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Abstract
The spatial relationship between stations and the ultimate origins and destinations of people's journeys has important implications for the relative competitiveness of rail transport. This relationship can be co-ordinated by the planning process but British practice in this respect has been erratic. This article reviews the functional and institutional arrangements for co-ordination between urban development and railway interests since railway nationalization and the creation of the modern planning system in 1947, and draws conclusions as to what factors influenced the good practice that occurred. It then goes on to consider the contemporary policy context which promotes the development of more sustainable patterns of urban growth which favour the rail mode, but wherein the British railway system has been privatized. This has thrown up a number of functional and institutional barriers to successful co-ordination. The article reviews these and concludes by making recommendations as to how things might be improved.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Strategic Rail Authority for funding research which provided the contemporary case study material presented in this article.
Notes
1. In the interests of brevity the word ’planning’ will be used instead of ’town and country planning’ in the rest of the article. Where transport planning is being referred to this will be stated in full.
2. Until privatization this could have been referred to as the British Rail network, i.e. that operated by the publicly owned British Railways Board. Since privatization in 1997 it has become conventional to use the historic term ‘main line railway’ to differentiate this network from the London Underground and other railways such as light railways.
3. Richard Beeching was brought in from private industry in order to bring a more commercially oriented and analytical approach to managing the railway network. Although he became a bête noir as far as the public were concerned, he was highly regarded by many in the railway industry who realized that the network needed rationalizing and modernizing if it was to compete with road transport.
4. In the 1960s it became clear that there are two kinds of services on Britain's railway, those that are commercially profitable and those which are desirable on ‘social’ grounds and require public subsidy. This has led to dependence on the Treasury and a tendency to interpret the word ‘subsidy’ in a pejorative way which has, periodically, threatened the continued operation of these services.
5. The Authorities comprise elected members and make policy for public transport, whereas the Executives are officer based implementation bodies. The areas selected were the English industrial conurbations with the addition of Glasgow. Cardiff and the Valleys were excluded as were ‘emergent’ conurbations such as Portsmouth-Southampton and Bristol-Bath.
6. Planning per se was not favoured by the Thatcher governments of the early to mid-1980s (see Ambrose, Citation1986 and Thornley, Citation1993).
7. This was created in 1970 to ensure that the BRB secured financial returns from effective management of the railway estate and disposal of redundant railway lands.
8. Serplan, a non-statutory organization representing all planning authorities in the South East, had been created in the 1960s but lost influence during the early Thatcher period. As the late 1980s property boom led to intense conflicts between developers and local communities, the government reinforced its role in order to seek out a more consensual approach to regional planning (Serplan, Citation1992).
9. This data refers only to the ‘main line’ railway network and excludes the various light rail networks and the London and Glasgow underground networks: there were losses from the main line total when routes were converted to light rail, as with Manchester's Metrolink system opening in 1992 for example.
10. High Speed Train.
11. Transport Development Areas are a concept for the promotion of specific forms of higher density trip generating development around transit hubs promoted by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Citation2000). The perceived need for such an initiative is evidence of shortcomings in PPG 13 and its implementation.
12. EU Directive 91/440 requires separate accounting systems for the fixed infrastructure and train operation. British railway privatization can be seen as a very literal interpretation of this and contrasts with the approach in other EU countries where national railways remain as publicly owned, vertically integrated industries, with accounting procedures adapted to meet EU requirements. In Japan where the state railways were privatized in the 1980s, this was as vertically integrated companies and in the USA, where most railways are privately owned, they are vertically integrated companies too.
13. This reflects the fact that, although the railway network itself and the rolling stock were privatized, the right to run passenger trains on it was not, it is merely franchised off for specific periods of time.
14. Railtrack protected its commercial interests post-Hatfield by imposing widespread speed restrictions which transferred the risk to rail passengers who, because of the consequent service collapse, transferred to other modes.
15. All the rolling stock companies, which engage in maintenance as well as acquisition, are now owned by banks.
16. Technically the Regulator fixes the level of investment as he sets track access charges and controls the overall budget of Network Rail, but in practice the cost of running the network is underwritten by government.
17. A ’rail bus’ is a low cost rail vehicle with slow speed characteristics, basic standards of suspension and interior decor which provide an uncomfortable ride for passengers.
18. The government announced a further review of the industry's structure in January 2004.