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Promise to keep traffic moving is scrapped as jams worsen
By Ben Webster

The Government accepts that in many cities congestion will worsen and targets to cut it will fail

MOTORISTS will waste an extra day a year sitting in traffic jams by 2010, according to government targets that assume that congestion will worsen despite efforts to control it.

Ministers have abandoned a pledge made in 2000 to reduce congestion by 8 per cent in cities by 2010. The Department for Transport has instead released new targets, under which it is assumed that congestion will increase in nine of the ten largest urban areas.

The department’s report, Journey Time Targets for Urban Areas, states that the target for Bristol would be met if average journey times were to increase by no more than 14 per cent. That is the equivalent of an extra 30 minutes a week or 24 hours a year. In Nottingham, journey times are likely to increase by 10.5 per cent and in South Yorkshire by 7.9 per cent.

Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, issued a statement with the report but mentioned only the three cities with the lowest congestion targets — London, Birmingham and Manchester. The targets for the other cities were in an appendix to the report.

The acceptance that congestion will worsen contrasts starkly with the commitment made in 2000. Gus Macdonald, then the Transport Minister, said in his introduction to the 2010 Transport Plan: “Congestion on our roads will be reduced from present levels by 2010.”

The plan had also pledged to tackle urban congestion by introducing 25 tram schemes. Several of the cities where congestion is expected to rise have had to abandon such schemes because of a lack of funding.

Manchester is the only city to have won approval for extending its tram scheme and is the only one of the ten largest urban areas with a target that assumes that there will be no increase in congestion.

The RAC Foundation said that the Government appeared to have abandoned any aspiration to relieve congestion. Edmund King, the foundation’s director, said: “Far from promising to make things better for road users, the department is actually planning for congestion to get worse. Such a lack of optimism is a bleak prospect for commuters. We need a radical rethink of transport provision in our cities, including more park-and-ride schemes and building better ring roads.”

A department spokesman said some cities were better able to cope with rising traffic levels, whereas roads in cities such as Bristol and Nottingham were already heavily used.

He added: “If you are nearing full capacity, it doesn’t take much to get to the point where there is heavy congestion most of the time. We are responding to the reality that people are making more journeys. Our aim is to mitigate the impact on an already busy road network and hopefully beat these targets.”

The department’s long-term plan for reducing congestion is to introduce tolls of up to £1.34 a mile on the busiest roads. However, a national scheme will not be ready until 2015.

The only way they try to reduce congestion is by taxing and pricing people off the roads. They don't seem to understand this will never work.

The ironic thing, is that it is trivially simple to reduce congestion but they don't want to because so much of their income is based on taxing motorists. All they need to do is pass a law that offers a large corporate tax break based on the percentage of home workers a company has. The important part here is to offer a financial incentive to employers instead of taxing employees.

The ironic thing, is that it is trivially simple to reduce congestion but they don't want to because so much of their income is based on taxing motorists. All they need to do is pass a law that offers a large corporate tax break based on the percentage of home workers a company has. The important part here is to offer a financial incentive to employers instead of taxing employees.

Additionally a return to the sensible policy that local parents have priority for places at all schools.

The price to pay for more road space

The increasing cost of petrol is doing some drivers a favour, writes Ross Gittins.

ONE thing I hate about politicians is the way they pretend to indulge us rather than level with us. They rarely tell us the unvarnished truth about what problems they can fix and what they can't, preferring to string us along. They act as though they can fix everything, which encourages a culture of complaint and a focus on the alleviation of symptoms rather than a search for fundamental solutions.

Take all the whingeing about the price of petrol. No pollie's prepared to tell us that since the problem is a global shortage of oil, the rise in price is a healthy development because, by encouraging both producers and consumers to adjust their behaviour accordingly, it offers the best solution to the problem.

Fortunately, neither side of politics is silly enough to embrace the populist cry for the temporary relief of symptoms that would come from cutting the tax on petrol - which would increase local demand without adding to supply.

A related issue on which the pollies have always lacked frankness is traffic congestion. They won't admit there are no painless answers to peak-hour delays.

It's not practically possible to eliminate congestion. The best we could hope for is to slow down the rate at which it's getting worse.

In his book Still Stuck in Traffic, Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution in Washington reveals just how ignorant of the nature of the problem politicians have allowed us to be.

He argues that traffic congestion isn't the problem. Actually, it's the solution to the problem - the only solution the public finds acceptable.

The real problem is that we all want to live together in big cities and travel to and from work or school at pretty much the same time of day. Now, it makes economic sense for us to live in cities and it makes social as well as economic sense for us to want to work when others are working.

But the problem is greatly compounded by our desire to live in low-density suburbs and to travel in our own cars - by ourselves.

So the demand for road space at peak times of the day greatly exceeds the supply of space available. The result is traffic congestion, which is merely a way of rationing the space on a first come, first served basis. It's a queue, in other words.

We all think of ourselves as having a democratic right to drive to work if we want to, but what the pollies never have the courage to point out is that, by exercising our private right to drive, we impose "social costs" on other people.

There are costs for other motorists - in the form of slower journey times and increased fuel consumption - and costs on the rest of the community, in the form of air and noise pollution.

The standard economists' solution to this is to make private individuals bear the social costs of their actions by charging them to use main arteries at peak times. You'd keep increasing the charge until you'd eliminated the congestion.

But no government in the world has done this. That's partly because technology hasn't yet advanced to the point where a fool-proof charging system is practical.

Mainly, however, it's because the public would vigorously object to such a charge. We hate the idea because it would disadvantage people who couldn't afford the charge (which is true), because we believe we're already paying enough tax and because we much prefer to leave the cost of congestion hidden from view.

See the point? When demand exceeds supply we have to ration. And when you won't ration by price (which is what economists advocate) you have to ration by queue. So congestion isn't the problem, it's the solution to the problem - the only solution we're prepared to accept, our unending complaints notwithstanding.

By hiding the cost of congestion - by paying it in time rather than money - we understate the cost of our preference for living in low-density patterns and we end up overinvesting in highways. Both things lead to urban sprawl, which increases energy costs, infrastructure costs, vehicle kilometres travelled and air pollution.

In theory, the problem of excess demand for peak-hour road space can be tackled either by reducing demand or by increasing supply. As we've seen, the public shies away from demand-side solutions because they impose costs directly on the individual. We prefer supply-side solutions because they impose costs on the community (and we can kid ourselves that others will pay, not us).

Hence the perennially popular solution of trying to reduce congestion by building more tunnels and expressways. The problem with it is that any success you have in reducing congestion and travel time is soon lost because it induces more demand from people who'd prefer to drive to work.

There must be some ultimate limit to this additional demand, but to reach it would require a huge expansion of expressways, involving the disfiguring of many landscapes and the destruction of thousands of homes.

It would also be impossibly expensive and wasteful (because of all the hours of the week when the extra expressways were underutilised).

So building better roads offers no realistic solution to congestion - a conclusion both public and pollies seem to be coming to in reaction to the modern practice of allowing private operators to build the new expressways and then charge directly for their use.

What about reducing road congestion by increasing the supply and quality of public transport? Not a bad idea, particularly since it's been so long neglected and in view of our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But the dearth of public transport in outer suburbs suggests it would be an expensive business to make more than a modest impact on road congestion. And to some extent you'd be shifting the congestion from road to rail and bus.

So what hope is there? Well, it turns out that a lasting rise in the price of petrol might have a significant effect in reducing the demand for peak-hour road space by shifting people to public transport and encouraging ride-sharing.

Downs says in his book that cutting the number of lone drivers would reduce congestion more than any other single change.

I'm not sure this Australian viewpoint is relevant in the U.K.