Texts for Translation 2006:
  Mark Ovenden

Malaising Gracefully

Sipping a cafe on the Boulevard Victor has never been the tranquil experience it might sound. A wide tree lined avenue, just inside the southern perimeter of the French capital, this was until a few months ago, 8km of noisy ‘South Circular’ sized arterial road. The traffic has now been diverted and the atmosphere replaced with the shrill sawing of stone, rasping reconfiguration of road junctions and relentless concrete dust, making it today, the longest construction site in Paris. The €300m (£203.5m) works which will result in the opening early next year of the newest and most expensive tramway in France, is just the latest phase of the region’s “Grand Tram” project which will cost around €1,500m (£1.02bn).

It’s a particularly pertinent place for a new arrival in the city to reflect on the nature of the 'malaise' of which Tony talks. Labours’ abundant spending record on the Health and Education of the British is self evident. But cast your mind back if you dare to the dying days of the last Conservative government. The loudest protestation made about the failure of the Tories and very much the third prong of Labours pledge was none other than Transport. As John Prescott famously remarked in 1997, Labour will have “failed if in five year's time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car”

This prophecy is now haunting the party and dogging British commuters, who sit less and less patiently in longer, interminable traffic jams, wait for yet more delayed responses from the Department of Transport or clatter about, nose to nose, in overcrowded privatised trains. The thorny issue of Transport must surely be Labours most ostentatious failure – and that is why the spinners have spun it off the public agenda.

Tony’s incoming government was to bring unparalleled relief to tired commuters, under investment and lack of vision on the railways, but while money has been spent, it’s sometimes hard to notice concrete improvements. In some areas things have got worse and as for attracting people off the roads…..according to Friends of the Earth, forecasts of road traffic growth till 2010 now vary from 16% to 29% - about another 9 million cars out there. Transport campaigners were among New Labours staunchest allies and the light rail lobby sensed an era of unprecedented expansion. Eight years later, and long after any radical improvements could very easily have been ‘railroaded’ through an entirely sympathetic parliament, surprisingly little has been achieved on the ground and the words 'public transport' have been effectively erased from the media gaze.

While a few national schemes have attracted attention, the grass roots work to vastly improve transport inside our big cities has fallen flat on its face. Far from instigating a “light rail renaissance”, protagonists like the Light Rail Transit Association believe the current government has single handedly delayed, curtailed or cancelled virtually every plan to get cars off the road & people onto urban rapid transit. On the mainlines, while many new trains have been bought – or lease purchased - and much of the aging network is being painstakingly repaired, anyone trying to get a ticket to use more than one companies’ services will know just how frustrating privatised railways can be. Transport columnist Christian Wolmar rightly blames “a botched and hasty privatization” but Labour has failed to right the inherited inequities; instead it appears that public money has merely poured into the coffers of private construction companies leaving passengers frustrated and few new converts to railways from their cars.

Companies like Balfour Beatty, whose original PFI investments were in the region of £180 million, are now valued at £600 million. The only major growth area for UK railways has been in wildly top-heavy ‘project management’; planning, design and legal costs can reach 25% of the total bill for new rail works in Britain compared with about 9% in France (and 3% on the Spanish Madrid – Lerida line).

When it was finally conceded that it would actually have been cheaper to build an entirely new high speed railway between London and Manchester, than to have overseen the most expensive railway rebuild in history, the West Coast Mainline ‘upgrade’, and Alistair Darling was forced to admit on Newsnight on 10 Oct 2002; “We think the total cost will be just over £10 billion”, Labour spin doctors secretly agreed to bury the whole subject of public transport as a monumental and embarrassing cock up. The final tally for this project could well be even higher. Even the building of a brand new super-fast fantasy maglev scheme between London/Midlands/Manchester/Scotland has been costed at less than the obscenely expensive WCML.

And herein lies Labours greatest problem. While many in the party clearly want better results everything they turn their hands to costs more than was expected. But is this the failure of the industry, the DoT or the politicians?
In a move which appeared to many as compounding their errors, against all sensible advice, and the wishes of Londoners and its elected Mayor, the cabinet forced through a highly dubious privatisation of London’s tube network which even the Tories would not have dared attempt. It has led to almost £1billion of public money each year going straight into the pockets of the shareholders of MetroNet (around £50m) and TubeLines (£129,721,000 operating profit in year till March 05 – almost £44m profit retained) to say nothing of the immense salaries of its directors and the huge costs involved in setting up the PPP itself – estimated by the National Audit Office to be over £455 million. Even the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said “maintaining and upgrading the [tube] network will cost £450m more than if finance came [direct] from government loans”.
Yet more damning for Labours record say transport campaigners, is that not one single kilometre of new Underground line has been built, apart from the already underway and hugely expensive £60m extension to Terminal 5 and the Jubilee Line Extension which was well underway when Labour took power.

Outside London the situation for urban rail transport is even bleaker. Last year Alistair Darling used a slightly lacklustre report on the performance of the UK’s modern light rail systems as a pretext for cancelling every new tram scheme on the drawing board. It was Deputy PM John Prescott who first halted the desperately needed expansion of Manchester’s successful Metrolink in 1997. The subsequent, mostly inflationary price rise of the scheme was cited by Alistair Darling as the reason why the second attempt to expand the Metrolink was deferred. But as a correspondent to one local newspaper put so succinctly “the only reason Metrolink will cost so much more now is because John Prescott cancelled the scheme he’d already approved five years ago”. Prescott then made a return visit to the city in 2004, even riding a tram himself and appearing to contradict Darlings project cancellation. But despite this heavy-weight backing the project remains stalled even though £200m has been spent in the city on property acquisition, demolitions, and utility relocation.

As a visitor to the “Get Our Metrolink Back On Track” website wrote at the time: “Does anyone really care if prices have gone up? Doesn’t this happen all the time, on every project? Hasn’t every scheme in London gone up in price too? The government is already spending billions of pounds on war, bureaucracy and countless other projects in the south but they were elected to spend public money on improving public transport everywhere, not just on education and health, so why when it comes to spending money outside London do they get such cold feet?”.

According to a study from the charity New Philanthropy Capital “£1bn has been spent on schemes to tackle bad behaviour and attendance”, yet there are no records of Alistair Darling complaining that projects like this, which incidentally failed, had “gone up too much” or were a waste of money. However desperately needed relief from traffic gridlock in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, South Hampshire & Liverpool, using proven and highly competitive tram schemes, which would have made a real difference to quality of life, have each been quashed. At the same time, building of new roads, widely condemned by the left for years, has experienced unrivalled growth, much to the chagrin of environmentalists and the public transport lobby. Just one mile of motorway takes 250,000 tonnes of aggregate and over £23 million, to say nothing of the environmental damage. Even at it’s most pricey, a mile of tramway is at least half that price and it’s carbon emissions are zero.

Compounding further their apparent indifference to providing solid transport infrastructure, Prescott’s plans for 200,000 new homes in the south east by 2020 include no attempt whatsoever to open even one single mile of new railway or to strategically place these homes next to existing public transport routes. One would be forgiven for wondering if Government policy had been quietly switched to deliberately force these new residents onto the already congested road network.

Such volte facing has flabbergasted the pro rail lobby who are now enduring a period of stagnation equal to almost every pro-car Conservative government since the War. As mainland Europe pushes through more and more new rail schemes we might hardly be surprised that some campaigners inside organisations like RoadBlock, CPRE and other green groups are now of the opinion that the UK government is firmly in the pockets of the road construction lobby and the oil industries.

In fact Labours record on public transport when in office is completely the reverse of their claims when in opposition. Friends of the Earth point to the fact that it was under a Labour government that five thousand miles of railways and two thousand stations were butchered by Beeching without so much as a public inquiry. It is now widely recognised that while there was obviously some over capacity and under use, a great number of those lost lines would be going a long way towards reducing road traffic and pollution if they were open in 2005. Some like the former rail route from Fareham to Gosport were to form the backbone of new tram schemes – this one would have had tremendous benefits for a grid-locked peninsular in South Hampshire.

It was in fact the Conservatives who (finally) pushed through the most important single expansion of the railways in a hundred years by supporting the start of work on the Channel Tunnel. It was under the Tories even that Britain’s first modern light rail schemes like Manchester, Croydon and Sheffield were started. It was also under Major that the long awaited Jubilee Line extension was agreed. While Britain is now getting its High Speed Link to the Channel Tunnel, at a cost of £5.2bn, and mainly thanks it must be said in this case to Labour, had this been built when the tunnel opened and when the French constructed their Hi Speed link to the coast, it would have cost less than £2bn.

In stark contrast to Britain, the ‘malaising’ French have completely revolutionised their public transportation with breathtaking investment that brings tears to the eyes of the British rail fan. Apart from the obvious runaway success of the TGV – upstaging the APT technology that British Rail pioneered and then dropped due to severe under investment – it is cited as one of the primary drivers of French economic growth and stability. No less than twenty French provincial cites will have an array of public transport options that puts all but London to shame. And before leaving the UK it must be added that one should be wary of what has been said about rail growth. The truth is that while Labour has given its tacit support to the 25 year old £10-£12bn Crossrail scheme, (now judged by some commentators as too late and massively overpriced – ring any bells Mr Darling?), very little public money is likely to find its way into this project if it ever happens. And despite providing a new direct link from Stratford to London it won’t even be ready for the 2012 Olympic Games because Britain takes on average three times longer to build new railways than France.

Even well served London itself will not be getting any more Underground extensions. You read that correctly. No more new tubes; ever. If the East London Line “extensions” are built, they will all be overground and may even result in the conversion of the line from “Underground” to some new hybrid because there is a huge dilemma about the power source for the new trains. Conversion of lines north and south to fourth rail current collection being ruled out, it will have to be powered by overhead wires in North London and third rail in the south – no such trains capable of picking up energy from three differing sources currently exist. Even the handful of tram schemes fought for by Ken Livingstone are not guaranteed – the route of at least one of these, the West London Tram, would it appears, be much more palatable to the antagonistic locals if it were covered by a simple five mile underground extension of the Central Line from Ealing.

Paris on the other hand has no such qualms about extending Metro lines and constructing tram routes. In the last decade it’s opened two new long tram lines and is building the third mentioned above, a fourth on an old rail alignment and another 3 in the Grand Tram project. In addition they are continually expanding the already dense and popular Metro and RER systems with up to thirteen “prolongements” on the drawing board.

The Metro, RER and now the Trams have considerably reduced the number of cars that there would otherwise have been on Parisian roads. But without dwelling too long on these capital cities, because it is common currency that capitals tend to have better public transport than the regions and France of course is infamous for being Paris-centric, skip with me if you will around the provinces of these two great countries and let us see the true extent of this ‘malaise’ of which our great and informed leader speaks.

In terms of population spread the two countries share some remarkable similarities. They both have around 60 million people, over 85% of which live in urban areas. The two big daddies of UK population are the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, each with around two and half million inhabitants. In France both Lyon and Marseilles have a population around 1.3 million rising to around 2 million if you include all the “Greater” neighbouring urban areas. It’s often argued that culture, sport and music are slightly more dominant in Manchester while Birmingham probably has the manufacturing edge. A similar second city tussle happens in France with Lyon claiming the upper hand gastronomically and on the sports field while Marseilles has arguably more industry. When it comes to the mobility of the residents though, this is where the Franco-British similarity vanishes.

Central Lyon is a pedestrian heaven with very few cars allowed to penetrate the inner squares and subsequently has clean, fresh smelling air. It has a superb modern underground Metro system of 4 lines covering 36 stations in 30km. Then there is the aesthetically pleasing tram system, two lines, recently extended with three new lines on the drawing board plus three new trolleybus lines on central reservation. Central Birmingham on the other hand, despite brave efforts to brighten it up, can be a most unpalatable place to negotiate on foot, or by car. The one tram line terminates a good mile or so from the centre – although in the last few months a minute concession from the Government should allow the construction of a spur into the central area.

Marseilles has two extremely well positioned modern underground metro lines and a Tramway, all soon to be extended. While traffic can be heavy through the port causing some air pollution, much of this is freight distribution which heads out of town rather than into the centre.

Central Manchester on the other hand is often gridlocked and the air can feel badly polluted. The one tramline through the centre is usually uncomfortably overcrowded and woefully inadequate for a city region of such immense size and stature. In comparison, Greater London – population 7.4 million, is only about three times the size of Greater Manchester in terms of inhabitants, making the majestic north west conurbation the 17th largest in Europe. Yet while Greater London has over 660 stations – Greater Manchester has only 100, many of which do not provide anything like the kind of rapid turn up and go service that can be found at most rail stations in the capital.

Large chunks of central Manchester including where much of the recent rejuvenation has taken place are too far from the single existing tram spine to be within easy walking distance, so many people still try to bring their cars in every day. The system has just three spokes into the suburbs, none of which go anywhere near Europe’s busiest bus corridor, the horrendously polluted and overcrowded Oxford/Wilmslow Road route to South Manchester.

Incidentally, at the height of tram operation, in the 1930’s, like many UK towns and cities, Manchester’s central quarters were riddled with transport options. Inner South Manchester once had some of the densest tram penetration in the world – all lamentably removed in the 1950’s during a shameless devotion to the motor vehicle…..by a Labour authority.

The other provincial French cities are in an altogether different league to Britain’s. Bordeaux (which compares in size to Liverpool) has just opened a €600m new three line tram system in record time. Its revolutionary power collection system which removes the need for unsightly overhead wires, leaves the panoramic vistas of 18th century façades along the Gironde unscathed, although it has experienced some teething troubles. Visitors to the next European City of Culture events in Liverpool will be getting the bus home. Toulouse (compares in size to Leeds which only has busses), Lille (similar size to the UK’s only other true subway city, Glasgow) and Rennes (Leicester – busses or walk) all have full scale metro’s and even smaller cities like Montpellier (at 208,000 a fair comparison to Southampton, whose 1980s monorail plan was famously talked out of Parliament by the now long gone Tory MP) and Orleans (pop; 113,126, similar to Oxford – a bus-only city), have modern tram systems.

Light rail construction is also underway in Nice (345,892), the Valenciennes region (368,279), Mulhouse (264,115) and Le Mans (146,064). Authority has been granted to build trams in Toulon, Angers, Reims and also for Toulouse, which already has a VAL system as well. Brest will probably follow. There are also “light-trams” in Nancy, Caen, and soon Clermont-Ferrand. For a country supposedly dominated by its capital this is pretty impressive……..and what has Labour achieved in eight long years with huge majorities and transport being the third biggest priority in 1997? One single new tram line through Nottingham. As one French transport writer put it: “If it was not so utterly lamentable, it would be truly laughable”.

The desperation of the UK’s embarrassed Public Transport Executives has become so deep that they hardly hold their head up on an international stage. At a recent conference of world transport undertakings a delegation from one British city altered their nametags to hide their PTE so they could avoid being laughed at. Paranoia about the dire state of urban rail outside London has become so extreme that even to suggest the idea that maybe, at some long distant point in the future, somewhere like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham or Leeds might possibly consider supplementing their yet to be built/paltry tram systems with even just a few kilometres of subway…..is considered such heresy that you would be drummed out of the City Hall with a scoff and scurry.

When Birmingham’s Conservatives pledged to investigate whether or not a short section of the proposed extension to the Midland Metro tram could be put underground instead of further clogging the cities already busy streets, they were derided off the face of the planet – in a strange twist of fate when the Tories later gained control of the City Council, a feasibility study went ahead into this very subject. Although it has since found in favour of the street trams there is the faintest glimmer of hope that long into the future, an Underground option might be considered for part of the Airport link.

Nobody in their right mind would deny London the tube – quite the reverse, it clearly needs expansion as do the other rail systems so that like Paris, the whole city is a five or ten minute walk from rapid transit – but can anybody really explain why the good people of Solihull, Seacroft or Stockport are any less deserving of a subway than Stratford? Why should Acton have seven stations when Aston, Allerton and Ashton under Lyne have just one? Is this not the kind of clear and extreme bias in favour of London that wouldn’t even be tolerated by the Paris-dominated French?

Some of Tony’s more adventurous speech writers on an international junket to France might even be happy to use the Metro in Marseilles or on the way back from the much celebrated “continental café style culture” in Toulouse or any other French city for that matter. One wonders if they have ever contemplated what they would do had they to use public transport in the British provinces. Which tube station would they walk use to get home to a suburb of Leeds? How would their kids get back from a night out in Belfast? What would be the nearest tram stop to Liverpool’s Albert Docks?

The French economy as a whole does indeed face some serious issues. If you can ever get a job it’s almost impossible to leave or move up the ladder. The 35 hour week can be excruciatingly difficult for new businesses. Finding a flat is a bureaucratic nightmare and if you let a property to a tenant who then doesn’t pay the rent it’s nigh on impossible to have them thrown out. But right across France there has been deep investment in huge transport projects to the massive benefit of most of the urban population. The big moan here about London winning the Olympics ahead of Paris was not so much that London “cheated” as was often reported in the British press, but more galling, Britain won on the basis of how much the games would “help the poor” – the French believe with their twenty years of high taxes and lavish public spending that a large part of such social assistance is already well underway.

The difference between the two countries is instantaneously apparent on a simple journey by rail between the two countries. You might for example be taking a mobile phone call as you descend into the local, Metro, often less than 5 minutes from your urban home in France – where incidentally you could continue to speak the entire journey if needed even under the ground as there is a full signal on almost all lines now. As you rise into Gare du Nord and sweep swiftly onto the Eurostar you could indeed remain connected to your call or to a website you are working on, for the entire duration of your rapid journey through northern France, even in the tunnels. As you hit the big tunnel under the sea at 180kmh you will lose your connection but there are discussions ongoing to wire even this to the outside world. Pop out into England and your train slows down. Should you have happened to want to reconnect your call, it will drop out not just in the tunnels but even in the cuttings! And of course your phones and wireless devices will not work on London Underground, and delays are inevitable.

Is France really having a ‘malaise’, or has it been spending its tax-payers money on sensible long term infrastructure investment while Britain’s leaders seem to be suffering from some sort of collective ‘Amnésie’? Let’s have a videophone conference in five years time; I’ll be underground at the new Metro station café in any ‘malaising’ provincial French city you care to name, you do the same in Britain – if you can find one - and we’ll compare notes.

Mark Ovenden is author of “Metro Maps of the World”, published by Capital Transport and currently based in France writing a new book about the Paris Metro.

Back to Texts