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Listen Up - Community Radio as a Tool for Talking 'Transport'

Graeme Sherriff January 2009

Since March 2006, the On The Move show has been broadcasting on South Manchester's ALL FM 96.9 fm on Tuesdays at 10am and on the Internet site www.onthemovefm.org. With the slogan 'It's not for Trainspotters', its designed to be a transport show that comes at the subject from a different angle. I'd like to share some thoughts about the role of this show, and community radio as a whole, in decision-making about transport and related issues.

To many people, transport problems are not 'transport' problems. I learnt this through experience when working as part of the Longsight Transport Project in 2003. As Friends of the Earth volunteers, we knew that we wanted to talk to people about that group of local issues that in our meetings we call 'transport': buses, trains, trams, walking, cycling, and cars.

But time and time again we would ask people about their 'transport problems' only to be told they did not have any. This was far from a cue to leave the area and find somewhere more deserving of our campaigning energy, as a couple of minutes more conversation almost unfailingly showed. Once freed from the constraints of 'transport', which often seemed to equate with buses, conversations might dwell on the difficulties of getting to the doctor's surgery, to school or to their friends. Elderly people who did not dare walk home from the post office for fear of being mugged on inadequately lit streets and mothers of four who needed to get a taxi to the GPs surgery because there was no bus available would be frustrated about their circumstances but have no 'transport problems'. Yet these are of course all elements of the rich tapestry of transport planning and its linkages with other policy agendas, including health and service accessibility. This was a challenge, but one that we were able to surmount to an extent by asking more about getting around and accessing services than about 'transport'.

The task of finding out about this community's experiences of transport was an important one. Understanding people's needs, preferences and values is a way to enhance decision making and make the outcomes of policy more acceptable and ultimately more effective. Public participation in decision making is increasingly seen as a way to improve the relationship between local authorities and their stakeholders with the intended result of people feeling more a part of their community and looking after their local area more. By talking to people about transport in a broad sense, using interactive and visual methods, and meeting people on their turf (their language classes, their library, their launderette, and so on) we were able to take a snapshot of the experiences of transport for that community, which is published in our 2004 report 'Better Buses and Safer Streets for Longsight'.

Around the same time as we were carrying out this consultation, the government's Social Exclusion Unit published its report 'Making the Connections: Transport and Social Inclusion'. With chapter headings like 'safer streets', 'access to work', 'access to learning', it seemed to be reflecting these concerns and the debate was hopefully moving on. These themes seemed to me to better sum up the problems: in none of them was transport the sole issue, but in each it is an important component. Safer streets, for example, make walking a more attractive option and may make it easier for those without cars to access learning opportunities.

It was this feeling that we needed to approach transport from a new angle that motivated Phil Hardy and myself to start the On The Move show on ALL FM community radio. Broadcasting to South Manchester it covered the traditional themes such as walking, cycling, buses, trains and cars but tried to link them to everyday issues such as local facilities, health and climate change. Having an hour of air time every month to explore these issues is a real luxury. On the day that Levenshulme's Somerfield Supermarket closed down, we were interviewing shoppers about how this would affect their travel habits. For International Women's Week 2007 we had a special show on transport and gender. We visited Longsight market and talked to people about how they got around. In January 2008, as the Core Strategy of Manchester's Local Development Framework (a key local planning document) was being put to consultation, we talked to the Community Network for Manchester about how people could get involved with this.

On The Move is also a tool for consultation. When Councillor Neil Swannick came on our January 2007 show to answer listeners' questions, we saw this as a way to help our listeners to learn about local issues and for Cllr Swannick to take back some local views to his next Manchester City Council meeting. When out on the streets with a microphone asking people what they think about their local facilities we were talking to individuals who would not normally take the time to respond to a 'transport' consultation but may have much to say on related issues.

By encouraging Local Authority members and officers to listen to the show, we are helping them to hear the views of communities through another means. We want people in Local Authorities to know that the show, and community radio as a whole is a useful tool in engaging with communities. In several cases, concerned local residents have come on the show to highlight concerns they had, one of them becoming a regular contributor.

Radio is a fun way to get people talking about transport issues, and this is something we found especially in the schools that we visited. At Crowcroft Primary School, year five made a mini-show to discuss local issues that concerned them. On the streets, 'being on the radio' is somehow more of an event than speaking to someone with a clipboard about bus services.

We've found that the Internet has been a useful tool in bringing the content of the show to a wider audience. On our site, www.onthemovefm.org, contains an archive of all the reports, interviews, discussions and new items since the start of the show. Visitors to the site can explore the shows and select tags for different themes such as 'climate change', 'parking' and 'ethnic'. Far from disappearing into the ether, each show becomes part of a growing portrait of transport and related issues in South Manchester that is accessible to everyone. Discussions with politicians and Council officers are on the record for future reference, and interviews with people in the local area form part of an oral history of the area.

On The Move has the potential to be a bridge between policy makers and communities, to be another way in which planners can understand the transport needs of the public, and to communicate policy, from regional to local level, to people in their living rooms and kitchens. It is beginning to do this, but needs to build up its audience and its links into the communities it tries to reach.

Transport issues cannot necessarily be constrained to one hour per month. Many of the themes that On The Move has covered are pertinent to other shows in the wide range of material that community radio offers. And there may be difficult decisions: if community radio is serious about engaging with the transport challenges we face, can we justifying continuing to call late afternoon shows 'drive time'?

On The Move is broadcast on South Manchester's ALL FM on 96.9 fm on Tuesdays at 10am. All the material from the show is available online at onthemovefm.org.uk. The report 'Better Buses and Safer Streets for Longsight' (2003) and a series of briefings about the Longsight Transport Project (2007) are also available on this website.