A failure of the industry?

"IT'S A failure of the industry." "Councils struggle to do their existing jobs." "This is navel-gazing."

This small selection of quotes from the Future Highways North and Open Data, Cities and Transport conferences at Manchester last week from highways and transport professionals reads like a litany of disappointment and failure. The public and private sectors still struggle to work together. The public sector does not have the resources to respond to new opportunities and challenges. The industry, in focusing on how to work more efficiently, is in danger of forgetting about its customers, the road users.

The fact that the industry is discussing how to do a better job and improve services is in itself testament to its desire to change and should be applauded. However, is it the case that such discussion tends to be circular or results in dead-ends?

As any psychotherapist will tell you, the identification of problems is a necessary but not sufficient step towards resolving them. Many in the industry have done that, with new public-private partnerships where there is trust rather than a legalistic, combative approach. David Hutchinson, executive director of the Highways Term Maintenance Association, a keynote speaker at the Future Highways North conference, recalled how contracts used to be "like a battleground".

The fact that he spoke in general terms suggested that the failure referred to by one delegate that I quoted is not the norm. Clearly more flexible contracts that allow a free-thinking discussion over solutions instead of a command-and-control approach are not universal.

Equally, Graham Grant, Tyne & Wear Integrated Transport Authority transport planner, speaking at Open Data, Cities and Transport, while pointing to the barriers to resources being devoted to identifying, aggregating and disseminating data, is clearly up for this agenda. He is one of a growing number of transport professionals who can see the potential benefits of taking on this new task. So it is not all doom and gloom.

In short, a frank conversation, including the disappointments, is exactly what is needed. This must be swiftly followed, however, by action - and that is exactly what such events can and do trigger with the can-do professionals who attend.

New thinking prompts profound questions

SOMETIMES change in local government seems to happen at a glacial pace - like when there's little incentive to do things differently. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
But at a time of severely straitened budgets, councils are having to re-evaluate everything that they do - just as businesses have to do constantly if they are to survive.

So we're seeing some interesting ideas coming along. Buckinghamshire is rightly questioning why there needs to be walls erected between transport and energy and housing and health, when the connections between them are profound. Why have people who job has transport or highways in the title at all?

And Matthew Lugg, the new president of the Association of Directors of Environment, economy, Planning and Transport, presents a very different argument to the old county surveyor of old.

Their job was to provide roads, and structures, so people could get from A to B. That was an imperative at a time prior to motorways when journeys across the country were difficult. But Lugg has put the nail in the coffin for the old silo based approach in a new interview with Local Transport Today.

He says: “We look across interventions. People don’t always have to travel to get to work so it’s not always transport that an area needs to build its economy,” he says. “Our members have a role in reducing the need to travel, including by identifying the biggest spatial priorities for installing high-speed broadband.”

This presents profound challenges for the industry. Why study for a Masters in transportation if there isn't a job that is specifically in transportation? Why belong to a transport-specific professional association, or read a magazine devoted to transportation? Do we need instead professionals able to say when to bring people to jobs, new homes have a stronger business case than a new road?

Transport is not going to go away as a concern or as a necessity. But if the writing is on the wall for a silo-based approach to providing it, the industry needs to respond to that, and quickly.