Mark Frost, Director of Fern Consulting and Chair of the Transport Planning Society (TPS), talks to LCRIG about his career and some of the challenges facing the industry.
Q. What is your background?
A. “Like many in the industry I somewhat fell into it and never managed to escape. Armed with my degree in Geography I emerged from Nottingham University wanting to get into education policy and worked for Surrey on that for a bit. I found however that I was getting more interested in improving my commute to the office (by bike and train as I didn’t have a car). I then started moonlighting as a cycle trainer for Royal Borough of Kingston and got my big break in 2005 as Hounslow hired me to the newly created job of ‘a School Travel Advisor’ – a new breed of transport planner created by Departments of Education and Transport to explore a mix of marketing and engineering solutions to tackle school run related issues. After a couple of years thoroughly enjoying this work, I took a step up by taking on a wider transport planning role, eventually leading transport strategy development, running a variety of European projects exploring behaviour change techniques and project managing the council’s community engagement work more generally on transport schemes. In 2014 I was successful in becoming head of service for traffic and transport, taking on traffic and parking management and civils – adding responsibility for Heathrow and a wider environmental strategy function in 2018, then parking enforcement in 2019, finally leaving Hounslow at the end of 2020 (15 and a half years after starting!) as Assistant Director for these service areas. I am now Director of Fern Consulting, a small consultancy offering services to public sector clients and those that work with them around strategic transport, placemaking and environmental strategy, etc.
“I’ve always tried to couple my day job with supportive ‘extra-curricular’ activities. To that end I completed a Masters at Imperial/UCL, provided expert advice to National Institute of Clinical Excellence on physical activity and environment, and was chosen as chair of the London Technical Advisors Group (LoTAG) Strategic Transport Forum back in 2018. This is the network for heads of transport across the capitals 32 boroughs and city to discuss strategic transport matters, share best practice and engage with DfT, TfL, etc.”
Q. What is your role with LGTAG and what other industry groups are you involved with?
A. “It was this last role with LoTAG that led to me getting more involved in national LGTAG, being voted in as a Junior Vice President in 2018 alongside taking on the chairship of the National Strategic Transport Board from 2021. Separately I am also a board member of the Transport Planning Society since 2019, and was elected chair in March 2021.
“The LGTAG national Strategic Transport Board is a really exciting vehicle for exploring matters of national significance with local consequences. It’s also a great forum for local members looking to engage with national conversations – be they related to current central government initiatives or being led by campaigning agencies. There is a great mix of LA officers and supply chain representatives which always takes the conversation into interesting and unexpected directions. It’s a great honour to be involved with.””
Q. What is the best way to try innovations on a huge customer base?
A. “Working within local geographies is always a challenge to scalability, but working through umbrella groups like LGTAG, innovators have potential to reach hundreds of local authority officers across the country and sell the benefits of their projects and proposals direct to them. Through those local authorities and their mature communication and stakeholder management channels it is then possible to reach millions of residents with a level of engagement that can’t be achieved through mass media alone. Whilst it may take longer, that approach is likely to lead to better conversion rate from innovative pilot to mainstream practice in the longer term.”
Q. What cutting edge technologies are you most excited about?
A. “There was an excellent connected places podcast the other day with Daniel Deparis, head of Urban Mobility at Mercedes Benz. His expressed view was that ‘we need to scale solutions of today before we start talking about the next thing’. He also noted that ‘building a community and taking people with us on this journey and to involve them from the beginning before the building of new things is as complicated as putting the technological solutions in place.’
“Too often I think we are forever desperately searching for the new, and not putting enough emphasis on mainstreaming what we know works already and can be deployed at pace – if we only put more effort into selling the benefits of the change to our communities, particularly where they result in complicated and sometimes difficult trade-offs in how people live their lives now.
“The recent experience on implementing emergency active travel schemes (Streetspace in London) is a good example. One of the most eye-opening ‘new’ technologies in terms of impact from the last 12 months has been the humble traffic cone and wand – bits of tech which have been deployed in the tens of thousands to overnight change acres of urban carriageway lanes for cars into public space for people. The technology is hardly new, but the innovation is in how it has been deployed at pace and the public engaged in that process. Clearly the pace of delivery hasn’t delivered perfect results in every locality, and more now needs to be done to explain the benefits of this shift in road space allocation to communities, but as a statement of intent as to how we can use our cities differently and deliver this quickly I’ve not seen any other technology come close.”
Q. In what ways does the sector need to evolve?
A. “For CIHT and TPS, Professor Glenn Lyons recent completed a 10 year review of Transport Planning competences. At the heart of his recommendations was the idea of being more open about the level of uncertainty inherent in our work and a need for the sector to develop a stringer culture of ‘constructive challenge’. As one stakeholder put it we need to be “giving the best advice you can, even if the client does not want to hear it”. There is a growing consensus of opinion that the status quo in how we plan and manage our transport networks is no longer desirable, we must address the climate emergency, clean our air, improve safety after a long stagnation in reducing collisions, and deliver healthy public spaces that encourage more physical activity and are conducive to people living long and happy lives. On some occasions the schemes we choose to prioritise and progress score poorly against that framework, and as transport planners it should be our job to point that out in a clear and compelling way. Ultimately these decisions will always be political, but we have a duty to ourselves and the next generation to ensure that the potential implications of decisions taken today on tomorrow are fully understood by all stakeholders at the point they are being made. The system of funding and appraisal is now creakily starting to recognise it needs to change, but the behaviour of transport planners is something that could adapt far quicker than the framework within which we operate – should we find the collective will to do so.”
Q. Can regulation be a barrier to innovation?
A. “Yes and no. In my experience the barrier can more often than not be perceptual rather than real, the product of layers of ‘this is how we have always done it’ rather than any actual legal impediment. More often the real barrier is a lack of resource – be that officer skill, time or actual money to engage with a challenge in an innovative way. It can always seem slower to do things differently for the first time than just to do it the way it has always been done, however in the long run that up-front investment can pay off and is indeed the only way we move forward as a sector and a society.”
Q. How do you stop innovation from just being another buzzword and instead something that is acted upon?
A. “Rooted in their communities, local authorities are well placed to facilitate mission orientated innovation – an approach that is based on solving a recognised and acknowledged problem that has broad buy in from their communities which require addressing.
“The LGA led project ‘The 21st Century Public Servant’ talks about developing a new generation of ‘municipal entrepreneurs’. These are a new breed of local authority officers who can properly implement client innovation – with the skills, resource, and most importantly time, stability and political buy in. With that bedrock local authorities can accomplish anything!
“And of course a lot of success in supporting innovation is just good project management – defining the issue to be addressed up front, what success might look like, and being able to measure progress towards those goals throughout the project life cycle at various stage gates. There are more feedback loops when delivering innovative approaches to new challenges, and a certain requirement to ‘learn on the job’, but the basic tenets of good project management are still applicable.”