Why transport policy shouldn’t be at the core of the levelling up agenda.
Transport policy is often seen as a pet project amongst politicians, having been incessantly toyed with over the past half a decade. Boris Johnson’s recent commitment to reopen railway lines closed by the Beeching cuts are the latest example of this. But how connected is the issue of transportation to the underperformance of struggling towns? This blog, the third in a series of four blogs on towns, uses travel time data to show that it doesn’t look like a driving factor.
Transport alone doesn’t appear to be the main factor in explaining the performance of the two exceptions highlighted in this series: a strong town near a weak city (STWC), or a weak town in the orbit of a strong city (WTSC). Figure 1 shows that in general, travel time differences across different town types are minimal. Towns next to strong cities seem to have slightly shorter commuting journeys. Meanwhile commuters living in strong towns next to weak cities have the longest commute on average.
This reflects the findings of the case study in the second blog in this series which looked at the towns in the hinterland of Birmingham. It found that a disproportionate share of high-skilled commuters did not choose to locate in the closest town, but instead opted for the towns which were more attractive. Weak towns next to strong cities might have the shortest commuting time to highly-paid jobs, but don’t benefit from it.
Source: TravelTime, 2021
In addition to having a slightly shorter commuting journey to the nearest city, people living in weaker towns next to strong cities have more cities within an hour’s commute than any other town type (Figure 2). This connectivity applies particularly to towns in West Yorkshire, with people living in Pontefract, Halifax and Castleford all having seven to eight cities commutable within 60 minutes. Yet despite this connectivity, in 2011 they all had an unemployment rate of more than 14 per cent. Transport isn’t obviously the answer to the problems these towns face.
Source: TravelTime, 2021
Reflecting on the findings in the previous blogs in this series, what seems to be more important is the performance of the neighbouring city. Figure 3 shows that while the commuting times to the next city seem only to play a minor role, the proximity to a strong city is strongly linked to the overall performance of a town. Given that all towns in the hinterland of cities share more or less the same commuting time, the missing link between weak towns and strong cities is not a transport problem but mainly the outcome of many cities in the UK underperforming.
Hartlepool for instance has three weak cities within a 60-minute commute – Sunderland, Middlesbrough and Newcastle. But given that all of them are underperforming and do not offer enough productive jobs, the residents of Hartlepool seemingly get little benefit from this, and suffer from an unemployment rate of 19 per cent. In contrast, the population of Fleet can also reasonably commute to three cities, however as these cities are classified as strong, the jobs they provide help to keep unemployment in Fleet to around 4.4 per cent.
Source: TravelTime, 2021; Census, 2011
While the previous analysis looked at the overall commutability by car or public transport, the next figure looks at how public transport alone is linked to the performance of towns. It shows that public transport connections do not seem to be a factor in the poor performance of weaker towns either.
First, whilst for most town types the usage of public transport increases the overall journey time to a city, the difference is the largest for strong towns next to strong cities (Figure 4). Using public transport instead of a car adds another 15 per cent to commuting time to the journey in these places. For weak towns next to strong cities, public transport reduces the journey time.
Source: TravelTime, 2021
The picture is similar when looking at the frequency of service measured by the difference between the minimum and maximum commute journey at peak times. So, if someone would like to arrive in a city at any of the peak times we selected, what is the percentage difference between the quickest and slowest commute? Figure 5 shows that the difference is the largest for STWC. On average, there is a difference of 40 per cent between the quickest and slowest connection to the next city, whilst for the other towns, it is around 32 per cent on average.
Source: TravelTime, 2021
The short analysis showed that weak towns are not systematically disadvantaged when it comes to different aspects of connectivity to cities. In contrast, weak towns – particularly those in the proximity to strong cities – seem to often have better connectivity on a range of different indicators. While public transport systems should be improved wherever there is a clear weakness, it should not be in the main focus of levelling up towns. Rather, policy should address bigger barriers such as skills, housing and crime in these places. Specific policy recommendations can be found in the piece ‘So you want to level up’.
Why levelling up towns must mean increasing investment in skills, housing stock and the attractiveness of a place – in conjunction with improving the performance of cities.
Ignoring the relationship between cities and towns makes it harder to bring greater prosperity to struggling towns.
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