In my last blog post, I said that the City Deal was evil.
In saying that, I did't mean that I thought the Wicked Witch of the West was on the payroll, or that anyone involved has particularly mean or malevolent intentions. I think the councillors and officers involved are putting in an incredible amount of work and that they really think that they're doing something wholly constructive. I wouldn't want to do any of their jobs, as I don't think they can please everyone by any means.
What I mean by evil is the older meaning of the word, that it is bad, the whole thing is doomed to have destructive consequences. It's existence bodes ill for the world, because it is malfunctioning, and headed for some very expensive mistakes. It is bringing anguish and fear to thousands of Cambridge residents, with worse to come. And not set to provide the solutions.
In systems theory, the health of an system or an organism can be assessed by looking at how well information travels around it. A healthy and strong organism will process input well, reaching all vital components and informed by the whole, affect its outputs. A broken organism will allow input through only one narrow pathway, bypassing most of itself. The latter is the behaviour the City Deal has been exhibiting.
So I'm delighted to hear today about a u-turn in one of its contrivances. The ability to change direction is of vital importance, but since the congestion plan was at the very centre of the City Deal I am now wondering if the wheels will fall off.
They obviously are listening, and there obviously isn't any madness in the City Deal troupe any more than there are miscreants. I think the criticism on those lines is more unfair than calling it evil (I will try to use less ambiguous words however). The process is just incredibly clumsy and anti-participatory.
Tanya Sheridan was at the Rebooting the City Deal meeting last Friday, giving up her evening as she does often to try and engage with what people are saying. But until now it has seemed as if the City Deal vehicle only has one gear and no steering wheel. When Heidi Allen MP asked the executive board on Thursday if they had the courage to go back to the starting board, she was trying to make it easier for them to do.
Perhaps now with Daniel Zeichner MP and Julian Huppert agreeing that the City Deal is in horrible shape, joining Ed Leigh and the other speakers at the Rebooting the City Deal event, we're close to the level of signal which the City Deal team needs to process the message.
The meeting of Rebooting the City Deal was excellent, by the way. The overview of light rail, transport hubs, and outlooks on improved cycling propensity, were eye-opening and ingenious.
Ed Leigh's suggestion that express buses do a loop around the Cambridge ring road instead of coming into to the city centre is a masterstroke, with the elegance of a practiced ceilidh dance. People must be able to interchange between services, and effort must be made to provide comfortable and pleasant spaces to do that. If all the county buses go around the ring road, then all the bus stops on the ring road become highly multi-functional and the city buses can focus on serving the inner city.
Dr Colin Harris talked about a light rail and how it could eventually become a circle line, providing routes to the Science Park and the North Cambridge station, as well as connecting the city centre with the West Cambridge site. He talked about sustainability, a solution that could grow as the population of Cambridge grows, probably doubling within 15 years.
I didn't hear much discussion of what else will be different in the future of Cambridge though. For all the excellent thinking and wisdom, it still seemed as if there was an assumption that Cambridge 2050 would just have a lot more people but would be the same in other regards.
I would like to see the City Deal process recognising the fact that Cambridge has an aspiration (if not a plan) to be zero-carbon by 2050, and to envision a way to get there. I think Lewis Herbert should be pushing for proposals that provide infrastructure for electric vehicles, including e-bikes, and exploring more radical ways to share rides and create shorter journeys.
Climate change will bring more extreme weather, it is already getting more and more common to have freakish floods and storms. The City Deal should have plans in place to cope with flooding by having distributed transport networks, which can't be taken out of action by a single localised incident. The focus on radial routes and convergence of traffic in the city centre seem fragile in the face of the extreme weather we can expect.
Commercially run buses are likely to stop running if there are any adverse conditions, just look at the pathetic response of rail operators whenever there is something unexpected on the tracks. That is one reason why people hang onto their cars, because they know they'll be able to get into a car and drive wherever they need to get to, even if they have to take a slow and winding route. Real public transport or (public-exploiting private transport like Stagecoach) can provide enormous carrying capacity in the best-case scenarios, but they offer nothing in the worse-case scenarios.
In case of security challenges, either on a personal or state level, the same applies. Global resource scarcity is likely to make us all less secure. An autonomous motorised vehicle offers vastly expanded individual options to flee or to provide support to loved ones, people who anticipate this will be very hard to persuade to forego their cars.
There was a mention of driverless buses, as a possible way to get more capacity on the guided busway. It's right to think about this kind of thing now, but actually the arrival of driverless cars is set to become a paradigm shift in the way we get about. It can bring increased potential for safety eventually, lower margins on taxi services, and smarter scheduling for car clubs. Car travel as a service has the potential to fit along with buses or trains for city travel, and could be cheap, low-carbon, low-emission and scalable. Tesla expect to have fully autonomous cars ready near year.
Finally the population is getting older, and in 15 years time I expect us to have a very different balance of ages in the city. Young people are already getting forced out of the city in their droves, and the people who can afford to live here tend to be those with high tech jobs, with lot of savings, or who bought houses when they were affordable. Many of the young people who have come to Cambridge or to the UK have been European migrants, welcome by the city but not now by the government. And also after Brexit the low birth rate may well become even more low. So we can expect more people in old age, some living in care, but we don't know quite what that will look like as the NHS suffers further awful cuts and privatisation. Cycling doesn't seem like an option that will support many members of this population, Somehow the aged residents must have options to get around safely to prevent loneliness and isolation, and the solution is likely to look something like the motorcar. It isn't safe or fair for people to wait around in the cold for hours for a bus, which will often turn out to be cancelled.
I'd like to move away from cars, and I think we can achieve a degree of modal shift away from them, but I would like to see much more public interface about how to do that and exploring why people will find it difficult. I'd like to see visionary travel plans that consider the journeys needed by delivery vehicles at the same time as school users, at the same time as commuters. Which aims to minimise noise from large vehicles in the middle of the night. I'd like to see those who have offered their innovative thinking on transport empowered to lead community workshops and steer a new City Deal which is bottom-up.
Again, wanting to be fair, the City Deal started trying to do this with the Hack Cambridge event a year ago. I didn't see many of the ideas from the event develop further, and it didn't have the breadth of participants that it needed to be a resounding success, but the idea was good. If the process hadn't been forced through such a ridiculously frantic rush, events like this could have been just what the people of Cambridge needed to win them over and explore the challenges of meeting future transport needs together.
Market forces tend to be destructive. In commerce they give us clone towns, in housing they give us unaffordable property, and in the wild they destroy habitats. It is the job of government to protect us from market forces and try to steer a course for the good of people and planet. We haven't been seeing that so far, it has been like living in a democracy where buses vote and people don't.
But if we can scrap one part of the City Deal, perhaps we can scrap some more parts and begin again, then the game will truly be on.
"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."
- Charles Baudelaire
No comments:
Post a Comment