Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy

Perspectives Essay Series

by Christian Wolmar

Transport is key to our daily lives. The transport system is essential to ensure the movement of people and goods, and most of us will use the roads or public transport every day. Vast sums are tied up in it and are spent on trying to resolve the problems of congestion and delays. And yet it is a most neglected field of politics. Britain has never had a coherent transport policy. Transport ministers are regarded as minnows compared with their ‘big beast’ colleagues in other ministries. Successive governments have barely attempted to get to grips with the challenge of getting people around efficiently and safely while limiting the environmental damage caused by transport. In this entertaining polemic, Christian Wolmar, an author and journalist who has written about transport for over two decades, explains why politicians have not addressed the crucial issue of balancing transport needs with environmental considerations. Instead, they have been seduced by the popularity of the car and pressure from the car lobby, and they have been sidetracked by dogma. Solutions are at hand – and successful examples can be seen elsewhere in Europe – but courage and clear thinking are needed if they are to be implemented.

Genres: Transport, Nonfiction

92 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 20, 2016

About the author

Christian Wolmar is a journalist, focusing on the history and politics of railways.

Reviews

[Mohammad Al-ubaydli · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is important but disappointing. It documents well how bad things are in the U.K. but documents too little *why* other places manage to be better. The U.K. is perfectly good at being in good at plenty of other things, why is it not managing here? And how could it get better?

Only in the last 5 pages does the book say the U.K. needs to:
1. Focus on accessibility (getting to where you want) rather than mobility (having infrastructure to spend lots of time traveling).

2. Allow demand management ie use price rather than time to manage traffic jams

3. Decentralise transport budgets

All other writing of the U.K. motoring lobby and British political culture is wasted space. It’s a pleasantly short book though!

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The question I wanted answering wasn't the title, but rather can I be bothered to read one of the author's full length titles? And the answer was maybe - it was accessible and did not get too nerdy, but also involved assertions and somewhat tangential comments.

This was both a brief history of transport in Britain and an examination of what could be done to change things for the better. The former was interesting and the latter quite political in nature, while being a bit selective - perhaps the smaller French cities that built modern tramways had particular geographies that made them suitable. The former was political too, but less didactic, as he illustrated how motorists and car manufacturers had shaped policy, and the flaws in decision making when it came to transport projects.

One interesting point was that the Dutch did not have an organic love of cycling due to culture or a flat landscape, but that public policy had made it safer and more desirable as a mode of travel following a decline in cycling. But despite its density the Netherlands still has lots of drivers and I felt he overlooked the sheer convenience of driving, semi-arguing that it's not more convenient if you are stuck in traffic all the time - but it is warm, dry, and doesn't have other members of the public playing Tiktok through their phones in earshot.

This was meant to be brief rather than comprehensive, so some of the evidence-free assertions could be overlooked, but the section on the future indicated that part of his reasoning is just that he prefers trains and cycling. He dismissed self-driving cars on the basis that they weren't great at the time he was writing - as though cars with combustion engines overtook bus and train travel overnight, and didn't have any technological improvements over time. At least he was pragmatic when it came to HS2, pointing out the flaws rather than extolling its virtues because it's still a railway, and the drawbacks on UK policy were his biggest strength in this. So perhaps I will read his more historical books one day, but it's not a guarantee.

[Oscar Jelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very misleading title - not much tram content at all! Instead what you get is a brief and slightly scattershot but very readable polemic against British policymakers' myopic (because overwhelmingly car-focused) approach to the issue of transport. The basics he sketches are clear and useful as far as they go, but a more extensive bibliography would have been nice. As with the last Wolmar book I read, it's full of good tidbits, one in fact concerning Tit-Bits, the lowbrow magazine that Leopold Bloom is reading on the shitter in the fourth chapter of Ulysses. And did you know that the first motorway ever built in the UK was Preston Bypass? What? Where are you going?

[Alex Abb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book, but I felt like it could have gone a bit more into detail and explained more around the HS2 history as well as the political reasoning/background behind the absence of a transport policy in Britain.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent review of how Britain arrived at its current car-centric transport policy and a suggestion for a path forward.