Local transport faces disproportionate budget cuts in the upcoming spending review, transport groups have warned, as ministers scramble to prepare savings of 25% or 40% by 2020.
Key groups, including pteg (the Passenger Transport Executive Group), which represents the six strategic transport bodies in the largest city regions outside London, have written to transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin outlining concerns.
The groups say 'every day transport' will be hit hard since major investment programmes for roads and railways are ring-fenced on five-year time frames, together with funding set aside for HS2.
On top of a focus on major national schemes from the Department for Transport, cuts to the revenue support grants from the Department of Communities and Local Government could result in further reductions to bus services, local roads falling into greater disrepair, and a failure to meet walking and cycling targets, the letter says.
Government transport spending could become 'entirely focused on major capital projects, and (that) all other transport programmes will be subject to very deep cuts', the letter warns.
'The risk is that major eye-catching projects, which carry short-term political kudos but have major costs and risks in delivery, will take precedence over the multitude of smaller local transport projects and programmes that together bring much larger overall benefits for everyone in the country,' the letter states.
Stephen Joseph, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, said: 'Our analysis shows that the Spending Review risks hitting very hard the everyday transport that people and communities rely on, while programmes like big road building schemes will escape unscathed.
'We hope the transport secretary will ensure that the review has a better balance between the major capital programmes and the funding for this everyday transport.'
The groups want the Government to review major transport programmes, especially the Road Investment Strategy, to help rebalance capital and revenue funding for everyday transport.
The letter calls on the Government to recognise 'that without revenue funding there will be no staff to plan and implement capital investment programmes and that capital funding for building transport schemes without the revenue funding to maintain them will benefit no-one'.
'The DfT’s own recent publication Finding the optimum showed that the return on investment is substantially higher in schemes which mix revenue-funded behaviour change programmes with capital investment,' it adds.
The letter has come from Campaign for Better Transport, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Living Streets, Pteg and Sustrans.
