This is a graph and a half. I work a bit on transport productivity. There are some pretty big productivity gains to be had in transport operation in Britain just by adopting proven policies from our neighbours. But,... it's a drop in the ocean.
Major policies to boost transport productivity in the UK are, • Motorway privatisation and tolling, as in France. Increases freight traffic (lorries) speed and reliability. • Urban congestion charging and tolling as in many US cities, Australian cities, London, New York.
Those typically require privatisation. On the public transport side, big opportunities for capital deepening. • Electrifying and making trains longer. Basically make trains in Leeds like trains in Rotterdam. 2x productivity. • Build trams and metros, ideally self-driving.
And last but not least, the one we're making real progress on in the UK, • Regulate buses and integrate public transport networks. Exactly what's now legal in Greater Manchester and Greater Manchester is now doing really well with the expected boost in passenger numbers.
There are more. I'm sure some are true. I've never quite been able to convince myself of them in the data. So while I think that encouraging cycling and active travel is good, I think most of the productivity benefits occur outside transport. Similar with privatising car parking.
ps. the UK's transport sector is by most measures really lagging on productivity. 25% behind Italy. 30% behind France. 50% behind Netherlands, USA, Denmark, etc...
The World Bank does a nice dataset (though I'm always a bit wary of scorecard type approaches, so be careful) called the Logistics Performance Index. The UK has fallen from near the top (9) to struggling (25) from 2007 to 2023. Which sounds bad. https://lpi.worldbank.org/
Much of this is lack of capacity on rail and roads. Freight trains slower and shorter than they could be. Lorry drivers sat in traffic instead of doing the driving they want to be because they can't price other users off our roads (which are too small otherwise). Hard to measure.
There's better data on public transport and cities. I counted and measured all the trains from Rotterdam and Leeds stations at peak time back in 2023. More trains left Leeds, but bigger electric trains meant twice the capacity left Rotterdam. That's 2.5x productivity!
All the details of that are in this thread. https://x.com/thomasforth/stat...
Here I analysed the public transport systems of three similar size cities in Europe. Leeds, Dublin, and Lille. Productivity (via a proxy of passenger journeys per driver hour) was 40% higher in Dublin (since up a lot) and THREE (3) times as high in Lille! https://www.tomforth.co.uk/too...
This is mostly accumulated low investment (and poor value from what public investment we do). On public transport, London is an exception --- it has a fantastically productive transport system --- but it's not much of the country, so it doesn't bump the national numbers up much.
pps. quite an unusual feature of much UK public transport is that it runs at constant frequency throughout the day instead of responding to commuter peaks of demand. Due to congestion, we actually provide more capacity at midday than we do during the morning peak. An odd choice.
