In the past week or so we’ve had a parliamentary statement – given by the Prime Minister, no less – on new security measures at the nation’s airports and stations, tremendous coverage of the opening of the new St Pancras International station and the departure of Eurostar services on a new high-speed line.

Yet why does the nagging feeling remain that transport only really gets discussed in terms of extremes? Preventing terrorist attacks; restoring the nation’s architectural heritage; exceptional feats of engineering – for transport, the everyday never seems to be noticed.

We in the Labour party are no better at it than the media. At conference this year, anybody wanting to hear the debate which included transport issues – jostling, note, with equally weighty matters such as local government and housing – had to wait until Thursday morning.

Yet I know from my time on the National Policy Forum how important transport is to everyone. There wasn’t one workshop at an NPF meeting discussing the ‘sustainable communities’ policy strand which wasn’t packed and didn’t spend much of its time discussing thorny issues like bus regulation and getting people out of cars and onto public transport.

And on occasions when we had discussions with employers and business leaders, it was even clearer how important transport issues were to them. Improving bus and local rail to make it easier for people to get to work and leisure destinations, making it easier to move freight by rail to combat congested roads and reduce emissions were pretty much at the top of their list. As Ken Livingstone and Ruth Kelly have demonstrated, you can even get big business to pay their share for new projects like Crossrail, when it understands the long-term economic importance of making it easier for people to move across the capital.

In January Sir Rod Eddington published a landmark report examining the long-term links between transport and the UK’s economic productivity, growth and stability. He didn’t pull any punches in some of his recommendations. Grand projects, like new high-speed rail lines, were out; he dismissed trams as not providing value for money; and said that easing bottlenecks on our roads and urban rail was of prime importance.
But where was the debate it within the Labour Party?

Discussion of transport is often conducted through the prism of tackling climate change and promoting sustainability. This is no bad thing, and organisations like SERA have led the way in campaigning against unfettered road building projects or airport expansion.

But there is more to transport policy than emissions. Strong public transport promotes social justice and economic inclusion. Using the number of actual journeys taken as a yardstick, almost half of all rail users are in social groups C, D and E – and this figures rises to 60% of all journeys on regional rail services. Women are more likely than men to use buses and coaches, whether for commuting or socialising. More than half of the population do not have a family member living within an hours’ travel time – for the 27% of households who do not have access to a car, this means using trains or coaches to keep in touch with family.

In short, transport deserves to be considered in its own right by the party, not simply as an adjunct or a function of other policies. It gives us a crucial nexus between tackling climate change and ensuring continued economic growth, particularly in our regions and beyond London and the south east. We should be asking how social mobility is constrained by poor transport links as well as education and family background.

So that is why the Labour Transport Group is being created – to serve as a forum within the Labour party for members to develop new thinking on all aspects of transport policy, promote a progressive approach to transport and the economic, social and environmental benefits which this brings and campaign to see debate and policy-making on transport given a higher priority within the party and beyond.

Transport touches on all our lives – getting to work, going to the shops, picking kids up from school – and the government has invested billions in improving our transport infrastructure. When it is schools or hospitals, the party is constantly discussing how best to use that money. We should be doing the same with transport.