03/12/2012 Inside Out London

Hello. Tonight in a special edition of Inside Out East Midlands, we

investigate transport - the future and the past. Coming up in the next

half hour: Falling out of love with the car. Research reveals who is

driving and who is not. What has changed attitude-wise is everyone

gave up. No-one cares about cars any more. Also tonight: eight

months on, controversy still reigns over Nottingham's tax on workplace

parking. It is outrageous. If people have a little place outside

their business, they should be able to park for themselves.

How did you travel today and how will you travel tomorrow? The

chances are you will drive or be driven. We have had exclusive

access to a major piece of research published today which suggests that

for some, our love affair with the car is going cold. Richard Westcott

has been investigating the figures and asking what it means for the

people who have to plan our Building roads is controversial but

not building them could be controversial too. So, how do the

planners get it right? How do they decide whether to spend our taxes

on road or rail? The only way you can ever be sure it is to beam

yourself into the future and we all know how easy that is. When these

fans were watching their favourite series back in the '60s, we thought

we knew how we would be travelling by 2012. There was talk of having a

little personal car that flew. sci-fi got it wrong. Most of us get

around now the same way we did 50 years ago. Having your own jet pack

remains a distant dream. Ever since I can remember, we have assumed

that traffic will get worse and worse. After all, we really love

our cars, don't we? Maybe not. Whisper it, but there is a rumour

going around transport circles that we are falling out of love with our

four wheels. In fact, they have even given it a name, Peak Car.

What is Peak Car? Just look at UK traffic growth in the '60s and '70s

when we could not get enough cars, but by the '90s, the trend was

slowing and by 2002, average mileage per person stalled. Is the

love affair with the car cooling down? What seems to be happening in

many advanced countries, including even America, is that traffic

growth due to car use simply is not going ahead at the same rate that

it used to. Now Inside Out has been given the first piece of research

into Peak Car in the UK and this report is full of surprises. While

some of us are driving more than ever, others are dramatically

changing the way they travel. Take young men, for example. When I was

young, I could not wait to get my hands on the keys to my dad's Mark4

1.6L T reg Ford Cortina with reversing lights. Like a lot of

young men, I saw getting my driving license as a rite of passage but

that is changing. Market trader Lee Vernon is 19 but he will not be

adding to the traffic around Mansfield any time soon. He has

been forced to sell up because he has been quoted �2,800 to insure

his three-wheeler. I really love it. It is a great looking car, a

classic, but insurance is too much and I cannot afford it.

research shows Lee is not alone. Young men are driving 2,000 miles a

year less than they were in 1995. Women, young and old, are driving

more than they used to, so what is going on? What has changed

attitude-wise is everyone gave up and got used to using Facebook and

phones, and sitting around, or using public transport that no-one

cares about cars any more. One of the big things from this report is

that young men are not driving much and there are a number of possible

explanations for that, including rising higher education and

insurance costs but if that carries on, there will be a lot less car

traffic and a lot less car What else has the report found?

This is the rainy 716 from Warwick Parkway to Marylebone. Over the

last two years, the numbers using this line have gone up by a

staggering 40%. And according to the report, that is in line with

the national trend. Since the mid- 90s, the distance the average

person travels by rail has soared by more than 60%. The last time the

trains were that busy was during the war. The key growth we have

seen is in two areas. One is business travel in the morning and

the other is leisure travel, where travel has become cheaper. At the

same time fuel prices are increasing, congestion is

increasing so that value equation is tilting in the favour of rail.

And all those gadgets mean you can work and play on the move. You can

even book your ticket on the train, if you can get a signal that is.

While business travel by rail is up, company car mileage is down by 40%

between 1995 and 2007, so that is before the recession. Scrapping tax

breaks made the difference and it has had a big impact on traffic in

London. Despite more people moving to the capital, there are fewer

cars here, but the report found people in the countryside seem to

be driving as much if not more than ever. Of course, in big cities you

do have a lot of options for getting around. Fairfax Hall runs a

London company making specialist gin and vodka and thinks he has

distilled the perfect formula for company travel. Whenever they need

a car or van, they book it from a car club and pick it up from a

designated car park space 15 minutes later. Like a lot of small

start-up businesses, you do not have a lot of money, so we invested

everything we had into the distillery. Investing money into a

van did not seem like good use of capital. It is low cost and the

other benefit is flexibility. You can jump into a brand-new vehicle

and drive it at 15 minutes notice. So here is a question - what does

all this research mean for the future you of the UK car industry?

We have had a bit of a boom recently. The UK is actually on

course to produce more cars than at any time since 1972, but that's not

because we are all buying ourselves a new motor. 80% are being exported.

These Minis are heading for Asia and South America. Last month in

London at the RAC's future car challenge, another famous sci-fi

face was in no doubt what the future holds. What is happening now

is a huge challenge for the car industry. I do not see that the car

will come to the end, they are too useful but we need to rethink the

model of how we use the car and electric cars are very much part of

that because it makes much more sense in a city. You have somewhere

to park it where it is always charged, ready to use. It is not

just the car industry that will look at this research. The

Department for Transport is planning a major role building

programme all based on the assumption that traffic will go up

by 44% over the next two decades. But what if they have got it wrong?

After all, since 1989, successive governments have overestimated

traffic growth. This is the range of predictions and the red line is

what is actually happening. There is always a risk forecasts will be

wrong but the key thing the model does is takes a wide set of data

and ensures that it is rigourously analysed. There is a lot of useful

things in this research to look at, but I am not convinced it shows we

have reached Peak Car. government points out that the UK

population is projected to grow by another 10 million in the next 25

years and the RAC foundation, who helped fund the report, says that

means we are still going to need more roads. This is not the end of

the car. The use of the car has been declining but for 70% of the

population, people will need to use cars unless they have railways and

buses available, and most do not have those things. Almost half a

century ago when Star Trek started, this is what we thought travel in

the 23rd century might look like and it is pure '60s. It goes to

show just how hard it is to predict the future. The danger is you end

up assuming it is a bigger version of what we have today. The motor

car has been the transport story of the last 50 years. But it just

might not be the transport story of the next 50. What does this button

If you would like to find out how car use is changing across the

Just how do towns and cities in the East Midlands tackle traffic

congestion and how much should we pay for expensive public transport

projects? Earlier this year, Nottingham launched a highly

controversial scheme that has managed to upset drivers, commuters

Back in April, Nottingham City Council made history. They did not

quite tax the street but got close, slapping a hefty levy on workplace

parking spaces and became the only council in the country to tackle

congestion this way. We thought the levy was the best option for

Nottingham. We decided against congestion charges and decided to

introduce the level to provide that local contribution to match against

the �0.5 billion the Government is putting in to our transport network.

It may well be changing behaviour, encouraging more people from their

cars onto the buses and trams, but it is a struggle to find support

for this new tax. It is outrageous. If people have a little place

outside their business, they should be able to park for themselves.

is not helping anybody and it is making things more difficult for

people. All it will do is drive businesses away from Nottingham.

think it will provide a lot of revenue for the council and

A small crew in a car equipped with cameras polices the levy. It is

their job to ensure employers with more than 11 spaces pay the �288

per bay to the council. Some suspect the cameras may be a stunt,

just a high-profile deterrent. car is equipped with cameras. It

takes pictures and certainly our experience on bus lane enforcement,

there is definitely something going on inside. We have seen the car

that is designed to enforce the levy with the cameras on the top

drive around on a couple of occasions. We feel very much Big

Brother and we are not happy about Steve Walker runs Art Systems based

a few miles out of the city on an industrial estate. He refuses to

pay the levy and parks his car on the road a few feet from his

largely deserted company car park. The estate has become overcrowded

with traffic on the roads because there is a migration of cars from

the car parks onto the roads around the estate, which has made it quite

difficult for the trucks to get around, which has made itcongested

and unsafe. Steve's company grudgingly meets half the levy.

Some of his staff pay. Others do not. I have chosen to park on the

road in principle, because I feel that this is an unfair tax on

ordinary people going about their ordinary business. We need to make

the transport infrastructure investment and there is no other

way we can fund the local The levy is set to raise �14

million a year to fund an extra tram line and improvements to the

railway station. But will it drive business away from the city?

have some evidence of businesses that have had to make people

redundant in order to pay the levy and reduce their investments,

because you can only spend the same money once. And some businesses

have left the city. Games Warehouse supply pub quiz machines. Boss

Bernard Taylor found he was in the hot seat facing his own killer quiz.

Should he pay the levy for his 40- strong workforce, around �7,000,

and risk redundancies or move to Derby where parking is free? Once

we had assimilated all the facts and understood what the cost would

be, it would became an easy question for us to answer and the

answer we came up with was to relocate to somewhere where we did

not have the same cost base imposed on us by local authorities. We made

the right decision and probably got the question right, yes. We have

been here for six, seven months and we are very settled here and

pleased with the move. Nottingham has lost what we consider a very

valuable talent pool. We have 20 or 30 highly educated, very clever,

intelligent people within our business who are no longer part of

the Nottingham scene. And there are signs that the levy is affecting

confidence among some businesses. If we need to expand we will need

to take on extra buildings. If we do that, we will take those out of

the city limits because we cannot justify working with a council who

appears to have little or no interest in local business.

there are fans of the levy. Adam Bird cycles to work and so do lots

of his staff at a new technology company. They come in via buses,

trains, trams, bikes, you name it. Some even walk. People change

behaviour and actually appreciate that getting the bus is not that

bad. It gives you a better quality of life if you use public transport.

You get to work fresher, you leave work fresher and you can enjoy the

city as well, rather than just seeing it as a place to leave every

day. If we are going to transform Nottingham and improve the mix of

businesses in the city, it takes the council to make bold steps like

this. The city may well be bold but the big question is will it work?

The only other city in the world to try this is over 9,000 miles away

in Perth, Australia. So to end this film, we asked Candice Barnes, a

reporter in the city, to tell us how it is going Down Under.

The parking levy was introduced more than 12 years ago. Now this

tax has since made parking in Perth the eighth most expensive in the

world, more costly than midtown New York city. This is a high cost time

and place in which to do business, and the presence of a parking levy

adds another burden to businesses, which at the moment are struggling.

We have not seen congestion ease, so it is difficult to see what the

point of it was. Parking is shocking. It is too expensive to

park in the city, about $35 a day. I do not get a bay and if I do park

in the city, I would expect to pay about 25 bucks. The revenue raised

promised to ease congestion and support a better transport system.

12 years on, and the latter is still in question while the revenue

sits in state government coffers. Nottingham, you might want to think

again about your parking levy, but I guess it is too late for that.

This is Candice Burns for BBC From cars to bicycles and this year

marks the 125th anniversary of Raleigh. At its peak the firm

employed 12,000 people at its Nottingham factory. Alan Sillitoe

wrote about it and now his son, David, is finding that despite

moving production to the Far East, the brand will always be associated

with the city where it has shaped Raleigh is the greatest cycle

There was a time when this bike would have been made here, Lenton

in Nottingham. At the Raleigh factory, which was on this site,

they used to produce 1 million bikes a year. Families worked there,

big families. In our department, you had five or six brothers

sometimes working from the same family together. You could go into

a frame shop and see brass boiling where frames were being dipped into

it to seal the joints. It was wonderful. There was huge talent

here, some of the skills we have had, it made it very humbling and

as a graduate coming into the business, you were very quickly

brought down to size. Of course Raleigh's bikes are now made in the

Far East. Because it is cheaper to make them there than here. But

Raleigh's reputation as a global brand was made in Nottingham. It

was the people of this city who turned it into the world-famous

name in cycling that it is to day. But how did a tiny business from a

Nottingham backstreet get known all around the world for making the

best bicycles money could buy? And what is the future for the firm now

These buildings are a credit to the city. They have won awards for

their design and environmental credentials. They are part of the

University of Nottingham, a 21st- century campus built to educate a

21st-century workforce. But this site was once home to a very

different kind of workforce. At its height, 12,000 people were making

bikes here and one of them was Harry Hardy. From school, a lot of

friends went there. You didn't know what you had let yourself in full,

but it was very friendly. A friend of mine was in the same class as me

in school. He was in the buffing department, buffing wheels. Dust

was indescribable. And naturally, not many of them retired because of

the effects of the dust on their chest. When Harry worked here,

Raleigh were selling bikes to 144 countries around the world, quite

an achievement for a firm that started out with only three

employees. It was called Woodhead, Angois & Ellis after the three men

that were running it. Paul Angois was an engineer, Richard Woodhead a

mechanic and William Ellis a financier. The fortunes of these

men changed when one day in 1887, a lawyer walked into their workshop

and bought one of their bikes. That lawyer was Frank Bowden. He was so

impressed with the bike they sold them that he bought the company. A

year later he founded the Raleigh cycle company, named after the

street their workshop was on. John McNaughtan joined Raleigh as a

graduate in 1965 and ended up running the place. What was the

secret of their success? Raleigh really has been created by the many

thousands and thousands that have worked for Raleigh and felt a sense

of identification with the product. The spirit that was in Nottingham

that went into Raleigh. What did they bring? A total dedication to

the product, identification with A huge factory, a huge impact on

the city, but what amazes me is when you come to Nottingham today,

you have to look hard to see any evidence that Raleigh was ever here.

They have invited Harry and the other former Raleigh workers to

talk about the factory that was here before the university. When it

is done it goes on a conveyor belt? No. From there, from that, it went

to the bench where you finished bracing there. I think it is part

of the city and the history of the city. I have just discovered that

the factory was here on campus. That is one student who has learned

something from these former workers. But there is more to be done. So

the university has commissioned a play to tell the story and

tonight's event offers the director an opportunity to research material.

One of the guys I was talking to was there on the very last day,

when Raleigh closed its doors. He was one of the 200-odd employees

who received a thank you mug as the doors were finally closed, so that

was great to find one of the 200- odd people left in Nottingham that

Geoff was also made redundant in 2003 when Raleigh closed the plant.

It was a massive blow to the city but an inevitable result of years

of decline. You could see the workforce decline. You'd ask,

"Where is so-and-so?" "They finished him on Sunday." "Why?"

That was the constant feedback. They are buying it in now.

decline started in the early '70s, but Raleigh managed to hold on for

another 20 years. One of the reasons was the Raleigh Chopper.

Geoff worked in the department that developed it, but the Chopper was

not the only product to come out of Raleigh. Anybody that was doing a

little work for themselves on the side, was doing a bit of a Jago. I

once saw a chap welding some steel together to make a wheelbarrow. I

myself made quite a few items, including a grandfather clock.

is the first night of the play. you keep your stuff behind the bar?

Are you excited? I am. A little bit nervous. I can't do anything about

it now, it is just sitting there When you went out onto town, you

could tell the girls that worked out Raleigh by the smell of their

Harry, what did you think? I think they have done a marvellous job.

Marvellous. It depicts the factory as it was. Excellent. What keeps

England going is export and Raleigh had its export. Throughout its 125

year history, Raleigh has been bought and sold half a dozen times.

The latest owner is the Dutch bicycle company Accell. What is the

future for Raleigh now? It may be linked to its past. I think they

bought it for reasons of its heritage and what they think they

can bring it back into being as it is in Holland and Germany, perhaps.

A bit of Cool Britannia for Europe? Maybe. The company it bought is

nothing like the one my father worked for and wrote about in the

1950s. Sadly those days are long gone, but the name Raleigh still

evokes quality thanks to the men and women of this city, my father

among them, and it is something we Happy anniversary, Raleigh, and

that is it from Nottingham, the city it helped put on the map. We