This is the story of a chartered engineer trying to make sense of highways and transport in the UK. In this month's article, his message is: ‘Courage, mon brave.'
The UK is scared of failure and it stops us being bold. It stops us admitting when things aren't working properly and in some cases, we end up defending things that really should be changed or improved. We need to change the culture.
It's hard to put a finger on when this thought crystallised for me, but it stems from being involved with and observing the progression of quite a lot of local authority schemes. I would caveat this by saying it is sometimes hard to separate the issues from people simply disagreeing with a scheme or just bad faith.
The rhythm of the problem starts with a scheme being proposed, which might push the boundaries a little (or a lot, depending on where it is). It will go through all of the usual engagement, design and political processes to get built. But almost immediately there will be an issue that quickly blows up, often getting into the national press because of the way the media works. The problem will be an objectively genuine one. Sometimes, the local authority reaction becomes very corporate in defending its position. The trouble, or its scale, will be denied; we'll hear the scheme needs time to bed in, or there must be an issue with users making mistakes. In some cases, people are getting hurt, there are court cases and in extreme situations whole schemes that were mostly working are ripped out for want of dealing with a localised problem.
The other dimension to this is the stuff that doesn't make the news: where staff and consultants are blamed for poor work, even though they are not in control of the wider network, which needs changes. There is also the issue of a loss of political capital that is absolutely needed if we are going to be bold in delivering better streets.
The classic examples within my area of work are kerbs that people fail to see because they are the same colour and tone as the footway and carriageway, two-way cycle tracks that end up with a cluster of collisions at an uncontrolled junction, which is far too busy with turning traffic, or a camera-managed modal traffic filter that has high levels of non-compliance.
This can literally start from scheme conception, where we don't spend enough time talking about the potential pitfalls, or even learning about some of the pitfalls others have experienced – and that depends on others admitting failures. This isn't really about risk either; it's about being clear that something might not work properly and building this into our communications plan as well as our programme and budget in the post-completion period.
If there's a problem that is going to be expensive to put right, it is going to be really difficult in an environment that delivers capital projects within set investment periods, but has no budget or time left to solve the problems. Some of the solutions might require network changes away from our scheme and that's even harder to tackle because it essentially means another scheme is needed.
I want to be clear though: this is not about negligence or incompetence, even though it is really hard to get sued or prosecuted for poor design. This is about good design that doesn't quite work for some reason, but has to be put right just as much as we should with poor design. I think this all boils down to a local authority having a vision and a plan for its area so everyone can see where a scheme sits, rather than just doing a thing with the best of intentions.
We need to get to grips with preparing the public for potential failures, but also reassuring them that we are prepared to both learn from failures and put things right.
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