Accelerating infrastructure delivery through public/private reform

Energy & Infrastructure
1

I am a Brit, born in Glasgow, currently completing a PhD in Switzerland.

For me, one of the most appallingly delivered functions of government in Britain is infrastructure. Edinburgh, a city of 500,000 people, has no rapid transit system. It has a bus network which results in 5-minute wait times at stops due to a 1950s method of handling fares (pay the driver), and the buses get stuck at every traffic light due to Victorian infrastructure—the roads have no flyovers or underpasses. Leeds, a city of 2,000,000 people, again has no rapid transit system. The same goes for Birmingham, Cambridge, Bristol, and to a lesser extent Manchester, where the coverage and journey times of the Metrolink are poor.

When traveling to other countries like Germany, the US, China, and living in Switzerland, one of the starkest differences is competence in infrastructure. Lausanne, where I live, is a city smaller than Edinburgh, yet it has 2 metro systems, one automated with 2-minute frequencies, plus a tram and new metro system under construction. Its main train station achieves passenger numbers of 110,000-120,000 per weekday; Edinburgh Waverley manages only 80,000.

Britain needs to get transport right to prosper. We cannot continue with 1900s rail infrastructure and 1960s road infrastructure. To be the richest country on earth again, we need 2030s infrastructure today, and 2050’s infrastructure in the 2030’s and 40’s. A lot of this can be achieved through public investment—spending more money on rail infrastructure, with an explicit focus on improving passenger punctuality (this is a metric used in Europe which measures passenger delay as opposed to per-train delay, helpful for journeys with multiple connections) will help enormously. Cutting safety regulations will help deliver this more cheaply. Instead of closing whole lines for renovation, we should do as the Swiss do and only close half of a double-track line. This would drastically improve service dependability, albeit at some cost to employee safety.

However, we also need NEW infrastructure and a lot of it: roads, trams, metros, new rail—both high-speed passenger and high loading gauge clearance (check out “Indian double-stacked container train” for an example). We simply cannot hope to compete without these changes.

Proposed Solutions

I would advocate two changes:

  1. The UK has both housing and passenger transport problems. We should empower local governments and the free market to solve these simultaneously. Give developers the power to petition Parliament for compulsory purchase rights to build and redevelop land alongside proposed railway lines, trams, or metros. They build the transit system and make their money as real estate developers, just as the pioneers of suburbia in the 1900s did here and as Chinese local governments do today. If this power is given to regional government (Combined Area Authorities), it could be achieved by granting them absolute planning powers alongside compulsory purchase/value uplift taxes. The fact that our local councils aren’t multi-billion pound real estate developers is a major state failure in my eyes!
  2. High-speed rail could be funded on a similar model with stations on brownfield/green belt land creating new districts around them. The Chinese have been very successful with this model ( Is High-speed Rail in China a "Gray Rhino"? - by Glenn Luk ), and this method has also proven very successful in democratic Japan, where the major JR’s derive most of their profit from real estate! Creation of new high-speed rail lines will free up capacity for rail freight.

Highways and major A-roads should be converted to a toll system like France, where all major highways and A-roads are tolled, giving any new developer a profit mechanism for new infrastructure. These tolls should also apply to busy through-roads in towns to allow the funding of bypass roads, improving quality of life for residents. Road builders should be able to petition Parliament/local government for partial funding. The increase in costs to drivers through tolls should be offset by a significant cut in fuel duty. This may well be too politically treacherous though!

As for rail freight infrastructure, I believe this largely must be done by the government through major upgrades to our north-south and east-west mainlines to enable larger trains, however the Hinckley rail-freight interchange shows that there is significant private interest in rail based logistics, indeed, American freight railroads are quite profitable.

2

Welcome to the community @dratd98.

My initial thoughts on this are that I wonder how realistic this is. I guess we can look at the overspends and delays on HS2 to see how slow things are in this country and how much we need reform. However, it feels like your proposal is more-or-less building everything from scratch, from train lines to cities.

As a conservative, I fear the idea of knocking down everything we have and starting over. I feel that tomorrow should be an extension of today, not built upon today’s ashes.

Basically, we don’t have a (naturally) growing population, or a rapidly urbanising population like Japan or China, so I don’t think that their models will work for us.

3

I am generally quite sympathetic to this, however something has to give in the current situation. The UK has some of the smallest housing in Europe while also having some of the least affordable. We also have by far the oldest! At current levels we are looking at over 1000 years to replace all existing housing stock! This is simply too slow to live a modern standard of living. I’d invite you to look at a lot of the terraced housing in the North of England and argue that we shouldn’t tear it down to build bigger and newer.

Transport is essential for a prosperous and sovereign United Kingdom. Economically Manchester losses 9 Billion a year in lost productivity due to poor transport, while also having some of the most expensive housing in the country. These are problems with highly complementary solutions and both must be fixed. We should respect our historic architecture, but also recognise that it cannot stay “as is” forever, and that certain buildings are less valuable than others.

We also do need new infrastructure between cities, if we want to have a strong industrial base and defense industry, we just have to compete with infrastructure. There is no other option. China, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Germany all have better infrastructure. Either we build better infrastructure or we lose. Full stop

4

I would argue that that is because the UK is over-populated.

Let us be clear, the UK has a population density of 279 people per square kilometer, potentially more if you belive the water companies and supermarkets, and an average living space of 17m^2/person. Our peers that you mention have

  • France 122 p/km^2 (20m^2/person)
  • China 151 p/km^2 (36.5m^2/person)
  • Germany 237 p/km^2 (47.5m^2/person)
  • India 492 p/km^2 (11m^2/person)
  • South Korea 531 p/km^2 (35 m^2/person)

South Korea breaks the trend by building huge skyscrapers for everyone to live in. I don’t entirely know how Germany bucks the trend so much, but my stance is more-or-less that terraced houses (I’ve lived in a few) aren’t a problem and are better than building blocks of flats to get more space.

Right now, we are also net importers of food, and if a war broke out, we might not be able to feed our people. I am as such highly dubious about growing our cities and getting more space for people that way when I consider food independence a national security issue.

As a rule, I am also painfully aware that infrastructure is an unsolvable issue. The better the infrastructure gets and the more capacity it has, the more people will use the capacity. This is why building more roads or adding new lanes is never the answer. You will just have to do the same a few years down the line, but the performance improvement will be marginal.

There is also an interesting cost problem. I have a related story about a hospital which was built near me and opened 2-3 years ago. It was apparently designed 5 years ago, with medical technology of the time in mind and doctors were very excited to be able to work with the architects and engineers to design exactly what they would want a hospital to look like to operate in the way that they do. However, when it opened, the medical technology had moved on, the space was not fit for purpose and the staff working there found the building almost unusable. This was all relayed to me by doctors I know and have worked with.

The moral of this story is that by chasing the modern, you will always find yourself very quickly being dated and no longer fit for purpose. Even if we updated all of our infrastructure overnight, in 10-20 years time it will be outdated and need replacing. That being so, we should not design for today, but should instead design things that fill human needs and are readily adaptable/flexible for the future. I don’t think that we are in a designing from scratch phase in this country, but instead are looking to adapt in a sustainable way.

5

This is definitely something we should think about seriously, or we will be left behind and “lose” as you say. A good example is the highly traditionalist and conservative Japanese realized in the 19th century that they had to modernize and adopt new technology and rapid change, or face being colonized by the West.

At the very least, we should consider some sort of national strategy as to what we “should” have, and then work towards getting those things done, even if they take time. For example

I think that does deal with some of Dr_Taspher’s objections. In that it’s not about having radical change over night, but at least a coherent vision for some things. For example, maybe new roads should be built to X width from now on, that doesn’t mean going back and rebuilding every road in the country.

Also you can be conservative while still supporting good innovation. The Victorians had conservative social values, while also implementing ultra high tech infrastructure.

I personally do support some sort of “Anglo Futurist” vision that combines tradition with futuristic innovation. Traditional villages AND high speed rail lines connecting them. Neo-Gothic cathedrals AND skyscrapers.

6

Yes, I will admit that part of the problem has been governments not being willing to plan for the long-term and do decades-long infrastructure plans. Sadly, infrastructure isn’t sexy and doesn’t pay off in the sort term.

Lords reform, to a more hereditary system could actually help here. If one of the chambers in the house is forcing a long-termist vision in Parliament, it will help things along.

I also don’t mind a blend of the old with the new. I think that Japan actually probably does that quite well. I think that it is very easy for things to go too far and for people to say that we should just get rid of the past. I also happen to hate plate class everything and would prefer neo-gothic skyscrapers if we must have any. Something like the Tribune Tower or the Woolworth Building. Places that feel like they are made for humans.

7

I would specifically object to the idea that we shouldn’t build infrastructure because it might become out of date in 10-20 years.

at the moment we are living off infrastructure which is 100-150 years out of date on the railway side, and nearly half a century out of date on a large amount of road infrastructure. We simply have to do better. The nations which have prospered and ruled the world in the past have done so on the back of their infrastructure.

The next right wing government is going to have an incredible mandate to change everything about how our system works. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for change. We simply must get it right. We should aim unambiguously to make Britain the richest country in the world again.

To do that we need many things, but one of them is infrastructure. it is not optional