Soapboxing

Responding to urgent need, Roger Levett has prepared a complete programme for transforming the efficiency of all public services. We’ve got a leaked copy.

Has government just got used to getting things wrong? In so many areas of our public services - housing, planning, transport, to name but three - we need a radical rethink. You want examples? 

Housing demand

Housing pressure is coming more from shrinking households than growing population. And in energy, water, waste and car mileage two can live (almost) as cheaply as one. Instead of building lots of new houses, government should tackle the problem at root (so to speak) by offering a new shacking-up allowance, payable to any two people, of any sexual preferences or none, who agree to live together permanently in sufficient intimacy to reduce their housing demand. To prevent fraud, a new government agency, the Office of the Voyeur-General, would send inspectors out to check that Shackers really are living together in a degree of intimacy that yields housing and environmental savings. Benefits would be withdrawn from any who are found to be concealing a solitary lifestyle.

Transaction integration

If the business parks, malls and superstores currently dotted round the edges of built-up areas were instead concentrated in the middle, with the houses round the outside, people could combine different errands in each trip, thus needing to make fewer trips. Concentrating all these destinations in one place would also provide an intensity of custom that would support a good bus service. This would reduce the parking space needed, which would enable the buildings to be even closer together, making it even easier to combine journeys. Moreover, instead of each superstore and leisure centre having to provide an in-house café, each office complex having to provide a gym and a cash machine, and so on, they could each provide their own service for each other’s customers. There could be restaurants that people from lots of different offices could eat at! I have coined a new term for this revolutionary new concept: Compact Integrated Transaction Intensifying Edifice Systems, or CITIES for short.

Park and ride

Buses serving park-and-rides could be permitted also to pick up passengers at designated points along ordinary streets. These points could be marked with special metal flags on poles so people would know where to wait. This could greatly shorten the journeys people need to make to get to the park-and-ride, particularly if park-and-ride services were to penetrate further into rural areas. This might even enable some people to catch buses without needing to drive first at all, thus bringing bus travel within the reach of those without cars, and making it possible to reclaim some of the big park-and-ride car parks for more benign use as playing fields, or even to hand them over to farmers to grow food.

Traffic congestion

Congestion can only happen when there is road space for vehicles to get stuck on. More road space allows more congestion. The most effective way to prevent congestion is therefore simply to remove the roads on which it occurs, starting with the worst affected: the M25, M4 and M6. Three years notice should be given, to give congestees time to adopt coping strategies such as living near where they work, or working near where they live.

Travel safety

Roads are so smooth and straight that motorists can drive at dangerous speeds. There is an urgent need to improve road safety by introducing features such as sharp bends, blind corners and summits, irregular cambers, sudden arbitrary changes in width and potholes. This will encourage motorists to drive at prudent speeds and in a state of continual alertness to possible dangers. Making car travel slower and more demanding will also make the UK bigger again, so domestic holidays will regain a proper sense of adventure and intrepidity. Putting the unpredictability and sheer arduousness back into all forms of travel will restore the feelings of achievement and relief upon arrival that make it meaningful. To be fair, the rail industry has been doing its best to work towards this...

Pending his no-doubt imminent appointment as supreme efficiency guru, Roger Levett is a sustainability consultant at Levett-Therivel. For more from his programme Efficiency: The Next Thrust, contact him at roger@levett-therivel.fsnet.co.uk

9 March 2007

Roger Levett