The Long View: Overcoming Short-Termism in Transport Planning and Investment
Key Takeaways
Short-term decision-making in transport creates false economies with significant long-term costs. Examples include:
- Building metro rail lines with too few stations.
- Immature strategic asset management.
- Stop/start investment patterns.
- Reflexively increasing road capacity.
- Overreliance on Benefit Cost Ratios (BCRs)
Solutions to overcome this short-termism include:
- Embracing funding models that recognise transport infrastructure’s long-term value.
- Developing more mature asset management practices to extend infrastructure lifespans and reduce lifecycle costs.
- Deploying continuous investment patterns that create institutional knowledge, supply chain stability, and better outcomes at lower costs.
- Moving from "predict and provide" to vision-based planning.
- Understand BCRs as valuable tools with significant limitations, not as definitive measures of a project's worth.
Next Steps
What changes can you make to your organisation today to address short-termism?
Introduction
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde
This quote perfectly captures how transport decisions are too often made: short-term penny-pinching takes precedence over long-term value creation, ultimately resulting in false economies that cost us more in the long run.
This short-termism isn't inevitable. It can be fixed, but mindsets need to change. Let's explore five common examples where short-term thinking undermines our transport systems and, more importantly, how we can do better.
Examples of short-termism in transport
- Building metro rail lines with too few stations.
Picture this scenario: A government plans to build a rail line from point A to B with 10 stations spaced a few kilometers apart. When funding constraints emerge, the typical response is to reduce the number of stations to cut capital costs.
This short-term approach creates several long-term problems:
- Reduced patronage on the line, increasing ongoing operational subsidies
- Expensive and disruptive retrofitting when stations need to be added later
- Missed opportunities for transport-oriented development and housing, resulting in increased car dependency and congestion
This problem is made worse by outdated thinking around travel time savings. While fewer stations do mean faster journeys, this approach fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of metro systems, where proximity to stations is critical for accessibility and ridership.
Better Approaches:
- Reprioritise transport budgets by shifting focus from road expansion to public transport.
- Embrace innovative funding mechanisms like value capture, tax increment financing, and overstation developments to help fund stations.
2. Immature strategic asset management.
Many governments are immature when it comes to managing and maintaining their assets. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) regularly reviews the state of American infrastructure. This year, it found that 40% of the roads in America are in poor or mediocre condition, and nearly 1 in 5 transit vehicles are in poor condition.
The poor condition of assets is often a combination of insufficient maintenance budgets and immature asset management practices, particularly the tendency toward reactive rather than proactive maintenance.
The consequences are predictable: short-term budget savings lead to premature asset failure, requiring costly early replacement that far exceeds what proper maintenance would have cost.
Better Approaches:
Transport agencies must improve their asset management maturity to drive better investment decisions, extend asset lifespans, and reduce total lifecycle costs.
3. Stop/start investment patterns.
Many transport investments are ‘lumpy’; they are made only periodically - for example, fleet replacements or the construction of new rail lines, creating significant inefficiencies:
- Agencies repeatedly build and disband teams, losing institutional knowledge and opportunities for continuous learning
- Service providers must constantly scale up and down, spreading risk across jurisdictions and inevitably increasing costs
- Specialist understanding of regional needs in service providers is repeatedly lost and must be rebuilt.
Better Approaches:
Moving toward continuous investment cycles reduces long-term costs and improves performance. France demonstrates what's possible - rather than disbanding the company that built Paris's Olympic metro lines, they've tasked it with developing regional rail projects, preserving valuable expertise and organisational capacity.
4. Increasing road capacity
Despite overwhelming evidence that expanding road capacity often worsens congestion in the long term, we continue making this error. This pattern persists due to:
- Public and political intuition that more roads equals less congestion
- Transport agencies clinging to outdated "predict and provide" planning models
Better Approach:
- Shift from "predict and provide" to vision-based planning that defines the transport system we actually want
- Develop comprehensive options to realise that vision
- Proactively identify congestion solutions beyond road expansion, such as freight rail investments to remove trucks from roads, public and active transport infrastructure to provide alternatives to driving.
5. Overreliance on Benefit Cost Ratios (BCRs)
Don’t get me wrong; I am not against BCRs - quite the opposite. However, we have taken the use of BCRs too far, assigning them a weighting on a decision that is not justified.
In 2020, the UK government reviewed its ‘Green Book’, which guides proposal evaluation. The review came about because of the difficulty of getting infrastructure projects to stack up outside London and southeast England. Key issues included:
- Failure to properly engage with strategic contexts and goals
- Heavy reliance on BCRs that aren't aligned with decision-makers' objectives
- BCRs favor easily monetised benefits while ignoring difficult-to-quantify values like health, environment, and placemaking
- BCRs often create a misleading impression of certainty
What is true in the UK also applies elsewhere.
Better Approach:
Leaders tend to fall into three categories regarding BCRs:
- BCR absolutists who make decisions almost entirely based on BCR figures
- BCR ignorers who dismiss unfavorable BCRs for preferred projects
- BCR pragmatists who consider projects based on strategic merits while using BCRs as one input among many
We need to help leaders understand both the strengths and limitations of BCRs to make better decisions and become BCR pragmatists. This should result in prioritising projects with strategic value, even when they have lower BCRs than less strategically valuable alternatives.
Conclusion
Short-termism in transport planning continues to create false economies where saving money today leads to significantly higher costs tomorrow. The examples discussed - building rail lines with too few stations, neglecting asset management, stop-start investment cycles, increasing road capacity, and overreliance on BCRs - all demonstrate how short-term thinking undermines long-term value.
The solutions require fundamental shifts in how we approach transport planning and investment:
1. We need to embrace more holistic funding models that recognise the true value of transport infrastructure beyond immediate capital costs.
2. Transport agencies must develop more mature asset management practices to extend infrastructure lifespans and reduce lifecycle costs.
3. Continuous investment patterns would create institutional knowledge, supply chain stability, and ultimately better outcomes at lower costs.
4. Moving from "predict and provide" to vision-based planning would help us build transport systems that serve our desired futures rather than amplifying current problems.
5. Decision-makers must understand BCRs as valuable tools with significant limitations, not definitive measures of a project's worth.
The cost of continuing our short-termist approach is expensive - not just in financial terms but in missed opportunities for creating better places. By taking a longer view, we can build transport systems that better serve communities for generations to come.
What changes can you make to your organisation today to start addressing short-termism?