Cardiff Blues - regeneration and transport in the capital

Cardiff: how has regeneration and transport fared almost 30 years after devolution unleashed a wave of energy? First, the good news, and there is plenty. The city centre is looking good, helped by a sensitive pedestrianisation scheme. It has superb historical assets in the castle with its Animal Wall, the market, the glorious arcades full of cafes and little shops and the civic area with excellent museum. At half term the city centre is buzzing. There is plenty of public art, including a snow dog trail providing fun for kids.


There are some good new buildings too. Cardiff Library (BDP 2009) has good proportions and a bright interior. It has a prominent site directly on The Hayes and seemed well-used and liked. The sensitively restored old library houses a lovely if confusingly named ‘Story Museum’ (the story of Cardiff rather than a museum of stories). I’m in two minds about the city-centre Millenium Stadium. It occupies a large block and it is not obvious why Cardiff City needs a separate 33,000 capacity stadium just a mile away. But it adds character to the city, it’s great for fans to have direct public transport and all the city centre facilities. It attracts a lot of people to its tours. And it is just out of the way enough to avoid sterilising too much of the city.


But the cracks are obvious even in the centre. Duke Street is a moat of traffic isolating the castle and as it races along the oddly named ‘Boulevard de Nantes’, and walking to the even more isolated museum involves instant traffic death or a grotty subway. The architecture and contents are worth it. The subway, not the death from traffic.


Cardiff Bay was the big regeneration hope. The Senate and millennium centre are great buildings. The Norwegian Church adds character but the rest of the bay is a disappointment. Mermaids Quay is lowest common denominator commercial development. Nice for a stroll, great if you like chain eatieries, but with very little character. Behind you are the grand old surviving commercial buildings. But many are vacant, some derelict and the surroundings are poor, enveloped in a swirl of traffic and fumes. This is the big opportunity area in Cardiff. Great buildings, crying out for new uses, for decent architects, for urban planning, for a decent environment to walk or cycle, for a bit of the regeneration cash that has been spent elsewhere on roads and faceless apartment blocks.

A walk around the bay reveals huge areas of derelict land waiting for development and the views are dispiriting. St David's Hotel looks awful and none of the other development seems to relate to the water or give it a decent skyline. There are a lot of apartments but little soul.


We walk round to Penarth, a pleasant but run-down seaside area and then need to get back to the city centre. The 89B took a mind and bum numbing 40 minutes to cover the four miles but we did get a lovely look at a lot of housing estates and out of town supermarkets. The bus company is the delightfully named NAT ‘New Adventure Travel’. They sure do make bus journeys adventurous. Which brings us to transport. Outside the pedestrianised city centre, traffic is supreme, the city is a mess of roads, flyovers and car parking that are hard to navigate on bike or foot. It is made clear that pedestrians and cyclists are very much second-class citizens and only tolerated because you are too poor to be in a vehicle.


A note to highway engineers – if you put up a ‘cyclist dismount’ sign, then you have designed something that is not fit for purpose. You wouldn’t expect to see a ‘motorist get out of your car and push’ sign, would you? Second note: Everywhere, everywhere are miles of pedestrian barriers. In doing so they make crossings feel longer, introducing psychological barriers, with most impact on the least mobile, and encouraging some others to make dangerous crossings to get around them. These barriers don’t just make it harder to cross the road, they sever communities and decrease opportunities for healthy transport.


Residential areas are dominated by roads and parking too. Despite the amount of tarmac, car dependency means all-day congestion which makes journeys on the limited, tortuous and confusing bus network slow and unpredictable. Multiple operators and fares makes things worse. Cardiff bus charges odd fares (£1.80?) but doesn’t give change.


The one-mile journey from Bay to City is typical. It should be easy. There is a train, but the station is marooned inland next to a traffic island, and trains go to Queen St, not the more convenient Central. There appear to be four bus routes by three (?) operators, but there are no bus maps, timetables are incoherent and fares appear random. Walking is unpleasant and cycling suicidal.

What should be done? Cardiff should be easy. Distances within the city are relatively small and much of the urban area is compact. Cardiff Bus is one of the few municipal bus operators left. It has an extensive but run-down suburban train network which should be converted to trams tomorrow.

First a change in mindset. It is the movement of people, goods and ideas that is important, not the free flow of traffic. Public transport, walking and cycling are very good at shorter distance movement, and they free up a lot of urban land for development. They create better conditions for living, working and investment. A really high-quality walking and cycling route from the Bay through the middle of the city centre and up to the University would be a good start. We need to redesign a few roads for people rather than traffic, and get the scrap metal merchants in for the railings.

Then there is the curious train shuttle, underused and of limited transport value. The obvious solution is to convert to a tram and extend it to the waterfront in the south and through the town centre (probably along St Marys Street) and out to the north. I know trams are expensive and hard to build in Britain, but this is a capital city we are talking about, not Stockport.

And then there is planning. It seems so unfashionable in Britain to link land-use and transport planning, but it can be done. Take a trip to Germany. Higher density near tram and train stations, but we know all that. Why can’t Cardiff do it?

Northern Transport Conference

As over 200 of the great and good of the north gathered in the swanky Manchester Midland Hotel for the Northern Transport summit 2017 the general election felt like ages ago; Cameron and Osbourne are ancient history. Pinch yourself to remember ‘Northern Powerhouse’ was only launched in 2014 as the idea fades from a minority Government with other things on its mind and about to spend transport cash in Northern Ireland rather than Northern England.

To recap, the stuttering northern economy is outperformed by the south, which also has higher education standards from secondary level. The London black hole becomes denser as all investment and talent is sucked into it. The further south you go, the easier it is to justify decent public transport: anything built fills up with passengers, and the economy can support local contributions from both the public sector and business. There’s not really any room for new roads, and the price and sort supply of land encourages denser communities and more walking and cycling, which in turn creates a better quality of life. In contrast, northern cities and communities are starved of public transport investment, lack skilled people, are poorly connected and find it hard to attract quality jobs outside the big cities. Northern railways are filled with slow, old diesel trains, the roads are filled with commuters and goods that should (and in other European countries would) be on rail and tram, and by dirty, lowest common denominator buses. The potential of cycling is untapped and everything is expensive, poorly co-ordinated and difficult to use. And it rains more. Welcome to the North.

Paul Swinney from Centre for Cities gave a solid and fact-based presentation that suggests that the north is a series of economies, not just one. Cities attract and generate the best jobs, but northern cities are key underperformers with skills and access to skilled labour the key reason. He painted a bleak picture of low skilled, poorly paid jobs in suburban call centres and distribution depots served mainly by congested roads. Sunderland, despite Nissan came in for special mention. He suggests that intra-regional transport is the main transport challenge, although the rest of the summit focussed on glossy inter-regional solutions: Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR): not High Speed 3 as it will not be high speed or trans-pennine motorway tunnels. Trams are obviously not sexy enough.

Light relief was provided by Jesse Norman (Eton, Merton, dad called Sir Torquil), Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport. Only in post 7 days, his civil servants put together a wiki-speech with plenty of northern facts, but he didn’t know anything about anything. He wanted us to have a single voice. Great - let us know when you have something to say, Jesse.

The dilemma for most participants was how to big-up their areas, companies and contributions but also recognise the desperate state of northern transport. Liverpool concentrated on NPR and the port. Cumbria points out that it is more than the Lake District. Is it? Lancashire look longingly at the unitary Greater Manchester system and wants to improve East-West links. Why, when the main economic focus is south to Manchester and Leeds? Sheffield is more interested with internal connections. Apparently 2 pairs out of the 4 South Yorkshire centres (Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley Rotherham) don’t have direct rail links. Can you guess? I couldn’t. And Manchester is the centre of the universe, has the biggest airport and wants NPR.

New GM Mayor Andy Burnham gave a rousing speech. He recognises the need to break through the Treasury appraisal rules, a key thread of the event. Now London Crossrail is almost finished, and Crossrail 2 is taking shape. It is obvious to everyone in the room that using conventional appraisal NPR is a dead duck and Crossrail 2 will overtake NPR in the funding queue. But no one was brave enough to say it out loud.

Highways England explanation of how they have got on and built roads and bridges contrasted with the highly defensive attitude of Graham Botham from Network Rail when challenged on high costs and poor project management. And this highlights a real problem: rail projects take decades and are risky, road projects are much easier. We’ve been here before. Recent northern history has seen integrated transport packages created, but only the roads get built. Perhaps Highways England should build our new rail lines? If we get any, that is.

Overall the impression was of some dedicated and passionate professionals looking for the right transport solution for the north. But I do wonder if everyone has been seduced by the glamour of new, almost-high-speed rail lines when currently 3-car diesel trains on a 2-track railway chug between Leeds and Manchester, held up by 2-car local trains. Transpennine electrification was announced in November 2011 and would reduce journey time, increase capacity and improve comfort but no progress is visible on the ground after six years. Why not?

As John Swinney pointed out, intra-regional transport is a key factor in attracting quality jobs. Manchester wants to be a world city but doesn’t even have a Metro, and local transport in Leeds is based on primitive buses. Thank goodness Liverpool built their Northern and Wirral lines tunnels in the sixties – they certainly wouldn’t be able to now.

What is my prescription? First, it is essential that Manchester-Huddersfield-Leeds TransPennine electrification is completed as soon as possible. This should come with some limited line speed improvements and four-tracking to allow fast trains to pass slower passenger and freight trains. Much of the route was originally four-track, so this should all be possible within the existing railway. There is plenty of decent quality surplus electric rolling stock available in the southeast.

Secondly, Manchester as the major growth generator in the north needs to start work on a tunnelled metro connecting electrified suburban lines. Metrolink is a good start, but it is slow and the city centre saturated with trams. A proper Metro would dramatically improve connectivity and unleash urban regeneration particularly to the north of the city where huge areas of derelict or underused land is available.

Everywhere there should be a focus on urban renaissance and walkable, cyclable communities based around fixed transport links. This is not rocket science and a quick Ryanair trip to any German city will explain how it can be done.

And we need to bin all those road proposals. They evidence is that they lead to dispersed, low quality and poorly paid jobs, and disparate, unconnected settlements with a poor sense of community. At the top of the pyramid the proposed tunnelled Transpennine motorway is a hugely destructive and wasteful scheme. We can do better than this.