EEH's Regional Transport Strategy
One week after the launch of the Framework Spatial Plan for the Arc comes England’s Economic Heartland’s (EEH’s) final version of its Regional Transport Strategy, ‘Connecting People, Transforming Journeys’. This might be regarded as the second piece of the huge jig-saw puzzle to define the future of the five Ox-Cam Arc counties, plus Hertfordshire and Swindon (the latter two included in EEH’s area but not in the Ox-Cam Arc). There is a Main Report plus Summary, five maps, two reports on Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) and nine Appendices, a grand total of over 600 pages.
The Strategy has excellent ambitions, including reducing car usage, increasing public transport (bus, rail and mass rapid transit schemes), doubling nature and achieving net zero carbon of the region’s transport systems by 2040. All these would be significant achievements with the communities, transport and infrastructure we have at present, but the strategy also imagines significant growth across the region, more or less in line with the ambitions of The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC). The EEH strategy highlights the same features of the region as did the NIC’s 2017 Partnering for Prosperity report - its science-based developments and contribution to national income, growth of which - it is claimed - is hampered by insufficient housing, transport infrastructure and over-reliance on car-based transport, creating congestion that reduces productivity.
And precisely how much growth does EEH imagine there will be? Well, you will look almost in vain throughout the 600+ pages to find any precise numbers of new houses, settlements and businesses expected to be built or created, and there is nothing at all about where all these new developments might take place. Instead, the Regional Transport Strategy document talks of ‘substantial additional infrastructure ahead of the arrival of planned growth’; and later, ‘the scale of planned growth increases the need for a step-change in our approach’. So how much ‘planned growth’ will there be in the region?
It is very clear that EEH has a whole series of quantitative models for future growth, both of populations and their possible distribution (Tempro for populations and ProjectView for mapping) and of traffic (Immense Simulations or ImSim models). It’s also pretty clear that there must be precise numbers or growth forecasts in these models; that’s how models ‘work’. EEH, however, refuses to share them, or put them down in these new documents, probably because they are so enormous. But, tucked away in Appendix E to the ISA, Equality Impact Assessment, Section 4.9, Projected Population, is the statement “the population between 2018 and 2050 in the EEH region is set to increase by 26% (from 5.4 million to 6.9 million)”.
No, the population isn’t ‘set’ to do anything of the sort. It’s the number that EEH imagines the population will grow to in its parallel universe model. That upper figure of 6.9 million is simply the number that EEH and others are planning for the area by 2050. In EEH’s July 2020 Pathways to Decarbonisation document, calculations assuming very high, continuous growth predicted that the EEH area population would grow from 5.21 million in 2015 to 6.94 million in 2050 (Pathways to Decarbonisation, Table 2), an increase requiring 862,482 new dwellings between 2020 and 2050 (Table 1). Notice the end point in 2050 in the decarbonisation document (6.94 million) is the same as the projected population to 2050 in the recent road transport strategy (6.9 millions). The ambition hasn’t changed, and EEH is almost in line here with the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Governmnent’s (MHCLG’s) Framework Spatial Plan released the previous week that, whilst again not specifying a precise figure, nevertheless referred to Partnering for Prosperity’s transformational growth scenario that involves one million new houses across the Arc by 2050 (our news item on the Framework Spatial Plan is here).
The reluctance in recent key MHCLG and EEH documents to mention the scale of growth planned across the region by 2050 appears to have been quite deliberate. How is it possible to produce over 600 pages on the growth of a region without mentioning just how much growth there will be?
The public disquiet over Ox-Cam Arc ambitions is well-known; but deliberately not mentioning it in the key blueprints for both settlements (MHCLG) and regional transport (EEH) is simply perverse.
Now look again at EEH’s ambitions for a zero-carbon future by 2040, the creation of well-connected communities and a doubling of Nature - all these to be achieved in the face of growth far in excess of recent levels and continuing, without ceasing, for the next 30 years? NEG will continue to challenge the growth agenda behind all these plans, and will continue to speak truth to power.
EEH’s Investment Pipeline. No, not the Rail Plans.
EEH’s investment pipeline map is shown on the right (click on the map for a high resolution pdf version; download it for a 2-page spread). Most of the legend items refer to rail improvements, additions or interchanges, but 5-G connectivity, cycle networks and local mass transit schemes (CAM in Cambridge, MRT in Milton Keynes and bus rapid transit in Oxford) also feature. East-West Rail (EWR) is shown in turquoise, with the as-yet undecided track of the section between Bedford and Cambridge shown as a dashed line. Although East-West Rail was originally planned to take significant freight coming from Felixstowe, these ambitions have now been scaled back. The northern line in purple runs from Felixstowe to Nuneaton and is already a major freight carrier. The large pale blue East-West arrows above and below EWR are additional rail lines EEH would like to develop, further increasing East-West connectivity
EEH’s Connectivity Studies. No, not the Road Plans.
Ten corridors for development or enhancement across the region are shown on the left. These were whittled down from an original group of 60 corridors.
So, what do these ‘corridors’ represent? To begin with we thought they were the road corridors complementing what we thought were just the rail corridors in the other EEH map (above). But they are not, quite. They are transport corridors identified for future study by EEH for what is called a ‘multi-modal’ analysis of the local transport network. So they may involve a mixture of roads plus interchanges with railway or bus connections at strategic points.
We understand that EEH will hold additional rounds of public consultation as these connectivity corridors are investigated, beginning in 2021 with the Oxford-Milton Keynes and the Oxford-Northampton-Peterborough corridors (Corridors A and B on the map, more clearly seen below).
In an EEH webinar the day following the release of its Transport Strategy, Naomi Green, EEH’s Head of Technical Programme, said “The road schemes that we’ve identified in the Transport Strategy are necessary not to enable growth in the future but only to meet existing needs.” She went on to explain that we need to change our perspective of roads, and that we will have to use them differently in future, in order to achieve our decarbonisation ambitions. That will be quite a challenge, given the high growth agenda underlying all of EEH’s plans. It means that for every extra one of those additional 860,000 houses to be built by 2050 you have to take the carbon footprint of its car(s) off the road system just to maintain the status quo. To get to zero carbon you also have to remove the carbon footprint of all the existing cars from all the existing houses as well.
And what is the meaning of ”…only to meet existing needs..” for an area that is ear-markied for unprecedented growth in the next 30 years? A little like Highways England’s economic modelling of the case for the expressway, EEH’s modelling of traffic flows across the network only takes into account flows from existing houses and those in current Local Plans (i.e. those whose location is known). Nobody yet knows where additional houses will go and so nobody can be absolutely sure that the connectivity corridors will be appropriate when the locations of those additional houses are decided. But looked at another way, the connectivity corridors selected by EEH could be used by MHCLG to decide where future housing developments might go under Ox-Cam Arc plans.
There is always a ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem with new houses and infrastructure such as roads. Much local development at present builds the houses first and then adds the infrastructure later (the ‘Expansion before Infrastructure’ or ‘E before I’ approach). This generally leads to chaotic and piece-meal development; in some cases the infrastructure never gets built. The better approach is ‘I before E’, Infrastructure before Expansion, where the infrastructure is in place before the first house is built. The up-front costs of providing infrastructure are often too great for Local Authorities to find, however, so they must wait for contributions from housebuilders (CIL or s106 charges) once houses are built and sold before they have the cash to build the infrastructure. Too often we end up with Expansion before Infrastructure.
A slightly more informative map of the connectivity corridors is shown below. The five shire counties of the Ox-Cam Arc are outlined in red/grey (Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire). The EEH area includes also Hertfordshire and Swindon.
There’s one obvious omission from the map below. Why are no connectivity corridors shown in Cambridgeshire? The reason is that Cambridgeshire+Peterborough is already and separately developing a transport strategy for itself, and it was felt pointless to duplicate this work in EEH.
Whilst duplication is certainly best avoided it’s difficult to see how a regional transport strategy won’t need to cross county boundary lines (as the ten EEH corridors below do) in order to be effective regionally. Cambridgeshire, it seems, is developing a separate economic strategy that you can read about here (where the Ox-Cam Arc is mentioned only about ten times in >130 pages, and never features significantly) and also a separate transport strategy. Is Cambridgeshire really serious about the Ox-Cam Arc?
