Transport crisis: How Alistair Darling can get Britain back on the move

For the past three years this newspaper has lobbied the Government hard through its Passenger Power campaign for improvements to Britain's creaking transport system. Now we have a new Transport Secretary who has an opportunity to begin again with a clean sheet. To give Alistair Darling a helping hand, we invited four transport experts to offer their view on what he should do. The unresolved question at the heart of Government policy is how to restrict car use without losing motorists' votes – car journeys are rising at 3 per cent a year.

On the railways, Mr Darling must bring in a successor to Railtrack. He must also keep its shareholders sweet and do something about the maintenance system with its byzantine chain of subcontractors.

Air travel also presents a problem. How do we balance airport growth with environmental concerns? And what should be done about bailing out the part-privatised air traffic control system, which has suffered badly from the world travel slump since 11 September?

Roads: Stephen Glaister

Professor of transport and infrastructure, Imperial College, London

The first thing the Secretary of State must do is grasp a basic understanding of why traffic increases. There are three reasons: economic growth and increasing standards of living; stable or even overall falling costs of motoring; and demographic shifts such as an increase in older people who can drive.

Then he must ask himself: does it matter that the number of cars is rising? Is it a bad thing? As long as it does not damage anybody it is a good thing. Households spend an average £55 each week on owning and running cars. The reason is that they judge it to be an enormous benefit.

There is a powerful body of opinion that thinks car use is "not nice". That has caused an electoral problem for the Government because many people are using cars every day and yet the Government has adopted a policy telling them not to drive. Lately the Prime Minister has woken up to the fact Mondeo Man and Fiesta Female have votes and do not use public transport.

Once Mr Darling understands the underlying economics, so he knows what is causing traffic growth, he must ask himself: "Where and how do I want to moderate that growth?"

If he decides not to increase road capacity then the inevitable consequence will be to increase congestion. But if he puts more money into road capacity then there could be a package that looks sensible to the general public and the motoring public.

In urban areas, part of the solution for managing traffic growth is road pricing, i.e., congestion charging. It is certainly worth doing in London and probably in bigger places like Birmingham and Manchester. He should also look at separate toll motorways.

The Transport Secretary needs to look at the balance of investment. The 10-year plan has been skewed in favour of spending on railways. Planned spending on them is £2.9bn a year public and £2.2bn private expenditure. That compares to £1.8bn a year on roads and £5bn on local transport, which account for 90 per cent of passenger kilometres. Road building, as long as it is in the right places, represents extremely good economic investment.

Mr Darling should also give the bus the attention it deserves. Even if he shifted a small proportion of the railway money into buses that would make a big difference.

The capital: Tony Travers

Director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics

It is too late for Mr Darling to row back on the public-private partnership for the London Tube. I have always been – and remain – an opponent of the PPP but I don't see how the new Secretary of State, especially one who has been in the Treasury, can say he is going to pull back. He and Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, are saddled with it.

So the question is, how can the Government salvage credibility for itself and its MPs in London? They could do that through a deal with the Mayor for new investment, which would provide Mr Livingstone with cash to get Crossrail and the East London line delivered. He also needs to to tackle the graffiti-covered, chaotic London railway network, which, in many ways, is worse than the Tube.

Without Mr Livingstone, the new minister cannot deliver in the Capital and without government money and commitment Mr Livingstone cannot deliver. Theirs is a relationship that involves either mutually assured construction or destruction.

Last year, the Mayor oversaw a six per cent rise in bus passengers in London, which compared to a two per cent fall in the rest of the country. Added together these figures came to a one per cent increase across the country – which means Mayor Livingstone saved the Government's bacon as far as bus use is concerned.

As to congestion charging, which will be introduced in February in the capital, the mood music has turned against making life difficult for car users.The Transport Secretary will have to decide whether other towns should follow London's lead.

I am aware of how incredibly miserable life can be when using public transport. Car users are behaving in a rational way. Therefore, I don't think the Prime Minister is going to go far in upsetting car drivers. But London is atypical. The proportion of people driving to work in London is 13 per cent whereas in the rest of the country it is 90 per cent.

The skies: David Learmount

Operations editor, Flight International magazine

Alistair Darling has tough decisions to make in two key areas: the apparently dire financial state of the part-privatised National Air Traffic Services (Nats) and the need for at least one new runway in the south-east.

The major concern will be the arguments over whether and where to build that new runway.

Whoever gets it, the decision isn't going to be popular. There is no way he can avoid the flak. Experts are fairly certain where it's going to be – and that's Stansted.

The most pressing problem is sorting out Nats' finances. The financial institutions backing Nats have threatened to send the organisation into administration.

Following 11 September, the Nats' income from user charges has dropped by 17 per cent. Nats has twice been to the Government, the major shareholder, for an injection of money. But the new man in the hot seat needs to recognise when the airlines and the banks are crying wolf.

I cannot see any point in the Transport Secretary radically altering the model on which the Nats is based. Any alternative will give you the same, or something worse.

Something worse would be going back to total public ownership but without an obligation from the Treasury to fund projects like Swanwick, the £623m air traffic control centre in Hampshire.

That would mean plans for a Scottish centre, which will acts as a backup to Swanwick going straight down the tubes.

Swanwick is the most modern air traffic control centre in the world.Software problems are the result of its groundbreaking advances but they will be ironed out. It is unfair to describe the centre as a Railtrack of the Skies. There have been 50 years of Government under-investment in the railways and the infrastructure was in a shocking state. That was not true of Nats.

Railways: Christian Wolmar

Transport analyst

It ain't quite so easy to get the trains to run on time. Even Mussolini had more problems than legend suggests.

The tempting thing for Alistair Darling to do would be to tell the train companies to "up their game" and "work together". This does not work. It would be better to sit down with themand work out what the problems are. They deep rooted and structural.

First there is the immediate task of getting Railtrack out of administration. The minister's predecessor promised shareholders a payment of £300m to get its replacement, Network Rail, a trust controlled by Government, off the ground.

That process must be carried out quickly. But the Treasury does not want the new organisation on its balance sheet, which may prove impossible.

Then there is the issue of integration. Already, the Strategic Rail Authority is working to reduce the number of franchises, but should these bigger companies take on some responsibility for the track? And should Network Rail take back in-house the engineering that Railtrack was force to contract out?

The most exciting thing the Transport Secretary could do is to take forward ideas for a dedicated high-speed line between the north and the south. This would take some congestion off the motorways.

There is, too, the idea put forward by Central Railway for a freight line between the north-west and the Channel Tunnel. That is an initiative that deserves thorough consideration by the now-dedicated transport ministry.

The railways will always be high profile – they are a national obsession, even among people who never use them. So, Mr Darling must be prepared and buy himself a flak jacket. He will need it.