Welcome to this morning’s evidence session, the second in our inquiry into joined-up journeys. We are examining how the Government can shape transport services to meet the needs of transport users and the journeys we make in our daily lives. This morning, we will be considering the physical infrastructure needed to support integration, but also the ways in which technology could better support joined-up journeys and the way people make the choices they do. Could the witnesses please introduce themselves?

I am Charisma Choudhury. I am professor of travel behaviour modelling at the Institute for Transport Studies and the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds. I am also a UKRI future leaders fellow working in transport.

I am Pete Dyson, doctoral researcher at the University of Bath. I am the author of a book called Transport for Humans, which was influential in the report we will be talking about.

Good morning. I am Chris Hillcoat, an associate director at KPMG’s future mobility team in the UK. In previous roles I have worked directly on travel demand management and behaviour change programmes in London and elsewhere.

I am Dan Simpson from Walk Wheel Cycle Trust, which makes it possible for everyone to walk, wheel and cycle more of their journeys. We used to be called Sustrans, and we look after the national cycle network.

Thank you. You do not all have to feel you have to answer all the questions. Some of the questions are quite specific, and one or maybe two of you may have more expertise, so do not feel you all have to answer all questions. I am going to start off with a general question. What are the most important factors that shape people’s transport choices? Is it cost, convenience, reliability, safety or just habit? Which of these are the hardest to influence?

Transport choice is quite complex. It varies a lot depending on where people live and who they are. If we take a step back and think about a simple travel choice we make, like our journey to work every day, the first thing that influences it is what the available options are. That is influenced by where a person lives and what the built environment is like there. Then among the options, as you mentioned, people usually look at attributes such as travel time, travel cost and reliability. It depends a bit on the purpose of the journey. Depending on how flexible the journey purpose is, the importance can vary. For example, reliability is of course extremely important when there is an urgent appointment that is not flexible at all. It also differs a lot among persons. There are measurable factors such as age, gender and income, but there are also subtle things such as attitudes, how they feel about the environment, and how they perceive public transport, for example.

We are going to drill down into that some more.

It also depends on experience, which is where the habit and experience interaction comes in. Habit is usually something that is formed gradually, but if someone has a particularly bad experience, it can act as a trigger to a change in habit. There are also triggers—for example, the pandemic was a big trigger in changing people’s behaviour and choices. Also, it can be a transport intervention, especially if there is a big investment in transport. Usually, people pay attention to it. They try it out, and that can influence their choices as well. Coming to your second point about the factors that are easy to change or that can be influenced, it depends on the choice. Most of the choices we make day to day, such as route and mode, are easier to change, but the harder things are those associated with lifestyle, such as car ownership, or something that people identify as their core identity—things like whether they are a car lover or a sustainable person. It is a combination of all these things.

We are going to drill down into some of those specifics, but thank you.

My discipline is behavioural change and behavioural science. Building on Professor Choudhury’s points, we can talk about the extent to which transport is embedded in someone’s life as a determinant based on their life choices and the built environment, but your question is about putting aside what is there and the built environment, and drilling down to the choice element. How do people decide? In many ways, they take two principal ways. First, looking upstream in the UK at whether to own a car, you make those big transport decisions about where you are going to live and what mode of transport you are going to rely on. After that fact, you are taking a set of day-to-day decisions that look a lot more like habits that run on auto-pilot or a fast-thinking aspect of the brain. The things that confront people are the many pain points that we will get to in the Campaign for Better Transport report, where what looms large is the prospect of delays, stress, cost, punctuality, reliability and safety. They will all go on that list. I would stress that there is no transport choice module in people’s brains. It is using the whole range of skills that we have at our disposal in thinking about cost, value, orientation and navigation. Really, the amazing thing about transport choice is that it leverages a whole range of psychological components.

To build on Pete’s point, in the transport industry people often think about the modelling of transport choices as almost like sprites in a machine—I am a drone, I have perfect knowledge of the network and I make a perfectly rational decision based on all the awareness of all my choices. Of course, that is not how anyone lives their real life. As an individual, first, I do not have perfect knowledge of anywhere near the full set of options available to me. I only really have knowledge of a very small subset of things that I have experience of, and perhaps I have anecdotal information from someone who has told me something, or something I have read somewhere. Then the way I make my choice, from a modelling perspective, might not be, as it is called, rational. As Pete says, the way we make choices is the way we want to make choices, by and large. That might be based on all sorts of factors. They might be more subjective or related to my personal experiences or the experiences of those around me. They have to fit into other areas of my life. The transport choice does not sit on its own; it is a component of my life choices such as where I send my children to school, where I go to work, where I go to get my shopping and all of those other things. Transport is an element of the choices that we make in our lives as a whole.

Your transport habits start as soon as you head out of the front door. Even if you start your journey with a car, you have to get to that car in the first place, so we are forced to walk and wheel to begin with. People will enjoy or not enjoy that bit of the journey. I am sure you have heard constituents say that, for example, if they use a wheelchair, even getting to their car in the first place, if the dropped kerb is at the other end of the street from where they are parked, can be really frustrating. Getting to choice is important, but it is also important to acknowledge that our habits are forced on us, and the walking and wheeling stage of that is really important. It is that glue that holds all your journeys together and makes an integrated journey more possible. For longer journeys, we have recently done some new research with More in Common on what leads to people’s different choices. As has been said already, it will differ for different types of journeys and different people, but we found that, overall, people ranked cost as the No. 1 factor that determined their transport habits, followed by reliability, which is quite interesting. It is not journey time, which is slightly further down. It goes cost, reliability, and then safety is crucially that third area, which we are interested in, but it goes beyond road safety into personal safety as well. Interestingly, at the other end of the list when people were ranking how they made their choices is access to information. That is quite far down. Information about a journey is important, but when you purely ask people, “What is important for you?”, it is further down than the basics of whether you feel safe, whether it is reliable, and whether you can afford it. I am sure we can get into each of those factors more, but hopefully it is helpful to set out an overall ranking based on some polling to begin with.

This may or may not be an easy question to answer, but to what extent are current transport choices driven by preference versus lack of variable and integrated alternatives?

I might not use the word “preference”, but rather “attitude”, because the literature will talk about transport attitudes and attitudes to particular modes. Over the past decade, initially it was thought that maybe attitude to your mode had a really significant effect on your mode choice. If you like driving, you would be more likely to drive; if you like cycling, you would be more likely to cycle. That has proved to have a pretty moderate to weak effect on people’s actual mode choice. It is influenced much more by their housing location and life choices, which are not necessarily even determined by them—it can be their family situation. What is worth stressing is that your behaviour also shapes your attitudes and your preferences. There is a relatively new set of findings over the past 10 years or so, which found this reverse effect that, by travelling, it shapes how you feel about that mode. The more you use a mode, the more you become favourable towards that mode, which we might get into as being a significant way in which we might change behaviour by getting people to try to travel in new ways and to become more fluent in ways of travelling.

The answer depends a lot on where someone lives, because the extent of the options available varies so much across the country. Maybe in London it is easy to make a choice because there are multiple options, but there are many parts of the country where it is down to what is out there.

Yes. As a London MP, I can agree with that. Q162 Dr Arthur: That is a really good point, but in a lot of towns and cities the choice is there, is it not? There is a bus. There may even be a tram. They can walk. They can cycle. For some reason, they are just not making that decision. Dan has touched on this a bit from his perspective. What are the everyday frustrations that stop people looking at transport in a different way and perhaps thinking about different ways to get from A to B? Dan has touched on some of them, but I wonder whether there are other perspectives.

I would start first with just the cognitive burden associated with looking beyond what is very easy to use. For example, with a car, people just look at Google Maps and they know the travel time. They can see the other options, but for the other options it is typically not a door-to-door journey, or the information is not of the same level of accuracy. For example, it may be easiest to take a car to the train station, park it there and take the train, but that is not something people can easily figure out unless they have the local knowledge to do that. That is one of the things; it was mentioned a bit earlier by Pete as well. Even if the options are there, it depends on whether people are familiar with the options or whether they have that cognitive capability or openness to look at the options. The second issue is logistics. If you have to look at many different apps, look at making multimodal journeys or buy tickets from different platforms, that adds another level of barrier. The third thing is the uncertainty if something goes wrong. If someone is planning to take a bus then a train, and the bus runs late, will it be easy to figure out an alternative option? In theory, although maybe there are options available, these sorts of barriers prevent people from making use of the system. That level of information or accessibility varies quite a lot across the country.

Presumably, access to that information depends on whether people are digitally included or excluded. I live in London. I use Google Maps and Citymapper. When I went to Calderdale, it was straightforward for me to work out whether there was a bus and, if so, when and where from. If you are not used to using apps, do not know how to or do not have a smartphone, those choices are not available. Q163 Dr Arthur: Are there any frustrations from you, Pete and Chris? What are the barriers to people making those changes?

I want to make two points on this. The first is around the type of journey that you make. If you are making a journey that is radial, in and out of a major city, the public transport network is largely set up for you to do that. The modal share reflects that. Broadly speaking, in every town and city, the highest public transport share will be on people going in and out of the town centre. A lot of people do not make those kinds of journeys. If you live in one suburb and your work is based on the other side of town, public transport may not work for you. That is one point. Q164 Dr Arthur: Often, those people have made an active decision to live in that place despite knowing that they are working in this other place. I get this quite a lot. People say, “I can’t get the bus to work because of where I live”; often they have recently moved to that area, and they have not factored that in when they have chosen their house, or perhaps they have.

Yes. It is a part of this whole system. The other point I was going to make is around the way in which choices manifest themselves. If I want to drive somewhere, the car keys are hanging by the door. I jump in. There is no cost to that journey that is visible to me unless I am paying for parking at the end. Of course, in reality there is cost. I have to fill up with fuel. I have to replace my tyres. I have to get an MOT and so on. The cost may be 40p, 50p or 60p per mile. None of that is visible on my journey, whereas, if I take the bus, the cost is immediately visible. Normal people would not put those things on a pedestal together. One of those is much more apparent than the other.

I might build on Chris’ point. The set-up of the system is such that people have chosen upstream. Your question implies car versus public and active transport. Upstream of that, they have decided whether to have a car. In the way we have set it up, there are sets of prices and costs. Research from about five years ago found that people systematically underestimate the cost of driving, which should be shocking given that the cost of driving is typically a household’s largest expenditure. There are lots of costs of driving that go unseen and are quite difficult to calculate, because some happen on an annual, a monthly or a different basis, whereas unfortunately, psychologically, the costs of public transport loom quite large, because you typically have to pay as you go. There would be potentially a future that balances those sets of costs and works out a set of incentives and a way of budgeting that is more favourable and, to be blunt, more honest about what transport is costing people. Q165 Dr Arthur: It is interesting, because we have seen the backlash to the pay-per-mile for electric vehicles, whereas that is a tiny little charge compared to what it costs to run your car per mile anyway. It is a small increase, yet there has been significant backlash to that. People say, “I am going to be charged per mile,” but you are already paying per mile to use your car. Dan, what do we need? What frustrations stop people walking, wheeling or cycling past their car at the end of their drive? How do we get them to get past their car?

You will not be surprised that I am going to say that safety is a really key part of it. To put it in perspective, our walking and cycling index, which you may know covers Edinburgh and various other cities around the country, found that 42% of people often use their car because they feel like they do not have another choice. I take the point about how, even where there is choice, people may still hop in the car, but that is the first thing that we need to remember. In lots of areas of the country, there is not that choice. Secondly, an interesting thing on choice is that, when you look at some research from Susilo from a few years ago, it found that if people feel like they do not have different options, their journey satisfaction goes down. Even if you have one option, such as a tram to get to the hospital, or you can take your bike to get to school, not having back-up options can make people feel really worried, which is why you end up buying that car even if there are a lot of journeys that you cannot take. I am duty-bound to say that walking and wheeling is already very popular. In Greater Manchester, for example, 95% of public transport journeys start with walking and wheeling. Because we immediately hop to cycling when we talk about active travel, sometimes we can see it as something that is not done by many people regularly, which is true, but with the walking and wheeling it is important as well. When you get to the barriers, it starts with the very basic ones. It is those cracked pavements that you see. It is the lack of a dropped kerb. It is feeling safe crossing the roads. We need to start by dealing with those basics. Then it is also about public transport, to be honest. It is not a competition between different modes. If we want to get people walking, wheeling and cycling more journeys, we need to invest in public transport because, for those longer journeys, you need to do that. Yes, we can think about cycle parking at stations, for example, or some very specific physical integration points, but the first thing is just stopping competition between modes and starting to invest in everything. Q166 Dr Arthur: On the competition point, I always think that you can discuss with someone driving less and using the bus more. That is a reasonable transition for people, but it is a bigger step for a lot of people to think about going from driving to cycling. That is a much bigger step for people. On the safety point, is there a gender or ethnicity dimension to this? We are not all the same, and people will perceive risks differently. Unfortunately, given the way society is, the risks that people experience are quite different from day to day as well.

Yes, exactly. There definitely are gender aspects to it. If you look at cycling in particular, 21% of men cycle on a regular basis, and it is about half of that for women. There really is that difference. Interestingly, when you look at the statistics on how safe people feel it is to cycle in their area, they are relatively similar between different genders, but it is how that filters through from that perception of safety to whether you will take the risk that is really affecting it. From an ethnicity point of view, I do not have the stats to hand, but from what I remember there is not as big a difference as you would think there.

I want to pick up on some of the behaviour change issues. This is possibly for the academics here. How do we maximise the opportunity for behaviour change, in particular when somebody’s individual choices are made? When does that opportunity exist? When do people finalise their choices about which mode they are going to use? Has there been any observed change in behaviour year on year? Is it reviewed? Are there peak opportunity windows to encourage modal shift, such as after disruption, cost inflation, back to school or back to work after holidays? Has the point at which, and the driver to which, people make those shifts in a regular journey been studied much?

At my university, there has been extensive research on what are called moments of change, which are the parts of someone’s life course. The ones that occur within someone’s life, such as starting a family or changing a job, are known as endogenous, and then there are exogenous ones, which are the shocks. That might be a radical change in fuel prices, or that the London 2012 Olympics are coming, causing a big reappraisal. It might be something even more local, such as a disruption event of some infrastructure investment, which causes some sets of rerouting. It has been extensively studied, and it keeps coming up that life-course events are a really important zero moment of truth where people reappraise how they travel and have a chance to reappraise how they travel. There have been various nice experimental trials where you can randomise leaflets and information to new home movers to provide them with information about a new bus route or with a set of incentives. It is consistently found to be effective.

It is effective.

It is, and that is where these messaging trials work well at a smaller scale. The rub of it is how to use administrative data to scale this up beyond a smaller set of trials—being aware of providing packs of information or sets of incentives when people have just moved home. You could imagine that that data could be used by local authorities, but currently it is not put to as much use. Where a new housing development is created, things such as section 106 investments provide the occupants of those new homes with incentives to use public transport or to buy a bike, for instance. That is within the life course. With respect to exogenous events, we are now seeing how a radical increase in fuel prices exposes people to more vulnerability to shocks and causes a reappraisal of whether to have a car, how much to drive, and whether that car might be electric. The more those shocks happen, the more people lack certainty about how they might plan for the rest of their lives.

I agree with that. In our work, we also found that life stage plays a big role, but something to be mindful of here is that sometimes the choices are interconnected. As Scott mentioned, where to live is also connected with how much I care about transport accessibility, for example. That is a tricky thing to address via intervention. I am aware that in Austria they did some experiment where they provided a free or heavily discounted transport pass to people who were just approaching their driving licence eligibility age. The last time I heard, they were yet to observe the long-term effects of that, but it was delaying the purchase of their first car. There is a lot of evidence that, once people have a driving licence, and have bought a car and made that investment, that spirals down to their other choices. I can dig up the details of that report.

That would be useful. Thank you.

Can we think about how people’s emotions and how they feel about doing this? I am interested in what features of a transport system most strongly affect people’s sense of simplicity and confidence in public transport options. For example, I have seen a study whereby, when you are waiting at the bus stop, your sense of how long you have been waiting depends upon whether there is real-time information there. Do the colours matching make a difference to how people feel? Pete, you are nodding, so we will start with you.

Yes, that was part of my evidence submission, so I will relish the chance. How people feel really does matter. I will jump right into some studies. A study in Sweden recently found that the emotional experience of transport predicts satisfaction more so than functional measures of journey time and even cost. It has found that the nature of a wait for a bus is not merely its duration; the way in which information is presented affects the anxiety and stress you might feel at the time. In Italy, a study found that—surprise, surprise—a 10-minute wait when you are provided with real-time information felt a bit like a 10 or 11-minute wait. Without that information, it felt like a 21-minute wait. That is just how much our minds are anxious and then have to attend to the time. The way in which we spend our time is no longer as meaningful when looking forward to the bus. It has also been found that more visually appealing and more pleasant transport environments feel faster, according to a Dutch study. They also find in Germany that people are willing to pay more for more visually appealing transport, to the tune of 50 cents or so. Meaningful improvements to quality change the experience. Your question really invited a point about what looms large to people. The phrase is simple, but it only works when it all works. Complex journeys need to be joined up, because then they happen more quickly and in a way that people can breeze through in a more pleasant fashion. They can do them regularly as well.

There was an interesting case study we found when I worked at TfL. We were doing demand management changes and campaigns, around 10 years ago, using Oyster card data to show when the busiest time is at lots of stations. The first iteration of the campaign was a simple poster with a bar chart saying, “The busiest time at this station is 8 am to 8.30 am”. It had a huge amount of negative pushback. People said, “Come on. This is really obvious. Why are you telling me this? Of course I know this. Don’t insult me”. In the second iteration, we rephrased the campaign. On the same poster with the same information, we said, “If you are a visitor or an occasional user of this station, you may like to know that the busiest time here is 8 am to 8.30 am”. All the negative feedback goes away. Interestingly, when we tracked the Oyster card usage, we found that the regular users of the station were just as likely to change their behaviour as the irregular users. You can defuse the negativity through wording. It comes to an issue around how people feel about their own experience of the transport system. A lot of people, certainly in London, feel that they are experts in the transport system, more so than they are. A lot of people then would react negatively to being told what to do, whereas, if you can provide people with information that works for them and is targeted well, it can result in changed behaviour.

That is interesting.

In terms of feeling, one thing that has come out again and again in studies is that the stage of a journey that people like the least is the interchange between different modes. You can improve the feeling of that by making the station environment nice and welcoming, making sure it feels safe, and maybe having a toilet if it is an interchange.

What about better coffee?

Yes, quite. If you are sitting there waiting for a train and you have something pleasant to do in that time, it can be better, but, fundamentally, people will try to reduce the number of changes they make even if it takes slightly longer to go by another mode. That is particularly the case for older people who might struggle with reading signage, changing trains or the kind of audio bombardment that you get in a station, and for women and LGBTQ+ people from a personal safety perspective. That feeling that you get in the cold or just feeling unsafe can really affect the journey. I want to also make a plug for joy in travel, which is something that we do not really talk about much. Travel can be joyful and lovely, whether that is sitting on the east coast main line and watching Lindisfarne go by, or whether it is just walking or cycling to the station and enjoying the walk as you are going. The feeling is really important.

I want to extend that point about the interchange. There is real scope to improve that experience by working on the improvement of wayfinding, as well as maybe investing in some research efforts. What sort of guidance, especially for non-familiar travellers, can make it easy to make the transfers at the transfer points, especially if it is a big station or a big interchange point?

Can I ask briefly about language? Maybe it is just me, but I understand the concept of a station and a bus stop, yet there seem to be a lot of new words that are used to describe precisely that. Does that confuse passengers other than me? Is there any sense that calling it something familiar builds confidence? It is just me, is it? I cannot cope with a “hub”.

Now the term that is more commonly used is the “mobility hub”.

Exactly, I do not think most people have the faintest idea what it is.

It means very different things to different people. Maybe we need to come up with further detail on exactly what features qualify a transfer point to be a mobility hub.

I cannot resist engaging with the emotional question. A lot of travel behaviour is habitual, but people have to make their decision upstream. That is really about emotion and desire. Everything about consumer psychology tells you that. I have used this metaphor before. It is like imagining that the petals on a flower are redundant. Of course, the petals are what attract the bees to the flower, but the reason the bees come to the flower is for the nectar. The problem with transport is that, if we miss the petals, we are missing the point that people need to be attracted to come to it, to go to places and to travel. If we treat those petals as though they are redundant, as many transport models do, we reduce people down as though they are merely seeking out very functional aspects of travel.

We could think about a simple analogy. You go to your local supermarket and they have changed everything around. The milk is not where you expect to find it. The bread has moved to the other side of the shop. It is very confusing and frustrating. A very similar feeling occurs in transport. It is not only about what we call things, but it is about when things move. The bus stops move to the other side of the junction. Why? When did that happen and how do I get to it? Is there a dropped kerb to let me cross over? It is about all these other things. There is also an element of consistency that people really value.

I will bite on the question of naming and briefly add two extra points. I do not know the statistics and I am sure it is something to look into more after the session, but the rebranding of all the buses in Manchester, on top of some important changes to fares and things like that, has really helped people to see the bus as something attractive and modern. That is really important. There is potentially a question of incentives for decision makers as well in the naming of some of this stuff, in that it may not be that exciting to invest in a better bus stop, but investing in a mobility hub may be more important to get interest in the first place. Ultimately, you are right. It is about something that people understand and that has the facilities rather than the name itself.

That was a really good deep dive into behaviour stuff. Some of our later questions may have already been answered.

Good morning. On the interventions that are most effective at changing behaviour, it sometimes feels like the individual interventions are determined by the funding pots that are available and the conditions attached to them. In a world that hopefully has a bit more integration and flexibility in transport funding, what interventions are most effective at changing transport behaviour? In this session, most of us are starting from the point of view of transport shifting out of cars to other modes, but I would also be interested in the contrary scenario. What interventions can transport authorities make that result in people transferring from other modes to greater car use?

You are right to diagnose that it is about that cross-mode thinking. The move in transport funding to cross-modal and longer-term pots is really helpful in that, because there is no one intervention that is going to be the best. It is really helpful to look at a corridor and think, “This corridor could be best served by a tram, a bus, a train or a cycle route.” That has been lacking in the past, because we have had modal pots where you have said, “We only have some active travel funding, so we cannot spend that on a bus,” or whatever it may be. The thing that enables that to be taken to the next stage is looking, at a local level, at things such as street space allocation frameworks. This is something that some of you may know. Edinburgh has one, for example—sorry, I am not sure whether Birmingham has one. Essentially, it is about looking at your city or town and thinking, “We’re going to prioritise these streets as a bus corridor; we’re going to prioritise these streets for people driving.” Once you have that framework, it makes sure that you can make those decisions and you are not going to regret it later and think, “I really wanted a cycle lane along there, but there is no space now because of the bus lane or the tram” or whatever. That is a really helpful starting point to then lead you to the right interventions.

When we think about travel behaviour change, we might think in a toolbox way where we have certain outcomes that we want to achieve, and then certain processes that we can use to achieve them. If we start with the outcomes at the end, we have already mentioned things that you might want to achieve: you might want to mitigate a major event such as the 2012 Olympics, you might want to reduce disruption from major roadworks or rail upgrade works, you might want to reduce congestion that occurs every day just because places are busy and there are hotspots. Then you can extend the same approach and say that we might want to reduce energy and fuel use. We might want to improve people’s health by helping them to travel more actively. We might want to stimulate economic growth. You can imagine that the list goes on. When we then think about the inputs or the processes, you can almost stitch together things that you want based on what you want to achieve. You might want to start with better information and advice, which is usually helpful, as we have said, in certain cases. You might want to engage with employers and businesses to understand staff and employee travel as well as deliveries and servicing. You might want to look at tools and products. I guess we will get on to digital wayfinding and mobility as a service. You might want to look at pricing and policy, and you might want to look at physical interventions. You have a menu of things you can choose. Ideally you would say, “Okay, what is the outcome we want and then how do we get there?”, and stitch together a cohesive package.

You mentioned two problems. One is about maybe short-term or targeted funding. The other thing is maybe a mode-specific focus. There is a disconnect with what we see in academic research. It shows the benefit of looking at it at system level, especially because the focus is on joined-up journeys. Rather than trying to improve a bus journey or a train journey, for example, we really need to look at what a person needs to move from A and B. That is what Pete has been working on as well. We need to find a way to bridge this gap. How can we move from mode-specific thinking to a system-level investment and design where there is enough emphasis on how to better integrate? Whether it is through digital tools or the right kind of messaging, it needs to be highlighted.

Did anyone want to pick up the point about decision making that can have the effect of modal shift but in the other direction?

That is very pertinent at the moment in terms of the car. This week, the Netherlands has approved Tesla full self-driving after an 18-month trial and research and development. Outside here, we have Waymos driving around autonomously now. The advent of autonomous vehicles is an enormous shock to the transport system that most of us are not prepared for. There are many people living in lots of different parts of the country for whom an autonomous car will be an incredible innovation. There are lots of people for whom it will not be, and there are lots of transport operators for whom it is a big threat. If I live in a rural area and there is a very skeletal public transport service available to me, having an autonomous car that could take my children to school would be incredible. If Bradford was in Germany, it would have a heavy rail network as well as a light rail network, but because Bradford is in the north of England it has neither. If I were able to lease a new electric autonomous car for £500 a month, I may well choose to do that because it would be a great change for me personally. The transport industry is not well set up for this. That is something that may well occur in quite a short timescale as well.

Look at how people went back to their cars during covid in order to avoid being on public transport, as we were warned to keep distancing ourselves.

That is a very helpful point. Returning to some of the local decision making by transport authorities, do you think, from your knowledge of examples within the UK, that transport authorities are sufficiently led by the evidence on what works? How do transport authorities in the UK balance that evidence from above—case studies drawn from a wide variety of examples—with local demand from residents about what people want and would react most positively to?

That is a brilliant question because it cuts to the heart of the “Better Connected” report and the way in which it moves to devolution and place-based approaches. We really need to concentrate on understanding just how generalisable things will be. At the moment, a central body has determined what happens in different places. If a particular place can look and consult its community, and co-design and create solutions that are appropriate for that place, how much can we learn and transfer from Cornwall and apply it to Bradford, say, on the other side of the country? That remains to be seen, but the work that has not yet been done is to really build an authoritative evidence base on what works. That phrase “what works” is pertinent because there are What Works centres, but transport currently only sits within a What Works centre for local economic growth. As we have seen today, it is abundantly clear that transport is the glue that holds so many other outcomes together. My own recommendation is that there is a What Works centre for transport more generally that builds a stronger evidence base nationally, which can be applied by different regions and by local authorities that might have a clear understanding of their own area but will be surely intrigued to know what works in other areas, and to trial it and test it out. There is a strong piece of work that needs to be done to make the evidence base available to people. First, there is the evidence that is built within the UK, but surely that cannot be sufficient when we see the whole plethora of transport in other countries that many of us look on with longing to see what we can learn from—Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan and so many more countries besides. There is also a need for an international evidence base that we might apply here.

I was very interested in what you said about autonomous vehicles, Mr Hillcoat, and I agree. Would you agree that the threat or disruption likely to come from autonomous electric vehicles further emphasises the importance of tackling some of the issues we have been discussing in terms of public transport being perceived as complicated? Also, does it mean there needs to be a mindset change in terms of how the Treasury approaches fares, in assuming that people who take the train, for example, are hostages with limited opportunity? That onboard experience and value for money is going to become more and more important in a competitive environment.

I completely agree. The disconnect is between the transport system as we pose it and then individuals who do not really see themselves as part of a transport system; they are just trying to do their own thing and make a decision that works for them and their family. If we have a framework that assumes that people who use public transport are somehow more moral than those who drive, that is going to get us into a sticky situation.

Or the other way round.

Exactly. There is a need to reassess from a transport operator’s perspective. Of course, more and more transport operations will be shifting into the public sector again, both in bus and on rail. It shows the importance of customer experience, as you just said. The reliability, comfort, convenience and all those things that we have already talked about cannot be thought of as “nice to haves”. They have to come back into the essentials box if they are going to compete with something that is incredibly convenient and takes you door to door.

Can I pick up on the point about whole-system thinking? Pete, you touched on other countries; there are lots of examples we know from other equivalent economies, but do any of those economies or countries take a whole-system approach to the relevant cost of travel choices, leading them to have more joined-up thinking, or is it a bit more complex and historical?

If we turn to a country with a very joined-up system that many countries look at for integrated transport, which is Switzerland, it takes a whole-system approach. It bears thinking about that it was really quite a radical idea in the early 1970s and then the 1980s in Switzerland. They changed their emphasis from “as fast as possible” to “as quick as necessary”. That is a subtle but very important shift, because it is then saying, “What transport operations do we have in bus and in rail? Yes, we could get more trains through from Bern to Zurich, but it only works if those trains then connect to buses and other trains.” They actually run a slightly slower and sometimes slightly less frequent service in order to maintain this amazing hourly Takt, as it is called in Swiss German, as in pulse timetable. They run things a little more slowly. It becomes more reliable because you are not trying to get as many people through. And what do you know? It radically improves people’s ability to interchange between places for reasons of the timetables connecting up. It is really emphatic that the feeling in Switzerland, having been there, is that you get off a train and the bus is waiting for you rather than you waiting for the bus. It is clearly a network that thinks agnostically about modes. The emphasis on integrated transport is perhaps partly about multimodal travel but also, bluntly, just getting the modes that are otherwise in silos to come and work together. There is a great hope among people in transport that both devolution and taking control of a little bit more of buses and completely of rail in public hands can enable that systems-thinking approach for the first time. Otherwise, we send it out to operators with good but narrower sets of interests.

It is good to see that the Government have picked up on the Swiss philosophy, looking at a particular best practice example. We need to move on—it has been a very interesting first hour—but first may I welcome Ansaf Azhar to our session? I know you have been caught up in rather nightmarish rail delays, so apologies that you have only been able to come now, but it is well outside your hands. Would you like to introduce yourself? Ansaf Azhar: Apologies for my delay. I was planning to be here an hour before the start time, but it did not work out that way. My name is Ansaf Azhar and I am the director of public health for Oxfordshire. I am here in the capacity of a board member of the Association of Directors of Public Health—ADPH—to give the public health expertise in this space. Thank you.

Welcome. Hopefully you will be able to pick up on some of the questions that are specific to your expertise.

We have had a lot of written representations about poor integration as a barrier to shifting travel behaviour. It certainly rings true in my area, where we have major arterial driving routes, parts of the national cycle network, heavy rail and a major bus corridor, but, if I am honest, it is less than the sum of its parts. Particularly, there is little advertising of the different services. Timetables are not integrated. There are no clearly signposted walking routes between the different modes. I am sure that is something that is repeated across the country. How does poor integration between modes affect shifts in travel behaviour?

You are absolutely right. Journeys right now do not feel joined up when you are making them. People do not want to unnecessarily change between services, so you should not be pushing for a reduction in services, using integration as an excuse to reduce services and say, “You can go into Bath and back out again” or whatever. Notwithstanding that, in our polling with More in Common, the thing that people found to be really important when they were choosing to take a multi-stage journey was information on journey duration in particular. Also, it is about access to best prices and things like that, because if you are taking different modes at once it can often be confusing. You are going from maybe Trainline for your train through to tapping on and off for the bus, and you are not quite sure how it all adds up. Interestingly, this is something where Greater Manchester might be leapfrogging London, in that, right now, the daily cap in London on your Oyster or your contactless is separate if you are on a bus compared to on TfL’s underground or even the rail, whereas the ambition is that, once there is more control for Greater Manchester over its rail, rail could be within the same cap as the bus, which could be really exciting. Information is really important for making it feel joined up. After that it is about getting the basics right. As you say, the wayfinding between places is really important. People do not want to have to get out their phone if they are just going from Euston down to St Pancras or whatever. We cannot forget the analogue solutions to this, dealing with those cracked pavements or whatever to make it feel more joined up.

Would the other witnesses like to bring to our attention any evidence or studies about poor integration as a barrier to modal shift?

In my previous role working at KPMG, I led the future transport zone in Solent Transport and the delivery of the mobility-as-a-service app, which was called Breeze. The Solent region—Southampton, Portsmouth, south Hampshire and the Isle of Wight—is totally disintegrated in its transport. There are four or five different bus companies, four or five ferry companies, multiple rail companies and so on. We created the Breeze MaaS app to integrate ticketing fulfilment with all those providers, so that within one app you can plan your journey and pay for everything. it did not do was integrate the network. It does not actually change the timetables. It does not introduce any new fares. It does not introduce any new ticketing products. What we found was a degree of success—people like the idea that they can see everything in one place—but, in reality, as Dan said, compared with the Bee Network in Greater Manchester it really is on a totally different plane. The importance of integration is only really proved by the examples of trying to create a veneer of integration over the top of a disintegrated network. It has some success, but it does not really meet the needs of people overall.

I would like to add something that is not really evidence. As I was mentioning earlier, one thing that seems to be overlooked a lot is car and public transport integration. A lot of the problems in the uptake of public transport are those of the first mile and last mile, as is well established in literature. What may still be a bit anecdotal is how integration can be improved. One way to do that is by providing more total journey information, but also more real-time information—for example, what parking availability there is at the station—and then, basically, reducing frictions in moving between car and public transport. Can people pay for parking while buying a public transport ticket? These types of things should be trialled and looked into to see how they can overcome the barriers. Ansaf Azhar: I completely agree with all the comments that have been made but will just add something. When we are considering behaviour change in this space, we cannot underestimate the simple design elements that can play quite a significant role. We have mobility hubs where we have bikes and car share, and all these kinds of arrangements in one place. These are simple things like bike storage, a traffic light system that adapts to cycle usage and—having just come in by train—being able to safely keep your bike in the train at peak times. Let us face it: one of the biggest shifts we are going to see, and where we are trying to utilise the integrated transport system, is when commuting to and from work. That happens at peak times, so how can we make that easier through simple measures? Just adding to that will have a big impact on some of the behaviour change elements as well.

Chris, MaaS apps have come up in some of our previous evidence sessions. You were describing one for a distinct geographical area. Is there a danger that there is just going to be a plethora of random MaaS apps that do not remotely add up to a joined-up journey, because people cross borders?

In theory, yes, but the reality is that the cost of building and maintaining these systems is such that a local authority on its own could never afford it. Some of the work we were doing was to look at how big the region would have to get in order to pay the cost of keeping it alive. These software systems are relatively expensive. The conclusion we came to is that a region or a subnational transport body is about the right size. The large city regions such as the west midlands, West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester have sufficient scale. The south-east of England could be of the right sort of scale, but it falls at the moment into all sorts of different authorities. The same goes for other areas. It is almost like roaming. It is a bit like when you take your phone on holiday and it connects to a SIM card, and then you can use it. A similar idea would apply where I have already registered to use e-bike system X in my home city, and I go on a trip somewhere else: “Oh, look. There it is. I can use it again.” The ability to use data integration to enable that is quite an interesting one. In the future, we are likely to end up with more national and regional systems anyway, which will obviate that problem. Q179 Dr Arthur: We spoke earlier about some of the barriers that are in place when people want to reconsider their travel options and think about doing things differently. We have spoken in quite general terms until now, apart from about the Bee Network, which keeps on getting mentioned—I am not sure whether you are on commission or something for that. Do people want to give specific examples of where a change has occurred, either a carrot or a stick, if I can use that phrase, and has had an impact, either positive or negative? Does anyone want to jump in without mentioning the Bee Network?

I can jump in first, and others can follow. In London, again, we did quite a lot of monitoring of projects around the disruption of roadworks and rail works, and also recurring congestion. The difficulty with doing studies in this area is that it is almost impossible to find a comparator. We say, “You have changed behaviour in a particular way.” As we have discussed, there are 500 reasons why you might do that, as opposed to a counterfactual. If you can find some kind of counterfactual, you can look at some sorts of differences. We found that, during a major set of roadworks that TfL did on the North Circular, as a result of a proper travel demand management campaign engaging loads of local stakeholders, public communications and so on, 7% of people re-timed their journeys out of the peak, and an additional 7% re-routed away from the North Circular. Because of the way that congestion is an exponential function, your transport network all works fine up to a certain point, and then you add a few more people and it suddenly gets very busy. Those numbers look quite small, but if you can reduce a relatively small number of journeys that are in that congested area, you make everyone’s journeys better. Everyone is stuck in a much shorter queue by having people taken out. Some really good case studies have been done. Q180 Dr Arthur: How does that relate to better integrated transport? Is creating roadworks the answer?

We have a lot of assets on the transport network that are not in a great state of repair and need replacing and repairing. Those are temporary things. When we look at recurring hotspots of congestion, you can see a similar, smaller effect, but we found that by publicising busier times at congested road hotspots, around 2% of people might choose to change their travel behaviour, and the same on the tube. Q181 Dr Arthur: What does changing travel behaviour mean? Does that just mean travelling at a different time, or are they now just driving down quiet residential streets to avoid a busy junction? It is not necessarily a positive outcome, is it?

That is a great question. Normally, in terms of changing travel behaviour, you might talk about the four Rs. Here comes some nerdy transport content: re-time, which is fairly obvious; re-route, which is also fairly obvious; re-mode, so switching from car to public transport or vice versa, or to cycling; and reduce, so not travelling at all. Of course, in our new hybrid working world, that is much more possible than it ever was. That is normally what we talk about when we are thinking about changing travel behaviour. Q182 Dr Arthur: The four Rs just involve putting “re” at the start of four words. It seems like a bit of a cheat, but never mind. Does anybody else want to give examples?

An interesting example of an intervention that was made but not really even introduced, or is yet to be evaluated, is the addition of 4G or 5G mobile capability on the Elizabeth line. It may have crossed your paths that you can now travel seamlessly through the Elizabeth line. Your phone signal continues, so you can even receive a voice call. It was aimed to be installed at the opening of the Elizabeth line but, unfortunately, that was delayed, as was the physical infrastructure. Amazingly, after about one or two years, it was published as to what had been achieved and what had been done. It was not even announced that 5G was part of the pieces of work that the Elizabeth line had conducted, yet you observe people travelling and so many people are using their phone, both to make the travel time more meaningful and to rendezvous and to do other work to make the trip more pleasant and more doable. The Elizabeth line has far overshot its forecast of its use, not only because of 5G, but it is startling that there are some interventions that improve joined-up journeys and connectivity that we can use, say, digitally, but are not being either announced to people or described. If we take what seems like a really London-centric, multibillion-pound intervention like that, but then zoom out and take it into a rural situation, we now have a scenario where we have patchy mobile data connectivity, yet more and more services are relying on digital apps to order, request or find a bus or demand-responsive transit. People are also more dependent on their phones than they have been before, and it is frankly not really up to their own expectations and standards, both for mobile data connectivity to be patchy, and for them not to be informed about the patchiness of that availability. Q183 Dr Arthur: Better phone signals on trains are a huge advantage for some people in getting them to swap over, because they see that time as productive time. I am less sure about the Elizabeth line, but for some people, like you say, those small pieces of information could be quite important.

Where it is quite captivating is that an intervention like that is quite free as a technology for people to use and appropriate for a benefit that they seek. When we talk about safety, having a mobile phone signal can increase people’s safety and confidence. When we talk about navigability, you can start using your phone to navigate more. There are some interventions that we might make that people use more freely to address the pain point that concerns them the most.

In terms of examples for integration between walking, wheeling and cycling and public transport, it is fair to say that we are slightly further back in the UK compared to other countries in examples where you can point to definitive modal shift afterwards. To give you an example, we have done some work in Stirling that has had a mixture of 200 new cycle spaces and parking at the station, including for non-standard bikes—cargo bikes and bikes that people who have different mobility impairments might use. We widened footways and, at the same time, working with the council, we re-routed national cycle route 765, which already went through there, to have 6.5 km of new protected routes for people walking and cycling, which makes it easier for people to get to the university, for example, from the station. The jury is still out on whether that is going to work, but it is really important. I have some examples from other countries that have worked. Ghent is a city that gets brought up quite a lot in integration matters, and a lot of that is to do with the traffic circulation plan that it put in place in the 2010s. That was building on that street space allocation framework. Dr Arthur: Edinburgh copied that—or was inspired by it.

It sounds like Edinburgh, Birmingham and Oxford have different plans to do this, but the evidence is really clear from Ghent on what has already happened there. Bus use rose from 9% of journeys to 14%, and cycling from 22% to 35%. Car journeys went down from 55% to 39%. So it is going in the right direction on so many areas. Even if you are driving there, there are fewer cars on the roads because of that circulation plan that was put in place. These kinds of cross-modal things really do work.

It is unquestionable that in quite a few parts of the country the car is the only option because, in effect, there is no bus service, and the distances are such that people would be unlikely to use active travel. It is interesting to see the different behaviours, because in those areas with limited public transport for that first and last mile, as you were saying earlier, Professor Choudhury, my observation is that, quite often, that means people will just drive the whole thing. They will not drive to the nearest railhead unless they go to London, when they do. People in my Oxfordshire constituency will drive to Didcot and then take the train to London. They will be far less likely to drive to Oxford and take the train to Birmingham or Manchester. What behavioural factors are available that could encourage drivers to use car journeys as part of an integrated network rather than just driving the whole way? We have covered some of this already, but do you have any new thoughts on that?

I have some. To my understanding, car to access rail is about 15% to 20% of journeys. Walking is 40% of journeys. It gives some context to current rail usage and may be a metric that will be improved. It has been touched on that Google Maps navigation, but also the DfT’s Connectivity Tool, are not able to calculate car and then rail as a journey option. Maybe there is, in the Google Maps case and the Connectivity Tool case, a thought that, computationally, it is beyond us. That would surprise me. Maybe it is more, let us say, silicon valley thinking that people do not drive to park and to use rail. Interestingly, a study by MIT recently managed to compute what would be involved in navigating people to parking, and different sets of parking options, knowing that people have a probabilistic choice about maybe going for the nearest train station parking. If that is not available and fills up, they drive to other places, which, in itself, is this dead miles problem, which is a big issue. If we were to do that, it would be useful to more frankly and more honestly display to people the actual travel time involved. At the moment, Google Maps will navigate you and show a trip by car from your origin to your destination as though there is no further walking time.

Or parking time, or whatever.

Yes, and it does not integrate live parking availability. The conclusion of that piece of research was that this integration between car and public transport would be greatly improved by having live parking information. It is a recent policy this year, it seems, that parking apps will be integrated into one simpler piece of parking, which will presumably help. Ansaf Azhar: To bring a slightly different perspective, in Oxfordshire we have many mobility hubs, trying to encourage and improve that connection between first mile and last mile. The extent to which we are communicating and framing this is really important in making sure that behaviour change happens. From a public health perspective, I have always said that you can put the infrastructure in place, but how do you get the community to utilise it effectively? How do we make that culture change? Particularly in areas of deprivation, how you get people to utilise the provision is really important. There is a lot in the new strategy about talking to and working with communities to co-produce solutions. In Oxfordshire, we had an example called the COAT—community outreach active travel—plan. Its main purpose is to work in the areas of deprivation and inequality and give them confidence around cycling. There are also bike library schemes in one of the most deprived parts of Oxfordshire, Blackbird Leys. Hundreds of bikes were loaned out, and it really did create a movement. We must not underestimate the ability of these new ways of framing to achieve modal shifts and take the whole community with us. From a public health point of view, the best way to improve people’s physical activity is not by building gyms or leisure centres, but by looking at people’s ways of movement and seeing how we then do the modal shift. The biggest benefit is going to be in communities who live in areas of deprivation. Purely from a health point of view, there is a massive benefit in this cultural shift.

I would like to come back to your point about the car and public transport integration. In addition to providing parking information, where there is evidence that that is a pain point, another issue I would like to highlight is that, in a lot of cases, what works is more like a carrot-and-stick approach. The reason why people are using park and ride more in certain locations is that it is very difficult to have a parking space at the destination, or it could be that there is a congestion charging or clean air zone, or something like that. Rather than just looking at what can make joined-up journeys attractive, maybe there needs to be some thought to how private modes of transport can be made more unattractive as well. The other thing is that, in terms of attractiveness, one opportunity to me seems to be that because EV uptake is increasing, if there are charging facilities available in park and ride facilities, especially for households that may in future have more than one EV, that can provide a really attractive alternative.

Can I add one more thing on cars? We have all been speaking about driving here, but interestingly our research on multimodal journeys found that people were far more likely to be driven to a bus or a train.

The kiss and ride concept.

Yes, exactly.

That is genuinely what it is called.

Yes. That is quite interesting, because that suggests that a family potentially has only one car, which is really helpful for enabling that multimodal journey to be a way of working. It is definitely not about being anti-car. You might be driven to a bus, for example. I would love every village in the country to have a regular bus service, but if there is a good way to get people driven to a nearby bus service and go on, that is surely a good thing as well.

Planning and design are often a bit confused and conflicted about kiss and drop.

We have spoken about many digital tools, apps, route planners and real-time information, and how important they are to get behaviour change. How do we do that without excluding those who are not as digitally confident as others?

It is a really good point. There are some technological advances that are happening right now that do not require digital literacy. Things such as tap on and tap off have been a massive improvement. It is a bit of a learning curve the first time you do it, especially remembering to tap off after you have tapped on. Fundamentally, there are these improvements that pretty much everyone, whether they are digitally excluded or not, can benefit from, which just make their travel and the fare simpler and fairer for them as well.

We think about three groups of people, largely, in this context, and they can overlap. One of them is the unbanked, so people who do not have access to bank cards or mobile wallets. One of them is people who do not have access to a smartphone for whatever reason. Another is people who have accessibility needs of various kinds, and we have already spoken about that to quite a large extent. It can be quite difficult for a transport operation to provide equal access to all of these groups. For example, in fares and ticketing, you can provide particular products that are available only in certain ways. As an example here in London, when contactless bank card payment was introduced, weekly capping came with that, but people who used an Oyster card could not have that, because the technology did not enable that, so then they had to go back and reverse engineer it. The same is happening in some of the city regions that are doing bus franchising, where they have an opportunity to think about fares and ticketing in a new way. They have to make sure that people who are using physical smart cards via ITSO have the same access to good-quality fares and products as people who are using mobile wallets. The point about physical accessibility is critical in understanding that people’s whole journeys have to be accessible. The weakest link is the point that defines whether a journey is accessible or not. Ansaf Azhar: It is a really good question, but it is about where the world is moving to in various sectors, not just within transport. If you look at the NHS 10-year plan, one of the three big shifts that it talks about is analogue to digital. It is happening. It is about increasing choices and giving options and different ways of linking people in, not just digitally, although the world is moving more towards that place. The second point is training. We have various community assets, whether it is libraries or other places; how can we give people the confidence to use digital modes? In the NHS, we are going to be dealing with a lot of older people, and those with long-term conditions. That is moving into a digital appointment system. Lastly, in public health, we have something called making every contact count, where, if they go in for welfare support, they hear about transport, and vice versa, or they hear about health initiatives. It has been incredibly powerful in generating communication and understanding, and giving confidence to the community. I wanted to put those points in as well.

If I may add, there will be some digital infrastructure things that we probably will not regret. It is telling that there is a standard for information for rail for displaying oncoming trains, but there is not yet a standard for providing display boards at bus stops that have that information, as well as onward travel. Touchscreens are a way of providing the type of smartphone experience that you might have, which benefits both those people who do not have a phone, and the over 90% of people who do but, for various reasons, want that information to be very salient to them right at the point. There are ways in which we might get the best of both worlds, and improving inclusion that is essential for the 10% really helps the 90%.

When it works, that stuff is really useful at the bus stop. It has had a bit of a ropey roll-out in London, but I think we are getting there. Scott, has Chris Hillcoat more or less answered your question? Q186 Dr Arthur: I think so. I was going to ask about accessibility and how we do this without making life harder for people who have mobility problems or making it more expensive for people who are on lower incomes. Chris gave quite a good overview of that; does anybody else want to add to or perhaps contradict what Chris said?

It is such an important issue that it bears repeating that one in five people in the UK have a condition that makes travel challenging. Four in five of those with such a condition feel stressed and anxious when using transport. We should remind ourselves that the type of joy that we might feel while travelling can be really deprived. If you have accessibility issues, you are not necessarily able to do all the meaningful, enjoyable things that you want to on your journey. You are having to spend some of that time thinking and navigating, which makes the transport time a real disutility and a real barrier.

It probably bears repeating that disabled people take 29% fewer journeys than non-disabled people, and that is holding them back from the economic benefits of travel, getting to work and to training, as well as the things that we all enjoy, like going to see your mates at the weekend or whatever. It is really important to think about it. Interestingly, we found in our research that mobility aid users were far more likely to make multimodal journeys than people who did not use mobility aids. Especially given that they are taking fewer journeys overall, that is interesting. In terms of the accessibility that leads to multimodal journeys, things such as poor pavements were at the top of the list when people were asking us what the barriers were. Dealing with the basics first is really important. Q187 Dr Arthur: We talked about autonomous vehicles earlier. One of the use cases is for people who have mobility problems, and those who feel stressed travelling on public transport, perhaps because they have a sensory issue. There are real opportunities there, among all the other things, but this use case is most interesting. Ansaf Azhar: Very quickly, there are some great examples in the strategy itself—for example, what they have done in Brighton in terms of creating space for wheelchairs on buses. If you have, for example, a child with a disability and accessibility issues, do not underestimate the impact on the family as a whole being able to travel. The connection to the whole community and family is sometimes lost. Those are my couple of points.

We have touched already on the multiplicity of transport providers and local authorities, and now we are going to have mayoral strategic authorities in some places, and whatever the other type is—non-strategic mayoral authority or whatever it is. I cannot even begin to fathom it and, frankly, I do not think the Government can either. How much do you feel all those bodies think about this stuff in terms of integrated transport and the behavioural change needed? What are the barriers, in terms of how they work, to achieving some of the goals? Again, some of this has been covered, but do you have any extra thoughts to add?

We work with quite a lot of authorities up and down the country, and we find that the officers in authorities work incredibly hard, but they are stretched beyond belief. We were speaking to a couple of people on a project in one of the large shire counties a few weeks ago. I said, “Am I speaking to the entire transport team?” They said, “Yes, you are,” and there were only two of them. We were asking about one particular thing, but they also have to look after 20 other things, so there is an enormous challenge around capacity and capability. We have seen a really concrete example in active travel, where the delivery of active travel infrastructure requires a sea change in thinking, both in the engineering firms who are designing it and in the local authorities that are commissioning and approving it. It is still ongoing. That quality improvement is quite slow to happen, and we would probably expect to see the same thing in many of these other aspects.

Is it a skills issue as well as a capacity issue?

Yes, to some extent. Q190 Dr Arthur: We all want more people to walk and cycle every day. What are the easy things we can do to better integrate walking and cycling into our towns and cities as part of these integrated trips? How do we make it easier for people to walk and cycle to the bus stop or the train station as part of their trips? What are the easy things that we can do? Dan is ready; I can sense it.

Why not? The first thing to say is that I have spoken a lot about walking and wheeling. That is important because they are things that people are doing a lot. If we were able to shift people from walking and wheeling to stations, to cycling to them, for example, and if you do a basic piece of geometry comparing the average distance that people will walk to a place with the average distance that people will cycle to a place, you increase the catchment of that station or stop by 20 times. That boggles the mind, but it does work, so there is real untapped potential for people cycling to services. Our walking and cycling index tells us that, in order to make that work, people want things like improving the route. Some 71% of people support specifically thinking about routes to bus stops and stations, and 66% of people support secure cycle parking at the station. To bring hire bikes and e-bikes into this, there was some research on Vélib, the Santander Cycles equivalent in Paris, which was really interesting in terms of where you place the stations. It is a docked rather than a dockless model. It found that if one of these docked stations was 300 metres away from where you were, you were 60% less likely to use that docked bike than if it was right by you. By the time you get just 500 metres away, people were very unlikely to walk or wheel to it to then get on the bike. We need to provide more docking points, and more space for dockless cycles off the pavement, where you can park those up, if we want people to make more of those journeys. Q191 Dr Arthur: What about the design? If we think about train stations and bus stations, as you get to 300 metres to 500 metres away from these destinations, it can get quite chaotic, because lots of people are going there and lots of vehicles are moving around. Is that an issue, or am I just talking about my experience?

That is a really good point. It is complex. If you are going to want people to be able to drive to the station, or to get the bus to the station, and to walk and cycle there, then you are going to have to balance all those different bits. There are things you can do around, for example, as is often the case in the Netherlands, building the bike parking under the station, which can use space to reduce some of that conflict. But it is always going to be a tricky design situation. Ansaf Azhar: It is a really important point, and we can talk about it for a long time, but, touching on what you just said about infrastructure, simple things like affordability, accessibility, storage and design can make a big difference. A lot of us—me included—drive to a park and ride, but have a bike parked there overnight. Just having a shelter in place can massively change behaviours. You can just lock your bike and then go into the city, come back, keep your bike there, and jump into an EV or on to a train. Those kinds of things can make a big difference. We need to get better at not necessarily educating but framing the benefits that people get from increased active modes of transport. It is not just about tackling obesity and overweight; it is the benefit you get in terms of mental wellbeing, tackling loneliness, and community integration. If you take School Streets as an example, there was a huge amount of nervousness when that was first introduced, but then you have situations where young people were walking to school with their friends and parents. It was a great way to connect to communities. They enjoyed it. It was fun. They were observing nature more. By the time they got to the classroom, their education attainment and attention span had significantly improved as a result. It is really important that we do not just compartmentalise this as tackling obesity, important as it is. Improving physical activity will improve populations’ health and wellbeing, which can directly translate into economic growth and productivity. It is really important to do that. Thirdly, as I touched on earlier, it improves confidence, particularly among ethnic minority communities and for those with accessibility issues. I am not a behavioural science expert, but there is this point that when you see a few of your friends and colleagues doing this, you have to do it. That pull factor is very strong. That cannot be underestimated. With all this stuff, it is something about sequencing. Professor Choudhury talked about the carrot-versus-stick incentive, and there is a careful balance around how you sequence this. If we were just seen to be reducing cars going into town on its own, without improving the infrastructure or visibly communicating with the community around the benefits and their ability to take on active modes of transport, that may well be the wrong way. That can come back to make it very difficult to implement some of these initiatives. Lastly, we must not underestimate the power of co-production. We need to get communities involved and speak to people with accessibility issues around what the issues are when they are about to take a bus journey. The strategy talks about it, but we really need to get into the detail of what the issues are. Is it the pavements? Is it the space inside the bus? Things like that will be really powerful.

Thank you very much. You made an important point about not using the word “educating” people, which sounds a bit preachy, but how one communicates—we touched on some of that earlier. Olly has a really important and timely question.

The Government have recently published their eagerly anticipated, if I can put it that way, “Better Connected: a strategy for integrated transport”. I would love to hear what each of you. perhaps in a relatively snappy paragraph, thought about the strategy and what was good and bad. Ansaf Azhar: I think it is great. It is sometimes about timing. Despite everything that we have discussed, we are seeing particularly younger people and most parts of the community now starting to embrace active modes of transport and multimodal transport. For this strategy to land at this time is really good. It talks about various active modes of transport. It talks about decarbonisation. It talks about healthy communities. There are some really good examples in there to take some of this work forward. Of course, I am a director of public health, so I am going to be looking at this from a health perspective, but not just because of that. It is really important that we adopt a health-in-all-policies approach in how we frame conversations. Transport should not be just about connecting places. It should be about improving health and wellbeing. It should be about movement of people. It should be about creating those walkable neighbourhoods, which allow people to integrate better. It should be about all those things. I will give you one example. From a silo point of view, I did my director of public health annual report a couple of years ago in Oxfordshire. Its main theme was climate and health. It was done purely to reframe the debate, because it is often seen as either climate intervention, health, or the cost of living. They tend to be competing with each other when, actually, it is the same thing. Climate interventions are seen as something that will benefit different parts of the world, and the benefit will be realised in a decade or so, whereas those same interventions can improve your health and wellbeing straight away, because of the increased physical activity levels and things like that. Those same interventions can also lead to benefits that are personalised to you. There is that integrated way of talking about it and, if you can expand on that, that would be really good. Also, there needs to be more on rural connectivity. We could go a little further on that to understand what interventions we can do. We could do a bit more on spatial planning. We have a massive opportunity with housing growth around spatial planning. How can we build in some of these issues straight away so that it is not a second thought and we are not addressing that separately? It is happening up and down the country. The last point that I would make is that it is really important that health is not seen as a co-benefit but as a main benefit of a transport strategy. The measurables should reflect that. If we get that right, it will have an impact on the whole economy and productivity, and the wider benefits that we often talk about.

I will be brief. I really liked many aspects of the report, some of which were already mentioned, and especially the fact that it put people at the centre rather than talking about different modal improvements. It would have been better to go a bit deeper in two areas. The first is about the heterogeneity among different parts of the UK. It differentiates between urban, suburban and rural, but the rural area close to Surrey is not the same as rural areas elsewhere, so that may be something to dig a bit deeper into in the future. It also talks about drawing on behavioural research to understand how people engage with the system, but there were no further details on that, so I hope that will be looked at in the future.

This report was previously called the integrated national transport strategy. As it is titled “Better Connected”, it belies a double meaning. We might think it is about better connected journeys, but it represents a step change in the Department for Transport and the Government really being better connected with communities. The report itself says at length that it is really co-designed. Its duration, in being a long time coming, was due to more than a dozen roadshows around the country, and much more. It does represent a step change in being better connected with the needs of real people in all parts of the country. With it come some useful moves in that respect to standardise the Your Bus Journey survey across all operators and to expand rail passenger research. Like Professor Choudhury, I also noted on the front page, unsurprisingly, the emphasis on drawing on behavioural research to understand how people instinctively engage with the transport system, but that is not yet followed up with how that will be conducted to improve the capability of local authorities that might not otherwise have behavioural science and behavioural change insight and, as we have previously said, access to evidence on what might work. There is more to be done to see how that capability could be improved. I am hopeful that it could also be accompanied with a commitment that local authorities will go on a similar sort of journey in being well connected with their citizens. It will not be sufficient only to research users of public transport, but rather to apply survey methods and qualitative research to speak to all the current non-users of bus, rail, walking and cycling, who we really need to attract into those modes. There needs to be more commitment to do that. Finally, it will be interesting to see which metrics are used to judge how we are progressing next year. Maybe we will get to these questions to see whether we are better connected than we used to be.

The focus on integrating journeys is very helpful. The discussion around technology, fares and ticketing is also really beneficial. There are a couple of areas where it would be interesting to look at more. Freight and servicing is not mentioned at all. It is not quite the focus of our panel, but the true integrated transport network includes the provision of goods and services that we all rely on every day. There is another area around appraisal, and funding and financing, where digging into that a little bit more would be really interesting—for instance, how we pay for transport up front and on an ongoing basis. We have also been talking about benefits to health and to other parts, yet the transport funding is still sitting in a silo. I would love to see a move across Government to break out of that silo and look at benefits and costs holistically, so that if benefits are being given to various areas of Government or the country, those areas are also involved in paying for them.

I would add just a couple of things. It is lovely to see a strategy that makes the case for transport, and not just how we improve transport. Transport is a good in and of itself, and a more mobile society is a more prosperous one that helps us to do more. That is great to see. We have discussed two of the three Ps already: people and place. The third P, partnership, is really great. It is important to have this vision that is not just partnership between the Government and local leaders, for example, but partnership among different areas of the transport system. For example, almost 1,000 railway stations are within 5 km of the national cycle network, so we need to play our part and work better with others on that. We are really looking forward to doing that. One thing that was missing from the strategy was a slightly clearer direction of travel on modal share. It was implicit within the document that, by and large, there would be some modal shift away from the private car and to other modes, through providing more choice for people rather than through wagging fingers at people who are driving. Without having a clear target on, for example, what proportion of journeys you want to have taken by different modes, it makes it harder for the Government to bring that partnership with others on board. I understand why there was not a target in there, as it is hard to hold people to that, but that then means the Government cannot bash us to work better together, for example. Q193 Dr Arthur: Thank you—and that was an excellent segue, Dan. In Scotland, we had a target to reduce car use. It was repeatedly announced and spoken about, and then eventually dumped. Should the Government be more interventionist? Rather than just talking about integrated transport as a good in its own right, should we be thinking about targets to perhaps reduce car use, or maybe even in our Railways Bill to increase rail use? Should the Government be more interventionist in that way? As a follow-up, can we do that at a national level, or do we have to delegate that to our local authorities, which are often struggling with really congested roads but would perhaps see this as a way of reducing congestion? Should the Government be more interventionist by setting targets, or at least encouraging them to be set?

I would say yes, obviously. We found that 58% of people still support the Government setting targets for modal share, and then measures that help to meet that. Dr Arthur: It is always the way with these surveys, though. Everybody wants fewer cars on the road, as long as it is not their car.

It comes back to the question of carrot and stick, and of being honest with people. If you are reallocating road space, for example, it is, at least in the short term, likely to increase congestion for people driving. When we are making a case for this—and I am having a go not just at politicians here, but also at campaigners—there is an issue of us not being honest with people about those trade-offs and why you are doing them. In the long run, hopefully it would settle down, but a new bike lane or even a bus lane can be controversial at points because it is taking away that space. By and large, if you are honest with people, they are willing to go along with that journey, even if they do not agree with the individual measure.

The Government have a very clear target of reaching net zero, of course, and that remains. It gets pushed backwards and forwards as tides go in and out. That is a downstream target, and there are lots of ways in which one could achieve that in different functions. On a smaller scale, the question—and it goes back to the strategy—is around what we want to achieve. What does good look like in the transport network in 20 years’ time? Pete made this point: how do we know that we are better connected? Does it mean that we want to set a target of an average speed on a motorway, an average connectivity to a particular place, or an average speed on a public transport mode? You could do all those things. It relies on what you want to achieve, and then you can work backwards. There are case studies on doing this kind of thing. In Singapore, they say the average speed on the motorways will be 60 kph, even at peak hours, and they set a toll, which varies in order to achieve that speed. That is a pretty draconian measure. If we are talking about being interventionist, in my opinion that is a double-edged sword. With great power comes great responsibility.

The targets for reduced car mileage are really just a step of an output, but not an outcome. Given that we have seen all this evidence that people’s travel choices are most largely determined by the built environment, their lifestyle and their requirements, and only secondarily, really, by the narrower aspects of choice and of want, a stronger target would be to acknowledge that some people definitely want to travel slightly less, and we might want to reduce the need to use a car. There are so many sets of interventions where we need not pit Government against individual, and we acknowledge that there are trip generators out there. They are called hospitals. They are called retail parks. They are called schools. They are called distribution networks. It is about how we use land. We could meaningfully reduce car mileage by changing the requirement that people feel they have to travel at all. Improving trip chaining was contained in this report and is one way in which you can achieve a lot in one trip rather than having to make multiple ones, but there is so much in our social world and social fabric that requires people to move around and bend to, say, appointment times that are unspecific or to travel in certain ways. Finally, it is noted that driving is, in a way, a revenue generator, but also causes a lot of harm. I read the evaluation of HS1 20 years on, and it is noted that that mode shift from car to rail is costing the Government in the sense that it is revenue forgone from fuel duty. That is factually true, but it is going to be a difficult, slightly bipolar scenario if we think that we both need cars and want to reduce car usage overall. It is noted in the “Better Connected” report that car usage is not forecast to go down. It is forecast that it will go up by 10%, so that is a sobering point when we think there is an ambition to reduce car usage. Q194 Dr Arthur: Car ownership and car mileage are different things, though, are they not? I see lots of people now who have second and third cars, but the average mileage by car is coming down because people have more cars per household.

That is right. The car fleet is broadly stable, at about 35 million vehicles. The growth in the past 20 years has really all been from there being multi-car households rather than from households that go from zero to one. With electrification, it looks like people with electric vehicles have higher mileage of about 10,000 miles a year. You would probably need your own inquiry to delve into the evidence on whether that is cause and effect, in that people who drive a lot like having a new electric vehicle, while disentangling the fact that they have lower running costs. You would expect something with lower running costs to have higher mileage.

Or whether they are high-mileage drivers anyway.

There is a little bit to disentangle there. Per person, mileage is about the same, but we have had population growth, which has put a lot of strain on the network.

Chris touched a bit on net zero. In order to have the maximum impact, the target should not be reducing car ownership or car mileage; rather, the focus should be on net zero, but also health and wellbeing impacts. Reducing car usage should be phrased as a way to achieve that. From a behavioural point of view, in order to make the behaviour change, one aspect of that is reducing friction. The other component is people being willing to make the change. For that, there needs to be more work done so that people are on board with moving to more sustainable options. Ansaf Azhar: If I can quickly add to this, setting targets is really important because, in a sense, it tells us how we are going to measure the success of the strategy. Framing it is really important, because if we just look at car usage on its own, that can polarise the debate and disenfranchise the population. If we frame it another way, we can have outcomes, which could be health, growth, or a reduction in congestion. Then it takes longer to see the outcome measures, but you have proxy outputs that you would measure in the meantime, which is where car usage and things like that come in. If you can frame these output measures with a holistic view that looks at health, at an increase in physical activity, at a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an improvement in air quality, and at a reduction in car usage, that kind of framing would be much better in terms of not polarising and disenfranchising the community. It goes back to the point of being honest with the community around these things. Q195 Dr Arthur: Local targets are more important because it means that you are not talking about net zero, which is a national Government target. You are talking about cutting congestion and then creating a city centre or a town centre that is just a much better place to be, so people are much more willing to go there and spend money. Ansaf Azhar: Yes, absolutely. The problem is that if you have a single target like car usage, it puts the strategy into a different context, and we do not want that. It is about bringing all that together, which will have a really healthy approach to it.

There was previously a target of 50% of journeys in towns and cities to be done by active travel. That was from the previous Government, and it was mentioned by this Government, but I noted that it was not present in the “Better Connected” report. It might be worth asking Active Travel England why that target, which was 50% of journeys by active travel by 2030, has disappeared.

On that point, some of us have asked that question wearing a different hat. The Government have said that as part of CWIS3—cycling and walking investment strategy 3—they are going to be setting targets like that. You are right to say that at the moment, in terms of hard numbers, it is non-committal, which is interesting.

Is better integration a way to bring about behavioural change, or will efforts to change behaviour lead to better integration? Ansaf Azhar: It is a bit of both, and they reinforce each other. Having an integrated transport system and talking with the community about it in a very inclusive way will encourage behaviour change and provide confidence. I mentioned earlier making every contact count; whether it is libraries or GP practices, or whichever settings people go to, having those conversations in a much more holistic way will also promote behaviour change.

Dan, you are looking enthusiastic.

I would, by and large, lean towards the latter, in that it is, essentially, about getting the basics right first. The way to do that is to see integration not as an outcome but as an approach. We all need to think cross-modally when we are making these decisions and advocating for them. Hopefully, that will lead to better outcomes, but the outcome should not be seen necessarily as an integrated system. The outcome should be about getting all the basics right and it working well together.

These are both things that happen over time. They are not one-offs. The most important thing is to maintain momentum going forward and not let it slip and go backwards. That would be my only comment on this.

We have seen that there is huge latent demand for cycling and walking, and for bus and rail. People have wanted to do it, but they have been held back by all the list of things that this research has found, such as cost, safety and reliability. It really is going to be on infrastructure investment to improve the real situation in transport, in respect of the real infrastructure—real in the material sense—that will then change the perception of how it feels to travel. Then you have a positive feedback loop or tipping point of people seeing more people travel and it becoming more preferable. The catalyst now, given the rough stagnation that we have been in, is going to be that we need to invest to improve integration first, which will lead to behaviour change.

We have touched on measuring success, but there is a question, Scott, that I do not think has been fully drilled down into. Q197 Dr Arthur: We have spoken a lot about how we value and measure the benefits of these changes. When it comes to promoting projects and thinking about the costs and benefits when you are making your business case, are these things adequately measured? Ansaf used the word “holistic”; when we evaluate projects, are we able to take in all these benefits and reach a decision, or are we constrained?

In the appraisal methodologies.

We are absolutely not equipped for that at all. Again, we are sat with a system that, on the one hand, does what it can count. It can count price, cost and journey time, but this report has found emphatically that there is a whole set of psychological things that you cannot numerically count so easily, such as stress, anxiety and all these pain points that are preventing people from travelling. I come back to bus stops and real-time information, which is something people have been calling for. We clearly have a problem with having people in the loop, in that people want it but the current system does not really have a clear way of valuing something like improved journey time information, because it is changing a qualitative aspect of the trip. You can find evidence that when we improve bus stops, we increase ridership, and then ridership has a certain set of outcomes that we can price up, but it falls between the gaps. There is a quip that we have both value of travel time saving on the one hand, and then the value of time spent travelling, and VTTS and VTS do not really match up. I would be interested to hear from others.

Some of the results of these measures are really difficult to monetise. As individuals, we have a set of routes that we know in our head. As we talked about earlier, we have common trips that we make. Disruption can be a means by which we learn new trips and, once we have learned them, we know them permanently or for a long time. It is sometimes the disruption that gives us the knowledge about new trips, but none of that is ever captured in the appraisal. There was one study that said that after a tube strike, 5% of people found a new way to travel and stuck to it, so it was the disruption that caused them to change their behaviour and then gave them another route that they could take.

There are definitely things we can change about transport appraisal, including journey time being such a big factor in it. Fundamentally, we already have a lot of the data we need. DfT has some brilliant modelling tools on outcomes that are more holistic, such as health, carbon and air quality, and we just need to use them better, frankly. A lot of people blame the Green Book, and that can be a cop-out, in some ways. The Green Book has all the tools and refers to all these various things. At the end of the day, you have to take a political decision about what you are going to prioritise within that, and that is the area where that falls apart.

So the tools are there; that is interesting. Ansaf Azhar: In public health, we often do health impact evaluation. The whole idea behind that is that an improvement in wider health issues related to housing, for example, can have a massive impact on your health and wellbeing. If you get this right and you move a substantial part of the population to increase their physical activity levels as a result, you can model the benefits in terms of reducing long-term conditions and, therefore, the impact on the NHS as a result. That is not to be underestimated. We need to get clever in terms of how we model those benefits, because it not only highlights the wider benefits but also allows a more joined-up conversation among different Departments.

Thank you very much. That takes me to the last question. You can each have a maximum of two sentences. Given that we have the Government’s integrated transport strategy, what action should the Government prioritise to encourage transport providers to prioritise integration, or to encourage potential passengers to consider public transport use when it is appropriate?

I will not repeat myself. I will literally just say again that modal shift targets are really important to then go down.

Culture and ways of working in transport operators are vital, as is seeing people as customers who have valid choices to make, and valuing their time.

People are not cargo. We need to understand the real ways in which people decide, so we should apply behavioural science to prioritise and understand what aspects of a journey to improve. We should apply social sciences to evidence the true value of transport to individuals, communities and the country at large.

I wanted to cover a similar point. We need to use the behavioural science aspect more, but we also need to focus more not on specific targets but, at a higher level, on moving people from one point to another, the efficiency of that, and the wider impacts of that in the decision-making process. Ansaf Azhar: Not surprisingly, I will be taking a health slant. There are two things. The first is health in all policies. It is really simple: health and wellbeing being seen as one of the main benefits will really help to join it up and shape it in a very different way, particularly with a focus on underserved communities and people who are affected by inequality. My second point is that breaking down departmental silos is really important. I keep going back to the NHS 10-year plan, but it talks about the neighbourhood health agenda. People are going to be accessing health services differently. Care is going to be closer to home. Are we having joined-up conversations about the impact on our transport plans and so on? I just picked one example, but it is about a more joined-up conversation, looking at underserved communities, and health in all policies.

Thank you; that was an excellent final round-up. That concludes today’s session. Thank you very much for your evidence and for what you sent in before. Do feel free to write to us if you feel there is anything more that you felt you did not adequately cover in your answers this morning. We look forward to resuming our oral evidence on this inquiry in a few weeks’ time. That concludes today’s meeting.