With recent policy announcements on cycling and increased uptake in many urban areas, now is a good time to think about future scenarios of active travel. Quantitative models are a powerful tool in the transport planner's toolkit for developing policies to maximise the potential benefits of cycling. This briefing sets out the government aspirations, describes the NTM and its (lack of) cycling projects and, finally, outlines possibilities to create more ambitious scenarios of bicycle use at the national level.
The UK government has has committed to increase the rate of cycling from its current level for economic, health and environmental benefit. This was set-out in the press release of a fresh tranch of money to promote cycling as a form of transport in target cities and national parks.
“Currently, only 2% of trips in the UK are made by bike, compared with 14% in Germany and almost a third in the Netherlands” (Prime Minister's office).
In the press release, David Cameron stated that “we want to see cycling soar”. “This government wants to make it easier and safer for people who already cycle as well as encouraging far more people to take it up”.
These aspirations are echoed by the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group (APPCG), which recommended concrete and measurable targets to accompany the investment: “The government should set national targets to increase cycle use from less than 2% of journeys in 2011, to 10% of all journeys in 2025, and 25% by 2050”. These targets relate to the proportion of all trips made by cycling, so are robust to shifts in the demand for travel and population growth.
Despite the recent high-level interest in cycling, the Department for Transport did not publish its projections for the cycling rate in the latest report of NTM's findings (DfT 2013), in contrast to its 2012 report on NTM projections (DfT 2012). Cycling is mentioned 3 times in the extensive 2013 report on the NTM (DfT 2013). Yet projections of the actual cycling rate were omitted from the report, despite “cycle lanes and schemes” being mentioned as a “major” factor influencing road travel.
Information about cycling projections in the NTM was made public following a parliamentary question. It was stated that “These [NTM] forecasts assume that the impact of smarter measures will increase cycling trips by 5% in 2015, 7.5% in 2025, and 10% in 2035.” It has since been clarified that these increases refer to increases relative to the baseline scenario. Given that APPCG's recommended target ammounts to roughly a 500% increase in cycling on current levels, based on new policies, these increases relative to the baseline are tiny and unambitious in the extreme. Many cities have experienced double-digit percentage increases in cycling per year, suggesting at least a doubling in cycle use by mid-century if current trends continue (Lovelace et al. 2011).
Another issue with the communication about the NTM's handling of cycling is that it uses units that are different from those recommended by cycling reports. The NTM has reported the rate of cycling relative to an unpublished baseline, and as absolute number of trips and distance nationwide. It would be more appropriate to measure the rate of cycling per person or as a share of trips/distance rather than in these absolute terms which are strongly affected by population. In addition, even if the projections were per person, they are moderate.
The central population projection made by the DfT (2013) is for a 20% between 2010 and 2040. This suggests that the NTM projects the rate of cycling per person to drop in absolute terms.
The overall distance travelled by cyclists is expected to peak around 2015, stabilising to 3.1 billion miles by 2040, from 2.9 billion miles in 2010. This corresponds to a 14% drop in the distance travelled per person by bicycle over the same time frame, once a 20% growth in population has been factored-in. The CTC has stated that these projections amount to “planning to fail”.
!!!Add image of cycle projections by APPCG
The cycling projections in the NTM have been
The National Transport Model (NTM) is designed to provide a “a systematic means of comparing the national consequences of alternative national transport policies or widely-applied local transport policies”. The model should provide a range of scenarios that “take into account the major factors affecting future patterns of travel.”
The central projections of the NTM are influential, because they are the highest-level model results on which many decisions are made.
accounting for “” scenarios which take into account the major factors affecting future patterns of travel.“
The NTM has a modular structure, with a central demand model interacting with rail and road modules (Chatterjee & Gordon 2006):
The NTM, like any model, makes simplifying assumptions in order to produce quantitative projections of change. Rather than setting the travel patterns directly, trip rates are set as a function of "background scenarios”, taken from other sources. Primary among these are gross domestic product (GDP) and population growth assumptions (DfT 2013). Key to the NTM's outputs are these inputs and the link between GDP and travel patterns via car ownership and use: “The main determinant of car ownership is income and the car ownership results strongly reflect GDP growth” (Chatterjee and Gordon, 2006, p. 258).
This vision of a 'return to normality' driven by stable oil prices and a strong economic recovery for the many is starkly illustrated in the following figure (DfT 2012).
These projections contrast sharply with discussion of systemic changes in transport behaviour in advanced economy, labeled as “peak travel” and “peak car” in the academic literature (Millard-Ball & Schipper 2010; Goodwin 2012).
Chatterjee, K., & Gordon, A. (2006). Planning for an unpredictable future: Transport in Great Britain in 2030. Transport Policy, 13(3), 254–264. doi:10.1016/j.tranpol.2005.11.003
Department for Transport (2012). Road Transport Forecasts 2011. Results from the Department for Transport's National Transport Model. www.gov.uk
Department for Transport (2013). Road Transport Forecasts 2013 Results from the Department for Transport's National Transport Model. Accessed from www.gov.uk
Lovelace, R., Beck, S. B. M. B. M., Watson, M., & Wild, A. (2011). Assessing the energy implications of replacing car trips with bicycle trips in Sheffield, UK. Energy Policy, 39(4), 2075–2087. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2011.01.051
Goodwin, P. (2012). Peak travel, peak car and the future of mobility: evidence, unresolved issues, and policy implications, and a research agenda. In International Transport Forum Discussion Papers (No. 2012/13). OECD Publishing.
Millard-Ball, A., & Schipper, L. (2010). Are We Reaching a Plateau or “Peak” Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Six Industrialized Countries. Transportation Research Record, 2(1), 1–26. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/~adammb/Publications/Millard-Ball Schipper 2010 Peak travel.pdf