How can the UK achieve the best outcomes from transport infrastructure?

Now that the electioneering is over, the King’s Speech serves as the surest crystallisation of the Labour government’s intent. At the heart of the 40 bills lies an overall vision for the future of the UK: sustainable economic growth, the transition to clean power, increased social mobility, and greater regional empowerment. Transport is central to delivering these commitments.

Yet the new UK government faces considerable constraints. Transport systems depend on infrastructure that is expensive and slow to deliver, and public finances are tight and likely to remain so for some time. The cancellation of the northern leg of HS2 may have been partly to do with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on budgets, but it was also the result of significant project slippages and a long-term drop in transport infrastructure spending.

At the same time, the longevity of transport infrastructure means policymakers are often bound by the choices of predecessors. UK rail lines still largely follow routes selected by Victorian entrepreneurs, while major roads like the A5 follow the routes dug out by Roman legionaries 2,000 years ago.

This is achievable and the results could be profound, but it will require resolving three deep tensions that have thus far prevented effective transport reform.

Tension 1: Between transport modes

At a national level, the rail and strategic road networks are infamously siloed, each optimising plans according to their own interpretation of transport needs. Yet they do not exist in isolation and, for better or worse, the decisions of one affect the other.

A new rail line will likely bring disruption to the roads through bridge, crossing or tunnel construction, but if it’s in the right place it can alleviate long-term road congestion. A new motorway could make it easier for commuters to get to a rail station, or it could convince them to drive for the whole journey instead, risking undermining the business case for further investment into the rail line.

When it goes wrong, the whole transport system suffers. Gaps, mismatches, and unnecessary duplication between modes are not only inefficient, but also deter people from using public transport altogether. This in turn leads to more congestion, higher carbon emissions, entrenched inequality due to the cost barrier of owning a car, and economic friction that holds back growth.

This lack of joined-up thinking isn’t necessarily the result of poor intent or dysfunction. There is an inherent difficulty in integrating multiple complex systems, which road and rail undoubtedly are. This deters collaboration on specific projects. It feels hard enough to get it right without having to factor in an entirely different, and sometimes contradictory, set of priorities. At the same time, complexity encourages high levels of career specialisation amid competition for limited resources – a combination that easily translates into institutional silos.

Nonetheless, policymakers do have two levers to reduce intermodal tension. The first is governance: for example, instituting a coordination mechanism between road and rail, as well as airports, and ensuring that targets and lines of accountability encourage such cooperation. Examples of that have been lacking in the UK, in large part because of the arms-length nature of the national delivery bodies.

The second lever, funding, could be helpful here.

The fact that you can drive or take a train from Copenhagen to Malmö is testament to the effectiveness of these two levers. Before 2000, travelling between the Danish capital and Sweden’s third city involved a ferry across the five-mile strait separating them. Now, 20,000 daily commuters pass through the Øresund Bridge-Tunnel, a road and rail link that epitomises intermodal and international cooperation.

Overseen by a consortium of Swedish and Danish public infrastructure companies, Øresund was primarily road-led, but policymakers also tasked it with accounting for the needs of air, shipping, and rail.

This created some challenges to overcome. For road travel it would have been easiest to build a cable suspension bridge, but this would have been too shaky for rail. High, wide arches were required so ships could pass, but this created a risk of collision for planes coming in and out of the nearby Copenhagen airport.

The result was an engineering marvel, a bridge transitioning into a tunnel midway through the strait, that successfully factored in everyone’s needs. Operationally, too, collaboration has delivered results. There is seamless service on the rail side, despite the Danish and Swedish systems using different currencies and languages, crossing on opposite sides of the track, and even using different electrification voltages.

Under the UK’s new government, the Department for Transport has already set up a shadow body Great British Rail to start collaborative working, bring decisions together, and deliver improvements for passengers. The aim is to have a fully functioning organisation within the first six months of the new government term, and the same principles applied here could also be extended between modes.

Tension 2: Between national and regional

Regional bodies are well-placed to transform transport outcomes without having to spend billions on infrastructure. The city of Curitiba in Brazil, for example, experienced deteriorating ridership on its bus network in the 2000s, largely due to erratic service and long delays. Traffic was increasing and fewer people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods were able to access services across the city.

Authorities were able to reverse the decline by building dedicated bus lanes to connect underserved suburbs with key terminals, implementing a priority traffic management system to improve journey times, imposing a single ticketing regime on operators with a flat fare across modes and subsidies for disadvantaged groups, and investing in last-mile cycling infrastructure.

This worked because a single local body had wide-ranging authority over planning, service franchising, and local roads, enabling it to fill the strategic gaps that often prevent effective public transport utilisation. It was also clearly focused on long-term outcomes rather than modes, and close enough to users to be aligned with their needs.

In the UK, mayors and regional bodies like Transport for London (TfL) and Transport for the North (TfN) have the same advantages, either in theory or in practice. Here, governance is not the issue. Central government can choose to empower them to take control of local transport delivery without causing much conflict with national delivery bodies: local services invariably fit around the strategic road network and intercity rail timetables, not the other way around.

The tension tends to manifest over funding. Currently, regional and national projects directly compete for money through competitive bidding, a process that tends to mean regional interests lose out. It goes a long way towards explaining, for example, why per capita public transport spending was 37 percent higher in London and the South East than the national average in the second half of the 2010s: major national projects like HS2 and Crossrail have been concentrated there.

This difficulty in getting funding has stalled attempts to integrate transport delivery regionally even when central government has devolved the authority to do so. The competitive bidding process is slowing local progress, with many local authorities deciding against the time and cost of making a bid, despite legitimate needs. That, in turn, prevents regional voices from reaching decision-makers in the centre, which is an essential prerequisite of effective empowerment.

A more consultative process, involving long-term funding settlements for high-impact projects, might involve some redirection of funds from national to regional bodies, but in so doing would generate greater overall impact.

Tension 3: Between transport and other infrastructure

How and where people and things move is fundamentally intertwined with where they live, work, and play. That’s why it’s not enough for transport infrastructure to be joined up. The principles of collaboration also need to apply between transport and other critical infrastructure like housing and energy.

For instance, EV adoption will be critical for decarbonising both transport and the energy system itself, as EV batteries and smart charging can help even out the peaks and troughs of renewable electricity generation. However, the ability to deliver on EV adoption depends on cooperation with various non-transport stakeholders, not least the electricity grid, and housing developers.

There needs to be sufficient chargers, in locations that drivers need them, connected to electricity supply through often new cables and pylons. There also needs to be sufficient additional generation capacity to meet this new demand at a grid level.

Inter-sector cooperation is a struggle, though, for the same reasons as intermodal or national-regional cooperation: complexities, occasionally conflicting objectives, organisational silos, and competition for limited Treasury funding.

The Rapid Charging Fund (RCF) is an example of where policymakers have used finance as a lever to nudge collaboration. Under the scheme, government funding would go towards the cost of electricity network capacity at key sites, to ensure the private sector can install ultra-rapid charge points where they are needed ahead of growing demand. Grid connections at sites funded by the RCF will be ‘future-proofed’ – built to handle future as well as current demand – for a minimum of 10 years, with applicants allowed to future-proof beyond that up to 2050 where feasible.

Planning is another available lever, particularly around housebuilding, something the government has already made moves towards in its first King’s Speech. While planning decisions are generally made locally or regionally, policymakers can make it easier to build homes around new or existing transport infrastructure. This helps to meet both housing objectives (such as people living in well-connected areas) and transport objectives (such as reducing car usage); the need for which has been stressed by the National Audit Office for the East-West Rail corridor between Oxford and Cambridge and put at the heart of the Rochdale Rail Corridor strategy.

It can work the other way around too, giving planning permission for housing developments only when new transport infrastructure is factored into the proposals. Kent Thameside, for example, is an ongoing regeneration project covering Dartford and Gravesham, which combines large-scale housebuilding with dedicated Fastrack bus lanes.

At a local level, planning can also be used to unlock additional private sector finance to help pay for transport infrastructure. For example, Hong Kong grants city transport operator MTR development rights around new stations at prices frozen at pre-announcement levels. This enables MTR to benefit from rising land prices, either taking a lucrative cut from property sales, or renting sites to commercial and residential businesses. Overall, the approach generates system-wide revenues equivalent to 60 percent of ticket takings.

Lean into digital easy wins…

Progress to resolve these three tensions will take time, particularly if it involves shifting towards a more collaborative culture. But quicker wins are also available.

Something as apparently simple as a single, integrated ticketing platform can have a huge effect. Journey planning and real-time updates can also encourage multimodal public transport trips by filling information gaps, improving reliability, and helping people avoid congestion bottlenecks.

Making digital infrastructure work requires coordination, whether direct or – through creating a regulatory framework – indirect. At the very least, joining up services in one user interface requires operators not only to sign up to the same interface, but also to share back-end data.

Try parking a car in the Netherlands, and you’ll see what it looks like when the coordinator gets it right. Starting in 2005, authorities set about creating a single, nationwide digital platform for car parking payment and validation, coordinated by a body called SHPV.

Take-up has been widespread, for two reasons. On the supply side, the Netherlands Vehicle Authority supported the rollout of the necessary camera, vehicle recognition, and real-time IT systems to make it possible. And on the demand side, SHPV created a framework that incentivised participation from all the key players.

Local authorities have been able to rely on SHPV to manage digital payments, contract management, data protection, and non-compliance enforcement, while retaining total control of local policies. Customers have benefited both from the convenience of using a single app in over 100 towns and cities, and from competition between the more than 20 vendors that operate on the platform. National and regional transport leaders, meanwhile, gained access to large-scale, real-time parking data to inform policy decisions and help track progress against road usage objectives.

…and be willing to make hard choices

In the decisive decade to come, the tensions above are navigable – and better outcomes achievable. Yet doing so requires an exercise in central authority that isn’t without risks or trade-offs. If the government wants to get the most from transport infrastructure for the long term, it will need to make decisions that are difficult, occasionally unpopular, but ultimately necessary. And ideally, navigating these with an innovative eye for turning zero-sum into win-win.