David Milne: Bold new vision is needed to break the political gridlock over transport

On the one hand, keeping Yorkshire moving is important for the economy. On the other, concerns about climate change, dependence on global oil supplies and our apparent lack of ability to manage the demand for road travel should all point towards a need to break free from many of the traditional constraints of transport policy in order to develop a bolder vision.

When Labour came to power in 1997, that is what John Prescott attempted to do with the ambitious 10 Year Plan. He succeeded in raising the profile of transport as a policy issue, and in promoting integration within the transport sector and with other areas, such as environment and land use.

But his pledge to reduce the volume of journeys made by road came to nothing and his successors have largely restricted themselves to tinkering with public transport while ideas about road pricing have gradually been pushed into the background.

In Yorkshire, plans to build a tram system in Leeds and to extend the system in Sheffield have both failed due to lack of central government support.

We will be seeing Active Traffic Management with hard shoulder running to increase capacity on our busiest sections of the M1 and M62, following a successful trial in the Midlands. But, as this apparently replaces plans for motorway widening, it does little to dispel suggestions that Yorkshire is being unfairly penalised in the Government's spending decisions.

Looking to the future, both Labour and the Conservatives are talking about high-speed rail to link the biggest urban centres in England and Scotland, raising many potential arguments about routes and which cities will be included.

Such decisions will have important long-term impacts for local and regional economies. Both South and West Yorkshire need to be included if these plans are to go ahead. But by far the biggest transport issue affecting ordinary people and businesses in the Yorkshire region is how we get around internally, especially within and between our urban areas.

History has bequeathed us a legacy of closely situated industrial towns and cities built over a naturally rural landscape. Hills, narrow winding corridors and bottlenecks cause congestion for private cars and are far from ideal for buses, for cycling or for transporting goods around.

Yet, with the exception of the Sheffield Supertram, covering just 18 miles in three directions from the city centre, we have no working examples of major investment in urban public transport that provides a feasible and attractive alternative to car use. Initiatives, such as the guided busways in Leeds, the tram-like FTR buses in Leeds and York and the Transdev Route 36 bus linking Leeds with Harrogate and Ripon, are piecemeal innovations that bring small local benefits, but do little to improve the overall system.

West Yorkshire is the only urban area in England where congestion has been increasing during the credit crunch and Leeds still claims to be the largest urban area in western Europe without a rapid transit system.

Money is clearly a constraint and the government may well be right in deciding that tram systems do not represent best value. At 500m, the Leeds Supertram was expected to cost double the currently proposed trolleybus. We cannot expect to create urban public transport networks to rival the best in Europe without also moving to the high tax economy model that supports them. But that doesn't mean we can do nothing.

What we require is a fundamental rethink of how urban and regional public transport is perceived by its current and potential users, rediscovering it as an essential public service that benefits everyone.

Schedules need to be planned and integrated throughout the region, so that the majority of regular journeys people make can be included. Operations need to be reliable, with a cast-iron guarantee that customers will not be let down when something fails, as being stranded once is enough to alienate travellers for good. Yesterday's snow-related travel chaos was a case in point.

Ticketing systems need to be region-wide, covering all modes and operators. They should avoid irritating inefficiencies, such as direct payments to bus drivers, and fares need to reflect the fact that they are competing with private car travel, where costs per person decrease when families and friends travel together.

We also need to get to grips with other reasons why many people may be reluctant to leave their cars at home, including comfort, knowledge of what is available, up-to-date information about schedules and delays, and service coverage and frequencies that may constrain travel flexibility, all of which can be addressed if we show sufficient will.

Within our towns and cities, we should be attracting people out of their cars by making sure that public transport provides the best option for many trips. We should be improving connections between our many centres, to aid regeneration in places like Bradford and Rotherham. We should also look seriously at proposals like reinstating the rail link between York and Beverley, which would increase cohesion between East and North Yorkshire.

This vision shares some commonality with the 300m investment approved by the Yorkshire Assembly's regional transport board in January 2009, but most of that only becomes available in 2014.

For the next government to do the best for our economy and the environment, spending should be brought forward rather than delayed. Creating a region-wide Transport for Yorkshire organisation, based on the London model, with significantly increased regulation of private operators, may be the only way to deliver results on a timescale.

We may also need to abandon some of the key public transport ideologies that have been in place since the Thatcher era, such as competition between operators and avoiding subsidised fares.

Achieving all of this may deliver far better value for the money spent than focussing investment on trams or high-speed rail, where those who enjoy the majority of benefits are far fewer than those who pay for them.