Prof. Anable featured on BBC Radio 4 Podcast- Analysis with Chris Bowlby
Prof. Jillian Anable was recently interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 Analysis Podcast with Chris Bowlby. The episode, Power Drive, focused on the political power of the motorist and how this may be changing. Bowlby sought to answer why driving cars has such a hold over our society and politics, why has tension over driving risen so much? and what is the future of the car?. Bowlby interviewed Jillian alongside criminologist Prof. Ian Loader from the University of Oxford, Oxford-based author Tim Abrahams, author Giles Chapman, mobility expert at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Dr Mimi Sheller, a London resident of 12 years who is entirely reliant on public transport Gabi Huckins, and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) Chief Executive Mike Hawes.
Prof. Anable referred to TRANSAS research throughout the podcast, and her interview is transcribed below.
- Putting the Leeds 'Motorway City' genie back into the bottle [08:20]
- Not all drivers take to the roads for the same reasons [13:20]
- The human, environmental, and infrastructural costs of mass motoring [16:30]
- It’s not car or no car. It’s - what is the appropriate use of the car? [27:00]
Putting the Leeds 'Motorway City' genie back into the bottle:
[08:20]
Chris Bowlby: We’re near the centre of Leeds on the University Campus, and I’m with Prof. Anable, Professor of Transport and Energy. Jillian, we’re near the campus, and I can hear a lot of traffic noise, but I cannot see the traffic, so what’s going on here?
Prof. Anable: Well, soon you will be able to see it. We are walking towards the Inner Ring Road in Leeds, which is sunk down from the position we are in at the moment because it is part of an urban motorway network Leeds is famous for.
Chris Bowlby: It’s famous for, and I think I’m right in saying in the 1970s [Leeds] used to boast about it and call itself a “Motorway City.”
Prof. Anable: Well, it did, and before the 1970s, there was a decent tram network in the city, but like many places around the UK actually, the trams were got rid of in favour of really trying to build what was seen then as a “modern city” built for the car, and Leeds really went for it.
Chris Bowlby: You can’t really imagine that being built now, and yet it created a framework that we are still living with today
Prof. Anable: It has, and what it leads to is more car ownership. Then, once people have a car, they orient their lives around it. So now, having had that spiral downward away from public transport and more towards the car... we’re now trying to reverse that, and it is an incredible genie to put back in the bottle.
Not all drivers take to the roads for the same reasons:
[13:20]
Chris Bowlby: Those in planning and politics who want people to drive less are thinking hard about how to change minds. What will help, says Professor Jillian Anable, is to understand that not all drivers take to the roads for the same reasons.
Prof. Anable: On average, about 75-80% of households have a car… within that motoring public, they’re split into a variety of different groups… It’s only at most about 20% of the population who are what I termed in my research ‘die-hard drivers.’ They love their car, they think they should have the right to drive it anywhere they want to at a price that doesn’t hurt them, they also shout the loudest. There is also a huge swathe of the motoring population who own more cars in the household than they want to.. life and schedules mean that they need to [have multiple cars]... They’re fed up, they hate sitting in traffic. They’d love to be able to use alternatives, but they just don’t believe that they exist.
Chris Bowlby: Much also depends on where people live; car dependence is, of course, more fundamental in rural areas where alternative transport has often disappeared. Those driving on city centre streets may be there because of say, housing costs, not transport choice.
Prof. Anable: A lot of people in that segment can’t afford to live right near to where they work. So, this is a housing market issue. So those people often have no choice but to use the car. We found this during Covid. Those people that had to still travel to work because they didn’t have a job that allowed them to work from home.. they directly matched with people who were living more on the outskirts of towns and cities, on the end of bus routes if a bus route existed, so they were doubly disadvantaged.
The human, environmental, and infrastructural costs of mass motoring :
[16:30]
Christ Bowlby: There is a remarkable absence in the political debate [in the UK] about Traffic. For victims of death and serious injury on the roads and those most vulnerable, like cyclists and pedestrians, the phrase “War On Motorists” seems bitterly ironic. The human cost, says Leeds Professor Jillian Anable, is part of a much broader cost of mass motoring that is rarely acknowledged.
Prof. Anable: If you actually accounted for the excess deaths and poor health that comes from, whether it's air quality or the fact that car-dependent lifestyles mean less active lifestyles if you accounted for a lot of the infrastructure, the additional infrastructure, it might be lighting, it might be signage, all kinds of things we don’t think about when we just think about tarmac on the roads, what have you... if you account for the whole costs for that and then, of course, most importantly, the environmental costs, you actually count the costs and you give carbon a cost.. then motorists by no means account for their costs.
Chris Bowlby: Essentially, you are suggesting the kind of human costs, which has been around for such a long time, deaths, serious injuries, other kinds of effects on health, but it has been quite striking, hasn’t it, that whereas this enormous concern about deaths on the railways or air travel, and so on .. it doesn’t really seem to have political traction.. the deaths and serious injuries that occur every day on the roads
Prof. Anable: It is absolutely extraordinary
Chris Bowlby: On average, there are between four and five deaths on our roads every day. Deaths and serious injuries affect disproportionately the poorest communities—those places where car ownership is lowest and public transport is less available.
It’s not car or no car. It’s - what is the appropriate use of the car?:
[27:00]
Chris Bowlby: When it comes to road transport, politicians in recent months have looked like nervous pedestrians hoping to cross a busy dual-carriageway dodging the cars… fearful that miscalculation will be catastrophic. They know the challenges with net-zero or congestion and they know too that driving is something many voters see as their identity. An unavoidable necessity, a daily test of how well or badly their locality is run. The most realistic political solution starts from 2 essential insights—most people want to drive cars, but many drive them too much.
Prof. Anable: We need to break away from the fact that once we have a car, we will use it for everything. That’s the key to this. Use the car for the family holidays—Fine! Absolutely no problem—It makes sense; it even makes sense from an emissions point of view per capita. It’s not car or no car. It’s - what is the appropriate use of the car? How can we structure our prices but also put into place the alternatives, particularly for local journeys that means we don’t have to just jump in our car for everything.