💼 Good, but could be better

Good day my good friend.

To start with, a public service announcement. As Andy Williams sang, its the most wonderful time of the year, and that means there are changes to the regular scheduled programming of this newsletter. I will be spending some time with my family from the middle of December, and as a result my last newsletter of the year will be on 12th December, starting again on 9th January. Furthermore, next week I will run my usual end of year quiz, and the final newsletter of the year will be a personal restrospective on the year. So this is your last “proper” newsletter for a while.

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The UK Budget is usually all about big headline numbers and political drama (and not the entire thing being leaked shortly before the Chancellor stands to deliver in Parliament). But if you care about getting around the country in a cleaner, fairer way, this Budget is actually quite an interesting one. It is not a perfect green transport Budget, but there is more here for sustainable transport than you might expect.

I had a look through the main budget documents and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s Fiscal Outlook to find out what on Earth is going on. Much of what underpins this is forecasting over the medium term with quite some degree of uncertainty, so approach it with some degree of skepticism. And from my own review, here are the key messages that I took away.

The first big story is how the government is trying to future-proof motoring taxes.

Fuel duty has been frozen, cut and then frozen again for years. The headline freeze in the Budget sounds bad, but it only extends the temporary 5p per litre cut for just five more months, from March 2026 to the end of August 2026. From there it unwinds it in three small steps: 1p in September 2026, 2p in December and a further 2p in March 2027, taking duty back to its pre-2022 level of 57.95p per litre. From April 2027 it goes back to rising in line with the Retail Price Index each year. Could this be extended again? Yes, possibly. But for the first time there is a definitive roadmap back from freezes and cuts.

So this is not another indefinite fuel duty freeze. In fact, the policy scorecard shows it costs the Exchequer around £2.4 billion in 2026-27, falling to around £0.85 billion a year by 2029-30 as rates catch up again. That is real money, but modest next to the scale of the overall tax rises in this Budget.

For households, the government estimates this set of decisions on fuel will save the typical car-owning household about £89 next year compared with previous plans, on top of an average £40 saving from the new Fuel Finder scheme that should make pump price competition more transparent. Helpful, but not transformational, especially once duty starts rising again.

The much bigger structural change is Electric Vehicle Excise Duty (eVED), a new mileage-based charge on electric and plug-in hybrid cars from April 2028. EV drivers will pay 3p per mile alongside normal VED. The Budget says the typical EV driver will pay around £240 a year, roughly half the fuel duty paid by an average petrol or diesel driver, with plug-in hybrids paying an even lower rate (1.5p per mile). Buses, vans, HGVs and motorcycles are all outside the scope at the start.

The Policy Costings document puts some numbers on this. By 2028-29 the Treasury expects about 5.5 million electric and plug-in hybrid cars doing around 8,000 miles each year. On that basis eVED is forecast to raise around £1.1 billion in 2028-29, rising to about £1.9 billion by 2030-31. This starts to plug the hole in fuel duty revenues that the OBR has been warning about for years as EVs take over the fleet.

However, the impact on EV sales is genuinely uncertain. The costing assumes quite a strong price response: a demand elasticity of -2 for EV purchases as the lifetime cost goes up, and a smaller response for mileage driven. The OBR estimates that over the forecast period there will be around 440,000 fewer electric car sales than in its pre-Budget forecast, although most of that is offset by other pro-EV measures (more on those in a second), leaving a smaller net effect.

Those numbers rely heavily on modelling assumptions about how consumers and manufacturers react, how quickly battery costs fall, and how the zero emission vehicle mandate bites. The OBR explicitly flags that the tax yield is uncertain because it depends on EV uptake. So it would be wrong to say this Budget has clearly damaged the EV transition. It might slow uptake, but the combination of the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate and generous subsidies could just as easily keep sales on track.

And those subsidies are significant. The Electric Car Grant, which gives up to £3,750 off eligible EV models, gets another £1.3 billion and is extended to 2029-30. The expensive car supplement threshold in VED for zero-emission cars rises from £40,000 to £50,000 from 2026, saving affected EV owners about £440 a year. Capital allowances for zero-emission cars and chargepoints are extended, and the government delays bringing Employee Car Ownership schemes into full benefit-in-kind taxation until 2030.

Taken together, it looks like an attempt at an overall policy package that is somewhat balanced. EV drivers begin to contribute something closer to what petrol and diesel drivers pay, but still at a discount, while the Treasury uses some of the proceeds to shore up the roads budget and fund more charging infrastructure. For sustainability, that is not a bad outcome compared with the alternative of simply letting fuel duty wither without replacement.

If your low carbon travel is more likely to involve a season ticket than a Tesla, the second big bit of news is on public transport fares.

Transport costs are about 14 per cent of household spending on average. To help with that, the government is freezing all regulated rail fares in England for a year from March 2026. Regulated fares include season tickets, most commuter peak returns and off-peak returns between major cities. The Treasury estimates that on the most expensive routes the average passenger could save around £300 over the year compared with the usual inflation-linked increase.

The rail freeze will cost the Exchequer about £145 million in 2026-27, rising to roughly £165 million by 2030-31. That is not enormous in the context of rail spending, but it is a clear choice to tilt the balance slightly towards passengers rather than demanding passenger pay for the railways - the standard Treasury orthodoxy.

Alongside that, the Budget reminds us that the national bus fare cap has already been extended so that no single bus journey in England costs more than £3 until March 2027, covering around 5,000 routes. Bus use is heavily skewed towards lower income households and people who do not have access to a car, so keeping that cap in place is a targeted cost of living measure that is also good for modal shift.

What does this do for households? The detailed distributional analysis does not break out rail and bus measures in isolation, but it does show that, taking all tax, welfare and public service decisions since Autumn Budget 2024 together, all but the richest decile gain on average as a share of income in 2028-29, with the biggest percentage gains for the lowest income deciles. Rail and bus support are part of that picture.

The OBR estimates that the package of energy bill support, the temporary extension of the fuel duty freeze and the one year rail fare freeze together knock around 0.4 percentage points off CPI inflation in 2026-27 at the peak, before the effect unwinds as fuel duty rises again and the EV mileage charge comes in. Lower inflation directly supports real household incomes, and in this case some of that is coming from cheaper or frozen public transport.

From a sustainable transport perspective, freezing rail fares while petrol and diesel duty only enjoy a short extension of the cut is a small but welcome rebalancing. Rail travel becomes relatively cheaper than it would otherwise have been, which nudges behaviour in the right direction without making a huge dent in the public finances.

Away from the headline tax changes, this Budget is quietly doing quite a bit on big transport schemes too. It is a very mixed bag for sustainability, but not in a bad way overall.

Let’s start with the obvious elephant in the room - the Lower Thames Crossing. The Treasury describes it as the largest road building project for a generation, with another £891 million committed in this Budget to finish the publicly funded works, before handing long term construction and operation over to the private sector using a regulated asset base model. Great if you are a government who wants to build stuff. The key test will be whether ministers double down on demand management and good alternatives so it does not just fill up with extra car traffic.

In London there is a more obviously green story in the Docklands Light Railway extension to Thamesmead. The Budget confirms that Transport for London and the Greater London Authority will fund most of the scheme through borrowing, with the government chipping in over the long term. This is exactly the kind of project that can lock in low carbon travel for decades if it is tied to dense new housing and decent walking and cycling links. Thamesmead has been marooned for years so getting a rail line in, rather than just widening roads and hoping for the best, is a genuine positive.

Zoom out from individual lines and you can see the shape of a more network focused approach in the North and Midlands. The Northern Growth Corridor gets pride of place, with the £11 billion Transpennine Route Upgrade rolling on and another £15.6 billion going through the Transport for City Regions Fund and City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements. Mayors are using that money for very tangible schemes: renewing South Yorkshire’s Supertram, extending Metrolink to Stockport, buying a new low emission bus fleet for Liverpool City Region and turning Leeds station into a proper multimodal gateway. There is also explicit support for West Yorkshire Mass Transit and a Leeds City Fund that will recycle local business rates growth into the transport network and regeneration around it. Taken together, this is a serious attempt to give big city regions proper, integrated public transport systems rather than just patching up what they already have.

The Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor also gets the cash. The Budget talks about more than £500 million of support for the area, tied to East West Rail, new reservoirs, an AI growth zone and a series of new towns including Tempsford. Again, you can read this two ways. Done badly, it is a recipe for car based sprawl along a shiny new road and rail spine. Done well, it could be a textbook case of transit oriented development, where new housing and jobs are clustered around stations and linked by decent buses and cycle routes. The documents do at least nod to planning reforms that favour development around train stations and a faster system for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, which ought to make it easier to get sustainable transport schemes off the drawing board and into reality.

Then there is the very unglamorous but vital stuff. The Budget promises over £2 billion a year for local roads maintenance by 2029 to repair, renew and sort potholes which is roughly double what was in place when the government came in. Some of that higher, long term funding is explicitly linked to the new mileage based Electric Vehicle Excise Duty, which is meant to provide a more stable revenue stream for road upkeep as fuel duty fades. Smooth, well maintained roads sound like a win for drivers, but they matter just as much for buses, cyclists and people using mobility aids. If the money really does materialise and is not quietly shaved away in a few years, this is one of the more useful, if unflashy, sustainability wins.

Then there is the not-so-good stuff. The government is pressing ahead with enabling a third runway at Heathrow by 2035 and points proudly to recent decisions that unlock Gatwick expansion, solar farms and wind farms in the same breath. The airport bits sit awkwardly with climate targets, even if they are privately financed and kept off the public balance sheet. On the other hand, the planning changes that speed up approvals for clean energy projects and tilt policy towards development near stations could make it easier to deliver the infrastructure a net zero transport system needs.

Overall, if you line these schemes up next to the tax and fare decisions, the picture is more balanced than you might expect. Yes, there is a giant new road and more airport capacity in the mix. But there is also a clear pipeline of rail upgrades, urban mass transit projects, a London rail extension into an underserved area and a big step up in local road renewal that is tied to the shift to electric cars. It is not the all singing, all dancing sustainable transport Budget some might wish for. It is also a long way from a road builders charter of government’s past.

Beyond these headlines, there are several measures that matter for the wider green transport story.

First, the energy bill package should slightly improve the economics of EV charging at home. The government is ending the Energy Company Obligation levy on bills after March 2026 and will instead fund 75 per cent of the domestic share of the Renewables Obligation from the Exchequer between 2026-27 and 2028-29.

This is a major policy victory. It consumers will not be paying as much for the renewable energy transition, with more of it being funded through general taxes. Which means that if you want to charge your EV by sunlight and wind it becomes more beneficial to do it. Together these changes are worth around £150 a year to the typical household, equivalent to about £134 off the Ofgem price cap, mostly by reducing policy costs on electricity. So you can charge your EV with cheaper electricity.

Second, there is a quiet but important push on charging infrastructure. The Budget commits an extra £100 million for EV chargepoints on top of £400 million announced at Spending Review 2025, plus £100 million of resource funding to help local authorities hire and train specialist staff to plan and deliver public charging. It also introduces a ten year 100 per cent business rates relief for separately assessed EV chargepoints and EV-only forecourts, and extends generous first year capital allowances for chargepoints to 2027. These are exactly the sort of dull but necessary measures that make owning an EV feel less risky and more convenient.

Third, a couple of smaller tax changes tilt in a green direction. Air Passenger Duty’s higher rate is extended to all private jets over 5.7 tonnes from April 2027, raising a little revenue from one of the highest emitting ways to travel. Tour operators’ margin relief is removed for private hire vehicle services from early 2026, which should reduce the scope for tax-advantaged cheap car-based trips relative to other modes. None of this will transform aviation or car use on its own, but it points in the right direction.

Finally, the Budget makes a big thing of using part of the new eVED revenue to sustain very high levels of local roads maintenance funding, over £2 billion a year by 2029-30, enough for millions of pothole repairs annually - or fixing roads properly depending on your preference. Good road surfaces are not just for drivers. They matter for bus reliability and for people who cycle or use mobility aids, so this is another area where a motoring tax reform can support sustainable transport if the money is genuinely hypothecated.

Zooming out, the Budget as a whole is tightening the public finances over the medium term. The scorecard shows total policy decisions raising over £24 billion a year by 2030-31, largely from broader tax reforms on income from assets, property and frozen thresholds. Transport specific changes are only a small part of that story.

Within that small slice, the pattern is quite sensible from a sustainability point of view. In the short term the government gives up some fuel duty and rail fare revenue to ease cost of living pressures and support greener choices. In the medium term it starts to rebuild a stable tax base by charging EVs for the wear and tear they impose on the roads, while still giving them a tax advantage over fossil fuel cars and ploughing some of the proceeds into infrastructure.

There are risks. If the behavioural responses to eVED are larger than assumed, EV sales could slow more sharply, making it harder to hit carbon budgets and the zero emission vehicle mandate. If ministers give in to future pressure to prolong the fuel duty cut again, that is not good for sustainability. And none of this substitutes for long term capital investment in rail, bus priority and active travel, which sits mostly outside the details usually published in the Budget.

But judged on what is actually in these documents, it would be hard to call this a bad Budget for sustainable transport. Petrol and diesel get only a modest, time limited boost. Rail and buses are protected on fares in a way they have not been for decades. Renewable energy for EVs gets cheaper relative to fossil fuels. And the government at least starts the tricky conversation about how to replace fuel duty in an electric future, while backing that up with serious money for charging and EV support.

For a single fiscal event in a tight fiscal climate, that is not a bad platform to build a more sustainable transport system on. If I was to give it a score for sustainable transport, I think a C+ is about right. It could be better, but its not bad.

The clever clogs at our universities have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Trajectory planning for drone landing, incorporating wind-sensing capabilities, operational and safety objectives, and reinforcement learning

TL:DR - This paper designs a landing planner that fuses onboard wind sensing with multi-objective optimisation to achieve robust landings under wind gusts and operational constraints. Experiments demonstrate safer approach profiles and improved touchdown reliability versus baseline controllers in windy conditions.

Are the speed-crash models applicable for low speeds?

TL:DR - Using micro-scale before–after datasets from streets and traffic-calming schemes, the authors test whether the widely used Exponential speed-crash model holds at lower speeds. Results are mixed—about half the categories align with model predictions—so the paper cautions against uncritical use of macro-derived models for local, low-speed schemes.

ICT usage, social networks, interactivity, and satisfaction: an exploration of travel behavior for students from three European countries

TL:DR - A structural-equation and MIMIC analysis of 2,455 students in Lisbon, Granada, and Zagreb shows ICT use shapes travel and social satisfaction mainly indirectly through social-network size and interaction patterns. The study suggests online activity tends to reinforce rather than replace face-to-face contact, with implications for equitable digital-era mobility planning.

Can infrastructural investments reverse the unfavourable modal split in Poland? Findings from a local study of the railway venture

TL:DR - Survey and decision-tree analysis around a restored rail line indicate many residents would try the train, but relatively few would fully abandon the car without complementary policies. The paper profiles who is most likely to shift and underscores that infrastructure should be paired with service, pricing, and access measures to deliver environmental and social benefits.

Engineering urban mobility through a strategic framework for tram route design (AHP–TOPSIS with sensitivity analysis)

TL:DR - This article presents a replicable multi-criteria framework that combines AHP weighting with TOPSIS ranking to select tram alignments under spatial and budget constraints. It includes robustness checks via sensitivity analysis, offering practitioners a transparent method to compare candidate routes and justify investment choices.

Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.

South Wales Metro adds year-round late-night rail

Transport for Wales is introducing late-night Metro services from 14 December, extending operating hours across the Valleys to better serve workers and the night-time economy. The change comes with the December timetable and adds more options for sustainable trips after dark.

North Wales rail: Chester–Wrexham frequency doubled

The December timetable brings an extra hourly service between Chester and Wrexham (2tph) plus other tweaks, boosting connectivity on the Borderlands and Marches corridors.

Worcestershire On-Demand buses expand with £1 fares in December

Two new zones launched on 24 November (North Central and North Malvern) and one zone expanded; all zones are free 24–29 November, then £1 per ride through December to encourage take-up. A further zone follows in January.

Households get new bus network guides + 50% day-ticket offer

The council is mailing clear network guides (routes, timetables, WESTlink info) to residents, paired with a 50% discount on a day’s unlimited travel to nudge trial use of buses.

New intercity bus pilot links McMinnville–Corvallis–Eugene

A new public-transit pilot launched on 24 November, creating a regional bus link with stops in Corvallis to expand car-free access between cities.

Look, we all know that Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are evil plans by the Woke Leftist Latte-Sipping Commie Urbanists Libtards to track our every move (/sarcasm). But here are some examples from London that…work?

These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport, and not just think about transport itself. I hope that you enjoy them.

Lay back, chill out, and have this on in the background. Thank me later.