The bicycle has one of the longest and most successful histories of any form of transport. During the nineteenth century it evolved from simple wooden machines into the familiar pedal cycle. By the late Victorian period Britain had become one of the world’s leading bicycle manufacturers. Thousands of local workshops produced frames, wheels, chains, saddles and components. Many engineering skills that later supported the motor industry were first developed in bicycle factories.
The bicycle was a truly local product. Every town had cycle shops that not only sold bicycles but repaired and modified them. Parts were interchangeable, skilled craftsmen could braze broken frames, and a bicycle might remain in service for decades.
The twentieth century brought enormous changes. Steel tubing became highly specialised, aluminium alloys became common, and later carbon fibre transformed racing bicycles. Manufacturing became concentrated in large factories, mostly overseas. The local cycle maker largely disappeared, replaced by retailers selling imported machines.
This model depends upon abundant energy, long international supply chains and continuous supplies of high quality metals. As the industrial economy contracts, each of these assumptions becomes less certain. Steel production requires huge amounts of energy and complex infrastructure. Aluminium is even more energy intensive. Carbon fibre depends upon sophisticated chemical industries. If these systems begin to fail, complete bicycles will become increasingly difficult to obtain.
That does not mean that cycling itself disappears. Quite the opposite. As fuel becomes expensive and motor transport contracts, bicycles become more valuable than ever. The question is not whether bicycles survive, but how they are made.
The answer may lie in rediscovering local manufacture using materials that can be obtained within the locality or recovered from the existing economy.
The first source of material will be recycling. Millions of bicycles already exist. Their frames, wheels, chains and gears represent an enormous stock of engineering materials. Even badly damaged bicycles contain useful components. Local workshops can recover, repair and rebuild machines almost indefinitely.
Eventually, however, even recycled steel may become scarce. Local communities will then need to explore other materials.
Timber offers one possibility. Modern wooden bicycles already exist, using laminated hardwoods such as ash, oak and beech. Properly designed wooden frames are surprisingly strong, absorb road vibration well, and can last for many years. Unlike metals, timber can be grown within the locality and replenished continuously through careful woodland management.
Bamboo provides another example where climate permits. It has exceptional strength for its weight and has been used successfully for bicycle frames in several countries. Although not suitable everywhere in Britain, it illustrates how natural materials can replace industrial ones.
Other parts can also return to natural materials. Wooden mudguards, leather saddles, wooden rims for certain applications, natural fibre baskets, hemp ropes and locally produced accessories all reduce dependence upon imported industrial products.
Local blacksmiths and engineering workshops could manufacture the few metal fittings still required from recycled steel. Bearings, axles and chains may remain the most difficult items to replace, making their careful maintenance increasingly important.
The bicycle itself may also change. Modern multi-speed machines are highly efficient but mechanically complex. Simpler designs, single-speed bicycles and direct chain drives require fewer specialised components and are easier to maintain locally.
This represents a return to an older philosophy. Throughout most of cycling’s history, people expected to repair rather than replace. A broken frame was brazed. Worn bearings were adjusted. Wheels were rebuilt repeatedly. Ownership meant stewardship rather than consumption.
Localism naturally supports this approach. Every locality could sustain a bicycle workshop employing skilled mechanics, woodworkers and metalworkers. Apprentices would learn practical engineering rather than simply replacing factory-built parts. The bicycle would once again become part of the productive economy instead of the consumer economy.
Ironically, the decline of industrial abundance may restore the bicycle to its original role. Not a fashionable recreational item, but an essential machine that local people understand, build, maintain and value.
The future bicycle may look rather different from today’s lightweight racing machines. It may contain more timber than steel, more craftsmanship than automation, and more local knowledge than imported technology. Yet it will still perform the same remarkable task that has made the bicycle one of humanity’s greatest inventions – transporting people efficiently using nothing more than human energy.
In a shrinking economy, that may prove to be one of its greatest strengths. The bicycle does not belong to the age of limitless industrial growth. Properly adapted, it belongs just as naturally to the age of localism.
The latest delay to approval of the first phase of the Hereford bypass is being presented as an administrative matter. Approval of the Full Business Case has slipped from July until September, while work on the Holme Lacy Road improvement scheme has also fallen behind schedule because of design changes and technical issues. The council says it will not enter a construction contract until the business case has been approved.
For many people this is simply another frustrating postponement. Yet the real lesson goes much deeper than delays to one road.
Britain has developed a system in which almost every important local decision depends upon lengthy approval procedures, detailed business cases, central government funding and layers of professional assessment. The result is that even projects which enjoy broad local support can spend years moving from one stage of bureaucracy to the next.
This is not simply a Herefordshire problem. It is a national problem created by centralisation.
Localism asks a different question. Why should local communities have so little authority over their own future?
A genuinely local system would allow localities to decide many of their own infrastructure priorities, raise a larger proportion of the money locally, and commission work directly. Decisions would still need to be made carefully and transparently, but they would be made much closer to the people who live with the consequences.
The endless cycle of studies, revisions, approvals and delays consumes both time and public money before a single vehicle uses the road. Every delay increases costs and undermines public confidence.
The bypass itself should not be viewed simply as another transport project. It raises a more fundamental question about how places organise themselves.
In a localist society, transport would be planned as part of a much wider pattern of local economic life. If more employment, shopping, food production, education and services were located within each locality, many journeys would disappear altogether. Roads would still be needed, but their purpose would change. They would connect self-reliant localities rather than compensate for an economy that requires people and goods to travel ever greater distances.
That does not mean bypasses have no place. Existing patterns of development have left Hereford with unacceptable congestion, and practical solutions are needed. But localism reminds us that the long-term answer is not simply to build more roads. It is to reduce unnecessary travel by rebuilding local economies that meet more of people’s daily needs close to home.
The repeated delays to the Hereford bypass therefore illustrate two different futures.
One future continues with increasing central control, where local projects wait for approval from distant institutions and progress depends upon complex administrative processes.
The other future trusts local people with greater responsibility for shaping their own places, reducing dependence on central bureaucracy and creating communities that need fewer large infrastructure projects because more of life takes place locally.
The debate about the bypass is therefore not just about transport. It is about where power should reside. As long as decision making remains concentrated at the centre, delays such as these are likely to remain a normal feature of public life rather than an exception.
Britain’s railways have once again become the battleground for a much larger argument. The Daily Telegraph article, “Labour’s rail nationalisation dream hurtles toward disaster”, presents the looming difficulties facing Great British Railways as a test of whether the state can successfully manage major industries. Yet perhaps the deeper question is not who owns the railways, but whether we have reached the limits of maintaining an industrial infrastructure that society can no longer afford.
The bizarre story of the “ghost train” from Manchester captures something of the absurdity of our predicament. A six-hundred-seat train departed empty to ensure that rolling stock would be available elsewhere, while passengers were left behind. Such incidents appear to confirm the failures of management, whether public or private. But they may also reveal something more profound. The system itself has become so complicated, so interconnected and so stretched, that rational decisions within one part of it produce irrational outcomes for those who depend upon it.
For decades Britain has debated whether railways should be privately operated or publicly owned. The arguments have become ideological. Supporters of nationalisation speak of public service and integration. Advocates of privatisation point to efficiency, competition and innovation. Yet both camps share an assumption that the existing scale of the railway network must somehow be preserved and expanded.
That assumption deserves examination.
The industrial age created infrastructures of astonishing complexity. Railways, motorways, airports, national electricity grids, water systems and telecommunications networks were built during periods of economic growth, abundant energy and confidence in continual expansion. They require constant renewal, enormous capital investment and highly specialised skills. Their maintenance costs do not stand still. As systems age, they often become more expensive to sustain.
The experience of HS2 should have taught this lesson. What began as a grand vision of modernisation became a symbol of spiralling costs and diminishing returns. Each additional mile demanded vast expenditure. The promise that ever larger projects would deliver prosperity appeared increasingly hollow.
Railways themselves face similar pressures. Tracks wear out. Signalling systems require replacement. Bridges age. Rolling stock must be renewed. Staffing costs rise. Passenger expectations increase. Yet the financial resources needed to satisfy all these demands may no longer exist in sufficient abundance.
The argument, therefore, may not be about state ownership at all. Public ownership cannot repeal economic reality. Nor can private ownership magically create resources that society does not possess. Changing the name above the door does not alter the underlying arithmetic.
Localism suggests another way of thinking.
Rather than assuming that every industrial structure inherited from the twentieth century must continue unchanged, communities may need to ask which systems remain essential and which have become unaffordable luxuries. Some railway lines undoubtedly perform vital functions. Others may represent attempts to preserve patterns of life shaped by an era of cheap energy and endless growth.
This is not an argument against railways. Rail transport remains one of the most efficient means of moving large numbers of people and goods. But it is an argument against the belief that bigger systems, more centralisation and ever greater complexity necessarily constitute progress.
Local economies depend less upon long-distance commuting and more upon opportunities close to home. If work, education, healthcare and recreation become more rooted in locality, the pressure on national transport systems may diminish naturally. The need for thousands to travel vast distances every day is itself a consequence of economic arrangements that separate people from the places where they live.
Perhaps the real lesson of Britain’s railway difficulties is that industrial civilisation has entered a period of choosing rather than expanding. The challenge is no longer how to build ever more elaborate systems, but how to simplify wisely and humanely.
Politicians may continue to argue over nationalisation versus privatisation. Yet future generations may judge that debate to have missed the central issue. The question was never simply who should own the railways. It was whether society had the means to sustain every inheritance of the industrial age.
In that case, the future lies not in preserving all infrastructure at any cost, nor in abandoning people to isolation, but in reshaping our way of life around what can be maintained locally, affordably and resiliently.
The ghost train leaving Manchester may prove to be more than an administrative embarrassment. It may stand as a symbol of an age trying desperately to keep moving along tracks laid down for conditions that no longer exist.
The recent article “Economic Entropy” on the Consciousness of Sheep website provides strong support for the view that localism is not simply a social preference but an inevitable response to the growing difficulty of maintaining large-scale infrastructure.
The article argues that all complex systems are subject to entropy. In simple terms, things wear out. Bridges crack, roads deteriorate, power stations age, water systems leak, and public buildings become unsafe. When societies are wealthy and energy is abundant, these assets can be repaired or replaced. However, as economic growth slows and resources become increasingly constrained, maintenance becomes harder and more expensive.
This is highly significant because modern economies depend upon vast networks of infrastructure that were largely built during periods of abundant energy and rapid economic growth. The author points to deteriorating bridges, ageing power stations and underfunded public assets across Britain as examples of a system struggling to maintain itself. Around 3,000 UK bridges are now considered unsuitable for heavy traffic, while many electricity generating stations are approaching the end of their operational lives.
For localists, this should come as no surprise.
Localism begins with the recognition that large systems are expensive to build, expensive to maintain and increasingly vulnerable to disruption. Every additional mile of road, railway, electricity cable, water main or communication network adds another future maintenance liability.
A locality-based economy works differently. It seeks to reduce dependence on distant systems by shortening supply chains and bringing essential activities closer to where people live. Food production, repair services, care of older people, small-scale energy generation and local enterprise all reduce the need for extensive infrastructure.
The entropy argument therefore strengthens the localist case. If maintaining national systems becomes progressively more difficult, then communities which can provide a greater proportion of their own needs locally will be more resilient. They will require fewer long-distance transport movements, less complex distribution networks and less reliance upon infrastructure that may become increasingly unreliable.
This does not mean that national infrastructure disappears. Railways, hospitals, telecommunications and some energy systems will continue to require national organisation. However, the balance is likely to shift. As the cost of maintaining large systems rises, the economic advantage increasingly moves towards local provision wherever practical.
The article also highlights another important point. Infrastructure decline is usually gradual. Bridges are weight restricted before they are closed. Roads receive temporary repairs. Power stations have their lives extended. Water systems limp on despite increasing leaks. The process is one of slow deterioration rather than sudden collapse.
This mirrors the localist view that society is not heading towards a dramatic breakdown but towards a long period of adaptation. As national systems become more expensive and less reliable, people will increasingly seek solutions closer to home.
In this sense, economic entropy is not merely a problem. It is also a driver of change. It encourages the re-emergence of local economies, local skills and local self-reliance.
The future may not be characterised by the construction of ever larger and more complex systems. Instead, it may involve rebuilding economic life around the locality, where infrastructure is simpler, maintenance is easier and communities are less dependent on distant networks whose upkeep can no longer be taken for granted.
The second law of thermodynamics may not have created localism, but it may prove to be one of the strongest forces pushing society in that direction.
The recent announcement that Oxfordshire County Council is rolling out a pilot programme of “quiet lanes” across rural roads fits neatly into a much larger shift that is now gathering pace across England. It also connects directly with the idea of localism, where decision-making, land use, and transport are increasingly shaped at the most local level rather than by distant national systems.
The Telegraph report on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) describes what are essentially rural minor roads where through traffic is restricted by gates, bollards, lower speed limits, and signage, while still allowing access for residents, farmers, emergency services, and local businesses. These are not closures in the absolute sense, but a reordering of priority. Roads that are used as convenient cut-throughs for non-local traffic are being returned to local use.
Gated lanes were not uncommon in the 1960s and earlier, especially where the lanes were unfenced, and sheep wandered freely.
Oxfordshire’s own documentation is explicit that this is about making minor roads “calmer and safer,” reducing speeds and vehicle numbers, and prioritising walking, cycling and horse riding, while retaining essential access. In practice, this is a structural change in how the countryside road network is being understood: not as a mini-motorway system, but as a local access system.
This sounds like localism
From a localist perspective, this development is significant for three reasons.
First, it restores the idea that rural lanes are primarily for the people who live and work along them. For decades, many of these roads have been treated as informal bypasses for satnav-driven traffic seeking quicker cross-country routes. Quiet lanes reverse that logic. They say, in effect, that speed and convenience for through-travel is less important than safety, peace, and local accessibility.
Second, it shifts power downward. The Oxfordshire scheme is explicitly locally led, dependent on support from parish and town councils and on evidence of local backing. That is a practical expression of localism: decisions about the character of a lane are made by those who experience it daily, not by a national traffic model.
Third, it changes the economic assumption behind rural infrastructure. The traditional model assumes that roads exist primarily to maximise movement efficiency at scale. The quiet lanes model assumes something different: that the value of a road can also lie in reduced traffic, reduced noise, and improved local usability.
Highway maintenance and the economics of quiet lanes
There is also a less discussed but important point: maintenance costs.
Quiet lanes are likely to reduce wear and tear on minor rural roads. Heavy through-traffic is a major contributor to:
carriageway deformation
verge erosion
hedge and ditch damage
frequent patching and resurfacing cycles
If through traffic is significantly reduced, the physical stress on the road network falls. That does not remove maintenance entirely, but it can shift a lane from being a heavily managed corridor to a lightly maintained local access route.
This matters because rural highway budgets are under constant pressure. Councils typically face the same dilemma: a long network of minor roads with limited funds for upkeep. In that context, reducing unnecessary traffic on the weakest parts of the network is not only a transport policy, it is a maintenance strategy.
Oxfordshire’s own approach acknowledges this indirectly by focusing on filtering through-traffic and keeping access only for those who genuinely need the route. Lower structural loads generally mean fewer interventions over time, particularly on narrow lanes that were never designed for modern traffic volumes.
A wider structural change
Seen in the broader picture, countryside LTNs sit alongside other changes: urban LTNs, 20mph zones, active travel planning, and the increasing use of modal filters. Together they point to a gradual reclassification of roads into two categories:
strategic routes for movement at scale
local routes for access and habitation
That distinction is very close to a localist model of geography, where scale matters. Not every road needs to serve national mobility. Some simply need to serve the locality well.
The tension
Of course, this shift is not without friction. Any reallocation of road space creates winners and losers. Through traffic is displaced onto main routes. Some journeys become longer. There is also a cultural adjustment required: the long-standing assumption that rural roads are “free for all movement” is being quietly revised.
But the direction of travel is clear. What is emerging is a countryside where the default assumption is no longer maximum connectivity for vehicles, but balanced use between local life and wider movement.
Conclusion
Quiet lanes and countryside LTNs are not just transport measures. They are a redefinition of rural space. They reflect a shift away from treating every road as part of a single high-mobility system towards a layered network in which local function is prioritised where appropriate.
In localist terms, they represent something quite simple: a return of rural roads to the people who actually live along them, and a recognition that not every journey needs to pass through the countryside at speed.
And if that also reduces maintenance burdens on fragile rural highways, it adds a practical economic argument to what is already a structural and cultural one.
The growing pressures on Britain’s transport system may ultimately strengthen the case for localism.
For most of the industrial era, the economy depended upon cheap transport:
cheap diesel
expanding road systems
large freight movements
centralised warehousing
mass commuting
national retail chains
long-distance food distribution
This allowed Britain to organise economic life on an increasingly large scale.
Food travelled hundreds of miles. People commuted long distances daily. Goods crossed the country overnight. Large urban centres absorbed workers from vast surrounding areas.
But all of this depended upon abundant surplus energy and affordable transport costs.
As diesel prices rise and the wider economy weakens, that model becomes progressively harder to sustain.
Heavy goods transport is particularly vulnerable because fuel is one of the largest costs for haulage firms. Some small operators already struggle with fuel costs and narrowing margins. At the same time, rail freight also faces rising energy and infrastructure costs because large parts of the railway system still depend upon diesel locomotives or expensive electrification.
Governments may attempt to support both road and rail systems through subsidy, but government itself faces growing financial pressures:
debt interest
welfare spending
NHS costs
infrastructure maintenance
ageing population costs
There are therefore limits to how much support can be provided indefinitely.
At the same time, households increasingly cannot afford continual increases in:
transport fares
fuel prices
delivery costs
energy bills
general living costs
The result may gradually become a contraction in transport demand itself.
This is especially important because much of Britain’s urban economy appears connected to discretionary activity:
hospitality
tourism
leisure
office administration
non-essential retail
entertainment
advertising
consumer finance
If discretionary spending weakens, associated travel and freight movement also weaken.
This is where localism becomes increasingly important.
Localism reduces dependence upon large-scale transport systems because more activity occurs nearer to where people live.
Instead of:
national food chains
long-distance commuting
centralised production
massive warehousing systems
a localist economy increasingly depends upon:
local food production
nearby employment
local repair
smaller distribution systems
shorter supply chains
walking and cycling where possible
essential rather than discretionary movement
In this context, localism is not simply an environmental preference or political theory.
It may become an economic adaptation to rising transport costs and declining surplus energy.
The implications are profound.
Large supermarkets depend upon huge distribution networks and constant freight movement. Urban office economies depend upon mass commuting. Online retail depends upon extensive delivery systems. Tourism depends upon discretionary travel affordability.
If transport costs continue rising while real incomes weaken, these systems become progressively more fragile.
communities become less dependent upon national logistics
local work reduces commuting demand
repair and reuse reduce freight demand
smaller local economies require less movement of goods overall
This does not mean the complete disappearance of national transport systems.
Britain will still require:
rail freight corridors
essential road freight
ports
strategic railways
specialist distribution systems
national infrastructure
But the balance may gradually shift.
The industrial growth economy assumed ever-increasing movement: more goods, more travel, more commuting, more consumption.
A shrinking economy increasingly encourages the reverse:
localisation
simplification
shorter supply chains
reduced discretionary movement
greater emphasis upon essentials
Under those conditions, localism may evolve not through ideology alone, but because it increasingly fits the economic realities of a society facing rising energy costs and declining transport affordability.
Last autumn, I received an internship application from Kozimo, who studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In his application, Kozimo sent a video of a large handcart he made, which he was driving on the streets of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
I have always dreamt of a handcart. I have never owned a car, and the only times I miss one are when I have to move stuff, something which has become increasingly common lately. Consequently, I proposed to Kozimo to build a handcart for me.
Now, I can no longer imagine living without it. I have used the vehicle to move houses and offices, pick up materials and objects I bought online (new or second-hand), and transport workshop and event materials (bike generators, solar panels, solar ovens, books, sound systems). I have done the same for friends. During these trips, I often took home materials, furniture, or objects that I found for free on the streets of Barcelona. However, the handcart turns out to be more than a functional vehicle for transporting things. It also offers a unique way of travelling, a transport mode that invites you to hang out and wander.
Why the original national infrastructure is the key to our decentralized survival.
Water transport is the oldest organized transport system in Canada, predating railways, highways, and even Confederation itself. Long before the first spike was driven into the Canadian Pacific Railway, Indigenous peoples navigated vast river systems for trade, migration, and sustenance. European exploration simply amplified this reality, turning waterways into the primary lifelines for the fur-trading empires that built the early economy.
Water: The Original National Infrastructure
The 19th-century canal revolution—from the Lachine (1825) and Welland (1829) to the Rideau (1832)—proved that artificial waterways could secure both trade and national defense. These projects allowed massive loads to move with minimal energy:
A single small engine or team of horses could tow barges carrying hundreds of tonnes. Canada’s resource economy—logging in B.C., wheat from the Prairies, and iron ore from the Shield—simply could not have flourished without this hydraulic backbone.
Decline, Survival, and the Logic of “Slow Freight”
While railways and trucks diminished commercial water transport in the 20th century, the network never truly disappeared. Today, as global supply chains falter and energy costs rise, the timeless logic of water reemerges.
In a localist Canada prioritizing self-reliance, waterways offer a low-energy alternative to fossil-fuel-dependent roads. A barge leverages gravity and displacement, using a fraction of the energy per tonne-kilometer compared to a semi-truck. Localities with river access gain a structural edge: the ability to move timber, grain, or aggregates without being held hostage by the volatility of global diesel prices.
A Grand Vision: The Great Northern Canal
To supercharge this localist revival, we must envision a project tailored to our geography: The Great Northern Canal. This monumental waterway would link the Mackenzie Delta in the Arctic southward through the boreal heartland, across the Prairies, and into the heart of the continent.
Strengthening the Continental Link: The Red River “Slot”
This isn’t a “moonshot” built from scratch; it is a project of connecting the dots. The natural geography for a north-south corridor already exists:
The Red River of the North: Unlike most rivers, the Red flows north from the United States into Lake Winnipeg. It serves as a ready-made “continental slot.”
The Lake Winnipeg Hub: By utilizing the massive reservoir of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan River system, we create a central terminal for the entire Canadian interior.
The Mississippi Connection: A short, strategic canal link between the Red River headwaters in Minnesota and the Mississippi River system opens a continuous water route from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
This creates a “Bi-National Watershed” that bypasses fragile coastal ports and expensive rail monopolies.
The Advantages of a Connected Watershed
Low-Energy Supremacy: Gravity and currents do the heavy lifting. In an energy-scarce world, moving bulk goods—timber south, grain north—becomes viable again.
Climate & Water Security: As southern droughts worsen, this canal serves as a “water redistribution artery,” moving northern surplus to irrigate Prairie farmlands and recharge aquifers.
Economic Anchors: Construction and maintenance foster local skills in engineering and ecology. Wharves become hubs for small-scale industry—sawmills, granaries, and workshops—that cannot be outsourced or automated away.
Conclusion: Making Canada Connected Again
In a shrinking economy, endurance trumps expansion. Water transport is decentralized, adaptable, and rooted in the land. From the historic Rideau to the visionary Great Northern Canal, we have the opportunity to reconnect a sprawling nation within its natural limits.The land has been waiting. The rivers are ready. It’s time to make the water work for us once more.
In law, a highway is a right enjoyed by the public to pass and repass. The adjoining landowners may own the surface, but the public right-of-way sits above it. In most rural lanes, the highway authority does not own the freehold. It maintains the surface and verges, but the subsoil usually belongs to the frontagers up to the centre line.
Highway authorities are normally county councils or unitary authorities under the Highways Act 1980. They have a statutory duty to maintain highways that are maintainable at public expense.
As the economy shrinks, traffic declines, and maintenance budgets shrink, authorities may conclude that certain minor lanes are no longer viable as publicly maintained carriageways.
Stopping up a public highway
To close a lane as a public highway, the authority cannot simply lock a gate. The public right must be lawfully extinguished.
There are three principal mechanisms:
Stopping up under section 116 of the Highways Act 1980. The highway authority applies to the Magistrates’ Court for an order stopping up the highway on the ground that it is unnecessary. Notice must be given to frontagers and the public. Objections can be heard in court.
Stopping up in connection with development under section 247 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. This is used where development makes the highway redundant. The Secretary of State makes the order following consultation.
Diversion rather than extinguishment under section 119 of the Highways Act 1980. The route may be altered instead of removed.
The authority must demonstrate that the highway is unnecessary for public use. In a shrinking economy, this argument would increasingly rest on measurable traffic decline, lack of strategic function, and the unsustainable cost of maintenance.
Transfer of responsibility and ownership
Stopping up extinguishes the public right. It does not automatically transfer ownership, because the highway authority often does not own the land beneath the surface.
In most rural lanes, once stopped up:
The land typically reverts fully to the adjoining landowners up to the centre line, free from the public right of way.
If the authority owns any strip of land, it may dispose of it under section 263 of the Highways Act 1980 or under general local authority disposal powers.
A formal extinguishment order should clearly identify boundaries to prevent later dispute. Land Registry updates may be required.
Reclassification as a bridleway
Instead of completely stopping up, a carriageway may be downgraded to a bridleway or restricted byway. This retains public passage, but only for specified user classes.
The categories of public right of way are defined in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 and related legislation. A bridleway allows passage on foot, horseback, and bicycle, but not motor vehicles.
Reclassification usually proceeds by:
A traffic regulation order removing vehicular rights, or
A public path extinguishment and creation order under the Highways Act 1980.
The process requires consultation, advertisement, and an opportunity for objection. If objections are not withdrawn, the order may be determined by the Secretary of State after inquiry.
Who maintains a bridleway?
If the former highway becomes a public bridleway:
The highway authority remains responsible for maintaining the surface so that it is passable for the class of users entitled to use it.
Adjoining landowners remain responsible for cutting back overhanging vegetation from their side.
The authority is not required to maintain it to vehicular standards.
If the route is fully extinguished and becomes private land, maintenance becomes the landowners’ responsibility entirely.
The financial and structural context
In a shrinking economy that does not return to previous levels of throughput, the issue is structural. Traffic volumes decline not temporarily but permanently. Fuel usage falls. Tax revenues contract. The network, designed for expansion, becomes oversized relative to demand and public finance.
The legal system already contains the mechanisms required. What changes is not the law but the frequency with which those powers are used.
Over time, minor lanes may move through three stages:
Full public carriageway
Downgraded bridleway or restricted byway
Fully extinguished highway, reverting to private land
Each step reduces the public maintenance burden.
The critical requirement is procedural order. Public rights cannot simply lapse. They must be lawfully extinguished or modified. If done carefully, the contraction of the highway network can be managed without legal confusion and without leaving ambiguous strips of land.
At some time in the shrinking future of the UK trams will again become financially viable.
Historic tram on the Burton & Ashby Light Railway crossing countryside between settlements (early 1900s).
Although the engineering principles are similar, the legal and procedural requirements differ in important ways. What follows sets out the principal processes in the UK context.
1. Securing Statutory Powers
In all three cases, statutory authority is required. This is normally obtained through a Transport and Works Act Order under the Transport and Works Act 1992.
A Transport and Works Act Order can:
Authorise construction and operation
Confer compulsory purchase powers
Permit stopping up or diversion of highways and rights of way
Grant deemed planning permission, and
Authorise works to or within the highway or open land
The application is made to the Secretary of State for Transport and includes detailed plans, land ownership schedules, and an Environmental Statement. Objections may trigger a public inquiry. Modern systems, such as Manchester Metrolink and Nottingham Express Transit, have used this procedure effectively.
2. Environmental Assessment and Consultation
Most tramway schemes require an Environmental Impact Assessment.
The Environmental Statement assesses:
Noise and vibration
Traffic and transport
Ecology and wildlife
Landscape and visual impact
Heritage and cultural assets
Flood risk and climate implications
Public consultation is formal and statutory. Consultees include local planning and highway authorities, the Environment Agency, Historic England, and utility undertakers.
Street-Running Tramways Within the Public Highway
Highway Authority Agreements
When rails are laid in the public highway, detailed agreements with the highway authority are essential.
Agreements cover:
Road layout alterations
Traffic signal control
Pedestrian and cyclist crossings
Maintenance responsibilities
Surface reinstatement standards
Traffic Regulation Orders under the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 are often needed to:
Restrict turning movements
Remove parking
Create tram-only lanes
Modify speed limits
Utility diversions are usually extensive due to dense underground services.
Tramways Along Abandoned Railways With Rails Removed
Ownership of the Corridor
A former railway alignment may be owned by:
Network Rail
A successor railway body
A local authority
A private landowner
Historic railway land can be fragmented. Some sections may have been sold, built upon, or absorbed into adjoining property. Careful title investigation and land registry checks are essential before acquisition. If voluntary purchase cannot be agreed, compulsory purchase powers within the Order are used.
Status and Structures
Former railway corridors may be subject to:
Public rights of way
Cycle routes
Ecological or landscape designations
Bridges, tunnels, culverts, and retaining structures must be inspected for load capacity and compliance with modern safety standards.
Tramways Across Open Land on New Alignments
Constructing a tramway across open land, whether agricultural, undeveloped, or peri-urban, introduces distinct legal and practical considerations.
Land Ownership and Acquisition
Open land must be assembled from multiple owners. Interests to consider include:
Freehold and leasehold ownership
Agricultural tenancies
Easements and covenants
Compulsory purchase powers under a Transport and Works Act Order may be required if agreements cannot be reached. Compensation must follow established statutory principles.
Agricultural and Rural Issues
If the route crosses farmland:
Field access and severance must be addressed
Drainage systems may need redesign
Fencing, livestock crossings, and farm access points must be incorporated
Agricultural tenants hold statutory rights that must be recognised and safeguarded.
Planning Policy and Landscape Impact
Open land schemes often raise planning issues:
Green Belt considerations
Local landscape character and scenic value
Impact on rural heritage and ecology
Although a Transport and Works Act Order can grant deemed planning permission, national and local planning policies and designations are central to the assessment.
Mitigation measures may include:
Earth bunds and tree planting
“Green track” surface construction
Sensitively designed alignments
Public Rights of Way
Open countryside frequently contains:
Footpaths and bridleways
Byways open to all traffic
These routes must be diverted, stopped-up, or accommodated with formal crossings authorised through the Order process. Protests from user groups are common and must be addressed.
Ecology and Environmental Constraints
Open land is more likely than urban streets to contain protected habitats or species. Surveys may identify:
Bats and breeding birds
Watercourses and wetland features
Priority habitats
Mitigation and habitat replacement can be required as conditions of project approval.
Safety Regulation and Authorisation
Before passenger operation, the Office of Rail and Road must authorise the system.
Requirements include:
A Safety Management System
Comprehensive risk assessments
Operating rules and procedures
Driver training and certification
Emergency plans
Street-running sections raise interaction risks with pedestrians and other road users. Former railway and open land sections require fencing, boundary security, and level crossing safety.
Funding, Governance, and Construction Controls
Capital funding must be secured before construction begins. Funding sources include:
Central government grants
Local authority transport budgets
Borrowing and bonds
Developer contributions
During construction, controls include:
Temporary road closures
Traffic Regulation Orders
Environmental management plans
Compliance with Construction (Design and Management) Regulations
Open land construction typically involves earthworks, new structures, and utilities installation.
Ongoing Maintenance and Liability
Responsibilities must be allocated for:
Track maintenance
Interfaces with highway surfaces
Bridges, culverts, and structures
Boundary fencing and vegetation management
Liability, insurance, and indemnities must reflect the mix of public highway, segregated corridor, and open land environments.
Conclusion
A tramway within a public street depends heavily on highway law and traffic regulation. A tramway along an abandoned railway depends upon precise title investigation and structural renewal. A tramway across open land demands comprehensive land assembly, planning justification, and environmental mitigation.
In every case, the Transport and Works Act 1992 provides the statutory backbone. What drivers, planners, and communities see on the surface is the result of careful legal and administrative work behind the scenes.
Fact 1: Britain is an extremely expensive place to build just about any kind of infrastructure.
Britain is currently building both the world’s most expensive nuclear power station and the world’s most expensive high speed railway line. British tram projects cost on average twice more than the average European tramway and three and a half times more than the average German tramway. The planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing (a road tunnel between Kent and Essex) cost more to produce than it cost Norway to build the world’s longest road tunnel and the world’s deepest subsea tunnel combined.
Fact 2: Britain is an extremely centralised country. Local leaders in Britain lack the power to independently approve or fund (via local taxes) new transport infrastructure.
To obtain permission to build new transport infrastructure, English local authorities must submit a planning application (Transport Works Act Order/TWAO) to the Department for Transport. In the case of a recent one mile tram extension, it took four years from submission to approval for the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) to obtain the TWAO.
To fund projects, cities and regions submit bids to the Department for Transport, who in close collaboration with the Treasury, decide whether or not to fund projects from general taxation. By contrast, Dijon (France) was able to plan, approve, fund, and build a 12 mile tram network in just 4 years. The project was funded via a local payroll tax on large employers (the Versement Transport). On a per-mile basis, the West Midlands project cost six times more than the Dijon project.
***
Is the latter (centralisation) to blame for the former (high infrastructure costs)? Alon Levy of the Transit Costs Project (TCP) doesn’t think so. In a recent blog, they argue that while there may be good reasons to devolve power, Britain’s centralisation isn’t the driver for Britain’s high infrastructure costs.
For those unaware, Alon Levy and the TCP have been extremely influential in highlighting the massive disparity in infrastructure construction costs between the Anglosphere and the rest of the world. The TCP has produced a number of country-specific deep dives into infrastructure construction. Readers can skim the Sweden, Italy and Istanbul studies to find out what works, or read the Boston and New York studies to find out what doesn’t. For those looking for even more lessons on what not to do, there will soon also be a UK study, covering Crossrail, the Northern Line Extension, and the DLR.
Levy’s key takeaway from this, as yet unpublished, UK study is that Britain’s infrastructure cost problems are not the result of excessive centralisation, but rather down to the gradual adoption of what Levy dubs the ‘globalised approach’. In essence, Britain, like other Anglosphere countries, outsources almost everything. Low-cost countries like Sweden and Italy maintain a core of engineering expertise within the state and complex projects are designed in-house then put out to tender. Britain, by contrast, is heavily reliant on private-sector consultants to design projects and public tenders bundle up design and construction. When projects finish in Britain, teams disband. Lessons learnt are lost. By contrast, the Swedish engineers who designed the Citybanan (a crossrail-style tunnel through Stockholm connecting up commuter rail lines) moved on to designing Nya Tunnelbanan (a massive expansion of the city’s metro system).
Levy points out that Italy can build cheaply (far cheaper than Britain) despite high levels of centralisation. What sets Italy apart is the deep banks of engineering knowledge within the state – knowledge that the British state can only access when it hires consultants at high cost (and at a severe informational disadvantage). It should be noted Levy concedes that Italian centralisation does differ in one key way: Britain relies on ministerial approvals while Italy lets civil servants with expertise in engineering get on with it.
I have argued before that while the direct costs of regulation, such as the requirement to build a £120m bat tunnel (a tenth of a percent of HS2’s total budget), are insufficient to explain why British infrastructure is so expensive to build, regulation is still a major cost-driver via an indirect route.
What matters for cost reduction is ultimately the ability to retain expertise between projects, to build supply-chains that spread fixed-costs over multiple projects, and to innovate in construction and design. The problem is regulation undermines all of these proven cost-reducers. In the case of nuclear, safety regulations force frequent design changes between projects undermining learning-by-doing. While a long drawn-out and uncertain planning process (plus the threat of judicial review) mean that investments in supply chains become incredibly risky – workers and equipment may sit idle for years between projects.
So why might centralisation be an issue? Because it exacerbates the planning and regulatory problems that drive costs increases.
In Britain, local authorities have every incentive to block new development and little incentive to say yes. New homes put pressure on public services and infrastructure. In some parts of the world, new development also brings a new cash flow. A $500,000 (£400,000) home in Houston generates around $9,000 (£7,200) in annual property tax revenue. Council tax in England is far lower, a home of equivalent value might bring in just £2,200 a year, roughly a third as much. And in Britain, councils have fewer freedoms to spend that revenue on their priorities – most of that £2,200 will go on statutory services like social care.
Britain’s most significant tax on housing is Stamp Duty, which flows directly to HM Treasury (and not to the local authority). Business Rates, which apply to commercial development, are only partially retained. Outside of special areas, local authorities only receive half of the revenue raised from business property taxes on new development. And funding formulas for local government often change for redistributive ends. Put simply, the fiscal incentives to approve development in Britain are extremely weak.
Some argue that the way to overcome local opposition to development is shifting decision making up a level. Labour’s re-imposition of housing targets and California’s Builders’ Remedy (where places that fail to build are forced to approve new homes) are two examples of this approach. The Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project system, where planning approval for major transport and energy projects is decided on by independent central experts (and not the areas affected) is another.
Want to stop new homes being built on farmland near the edge of your town? Lobby for a stronger green belt that blocks homes being built on farmland on the edge of every town. Want to stop a new motorway that might shift traffic to your area? Campaign for tougher nature protections that apply equally to motorways in Kent, trams in West Yorkshire, and nuclear power stations in Somerset. Anti-pylon activists in East Anglia are some of the strongest defenders of the National Landscapes duty, which blocked a station car park expansion in Essex, created problems for airport expansion in Bedfordshire, and delayed housebuilding in Kent.
And if you are a Government minister who wants to repeal a law that makes it easy to sue developers or a law that mandates extensive consultation, be prepared to fight a coalition of people opposed to motorways in Kent, homes in Hampshire, and nuclear power stations in Somerset who would have little in common other than opposing development near them.
Not every development is unpopular, but even popular developments have to comply with regulations and requirements designed to stop unpopular developments. There are few environmental wins more clear-cut than taking cars off the road and replacing them with trams. Trams are good for air quality, cut carbon emissions, and reduce noise. They are also popular. Poll after poll shows high levels of support for a tram in Leeds. Yet the same environmental bureaucracy built-up to delay and block more controversial types of development is also holding up popular new green infrastructure. Over 5,000 environmental surveys have been carried out for the now-delayed Leeds tram.
In other words, the incentive mismatch caused by Britain’s excessive centralisation has not only prompted the creation of tools to stop controversial development, but also created the crud that makes it hard to build almost anything.
This incentive mismatch is not the only driver of the growth of planning and environmental red-tape. People support environmental regulation in part because they sincerely want to protect the environment. Post-Grenfell fire safety rules make it much harder to build new residential towers, but they were adopted out of a genuine concern for safety. Planners genuinely believe that the planning restrictions they advocate around light, outdoor space, height, and so on, do create more ‘liveable’ places. Yet centralisation matters here too. If local authorities depend on new development for revenue, they would have a strong incentive to push back on excessive restrictions on building. There would be a political cost to regulatory growth. The problem is for many opponents and veto-players, the trade-off for greater environmental protection/fire safety (less development) is a feature not a bug.
France’s rapid nuclear buildout is sometimes understood as a triumph of the state overriding local objections. Tony Benn was famously told by a French official that ‘when you drain a swamp, you don’t consult the frogs’. Sizewell C by contrast had 7 separate consultations in 8 years. Yet there’s another side to the story. France’s tax system, which levied taxes on business structures (a bit like business rates), meant that areas which hosted nuclear power stations benefitted massively financially. Alex Chalmers notes that “French councils paid an average of €35 in subsidies … per local resident. In the 19 areas that hosted nuclear power, the average was €450.” This may be why support for France’s nuclear programme remained strong even in the wake of disasters like Chernobyl.
It is a world away from the incentives in Britain. Hinkley Point C’s community benefit package of £128m over 40 years works out to roughly £6 per Somerset resident per year. Britain’s tax on business structures provides much weaker incentives to approve development: councils retain only 50% of the rates they raise locally, face levies of up to 50% on ‘disproportionate’ growth, and see gains redistributed nationally based on ‘needs’ at regular intervals. Unlike in France, Hinkley Point C’s rates windfall will not lead to local tax cuts visible on every household bill.
There are other ways centralisation creates problems in Britain. Transport projects are typically funded out of national pots. There is a separation between who pays, who benefits and who approves. If a project is over-budget or gold-plated in various ways, locals don’t bear the burden. Londoners are not paying £4bn more in tax because Crossrail was £4bn over-budget. Instead, the costs are spread across the whole country. This can happen, as it did with HS2, but when a project has sufficient momentum behind it, it becomes a prime opportunity to get pet projects funded.
Britain’s planning system contains multiple veto points where public bodies who have, at best, weak incentives for projects to be delivered cost-effectively can cause significant delay (and in some cases, kill projects all together).
When Crossrail was being planned, Tower Hamlets Council submitted a list of 96 objections. After extensive negotiation Crossrail were able to resolve the dispute – by accepting 94 of them – though the Council came back with even more. Due to the length of Crossrail, this process was repeated for 15 other councils. In some cases, redesigns in response to objections (the Fire Brigade requested eight large emergency evacuation shafts across Central London) were themselves redesigned (read: cancelled) in response to objections from boroughs.
Water Transport as the Original National Infrastructure
Water transport is the oldest organised transport system in the UK. Long before railways or motor roads, rivers and coastal waters carried bulk goods cheaply and reliably. Timber, stone, grain, coal, clay, lime and later manufactured goods all moved by water. Settlements grew where boats could reach. Waterways shaped the economy, the landscape, and the pattern of daily life.
Natural rivers such as the Thames, Severn, Trent and Ouse formed the backbone of early trade. By the seventeenth century, these rivers were being improved with locks, weirs and cuts to make them more reliable. The real transformation came in the eighteenth century with the building of canals.
The canal age began with the Bridgewater Canal in 1761. Built to carry coal cheaply into Manchester, it demonstrated that artificial waterways could dramatically reduce transport costs. This triggered a national boom. Over the next seventy years, thousands of miles of canals were built, linking coalfields, factories, farms, ports and towns into a single connected system.
Canals allowed heavy goods to move using very little energy. A single horse could pull a boat carrying thirty tonnes. This was not just cheaper than road transport, it was transformational. The industrial economy of the UK could not have developed without canals.
Decline, Survival and Reuse
The arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century, followed later by motor transport, reduced the commercial importance of canals. By the mid-twentieth century, much of the network was derelict. Some waterways were filled in or abandoned. Others survived by chance.
Yet the network never disappeared. A surprising proportion of canals and navigable rivers remained intact. In recent decades, many have been restored for leisure boating, walking, wildlife and heritage. Organisations such as the Canal & River Trust now maintain a system that still links much of England and Wales.
What is often overlooked is that this network remains physically capable of carrying freight.
Water Transport in a Shrinking, Localist Economy
As the formal industrial economy contracts, the logic that once made water transport essential begins to reassert itself.
Road transport depends heavily on diesel, imported vehicles, complex supply chains and continuous cash flow. Water transport depends on gravity, simple engineering, and modest maintenance. It is slow, but it is reliable and extremely energy-efficient.
Localist areas with access to canals or navigable rivers have a structural advantage. They can move bulky, low-value goods without relying on long-distance lorry traffic. Timber, firewood, charcoal, building stone, bricks, lime, grain, compost, soil conditioners and even prefabricated components can all be moved by water.
In such localities, workshops, yards and small processing sites naturally cluster near wharves. Employment follows. Skills return. Boat building, maintenance, loading, unloading and storage all create work that cannot be outsourced.
Water transport also encourages cooperation between localities. One area produces surplus timber. Another produces lime. A third grows food for processing. The canal or river quietly links them without requiring a centralised system.
The Return of Local Export Networks
The historic canal network already connects much of the UK. From the Midlands, goods can reach the Thames, the Severn, the Mersey and the Humber. This allows local production to reach distant markets without relying on fragile road systems.
In a localist future, export does not mean mass global trade. It means surplus moving steadily between localities. A woodworking area exports finished timber products. A food-producing area exports preserved food. A pottery area exports bricks, tiles or domestic ware.
Waterways allow this to happen at a human pace, aligned with declining discretionary demand and rising practical need.
Building New Canals for New Localities
One of the most important possibilities is the construction of short, new canals linking productive areas into the existing network.
These would not be grand national projects. They would be modest, locally driven connections. A productive area that lacks water access could justify a new canal if it enables long-term export of bulky goods.
Historically, canals were often built by local investors for very specific purposes. There is no reason this logic cannot return, especially where land values fall and employment needs rise.
Waterways as Economic Anchors
In a shrinking economy, stability matters more than speed. Water transport provides that stability. It is resilient, decentralised and understandable. It supports local production without demanding constant growth.
Localities with access to canals and rivers are likely to become anchors of the emerging informal economy. They will be quieter than the industrial past, but more durable. Water will once again shape how goods move, how people work, and how localities relate to one another.
The future of water transport in the UK is not nostalgic. It is practical. It fits a country learning how to live within limits, while still remaining connected.
The early waggon ways of Britain, built long before steam engines, were not the beginnings of a public transport system. They were something much more specific and much more powerful. They were the physical infrastructure of the coal economy.
From the early 1600s onwards, hundreds of miles of wooden and later iron-railed tracks were laid across Northumberland, Durham and parts of Yorkshire. Their purpose was simple. They moved coal from pitheads to rivers and ports. Almost every early line ran from a colliery to a staith on the Tyne, Wear or Tees, where coal could be tipped straight into ships bound for London and other cities.
This was not a minor trade. By the late seventeenth century, London was burning well over half a million tons of coal each year. Houses, breweries, glassworks, brick kilns, metal workshops and lime burners all depended on it. Without cheap, reliable coal transport, the city would have stalled.
Waggon ways made that possible. Iron-tyred wagons running on wooden rails created far less friction than carts on muddy roads. A single horse could pull a load five or six times heavier than it could on an ordinary track. The cost of moving coal collapsed, and the volume surged. These lines were, in effect, long, thin conveyor belts feeding the capital with energy.
Because of this, the geography of the system was highly specialised. Tracks ran downhill from pits to rivers. They did not link towns to towns. They did not form networks. They were industrial arteries, not public roads.
This brings us to the question of farm produce.
In practice, waggon ways carried almost no agricultural goods. Farmers did not use them to send grain, vegetables, milk or animals to market. There were three reasons.
First, the lines were privately owned by coal companies. They were built, maintained and controlled to serve pits and staithes. They were not open-access routes for the surrounding countryside.
Second, their layout made them useless for farming. They ran from mine to river, often across open moorland or along narrow industrial corridors. Farms lay scattered across fields and lanes, nowhere near the rails.
Third, agriculture already had a transport system that suited it better. Farm produce moved in small, mixed loads to many different markets. That was done by carts, packhorses and later canals. Waggon ways were designed for one thing only, moving huge volumes of a single heavy commodity in one direction.
There were a few later exceptions. Some lines carried stone, lime or iron ore where those lay close to collieries. But these were still extractive, bulk materials, not the outputs of everyday farming.
When steam locomotives appeared in the early nineteenth century, they did not create a new pattern of movement. They inherited an old one. The first railways ran where the waggon ways had already gone, from coalfields to ports and industrial towns. Passenger services and agricultural freight came later, layered onto a system that had been built to serve energy first.
In that sense, Britain’s railways did not grow out of a desire to connect communities. They grew out of the need to feed a distant city with fuel.
The iron roads that eventually carried people and food across the country began life as wooden tracks whose sole purpose was to move black rock to the sea.
Scamell Scarab three-wheeled delivery tractor used by British Railways in the 1950s.
When I was young in the 1940s and 50s, there was a very particular sight around country railway stations that many people today have forgotten. It was the small three-wheeled delivery tractor with a single wheel at the front and two at the back, pulling a flat trailer of goods from the station yard to shops, farms and businesses.
Many of these vehicles were Scammell Scarabs. They were not lorries in the modern sense. They were designed to work in tight spaces. Their triangular shape allowed them to turn almost on the spot, which made them ideal for crowded goods yards and narrow village streets.
In those days, the railway goods (freight) system was intensely local. Trains brought coal, fertiliser, food, animal feed and parcels into small towns and villages. From there, these little tractors took the goods the last mile. Rail did the long haul. The Scarab did the short haul.
That system was not scrapped because it was inefficient. It disappeared because diesel lorries and motorways enabled the centralisation of everything into distribution centres far from where people lived. For a while, that seemed cheap and convenient. But ithas tied the whole freight system to liquid fuel and long road journeys.
Now we are moving into a very different world. Diesel is not literally running out, but it is becoming more expensive, more politically sensitive and more vulnerable to disruption. At the same time, the government is pushing to end the sale of new diesel heavy goods vehicles over the next fifteen years.
Electric lorries may work well for some jobs, especially where vehicles return to base and can charge overnight. But for long-distance heavy freight, they remain difficult. Batteries are heavy. Charging takes time. Motorway service areas do not yet have the electric power required to recharge fleets of lorries.
This is why rail will come back into the conversation. Rail is already one of the most energy-efficient ways to move heavy loads over long distances. If the main routes are electrified, trains can then run on domestic electricity rather than imported diesel.
But rail on its own is not enough. Every load still has to get from local stations to its final destination. That last mile is where modern electric vans come in. They are the modern descendants of the old Scarabs.
This is where the idea of rebuilding some branch lines and local stations with goods yards becomes essential. We do not need to reopen every rural railway. But having more rail-connected local freight hubs would allow containers, pallets and bulk goods to be brought close to where they are needed.
From there, local electric vehicles could quietly and cheaply deliver the goods. Villages would no longer need streams of heavy lorries coming from distant warehouses. Instead, they would be served from nearby rail hubs, just as they once were.
In effect, we would be recreating a modern version of the old system. Rail for the long distance. Small electric vehicles for short distances. It is not nostalgia. It is simple energy logic.
[ChatGPT created the picture at the top of this article. It shows a Scammell Scarab doing that job in the 1950s. But it shows the vehicle on the passenger platform. I could not persuade ChatGPT to place the vehicle on the other side of the building.]
Heritage railways exist across the UK, mostly as leisure attractions. They are usually short lines, often between five and fifteen miles long, using restored steam or early diesel locomotives. Many follow the routes of former branch lines closed in the mid-20th century. There are over 150 heritage railways, with a combined track length of roughly 550 to 600 miles. Most are run by charities or trusts and rely heavily on volunteers.
In their current form, heritage railways depend largely on tourism and discretionary travel. Families visit for days out. Enthusiasts travel long distances to ride behind particular locomotives. This model assumes spare income, cheap fuel, and a willingness to travel for pleasure. In a shrinking economy, those conditions weaken. Discretionary spending falls. Tourist travel declines. Long journeys become less affordable and less frequent. As a result, the existing heritage railway model becomes increasingly fragile.
However, decline in tourism does not automatically mean decline in usefulness. It may instead force a change of purpose.
In the 19th century, Britain’s railways flourished in an economy far smaller than today’s. Total economic output was a fraction of current levels. Average incomes were low. Most people lived close to where they worked. Travel was limited and purposeful. Yet by the 1870s Britain had more than 15,000 route miles of railway, much of it serving small towns, villages, farms, quarries, forests, and ports. Many lines were slow, lightly used, and short. They existed to support everyday life, not leisure.
The key difference lies in the nature of travel. Victorian railways did not depend on tourism or discretionary trips. They carried workers, food, fuel, tools, animals, mail, and local passengers making short journeys. A five or ten mile trip was normal. Speed was modest. Frequency mattered more than comfort.
A shrinking economy pushes society back towards that pattern. As discretionary travel declines, people travel less often and over shorter distances. Car ownership becomes harder to sustain. Fuel costs become uncertain. At the same time, economic activity becomes more local. Food production, repair, care, storage, and small-scale manufacture take place closer to where people live.
In that context, heritage railways could evolve away from tourism and towards local utility.
Many heritage lines already connect small towns with their surrounding countryside. Some pass close to farmland, woodland, former industrial land, or edge-of-settlement sites suitable for workshops and depots. Their low speeds are not a disadvantage when journeys are short. A train running at 20 miles an hour over five miles is slow only by modern, long-distance standards.
Energy use also matters. Steam traction, often dismissed as obsolete, is adaptable. Steam locomotives can operate on coal, wood, or charcoal. In a future where liquid fuels are scarce or expensive, this flexibility becomes valuable. Heritage railways already possess the skills, tools, and workshops needed to maintain such systems without digital dependence.
Employment is another factor. Heritage railways are labour-intensive. They require drivers, firemen, track workers, maintenance staff, signal operators, and administrators. In a shrinking economy, labour becomes more available while capital becomes more constrained. What is now volunteer activity could shift towards modest, locally paid employment, embedded in the locality rather than dependent on visitors.
Socially, local railways function as shared assets. Stations become practical places again, not attractions. Timetables respond to local needs rather than tourist peaks. Governance remains close to the ground, fitting naturally with a wider shift from centralised systems towards informal, locally managed ones.
Not every heritage railway would be suitable for this transition. Some are isolated. Some serve routes with no remaining local demand. Some are too closely tied to the visitor economy. But others could adapt gradually. Tourist services might reduce while regular local services increase. Goods wagons could return alongside passenger coaches. Income could shift from visitor fares to subscriptions, local contracts, or support linked to food, fuel, and materials movement.
As tourist and discretionary travel declines, systems built around leisure struggle. Systems built around necessity endure. The revival of heritage railways would not be about nostalgia or days out. It would be about rediscovering a form of transport that works at small scale, with low energy use, high human involvement, and strong local purpose.
The 19th century railway network grew in an economy far smaller than today’s and with very limited discretionary travel. As the modern economy contracts, similar conditions re-emerge. Under those conditions, heritage railways may find that what once made them seem obsolete is precisely what makes them relevant again.
BUT. The construction of the vast railway network in the 19th century was an essential element of the growing capitalist economy. Not so now.
I have chatted about the use of wood tramways for moving heavy loads within local areas where a wood-based economy has taken over.
Here are some examples
The Blyth wooden wagonways
The “wagonway” system was an early form of railway — wooden rails (often beech) laid on oak sleepers, over which horse-drawn wagons ran. This was before steam locomotives existed. Wikipedia+2loit.org.uk+2
Wagons (often called “chaldrons”) could be drawn by a single horse — and on level ground one horse could pull a surprisingly large load: up to about 10.5 tons of coal for “24 miles”, according to one historical account. Suscram.+2Suscram.+2
These wagonways allowed collieries (coal mines) inland to transport coal to the river/harbour at Blyth, from where coal was shipped — coastal shipping was often the way coal was exported. blythtown.net+2England’s North East+2
The rails were originally beech wood on oak sleepers; wagons had wooden wheels with nails driven into them to reduce wear. Each wagon was drawn by one horse and guided by a man. blythtown.net+2Wikipedia+2
The route of the old wagonway influenced the later layout of streets in Blyth (for example, what is now “Plessey Road” runs along part of the old wagonway). blythtown.net+1
Bebside (Blyth) Wagonway
There was an earlier wooden wagonway built before 1606 from a coal mine at Bebside to the River Blyth. heritagegateway.org.uk
This is recorded as perhaps the earliest known wagonway in Northumberland. heritagegateway.org.uk+1
So — there were at least two (maybe more) early wagonways around Blyth: the Bebside/Blyth and Cowpen/Blyth lines — very early in the 1600s — and then later Plessey-to-Blyth, which became the main route for coal transport for over a century.
🌍 Historical Significance
The wooden wagonways around Blyth are among the earliest examples in Northumberland — and in Britain more generally. The trend began after the success of the very early Wollaton Wagonway (1603–1604), built elsewhere in England. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
They played a critical role in enabling coal from inland pits to reach the coast for shipping. Without roads or canals reliable enough for year-round coal transport, wagonways offered a revolutionary advantage. Wikipedia+2blythtown.net+2
As the coal export trade grew, the return from using wagonways helped make towns like Blyth important coal-exporting ports — boosting the local economy. England’s North East+2blythtown.net+2
Over time, as technology advanced and steam railroads replaced wooden wagonways, these early horse-drawn wagonways were gradually abandoned; some closed as early as 1618, others lasted until the early 19th century. heritagegateway.org.uk+2northeasthistorytour.blogspot.com+2
🧠 What (if any) Remains Today
According to the historical record, nothing remains of the earliest wagonway (Cowpen–Blyth) today. heritagegateway.org.uk
In the case of the Plessey Wagonway, parts of its route are still traceable in the landscape — though much is overlaid by modern roads (e.g. parts are beneath the A192 / A1061). northeasthistorytour.blogspot.com+2England’s North East+2
Because wagonways were built of wood and earthworks, many original materials (rails, sleepers) have long since decayed; what survives tends to be earth-levelled embankments, depressions, or sections now incorporated into later roads or paths.
Early tramroads between Abergavenny and Hereford
In the early 19th century, a network of horse-drawn tramroads (or “plateways”) connected parts of South Wales and Herefordshire, enabling transport of coal, iron, limestone and other goods. govilon.com+2Wikipedia+2
Key components included the Llanvihangel Railway (chartered in 1811) running from the canal at Llanwenarth near Abergavenny toward Llanvihangel Crucorney. Wikipedia+1
From Llanvihangel Crucorney a further tramroad, the Grosmont Railway, extended toward Monmouth Cap. Wikipedia+1
Finally, the Hereford Railway (opened 1829) linked Monmouth Cap to Hereford on the Wye — completing a continuous horse-drawn link from the Abergavenny canal through to Hereford. Wikipedia+1
So, by the early 1820s–1830s, there was a working freight tramroad route of roughly 20–30 miles connecting the industrial areas around Abergavenny with Hereford — mostly for minerals and goods, not passengers. govilon.com+2Wikipedia+2
🔄 Transition to a steam railway: the Newport, Abergavenny and Hereford Railway (NA&HR)
In 1846 Parliament authorised the NA&HR, which purchased the old tramroads (Llanvihangel, Grosmont, Hereford) — acquiring their routes and rights-of-way. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
The aim was to build a standard-gauge steam railway, better suited for heavier loads and faster transport than horse-drawn trams. Wikipedia+1
The new railway opened to goods traffic in July 1852; passenger trains began to run on 6 December 1853 (though public service from Hereford started in early January 1854). Wikipedia+2htt.herefordshire.gov.uk+2
The original tramroads were decommissioned around May 1853, as work prepared for the new main-line railway. Wikipedia+1
🚉 What remained later: stations & legacy
The modern steam railway replaced the tramway, but some place-names reflect the old routes. For instance, the now-disused Tram Inn railway station — on the NA&HR line — took its name from the original tramway that carried coal into Hereford before the steam railway era. Wikipedia+1
After decades of use, parts of the NA&HR line (especially local intermediate stations) closed in the 1960s and 1970s. htt.herefordshire.gov.uk+1
The old tramway itself largely disappeared physically: in many places the route was replaced by modern roads (for example parts of the route are now roughly followed by the A465 road between Abergavenny and Hereford). Wikipedia+1
🧭 Significance & what it tells us about past transport and future possibilities in the post-fossil-fuel era.
The Abergavenny–Hereford tramway illustrates early-19th-century industrial transport in Britain — how horsedrawn plateways moved coal, iron and limestone across difficult terrain before steam railways. It also shows how many early tramway companies were later absorbed into standard railway networks (as with NA&HR), marking the shift from small-scale industrial transport to larger-scale, long-distance steam railway systems.
🚉 What remained later: stations & legacy
The modern railway replaced the tramway, but some place-names reflect the old routes. For instance, the now-disused Tram Inn railway station — on the NA&HR line — took its name from the original tramway that carried coal into Hereford before the steam railway era. Wikipedia+1
After decades of use, parts of the NA&HR line (especially local intermediate stations) closed in the 1960s and 1970s. htt.herefordshire.gov.uk+1
The old tramway itself largely disappeared physically: in many places the route was replaced by modern roads (for example parts of the route are now roughly followed by the A465 road between Abergavenny and Hereford). Wikipedia+1
🧭 Significance & what it tells us about past transport
The Abergavenny–Hereford tramway illustrates early-19th-century industrial transport in Britain — how horsedrawn plateways moved coal, iron and limestone across difficult terrain before steam railways. It also shows how many early tramway companies were later absorbed into standard railway networks (as with NA&HR), marking the shift from small-scale industrial transport to larger-scale, long-distance steam railway systems.
Transport built the industrial world. Coal reached the cities by rail; oil carried goods across oceans; cars and lorries made long-distance trade seem normal. But every mile travelled on fossil energy widened the gap between people and place.
In a wood economy, that gap closes. Movement becomes shorter, slower, and more meaningful. Instead of petrol engines, we turn again to horses, wheels, rails, and rivers – all shaped from the coppice.
Horse-drawn Tramways
Before steam, coal moved along horse-drawn tramways. Wooden sleepers and iron rails let a single horse pull loads many times heavier than it could on the road. The same principle can serve a localist economy.
Each localist area might maintain its own light tramway network. Rails made from scrap iron and wooden sleepers could connect the coppice, the charcoal kilns, and the village store.
On level ground, a horse can haul up to ten tons; on slopes, gravity does the work downhill, and hand-cranked capstans pull the wagons back up. The tramway becomes the parish’s artery for moving heavy items and individuals with luggage – quiet, steady, and powered by oats rather than diesel.
Wheelbarrows and Pathways
For smaller loads, the model comes from China. The Chinese wheelbarrow, with its large central wheel beneath the load, allowed one person to move several times the weight of a Western barrow. Narrow lanes, plank ways, and stone paths make this form of transport efficient without heavy infrastructure.
Wide motor roads are no longer needed. Instead, there are narrow, shaded paths, suited to barrows, handcarts, and walkers. Movement becomes gentler and human-scaled.
Boats and Rivers
Where rivers run, timber barges carry heavy loads – charcoal, wood, grain, and lime. They are made of pine or oak and are powered by sail or tow rope. River transport is slow but requires little energy, and in many regions, the old waterways still lie beneath overgrowth, ready to be cleared and used again.
Roads Reclaimed
Without motor traffic, roads return to quiet lanes. Tree shade cools the surface in summer, reducing dust. Charcoal fines mixed into the surface can harden it – an idea drawn from Bates and Draper’s work on biochar, where carbon becomes part of the built environment. A carbon-rich road absorbs heat and sequesters carbon instead of emitting it.
The Social Nature of Travel
In the industrial world, travel was solitary – a car, a driver, a destination. In a wood economy, journeys are communal. People walk together, share carts, or ride the tram. The pace allows talk, thought, and rest. Time spent travelling is not wasted but lived.
Work, Health, and Connection
Without fossil fuels, physical activity returns to daily life. Hauling timber, walking to neighbouring localities, or loading a barge keeps the body strong. Sport and transport merge: people are fit because life demands movement. The village green hosts cricket and hockey, but every path also becomes a kind of playing field – work and leisure woven together.
The New Geography
Distance shrinks back to human scale. The localist area becomes the actual size of the economy and governance. Nearby places are reached by cart or boat. Trade still happens, but it is local, not global.
The industrial age built networks that spanned continents; the wood age will create networks that fit landscapes. Rails and roads will follow the shape of the land and the flow of water, not the logic of the market.
The Quiet Landscape
With fewer engines, the world grows quieter. You hear hoof beats and wheels on gravel, and the call of the water birds along the river. Travel becomes part of nature’s rhythm again.
The conclusion of this piece, in relation to the future of diesel for freight transport, is that “The future will be increasingly localized, with much less product variants and with much simple lifestyles.” Yet another reason for a future of localism.
The world economy is grappling with a gradually worsening diesel shortage. In fact we might have already passed peak diesel in 2023, already. Despite claims to the contrary the world is still fed, moved, mined and built using this extremely energy dense fuel, thus its increasingly tight availability is starting to become a limiting factor to the growth of the world economy. The question poses itself: can the electrification of transport and mining ease the pain somewhat, or is it yet another myth?
World oil and natural gas supply is about to peak, then begin its long decline in the years ahead. While this statement stirred great controversy two decades ago, today it seems to be normal news. Almost too normal — as if the world no longer needed oil. Looking at the prices alone West Texas Intermediate at $65 per barrel seems to be a bargain, especially when compared to the price of gold or other commodities. Surely, if we needed more petroleum its price would be much higher, right? Well, as usual, things are a bit more complicated than that. In fact, I argue, the collapse of oil prices foreshadow a much greater than expected fall in oil supply, but let’s not get ahead ourselves just yet.
Oil is not just another commodity. It is still the lifeblood of this civilization thanks to its immense energy density, portability, low weight and widespread availability. Despite the fact that its use is a major contributor to climate change, we still heavily depend on it for agriculture, mining, long distance transport and construction. Yet, as the image below (taken from the same Ember document we discussed last week) shows: transitioning to an electricity driven transport system takes longer than expected. To be on the optimistic side I could say we just have to wait another century. Or two.
I’m not here to spread unwarranted optimism, though. We simply don’t have time till the end of this century to make a dent on fossil fuel use in road transport — and not primarily because of climate concerns. Diesel fuel availability worldwide is already on a high plateau, even as we add more and more unconventional oil and natural gas liquids to the mix we euphemistically call ‘oil’. Before 2014 every barrel of oil added to world supply resulted in a proportionate increase in diesel fuel consumption: the conversion ratio hovered around 30% (i.e.: one third of each barrel of oil was turned into gasoil). After 2014, however, this tight correlation started to break down: diesel consumption could no longer keep up with growth in oil supply. While prior to 2014 diesel supply grew at a steady 2% year-over-year, after 2014 that annual growth rate virtually collapsed by an order of magnitude to 0.28%. What’s that all about?
Diesel fuel consumption worldwide is already at a high plateau, even as we add more and more unconventional oil and natural gas liquids to the mix. R values represent correlation between diesel consumption growth and increases in world oil supply. The closer this correlation is to 1 the better the match between the two data sets are. Data source: Energy Institute / Chart: own work
As we have seen from the ratio of electricity use in road transport, that abrupt slow-down in diesel consumption growth could not come from truck drivers switching to batteries all of a sudden. If we take a good hard look at the source of “oil” supply growth since 2014, however, we might quickly realize that not all that glitters is gold — i.e. not everything is “oil” in that ever growing mix. Production growth of conventional onshore and shallow water crude — the best inputs to make diesel fuel from — began to stall in the middle of the 2000’s already, with almost all new sources of oil coming from unconventional wells ever since 2015. These new sources of petroleum, especially tight oil (oil trapped in low-permeability rocks like shale and limestone) and natural gas liquids (hydrocarbons extracted from raw natural gas during processing, including components like ethane, propane, butanes, and pentanes), however, contain very little if any diesel compounds (1). Sure, refineries could and did make a lot of plastic and gasoline out of this new found “oil”, but very little truck fuel. You see, this is the problem with trying to “replace” conventional oil with all kinds of liquids produced by the petroleum industry: most of it is unsuitable for use in trucks, excavators, ships, locomotives, combined harvesters and the rest (2).
Note how the peak oil movement in the early 2000’s was right: conventional onshore plus shallow water crude oil did peak in 2005. Adding deepwater oil into the mix pushed out this peak by two years only. These conventional oil sources are on the decline ever since, with natural gas liquids, extra-heavy and tight oil being the sole sources of growth these days. Source: IEA
What does the future hold, then? Well, not more conventional oil, that is for sure. According to the forecasts prepared by Rystad Energy and used by the IEA, we have 2–3 years till both oil and natural gas production peaks worldwide, then begins to decline. And if you take a look at the chart below, you can see that conventional oil production will experience an especially steep decline, despite additions from investments in existing and approved projects. Unconventional oil production will continue to expand into the future, but it will be unable to offset the decline from traditional oil fields, let alone make up for the fall in diesel fuel production.
Diesel availability can thus be expected to drop precipitously in the decades ahead, foreshadowing serious problems in road transport, mining, shipping and mechanized agriculture.
Oil companies will not sit idle, and watch their market collapse, though. They will do everything to at least mitigate that catastrophe ahead. According to the IEA analysis linked above:
“After a primary recovery period, during which oil and gas is produced via natural reservoir drive mechanisms, operators can deploy a variety of measures to boost production or to slow decline. This includes infill drilling of both vertical and horizontal wells, pumping and lifting, large-scale injections such as water flooding, and enhanced recovery techniques. In practice, these activities can occur in sequence or in combination according to suitability, availability and economics of the technology, and in accordance with a company’s reservoir management practices.”
However, these techniques are not without their own risks:
“Once well density is maximised and infill drilling slows, production decline may accelerate above the rates observed before the new drilling was undertaken.”
To put it bluntly: enhanced oil recovery can buy us a little time, but at the cost of an abrupt decline in the end. Not the most reassuring news, if you ask me. Switching fuels sources will be of little help either. Encouraging home owners to change to electric or gas heating from oil, will not solve anything since both are dependent on a non-renewable resource equally prone to peak and decline just like oil (40% of US electricity is still generated by natural gas). The same goes to trucks, buses and agricultural machinery powered by CNG or LNG: since worldwide gas production is about to peak together with oil, switching between the two energy sources will not improve the situation the slightest.
Electrons to the rescue!
That leaves us with one thing to pin our “hopes” on: the rapid electrification of road transport and mining. And why not agriculture or container and bulk shipping? — one might ask. Well, weight is already a huge issue when it comes to agricultural machinery. Soil compacted by tractors can absorb less moisture and plant roots do not develop properly in them. Ocean shipping, often covering thousands of miles, is also “hard” (read: impossible) to electrify — no battery would last a month long journey across the Pacific. And while wind sails and solar panels could reduce fuel consumption by a couple of percentage points, they cannot completely eliminate it. That leaves us with using batteries in road transport, thereby saving fuel for agricultural use and shipping where heavy batteries and electrification is still not an option.
So what are the trends in heavy-duty electric vehicles? According to the EIA’s Global EV Outlook 2025 electric bus sales have already reached an invisible ceiling (around 60% of all units sold) in China, while other regions are still dominated by diesel bus sales. Demand for electric trucks, on the other hand, is still in the 1–5% range — even in China. No wonder, despite the optimistic sentiment shared by the EIA and some other organizations, long distance (500 km range) battery electric trucks are still two to three times more expensive than regular ones, and require multi-hour long stops to recharge. Using a fast charger, on the other hand, would degrade the battery much faster than regular charge, so the cost of replacing batteries much more often would quickly negate the benefits of not having to wait several hours for each recharge. And while battery swapping could be an option, building continent wide networks of standardized battery swapping stations is still a pipe dream. Consequently electric trucks seem to remain stuck in the niche of short distance milk runs, parcel deliveries, or drayage (the transport of shipping containers over a short distance to their final destination).
Battery electric trucks are ideal for cycles with combinations of lower daily mileage, lower speeds, and predictable routes, not for long distance delivery consuming the vast majority of diesel fuel worldwide.
Then what about electric vehicle trends in mining? Well, apart from some promising experiments, the market for battery electric mining equipment is virtually non-existent at the moment. Even the most optimistic analysts admit, that there are serious productivity concerns when it comes to switching to battery electric mining trucks: “Currently, electric trucks cannot match the uptime of diesel trucks, which require only about 10 minutes of refueling per day compared to the 1 to 2 hours battery charging.” And not only that. “Battery technology remains a key obstacle, with current advancements from suppliers like CATL, ABB, and Northvolt only recently meeting the high demands of haul trucks. The lack of a unified standard in battery designs and chemistries complicates the selection of the optimal solution for mining applications.” From where a 32% compound annual growth rate (unprecedented in any other business) would come from then, remains a mystery for me. And remember, if Rystad’s calculations are correct, we are looking at a nosedive in conventional oil production in the years ahead. We don’t have decades to develop and to ramp up new battery technologies.
The little time left to ramp up electrified mining and road transport is not the only limitation, though. While battery technologies could and most probably will improve in the future, generating the megawatts of electricity needed to fast charge these huge batteries will require a massive expansion of the electric grid, or necessitate a similar scale power generation on site. Since grids are overloaded already — and because most major mines are far away from civilization — this latter, however, could only mean natural gas turbines. “Renewables” could only provide some auxiliary support, as a mine cannot be shut down just because its overcast outside or the wind isn’t blowing. (The same goes to long distance trucking, just sayin’.) This continued reliance on fossil fuels begs the question, though: what’s the point of electrification if we just swap one fast depleting fuel (diesel) to another one (natural gas), or in the case of China: coal?
Economic reality
Finally this takes us back to the economics of extracting and making these fuels. As we have seen above, demand for diesel was not dented by electrification or alternative fuels. As a result the world is already grappling with a serious diesel shortage, evidenced by record high refinery margins made on making and selling this type of fuel. Ever since 2022 (the failed return to growth after the pandemic and Western sanctions completely upsetting diesel supply in the EU) there is a chronic shortage of the right kind of oil to make diesel from. And with relentless attacks on Russian refineries, diesel export capacities are dwindling as well. Adding all sorts of liquids from unconventional sources, on the other hand, have only resulted in a decline in oil prices, and a widening gap between desires and reality. After ten years of struggling conventional oil (and consequently diesel) supply, the penny has dropped: real, productive economic growth could no longer continue. Something got to give: the Chinese building boom had to end, and Europe’s prosperity had to be sacrificed on the altar of continued financial expansion — lest we wanted to risk tipping the entire system over.
Perhaps the best indicator of this combination of demand destruction, mounting recession fears and flight to safety is the gold to oil ratio, representing how many barrels of oil you can buy with one ounce of gold. You see, the price of oil is the first to plummet during a recession, while gold is seen as a safe haven to protect “wealth”. Whenever this ratio blows out, it indicates a flight to safety and prevailing market caution. As shown on the chart below, we are well past anything we have seen in the past — except for the 2020 health crisis, which resulted in negative oil prices. Such low prices, however, virtually guarantee the outcome laid out by Rystad and the EIA above: oil at $65 or below is simply too cheap for most of the drilling companies to go after. The material costs of drilling ever deeper, less and less productive and ever faster depleting wells simply does not worth the expenditure at these low prices. And soon, not even at $95 a barrel.
Gold to Oil Ratio — Historical Chart. Source: Macrotrends
Conclusion
Based on these premises electrification can only slow the decline in transport and mining volumes somewhat, but not considerably. As the looming diesel crisis becomes acute, the price of this fuel could skyrocket — but only for a very short time. Since our entire world economy with its six continent supply chains and high material intensity relies on cheap fuel to operate, should such a price spike occur businesses would go bankrupt in droves. A slow but steady rise in the price of diesel, on the other hand, could make anything mined, transported or built by oil so expensive, that people could no longer afford them, leading to a deflationary crisis. Either way demand for diesel would fall in tandem with supply, leaving us with less and less stuff manufactured then brought in from far away. Eventually all the benefits of globalization would be eliminated: no more cheap clothes made available by cheap labor in Cambodia, or battery minerals mined in the Congo, copper in Chile and nickel in Indonesia.
The future will be increasingly localized, with much less product variants and with much simple lifestyles. Remaining diesel supplies will be diverted entirely to maintain agriculture and food delivery, focusing on plant based foods (animal husbandry requires a lot more fuel than growing peas and beans). For the average citizen this will translate into higher food and skyrocketing meat prices, leaving little to no budget to buy anything else than a shirt or a pair of shoes every now and then. (Especially so, if you consider the effect of forced localization raising the cost of doing anything as opposed to just importing stuff from the cheapest source.) Infrastructure projects will be abandoned, just like major housing developments as these activities take a lot of fuel to complete.
How our complex, self-adaptive world economy would react to such a shock as a withdrawal of its prime source of energy, is anyone’s guess. We are looking at a highly volatile situation ahead, lasting decades into the future. Currency crash, inflation, deflation, stagnation and decline are all in the cards. Once the initial part of the crisis is over, we will be looking at a totally different economy though. Many companies will go bankrupt, and the workforce hence released would have to find jobs in agriculture and local workshops, as the demand for cheap labor could only increase with less and less affordable fuel to drive machinery. Adopting a much less materially intensive lifestyle could, however, match the availability of diesel supply, and together with a persistent fall in birth rates could ensure a smooth landing towards the end of this century when oil finally runs out. Yes, I know this might sound messy and pessimistic for those pinning their hopes on this technological civilization going on forever and a day… I have to ask, though, how exactly did you expect ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’ to play out then?
The Economic and Technical Possibilities Report of a Panel set up by the Ministry of Transport LONDON 1964
FOREWORD by Dr. R. J. Smeed, Road Research Laboratory
Economists have claimed that considerable net benefits could accrue to the nation if vehicle owners had to pay higher charges or taxes when they used congested roads than when they used uncongested ones, without there necessarily being any change in the total motor taxation paid by them. These charges would be in the nature of prices for using the roads, the prices varying from one place and time to another according to the costs-notably the congestion costs- involved in driving in a particular area at a particular time. The Ministry of Transport set up a panel, under my chairmanship, to make a preliminary examination of the technical
feasibility of collecting such taxes, and to consider some of the economic implications. The members of the panel have served in an individual capacity and their report does not necessarily express the views of their respective organisations.
In the 1960s, I was a Traffic Engineer in charge of highway traffic management in Hull. In those days, there were many more cyclists in the city than cars. And yet traffic congestion, nothing compared to today, was a concern.
This paper by Dr Smeed of the Road Research Laboratory about Road Pricing seemed the way forward. But I wasn’t allowed to pose it as an option for Hull.
Now, 60 years on pay-per-mile car tax changes could be implemented in the government’s budget despite their significant impact on drivers.
Reports now suggest that the Treasury could be looking at ways to charge motorists based on how much they drive.
This could be compatible with localism and heading in a direction that will be good for the climate.
Despite the forward-thinking nature of the 1964 report, road pricing wasn’t pursued as a policy option at the time. Instead, traditional methods of taxation continued, with motorists paying fixed fees regardless of how much they drove or where they drove.
The Labour Government’s Potential Revival of Road Pricing
Fast forward to today, and the Labour Party government may be revisiting the idea of road pricing to raise revenue.
Reports suggest that the Treasury may consider a pay-per-mile system that could be introduced in the upcoming budget. This move is prompted by the need to find sustainable revenue streams as traditional fuel taxes diminish with the rise in electric vehicles.
In addition to the financial reason for implementing such a system, the government could decide to use the system to charge higher rates applied in congested urban areas or during peak hours,
This could create a more flexible and responsive road taxation system, discouraging unnecessary car journeys during busy times and encouraging alternative forms of transport, such as cycling or public transit.
However, with the government’s need to raise revenue quickly, a simple system may be preferred based on the mileage submitted in the annual MOT certificates.
Compatibility with Localism
One potential strength of road pricing is its compatibility with localism. Declining prosperity and affordability of discretionary travel will result in motorists needing to reduce their travel behaviour to local journeys. In time, localism could evolve.
Major Impacts on Drivers
While road pricing could offer environmental and economic benefits, it will likely significantly impact drivers. Introducing a pay-per-mile tax would represent a significant shift from the current system, where road users pay through fixed vehicle taxes and fuel duties. This could increase costs for those relying heavily on their vehicles, particularly in areas with limited public transport options.
To mitigate these impacts, the government must carefully design the system, possibly offering exemptions or subsidies to essential car users, such as doctors. Additionally, investments in public transportation and cycling infrastructure would be necessary to provide viable alternatives to driving.
The introduction of road pricing could be a vital element of the transition to reducing energy use.
