 300 people, you will have a public transport service every hour. If you live in - on a corridor where multiple settlements combined to give strong demand, you will have a service every 30 minutes. If you live in a large, dense settlement, you will have a public transport service at least every 15 minutes, and services run from six in the morning till midnight, seven days a week. Buses and trains connect, and the services repeat hourly at regular intervals.

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And so let's look at what that means for that little village of Buch am Irchel, which has a population of 564 people. The first direct bus to Winterthur from Buch am Irchel leaves at 5:30 in the morning. And then from about 10 to 6 in the morning till about 10 to 10 at night, there are two buses every hour from this little village to, either to Hettlingen to Andelfingen and both of those are places on the train line into Winterthur, and when you get to Hettlingen and Andelfingen, you hop off the bus and there's roughly a three-minute connection, you walk across the platform, get on your train and go into Winterthur, and that whole journey takes about 30 minutes. And then the last bus to Winterthur at night is shortly before midnight, 20 to 12. And that happens not just Monday to Friday, but seven days a week. So this is Sundays as well. So the whole ethos is of a completely comprehensive service.

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So this is all... okay. This is a graph that has got messed up. So let me just explain and - I don't know whether the versions you've got in your handouts at work? Do they look right? They got messed up, dear me. Okay, so ignore the graph and let me just tell you what I would have told you, which is that if you live in Zurich City region the average person there makes 500 public transport - about 450 public transport trips per year. If you live in Munich, it's on average about 250 public transport trips per year. If you live in anywhere, in a big, in a conurbation in England, apart from London, then on average you will make about 100 public transport trips per year. So we make very much less public transport, very many fewer public transport trips than people who live in Zurich city region, or Munich city region. And the question then is, how much difference does it make that those cities have much higher levels of public transport use? What's the effect of that on car use? And if our English cities and the regions around them had comparable levels of public transport use to the -that places like Zurich and Munich, we could expect to reduce car mileage by about 9%.

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And just before I leave talking about public transport, Dunkirk in France has been looking at a new approach to encouraging people to try alternatives to cars. And that is that since September of 2018 they've made all of their bus services free. And a the same time, they also improved the bus network. And the effect of that has been, roughly speaking, almost two double levels of car of bus use. So bus use has gone up by about 85%, and one in 10 of the people of the new bus users have given up their second car, and about half of the new bus users previously drove. And so that's a new way of getting people to think about, not using a car that is starting to develop, -becoming quite - there's a lot of interest in it in France at the moment.

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Let's move on to talking about cycling, particularly and against some real-world examples. So first of all, Seville, fourth largest city in Spain. It's got very big wide roads. But in the 1990s it had a really big problem with traffic congestion because of booming economy. And there was a lot of debate about what to do about traffic congestions. Cycling wasn't seen as the natural solution because Seville is a very hot city down in the south of Spain, it didn't have a cycling culture. People said it's too hot to cycle. But despite that, the city administration built 120 kilometres of cycle paths alongside main roads but separated, segregated from the traffic, over a four year period. And the effect of that was to increase the number of cycle trips per day quite dramatically from about 13,000 per day before the cycle network was built, to 73,000 afterwards. And you could see on the left-hand slide what those cycle networks looked like and how they're physically separated from the traffic, and one of the very striking things, when you go to Seville, is that you see, it's not just like young men in lycra cycling, it's older people, young people, women, people who maybe aren't very physically active and fit looking. So ordinary people cycle in Seville.

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London is building a lot of very high-quality cycleways and those are having a very big effect on the levels of cycling in London. London is probably the leading city in the UK at the moment, in terms of just building lots of cycleways and seeing what affect it has, and it's proving very effective. And some research that transport for London has done suggests a very high proportion of the journeys that people make by car are potentially cyclable. And probably about 1/4 of the distance driven could potentially be made on a bike, so there's lots to aim at.

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And cycling can also replace cars outside cities. So this is what's happened in Denmark in the area around Copenhagen, where they're building a massive network of cycle superhighways alongside main roads, really long distances. Copenhagen's down there at the bottom right, the longest cycleway there goes right across the page, that's about 40 kilometres and what they look like out of the towns is shown on the right-hand side. And on those cycleways, typically, about one in four of the people using them previously drove and the average distance cycle is about 15 kilometres. I'm just going to just skip over this because of time to say that one of the reasons that the cycleways in Copenhagen and Denmark have been so effective is because a lot of people in Denmark are now starting to use electric bikes. And electric bike sales are really high in Europe. They've really taken off much more than they have in the UK, partly because they're being grants to people to buy electric bikes, which is something that we don't yet do here.

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So just to finish, how does the planning system affect how we travel? And just to say there are four big factors that affect how much we drive that are important to think about when planning, for example, new housing. So location, your big city or rural. Density. If homes are close together and at least 100 homes per hectare is that kind of key measure. Then many more people will use public transport, and walk, and cycle. If there are lots of local facilities, people will walk and cycle to them rather than driving, and so will use cars less. And developments that have very good connectivity. Really good public transport services nearby will tend to have lower levels of car use.

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And just two final slides. The first one is showing car-dependent housing in rural areas. So this is an area in Essex, a new housing development about five kilometres from the nearest market town. Not very good public transport and not very many local facilities. And somewhere like this, typically about 80% of residents will drive to work. And in contrast, if you look at the Climate Innovation District, which is planned for Leeds at the moment, would be designed around walking and cycling, its going to have a high density of development, more than 100 homes per hectare, and people who live in areas like this will typically use their car maybe 2 to 3 times less than somebody who lives in a car-dependent rural area. Just notice by the way that although that's high density, it's no high rise and it's very green.

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And so just to finish, do we have the final slides? Yes, thank you. Okay, so three alternatives to cars that we've looked at. Coordinated public transport with frequent services is a key thing to look at. Cycle tracks and electric bikes can potentially cut car use. And building homes in cities, to higher densities with local facilities and with good public transport, are also ways that we could look at reducing cars. Thanks very much.

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Sarah: Thank you. So we're gonna pause to give you a chance to write down questions. Again a maximum of two questions each for Lynn, one per post-its. Table facilitators, once you've done that, if you want to go straight onto prioritising the questions for the speakers, that would be great.

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