The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2023 was recently published. This survey, of 32000 people in 28 countries, asks about attitudes towards various institutions and organisations and is a reliable source of headlines every year about where we are all headed in our handcart. It makes fascinating reading and is amenable to every sort of motivated reasoning…to which I shall now add.
One of the core findings is that government and media are seen together, in most countries, as being unreliable sources of information and that commercial organisations and NGOs are more trustworthy sources of information. This is quite a staggering finding, when one thinks about it. Businesses and NGOs, after all, are explicitly set up to seek specific goals, and each class of organisation, in their own way, makes clear that it is trying to influence opinion in favour of its particular focus. Government and media, on the other hand, exist to provide general benefits and are supposed to be serving anybody…and yet the organisations that exist to serve us all are less trusted than those who admit they are trying to convince us of their own point of view.
You will have your own ideas about why this is and, as with any such statistics it is worth digging beneath the headline to understand the data in more detail, but my reason for mentioning it is to ask some questions about what (if anything) it might mean for transport decision-making.
The challenge with transport is that it depends on infrastructure, which has to be provided at a societal level, and that everyone’s personal decisions impact on everyone else. Few of us are immune to the contradictions this entails: I have observed before that roads, which are a public service provided free at the point of use (and funded by general taxation) are shared out, like the NHS, by queuing (or “congestion” as we call it in transport). Every decision to improve some people’s experience (by building another road, say) requires impositions on other people (by taxing them, or, more locally, by imposing the inconvenience of construction work and increased traffic with the concomitant noise, air pollution and so on). This is inevitably the stuff of politics – or to put it the other way around, politics is the way that we agree on our priorities in society. This is pretty obvious stuff…but what are the implications of a world in which the organisations that we rely on to do our politics are the least trusted organisations in our society? To go one step further we might note that much of our infrastructure is now in private hands: not our roads, for the most part, but our rail services, ports and airports, the energy and water systems and so on. If we extrapolate a bit from the Edelman data we could imagine that the private organisations that seek to make profit from these infrastructure might want to exploit the fact that they have equal or greater credibility with taxpayers and customers (who are, of course, the same people) than the organisations that commission and regulate them.
You might be able to think of examples that are local to you, and there are certainly examples at the national level. National projects like HS2, or. major roads projects like the Lower Thames Crossing have to depend on some level of consensus, over the medium term, to get built and lack of consistency leads to increased cost and delays as we have seen in these and other projects time and time again. Local to me, in Cambridgshire, the Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP – the regional body responsible for implementing the “city deal” money) have made proposals for transport solutions to support the massive economic and population growth in Cambridge – a city whose attractions are based around the charms of its mediaeval streets and buildings. The plans are to significantly expand shared transit (public transport) and to fund it with a road use charging scheme. They are in the middle of losing the political battle and the way the evidence base is represented is critical: the credibility of the public sector entities is seemingly outweighed by the protesting voices that purport to represent “public opinion”. The evidence suggests that the actual public opinion is fairly well balanced for and against the proposals but “public opinion” as represented in the debate is, well, less well balanced. (Note that I am not arguing for or against these or any other proposals here…for these purposes I’m focusing on how the debate is being staged and the assumptions being made about what, and who, can be trusted.)
These issues are not new and far cleverer people than me have thought deeply about them. But it behoves us, as transport professionals, to think about how we can deal with the world as we now find it. The role of evidence in policy and decision-making is an important example. Recognising that society has been operating in an unsustainable way for a very long time requires us to take the evidence of transport’s direct and indirect impact on the environment into account; but we also need to recognise that evidence doesn’t make priorities and decisions on its own: the way we weigh and interpret evidence is critically dependent on our values and assumptions. This is the stuff of politics and the more we recognise this and prepare for it the more effective we can be in helping society with the increasingly challenging decision-making ahead.