There is a speculative tube map of Cambridge that does the rounds every time there’s an election in the offing. The basic version shows the ancient university city transformed into a modern European metropolis by the addition of a light rail route, the Isaac Newton Line, which would run in tunnel under the bit with all the colleges. That, though, seems to lack ambition compared to the complete network currently being promoted by campaign groups Railfuture East Anglia and Cambridge Connect, which includes lines named Darwin (after another alumnus) and Eastern Cambridge (we must assume the town has never produced a third important scientist).
Such maps are often greeted with irritation by residents of, say, Birmingham, which is an order of magnitude larger but has been stuck with a single line for decades, or Leeds, which despite sitting at the heart of an urban region of around one million people has nothing of this sort at all. There’s inevitable grumbling at the idea that Cambridge should only qualify for such things because it is a) near London and b) a place where a sizable chunk of the political class went to university.
All of which misses the basic point that someone just made this whole thing up. The diagram of the Isaac Newton line and friends is less a piece of urban planning than a work of science fiction.
The thing is, though, there’s no reason it should be confined to fantasy. The smallest city in the world with its own metro system is Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva – a 14km metro network with two lines serving 28 stations. Lausanne is almost the same size as Cambridge at present, but is unlikely to remain so because the latter city’s booming economy means that successive governments have been minded to plan for its substantial growth. Given that – and given that Cambridge residents may start complaining about the city’s terrible traffic – why shouldn’t it be in line for its own metro network?
And the answer is because such schemes only happen in modern Britain thanks to national government largesse. The same Treasury that repeatedly refuses funds for a Leeds metro is not going to give grants to Cambridge all of a sudden.
This is no sensible way to run a country, of course. In the halls of Whitehall, the transport budget is always going to be a lower priority than for health or schools or, in 2025, defence. In the Treasury, investment in rail, with its tendency to run over budget and incur ongoing costs, is seen as a poor bet compared to investment in roads. And whatever money is available for such things then gets divvied up between the entire country, including the capital, whose appetite for transport investment is apparently infinite, and where those making the decisions all happen to live.
So what chance do regional projects possibly have? Leeds is trying, in a third-time’s-the-charm sort of a way, to persuade the government it’d be worth investing £2.5bn to create a tram network for the largest urban area in Western Europe with no rapid transit. Meanwhile, the Treasury is blowing £9bn on a single 15 mile road, the Lower Thames Crossing. Just planning it has cost £300m.
If national government is not going to fund such things, there is a possible answer: take the decisions out of the hands of national government. Leeds’s new tramways may never be an investment priority in Whitehall, but they almost certainly will be one for the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, of which Leeds is the heart. If ministers are serious about going for growth and rebalancing the national economy, they should break the Treasury’s fiscal monopoly, and devolve the powers necessary to fund it.
Whether the Isaac Newton line would offer enough benefits to make it worth its city or county funding it is an open question. (I suspect not.) But it doesn’t seem implausible that, say, the counties of Devon and Cornwall may see it worth completing the rebuild of the northern railway route from Exeter to Plymouth via Okehampton to address the fact that the peninsula’s only working rail route to London periodically gets washed into the sea. There are projects the length and breadth of this island that will never top the Treasury priority list, but would be transformative to communities, if only we let them raise the money themselves.
Once upon a time, even small British cities had tram or trolleybus networks, because powerful local corporations had the powers necessary to build and operate them. Local government has been neutered over a period of decades, but did more to build the physical fabric of this country than Westminster ever did. The government claims it’s serious about rebuilding Britain. Perhaps it should empower them to do it again.
[See more: The fight for wages for housework]
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