The response published yesterday by the Department to the Stern and Eddington reports was hyped up by the Financial Times on Monday with suggestions that it would include definite plans for a high speed rail line and lots of extra motorway lanes. This apparently embarrassed the Department which wanted to slip the report out unnoticed and, indeed, it was surprising that there was no press conference or keynote speech.
That's because any good news that could be mined out of the report had more holes in it than a chunk of Gruyere. None of the promised goodies, though, are for now. There is apparently some £20bn of unallocated money available between 2014 and 2019, and that’s when these investments would occur. That is clearly patent nonsense. Governments do not plan their expenditure plans over such long periods and the idea that there is a pot of money available in that particular time frame is laughable. Moreover, Ms Kelly and her prime minister will be long gone by then and their successors may differ entirely on what plans they have for that money.
The only way to judge a government is by what it is doing now and in the short term during which it can influence decisions. Here, it is clear that she is dodging all hard decisions. Her thesis is that transport growth should not be constrained in any way and that the emissions from transport activity should be traded away with other sectors. Why transport should be exempt from the constraints suffered by other sectors is not explained.
In a fascinating article in the latest issue of Local Transport Today, Phil Goodwin, one of the country’s best thinkers on transport, argues persuasively precisely the opposite: that not only is there a practical case to reduce the environmental damage caused by transport because reducing congestion has widespread benefits ranging from health to economic efficiency, but there is also a moral case to demonstrate to developing countries that we are doing everything possible to reduce our carbon footprint.
This sort of thinking eludes the government entirely. It seems we are largely stuck in a predict and provide framework, with little thought about encouraging modal shift or overall transport patterns through the use of the price mechanism. Congestion charging remains a long term aim, but without a clear road map of how to get there, it is really a fig leaf for ministerial inactivity. It is difficult not to think that we are in reverse gear on transport policy.

When I was in Paris last week, I picked up the freesheet paper on the Metro and buried in the middle of the paper was a small piece that attracted my attention. It was a report on the go-ahead being given for an extension of T3, the third tram line, which has proved a resounding success, exceeding the predicted 100,000 journeys per day. The cost was to be some 400 m euros.
What was amazing was the matter of fact way the story was presented. It was not the splash but a relatively small story on an inside page. The message was that transport improvements are routine and expected. Sure the decision followed a consultative process and the usual delays, but Paris seems always to have a couple of metro and tram lines on the go all the time. Sure, the situation in London is quite good at the moment, with schemes on Thameslink, East London Line, and the Docklands Light Railway, as well as Crossrail and the opening of the new station at St Pancras for Eurostars, but that seems to be more a matter of happenstance than any coherent strategy.

My partner Deborah and I are going to Wales this weekend from London and I really really really tried to avoid driving there. But it has proved impossible because we are undertaking a complicated three legged journey that is not accommodated on the trains.
We are going for a birthday outing up a mountain in Macynlleth but also wanted to drop in on Deborah's mother who lives up the coast near Porthmadog. However, there seemed to be no trains between Mac and Minffordd, the nearest station to Deborah's mum's place. With her mum unable to drive long distances, that meant we would have had to take a bus up to Minffordd and then the train back from Blaenau Festiniog. However, that turned out to be a bus and meant that the return journey to London would take over six hours. Then, of course, no cheap tickets were available, which meant, essentially, we would have to buy two saver returns each, discarding half of both, and therefore the total travel bill would have been over £250 or so. (As an aside, it is shocking that when you go on to the Virgin website and try to buy a single, it fails to point out that it is cheaper to buy a saver return and discard the return bit).
We could not go all the way to Wales without seeing Deborah's mum, so I spent much time checking out possible other options, such as a car hire, but to no avail. So I'm afraid we are jumping in the car on Friday and coming back, along with millions of other people, on sunday evening, instead of spending many pleasant hours on the train.
It is the basic high price of rail fares and the lack of flexibility that is the problem. In Germany, if you have a bahncard, you can get a discount on all fares and the basic levels are lower, thus encouraging rail travel. Here, to get a good deal you have to book in advance and travel at times when the deals are available, which is generally off peak during the week, rather than at holiday weekends.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that plans for a national road charging scheme are being quietly buried or 'back burnered' in an expression that does damage to the English language. I gave two speeches on the subject last week to conferences and I am in no doubt that this is correct. Ruth Kelly, the still relatively new transport secretary, has barely mentioned the subject since arriving at Great Minster House, allowing the opposition to build up even more momentum.
The Telegraph uses the calculation that road pricing would cost £1 30 per mile, the same figure that was used on the infamous Downing Street website petition which attracted a staggering 1.8m signatures. In fact, this was a complete fiction. No such detailed work had ever been carried out and there was never any clear idea of how much driving would cost when the scheme was introduced.
This is all incredibly depressing for several reasons. First, it shows that reasoned debate can so easily be hijacked by uninformed campaigners with a vested interest who will do anything, including tell fibs, to derail a policy initiative. Secondly, it is clear that road pricing or some version of it is essential as a way of reducing the insatiable demand for road space, the only 'good' in our society still allocated by the Soviet method of queueing. Thirdly, no alternative is being offered as a way of tackling climate change, the biggest problem facing the world today.
The government has tried to export the risk of implementing a national scheme by persuading local authorities, with big dollops of money through the Transport Innovation Fund, to introduce local charging projects, but they have all run into trouble, not least because there has been no national champion to help create the sort of climate in which it would be possible to persuade local people to support a scheme.
If the Telegraph is right - and I suspect it is - much of the blame must go to Alistair Darling, who, for no good reason, ditched a lorry road user charging scheme that was popular with the road haulage industry because it would have resulted in a level playing field between British and foreign trucks, who currently often arrive with full tanks and pay no tax. Darling, the ultimate 'play safe' politician, got it completely wrong and essentially stopped what would have been a major test of the technology and a way of softening up public opinion. As I have mentioned in a previous post, it's not surprising that his inadequacies are gradually being exposed in No 11. Just look at the furore he has created with his capital gains tax plan.

So we have Crossrail at last. It may be somewhat the wrong scheme, not going to the right places - who wants to travel from the wilds of Kent to Maidenhead? - but it is nevertheless an essential part of London’s plans for growth and certainly better than doing nothing. But if anything illustrates the inability of the British planning system to cope with major projects, it is this. It has been so long in gestation that most of those who would have benefitted from the original scheme are dead or retired!
Governments have never recognised the value of the railways to the economy and the Treasury has always been able to ride roughshod over the Department for Transport. So rather than being up and running now, the scheme will not be open until the back end of the next decade. Even now, so little urgency is being shown, with construction not due even to start until 2010.
At least a new method of funding infrastructure through business paying an extra levy, which is a model that should be copied elsewher. Moreover, the scheme is not going to be a crazy PFI project, a recognition that the risks of tunnelling under London are just too great to try to pass on to the private sector. But when costs soar, I bet it will be the public sector that gets the blame, even though it is highly likely that the increase will be a result of the sheer complexity of the task.
It’s amazing what the imminence of an election can do. Perhaps we should have them more often.

Transport affects virtually everyone every day yet never figures in elections. Even the amazingly contentious issue of rail privatisation barely featured in the 1992 election, despite the fact that it did not take a Cassandra to realise that it would cause the biggest upheaval in the railways since 1948.
In the run up to previous elections, I have often been rung by TV companies saying would I be on hand to comment should any big transport issue arise. I always say ‘sure’, knowing the phone will never ring. And it never does.
This time it has even gone quiet on transport before the election. Partly, that is because both Ruth Kelly and her counterpart, Theresa Villiers, are relatively new. Both, so far, seem to be speaking from their scripts, with very little attempt to formulate any new ideas or policy. Road charging, for example, seems to have disappeared off the agenda.
There are ideas popping up from the fringes, like the commissions set up by David Cameron. But it is noticeable that the ideas in them are being knocked down almost as soon as they are published. At a Conservative conference fringe, for example, I asked Villiers whether she endorsed John Redwood’s idea of boosting rail capacity by 50 per cent. We would like to increase rail capacity, she said guardedly, ‘but I would not like to pin myself down to a particular figure’.
Redwood, by the way, is Upminster, one stop beyond Barking. I had a brief chat with him over his ideas and he seems obsessed with the idea of lighter trains which, for some reason, he thinks these would greatly increase capacity. He also wants to see rubber tyred trains, not aware that the whole point of metal on metal is that there is far less friction and therefore less use of fuel, and he also talked about seat belts on trains, unaware that the idea has just been rejected after a comprehensive
When challenged, he just says that he is thinking the big ideas and that its up to other people to work out the detail. John Gummer, in his quality of life report, has done the opposite, producing over 500 pages which of course no one will ever fully read. No wonder the Tories have us much chance of winning an election this autumn as I have on recouping a substantial sum I have placed on QPR this season, given they are the only team of all 92 in the league not to have won a single game yet.