This echoes the comments of Vancouver’s Brent Toderian at Bristol’s Festival of Ideas: that it is easier to increase densities in city centres - the real challenge is how well we do the suburbs, where the car too often remains the default choice.
Similar thinking is taking place in the West Midlands, for the 110 stations within the West Midlands Business Unit. Malcolm Holmes, programme director at West Midlands Rail, sees a realignment of incentives as key to achieving the desired outcomes.
“At the moment, a franchise simply has to hand back a station in the same state that they got it. We want to create quality gateways that support the changing needs of passengers and help generate prosperity.
“We want to encourage station adoption, and adapt stations for the multiplicity of uses that ACoRP has helped to champion - social enterprise cafe, skills centre, art gallery, training, startup units, and so on. The link between station adoption and passenger numbers is now becoming well recognised, and it improves security. Stations could house post offices or provide a parcel collection service, and much more besides.
“There is huge room for improvement. Take Dudley Port, the station is the closest rail connection to Dudley, a town with a population of over 80,000 people, and has nearly 500,000 users a year, despite the waiting room being like a mesh cage and tickets being sold from a crumbling portable building. It should be a great interchange, but the bus stops are across a busy road with little signage or information. There is scope for above-station developments at Five Ways, University (used by over a million passengers a year) and Perry Barr, which is in a cutting, so suitable for a raft across it and well located for student accommodation above.
“For developments like this, we need to help developers through a process that can seem intimidating, given the number of stakeholders often involved. We don’t have the wherewithal of realising a development on the scale of Five Ways. We are looking at doing a trial with a small group of stations with whatever model we choose before a full programme.”
ADVOCACY
Throughout the world, city planners and transport professionals broadly agree the direction that must be taken because urban areas share the same problems of pollution, congestion, noise, rising population, poor design, and declining resilience in the face of climate change. Many urban spaces are far from uplifting places.
We have known for decades that we cannot build our way out of congestion even if was desirable to do so, which is why self-driving cars are proving to be a distracting cul-de-sac. Yet still governments pour money into road schemes, and exacerbate the problems we face.
A trenchant, broadly based critique of our failure to use knowledge to transform the way we manage our cities was published in 1997. Cities for a Small Planet by architect (Lord) Richard Rogers remains as true today as 19 years ago, although the urgency is ever greater.
Addressing his own question of ‘how?’, Brent Toderian states that we need vision combined with great data and storytelling, and the ability to convey (using ample evidence and engaging anecdotes) how much better we can make places.
The railway industry, allied with those skilled at place making, has a golden opportunity to accelerate the re-orientation of our urban spaces.
