Nothing fast about Fastway this morning

Sometimes even I am astonished by my naivety.  Perhaps misplaced optimism is a better alternative.

After last night’s walk I knew there would be no buses up Tollgate Hill (no problem as I don’t want them anyway) but I just sort of presumed the more level roads would be better anyway and that the main roads between local shopping parades and the town centre had more chance of having been treated – so I walked the mile up and down hills to the Fastway stop and discovered just how wrong I was.Having got that far I decided it would be easier to walk the remaining four miles to work than to come back up the hill.   I also thought I should make the effort just in case our VIP visitor did manage to make the journey in the afternoon.

By lunchtime we saw some No. 10 buses go past our offices, but they only had town centre as a destination.  By mid-afternoon it was confirmed the VIP visit was off so I came home and found that the No. 10 was going as far as the Broadfield stadium, which helped a lot – I’m still not happy though.

I am giving the optimism a rest for now.  I have decided to not even bother putting out my bins or my four weeks’ recycling tonight.

The iconic Crawley crows feeling the cold

I can't help thinking that if a certain house in Bewbush had such a gadget back in October 2005 it might have looked something like this… 

View inside the house:

View outside the house. 5 minutes later: 

We have one of these rising bollards at Broadfield stadium as part of the Fastway system. If I remember rightly it is designed to collapse if hit so that it can be easily replaced and also for some health & safety reasons. Also there is quite a delay after the bus passes before it rises.

I think I would like to see something like these ones in Manchester instead. Just look at how soon they come up after the bus passes, and how robust they are. If we had one of these installed I reckon we would also need a bench or two for spectators.

It might work back on his planet, but I can’t see it working here. Ok so they do it in America, but America has very simple road layouts compared to the UK. No roundabouts anywhere, and most junctions are plain crossroads, with far fewer pedestrians and cyclists than we have. Turning left (or right in their case) at a red light is a lot more feasible over there, but even so only some states allow it: most do not.

If those other states think its not a good idea, with their simple roads, why should anyone think it would be a good idea with all our contraflows, one-way systems, 6-way junctions and cycle lanes to the left of the car lanes in some cases?

You can just see what would happen. The Highway Code would say something like “you can turn left at a red traffic light unless otherwise indicated and provided that the road is clear” and nobody would remember it past the word “light”. Knowing that you can turn left, you would be tempted to not even slow down when you see the lights are changing.

At the moment, if you want to turn left, you have to give right of way to anyone crossing the road, but that gets ignored. The only thing which makes some pedestrians feel safe is the green man telling them it is safe to cross. At the moment the green man means that traffic lights are stopping cars from coming so you can cross. In the future it would mean nothing.

The gist of the proposals is this: move bikes onto the pavement, move motorbikes, milk floats and taxis into the bus lanes and make traffic signals more of a guideline than an instruction. Its hardly going to encourage me to walk more, or take the bus if its going to be stuck behind any vehicle deemed to be getting in the way.

Going back to my previous point about risk compensation, all these proposals would achieve would be to increase danger by persuading drivers that it is safe to go too fast.

There is an argument that all the safety features in cars, like air-bags, crumple zones and the like make drivers feel invulnerable, leading them to take more risks as there is less perceived danger. I don’t think anyone is likely to carry out a full-scale test on this, but I suspect that if you fitted 100 cars with drivers-side airbags and another 100 cars with a bloody great spike in the middle of the steering wheel, the latter group would be driven much more carefully… I know I would go even slower than I already do most of the time. Anyway, thats the reductio ad absurdum version of the argument: I am not actually proposing huge spikes on car steering wheels, except for BMWs. Obviously. And maybe on Fastway buses. Might make their drivers pay a bit more attention.

Now I know that the Fastway bus service in Crawley has its critics, leading to the local nickname of ‘Farceway’ but I thought that was a purely local phenomenon. Or maybe they were just looking for these people instead?

The strange thing is that I tried that Google search myself, and this site is only about the 8th or 9th on the list. Way higher is the Wikipedia entry on Fastway, which I had a quick look at. I was quite disappointed by it. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the system, the Wikipedia entry is possibly the least neutral I have ever come across. (I haven’t looked at the really contentious ones like ‘Tony Blair’ or ‘George Bush’)

I had a look at the discussions for the entry and amazingly it used to be even worse. Apparently the entry used to start like this:

Crawley Fastway is a controversial project to provide a new guided bus service linking some areas of Crawley in southern England with the nearby Gatwick Airport. The project has required the destruction of large sections of the existing road infrastructure, and has run into heavy local opposition.

I suppose it is an indication of the merits of the whole idea of Widipedia that this has since been toned down, but I think the article is still a long way from being neutral. Some of the external links on it, and sources of quotes are: a local bulletin board, a couple of local bloggers and a Lib Dem newsletter, all of which have a known anti-Fastway bias. Its one to keep an eye on I think. It demonstrates the pitfalls of the Wiki system, but lets hope it eventually comes to prove the benefits of decent moderation.

Regardless of my own opinions on Fastway (Good idea. Nice buses. Terribly fragile shelters. Bad project implementation and appalling control and reporting of costs, but hopefully the service will be running long after the memories of that mismanagement have faded.) its a shame that the integrity of the whole Wikipedia project is being undermined for the sake of some local point-scoring.

• I could not believe how much more serious and businesslike the meeting was than any of the borough council ones I have been to. Not very exciting to watch, mind you, but refreshing. Maybe its just a Crawley thing and we are all stroppy, rude and boisterous here and it shows in our meetings. A more charitable spin on that would be to say we are more lively and colourful.
• The sound system in the town hall is still atrocious. I found it hard to catch eveything that was being said. If the meeting had behaved like a CBC meeting I would have heard nothing. Likewise, the few members of the public were quiet too which helped make it audible. That sound system has never really worked well, and I am starting to think that it never will.
• I had a feeling that the people running the county council were the most adept local politicians I have ever encountered. Unfortunately I am talking about the senior officers. There are often suggestions that the borough council is too officer-led and I really felt that the county council is too.
• And that seems to be at the root of these Fastway problems. It really looks like there is a culture or atmosphere down in Chichester where project workers can find something like a £6 million hole in a project but feel that its not something they need to bother the councillors about.
• The discussions were about such dry-as-dust topics as management information systems, reporting systems, project management methods and suchlike. Fortunately that overlaps with my experience working in such fields in large organisations so I could get a handle on it.
• Some of the specifics in the paperwork were quite scary. At one point there was £4m funding from an external partner but they spent £3m of it themselves directly leaving only a balance of £1m to go in the pot. However the whole £4m was counted as funding making it look like there was £3m more available than there really was. It looked to me like there was an assumption in the report than only £1m should have been included as funding, but personally I think they should have included the whole £4m but also included the £3m of spending so that the correct overall cost of the project could be known. I wonder if any other external partners have had work done which they paid for directly so that the total cost of the whole system is being understated.
• According to the summary of events prepared by East Sussex CC’s audit, as late as March 2005 it looks like the Highways & Transport department actually thought there was an underspend, so at a time when the council were committing funds milions of pounds in excess of their budget they actually thought it was coming in below budget. You don’t get a better indication of an institutional failure in processes that that. I am surprised that more has not been made of that comment, particularly by the cabinet and leader. Our suspicions of underhand behaviour and hiding the overpend until the elections, were based on the assumption that nobody could be that stupid, but apparently somebody was.
• One reason for all the confusion might be that the word ‘budget’ seems to be used in a number of different ways. Anyone who has worked for a large company will have come across this. Budget can mean the total amount of funding available, or it can mean the amount approved for spending, or it can mean the amount expected to be spent, or the amount approved or expected in any given year. The distinction between spending of money and commitment of money is another area of confusion. At the moment Fastway may have spent less than was expected, but commitments have been made (in the form of purchase orders) whcih will lead to future bills which exceed the budget.
• I heard the term ‘blank cheque’ used by one member of the panel, and seeing the reports it is apparent that as far as utilities are concerned a local authority does more or less have to do that. I have some sympathy for the procurement people faced with such a situation – the report says “There are no contractual agreements with utilities. The estimates they provide for works to be undertaken can vary significantly from actual amounts.” This means, I assume, that a utility can say a job will cost about £10,000 so you order the work and then they say it actually cost them £20,000 and you have to pay up. I can’t see any commercial organisation willing to put up with such an arrangement.
• A lot was made about the council’s SAP system for accounting and reporting. Having a quick look at the action plan and its implications for IT systems made me think that I would not be surprised if the cost of carrying out the action plan could easily compare to the overspend being talked about. Not only that, it would not prevent overspending on future projects but merely make everyone aware of overspending sooner. That was made very clear in the paperwork and verbally.
• I would hate to be the person in the council’s IT department on whose desk the last point in the action plan arrives. It is to investigate providing an interface between MS Project and SAP. Lovely. It doesn’t sound like much, but that is going to give someone a real headache, especially if it is a two-way interface. I can remember how much time it took trying to align a PC-based management reporting system with a mainframe-based one at ICL in the 80s and although technology has moved on the principles are the same.
• Is it too late to buy shares in whichever SAP consultancy the county council use? I reckon they are in for a major pay-day. SAP is notorious for requiring lots of additional modules or work after initial implementation and any consultancy or dealer knows that they will make more money from variations and additions than from the initial contract.
• My gut feeling is that that some suppliers, whether utilities, building contractors, consultants or whoever, really took advantage of some slack procedures and then the council did not have the means to realise this was happening. It would be too ironic if whoever they get in to make the expensive system improvements needed to fix it did the same thing.
• Can these various suppliers smell an easy target or something? There was a scam where a bogus company sent out invoices to hundreds of organisations on the assumption that a certain proportion would just pay them. The council have behaved like one of those victims. In my company you have to get a purchase order authorised and only then will the procurement department place an order for you. When the invoice comes in they will not pay it if it is for more than the order. In the council’s own internal audit report they say they found an example of an invoice £82,700 more than the order! (Not on Fastway but on a school building project)
• At the moment the SAP system does not prevent the processing of invoices greater than the value of the original order. There is a recommendation to change that, but I still can’t believe something so fundamental and contrary to common sense was in place.
• Much as I find him a bit ridiculous for insisting on his military title (Why do people do that? I always call him “Mister”. Maybe thats why he always pretends not to know me despite having been on a committee with me for two years ) and adopting the name Tex, I am not so sure these calls for Pemberton’s resignation are valid. Not on these grounds anyway. You could hold him responsible for the duration and extent of the traffic chaos or the poor design of bus shelters or other such practical matters, but as far as the money goes he looks like being a hapless victim. As we can see, money is being forked out on other projects in excess of order values (and therefore budgets?). The system is broke and has been for a long time: it must have been overspending all over the place in small amounts – which all add up. Whether he and his colleagues, or the officers, should have spotted this pattern earlier before it happened on a large scale is another discussion.

Very dull thoughts perhaps, but then it was a very dull meeting.

The chap in the photo is Richard Symonds who is to the Crawley papers’ letters pages what Keith Flett is (or was?) to the nationals. I’ll often disagree with him but have to give him credit for not being afraid to run the risk of looking foolish and for being willing to stand up and be counted. Even if the counting rarely requires the use of more than one hand’s worth of fingers. Not so sure about the scarf though.

The public gallery for the meeting was hardly packed. There were ten of us, and that included three county councillors who were not taking part in the meeting and our MP’s husband. I don’t know who all the others were, so they might have been county councillors too.

I do hope this does not discourage the county council from their enlightened policy of holding such meetings here though. When I was involved in scrutiny for the borough council I tried very hard, and failed it has to be said, to achieve something similar. I argued that if a meeting only affected one locality (which was always possible on the Area Issues scrutiny committee) it should meet in that locality in order to be more accessible to those most affected.

I know that the results would have been the same in most cases – ie hardly anyone turning up – but I felt it was right in principle to make the meetings more accessible even in the face of local apathy.

Today’s meeting was every bit as dull as I expected it to be, but when the county have made the effort to reach out from their HQ miles away in Chichester it felt right to make some small reciprocal effort, especially as I was not required in Court at the time for my anti-climactic jury service.

A bit of background: Fastway is a guided bus system. Its a good theory. When I first joined the borough council we had some presentations about it and it all looked very efficient. A couple of years later I sat through some presentations at a planning summer school which supported the idea that buses are the future for all but the largest cities.

However, the reality has fallen somewhat short of what was on the drawing board. The implementation has been going on for years and caused enormous traffic congestion which is extremely unpopular. What we have got does not seem to be as good as what we were told to expect either in a couple of respects. To add insult to injury, the Fastway contractors vacated their temporary base in Broadfield last year and did not secure the site properly. Instead of their departure being followed by other workmen fixing the park up and putting in new football pitches it was followed by the arrival of at least 50 caravans full of travellers who stayed there for months – in the run-up to elections and the Labour party always get the blame for any travellers.

When the service started running it was plagued by having all its shelters vandalised and the new buses are huge things which intimidate everyone else on the roads. With such negative public feeling the local papers are keen to jump on every little problem, and then they get presented with big problems – like a bus leaving the road and parking in someone’s living room, a barrier at the Broadfield stadium getting broken and allowing normal traffic to cut through, or news emerging that the £23 million project has overspent by about £6 million.

This last thing is what is causing some concern in the Labour party. The overspend was announced in July, just two months after the elections, and we have a bit of a suspicion that the details may have been known before the elections but supressed in case they affected them. Bear in mind that the leader of the county council was standing for parliament here in the very town most affected by the Fastway bus project. Maybe the political leader of the county council were totally unaware that a project which had been running for 4 or 5 years was overspending but I for one would need proof of that before believing it.

Anyway, the county council had an independent investigation carried out (by the neighbouring county, which has the same political control and whose officers must work with ours, but never mind) which more or less said that there was a huge cock-up but nobody was to blame. They recommended some improvements in project management – always a good thing. Early on in my time at the borough I managed to get project management training for senior officers incorporated into recommendations from a scrutiny committee.

The report from this investigation is being discussed by the county’s Policy & Resources committee on Friday 13th and they are holding the meeting in Crawley instead of in County Hall in far-away Chichester.

One anonymous comment referred to above says:

A group calling themselves ‘The Crawley Highwaymen’ are planning to attend West Sussex County Council’s ‘Farceway’ Meeting at County Hall (Friday the 13th, January, 10.30) – to demand the resignation of either Henry Smith (Leader of West Sussex County Council) or Colonel Pemberton (Cabinet Member for Transport and Highways).

This is followed up by

A ‘spokeswoman’ for the Group said last night : ‘If the demand is not met next Friday, action will be taken, from w/b 16 January, to reduce the gridlock( & highlight the dangers), caused by the ‘Farceway’ bus lanes in Crawley.

The question I have is, do these people really exist?

The chances are that there is just a frustrated person posting anonymous comments about what he would like to see, but the way tempers are with Fastway it is always possible that there is something organised. At first glance it looks like some Fathers 4 Justice sort of thing, but the second comment is a bit ominous. “Action will be taken to reduce the gridlock”. What does that mean?

What is worrying for me is the suspicion that these comments are motivated by a frustration at roadworks rather than the financial mis-management of £30 million of our taxes. I just hope it is a single frustrated person rather than any real organised protest. Lest face it, how do you “highlight the dangers” without doing something dangerous?

For the record, I have used the new buses quite a bit and they are OK. My biggest problem with them is that they don’t come all the way up my my road, but I was led to expect something a bit better. I thought there would be large sections of guided busway and not just the odd few metres of it here and there. I expected the buses to get a lot more priority over the cars as well.