Q20 Mr Steinberg: You mentioned about
this new organisation you are going to have. What I have also
noticed, particularly on the Western Bypass because that is the
one I use all the time, is that there is an accident every day—sometimes
two a day on this stretch—and once there is an accident
that is the end of it. Just as the accident takes place, for the
first 10 minutes or whatever it is, you can get through—people
manage to get through. Then the police arrive, and there is total
chaos; nobody can get through. You are stopped and you are stopped
there until they have taken statements, and you are not there
for 35 minutes you are there for two hours. What is your organisation
going to do to improve on what happens now?
Mr Robertson: We will release
the police to do their scene of crime investigation quicker, and
while they are doing their scene of crime investigation—
Q21 Mr Steinberg: But will they still
have the seven police cars and the 24 policemen there taking statements?
Mr Robertson: That is up to them
but they will not be there to do traffic management because we
will be doing that.
Q22 Mr Steinberg: I want to go on to
the other point that I really wanted to raise, and I have wanted
to say this for so long and maybe this is the opportunity. Lorries,
Mr Robertson: lorries on the motorway and on the trunk roads.
At one time, when I first got a motor car, the lorry drivers were,
perhaps, the best drivers on the road; now they are appalling.
They are the worst drivers in the world; they have no respect
at all for anybody else on the road, and they have great big,
huge lorries which thunder down. Why is it that they are allowed,
first of all, to overtake so often? They overtake on inclines
which means that nobody can pass them for miles and miles and
miles because they are fighting each other to keep side-by-side;
neither will give way. When are you going to do something about
that? When are you going to make them stay in a dedicated lane
so that they do not come out of a lane? Lorries do not need to
be doing 90 miles an hour, thundering past your car so that it
shakes all the time. When are you going to do something about
that?
Mr Robertson: We are undertaking
consultation right now on the M42 with a view to trying it out.
It has already raised the concerns of the Freight Transport Association
and others, as you might expect, but we do believe, particularly
as a means of keeping traffic moving up hills, that there is something
to shoot for here and we will lead, I hope, for trials on the
M42 very shortly. I have every sympathy, and not necessarily every
answer—
Q23 Mr Steinberg: It is no good having
sympathy! You are a very sympathetic man, you can tell that, and
you are a very compassionate man, but that does not help me when
I am stuck behind a bloody lorry doing 70 miles an hour and another
lorry is doing 71 miles an hour. Nobody can get past, the muck
is coming over your windscreen, and they are never going to get
past because there is an incline and it is a two-lane road and
nobody does anything about it. It has been going on for years.
Mr Robertson: I have just told
you what we are proposing to do about that. You need to recognise
that, again, just putting this into an international context,
we carry more freight on our roads than just about any other country.
We carry little freight by sea round the coast and inland waterways
and we carry even less by rail. That gives us all, whether as
road-users or people responsible for looking after the highway,
a very, very demanding environment in which to work. As far as
accidents with trucks are concerned, we have already begun working
with the Road Haulage Association and the Freight Transport Association
to point out the blindingly obvious, which is that if they do
not have accidents they will not be stuck in the queues behind
them. We are providing them with information about individual
accidents suggesting that they go away and work out how it is
not going to happen.
Q24 Mr Steinberg: So they are going to
regulate themselves?
Mr Robertson: They are regulated
by others, they are not regulated by the Highway Agency. What
I am suggesting to them is that if they think of straightforward
economics, if they run their fleets better they will be able to
run longer because they will not get stuck in their own accident
count.
Mr Steinberg: I look forward to another
year of you being in the job, Mr Robertson, and when I am stuck
on the Western Bypass I shall remember your name. You might get
a few letters.
Q25 Chairman: Mr Steinberg has spoken
up for people in their cars but you can look at this report in
a more sedate manner dealing directly with Mr Steinberg's questioning.
If you look at paragraph 3.3 which is on page 27, it says: "Motorway
and trunk road user groups . . . were dissatisfied with the quality
of on-road information provided to motorists. They pointed out
that the information was not up-to-date, and did not enable road
users to consider alternative routes . . . For example, electronic
signs on the M25 carrying messages such as `Accident M40 North'
are of limited assistance to motorists as they provide no indication
of how long it will take to clear the scene of the accident and
the resultant tailbacks, or of what motorists should do to minimise
or avoid delay . . . etc, etc." So I think Mr Steinberg was
simply asking you, Mr Robertson, what you are going to do to provide
useful, clear signs to people not only on the motorway but before
they join the motorway to make sense to them so they can plan
their journey; so poor Mr Steinberg is not sitting there fuming,
thinking up angry letters he is going to send you?
Mr Robertson: The National Traffic
Control Centre has a mission to deliver the information that is
required to get us to a position where we can indicate to people
how long they are going to be delayed, or whether there is an
alternative route that they may consider. That information is
already on the website, not in the form that we want it. We will
continue to roll out—
Q26 Chairman: I am sorry, Mr Robertson.
You have got to do a lot better than that. Reading the website
is of absolutely no use at all to Mr Steinberg when he is sitting
in a traffic jam.
Mr Robertson: I agree with that.
What we need to do, what we plan to do and what we will do—and
I believe we have resources to do it in the spending review—is
we will get that information transferred into a form that Mr Steinberg
and others can use, whether it is over local radio or on breakfast
TV, or whether it is on the website.
Q27 Mr Steinberg: We want signs on the
roads. I have never watched breakfast TV—never!
Mr Robertson: I think the point
is that that will be there as well, but different people will
have different requirements in order to plan their journey.
Q28 Mr Curry: You can see why road rage
is such a problem. Unlike Mr Steinberg, I do have an acute interest
in the M1 and, indeed, the A1 because I have a constituency in
North Yorkshire and I drive up and down to it, and it is such
a big constituency that if I take the train I have got hours of
driving and I get to the wrong place at the wrong time—besides
which rail fares are so monstrous it seems easier on the taxpayer
if I take the car. At the moment, you have got major roadworks
at a place called Carlton, just south of the trio of roundabouts
on the A1, and the big decision I have to take is as I come down
the A1. There is no point in my looking at a website two hours
before I reach those roadworks because things might have shifted;
the point of decision is when I am just near Leeds and the A1
divides and I go along the M1 or I go along the A1. What I need
at that point is something which tells me whether, if I take the
A1, I am going to be able to run through clearly—okay, accidents
might happen subsequently and you cannot be responsible for that—or
whether I should take the M1, which I know for certain will be
brought to a halt about eight times on that road between Leeds
and London, whether there is an accident or not. All I get on
the signs is something which says, "Queuing ahead" or
some slightly banal message like "Take a break" or "Have
a rest", and when you are actually stationary on the road
the thought of taking a rest is not the most useful advice you
can be given. If it is suggested I take an alternative, I do not
carry the road map of England in my head, I do not just want to
be navigated off the road I want to be navigated back on to the
road with clear signs. When can I hope to have that information,
which is all part of the decision I have to take quickly when
I am driving? No power on earth makes me listen to local radio,
I am very sorry indeed. Absolutely no power on earth will make
me do that and, like, Gerry I have never watched breakfast television
in my life and I am too old to start now. I want a decision in
the cab of my car as I am approaching the point of decision.
Mr Robertson: On a sign, we already
have predictive models that can give you advice about what are
the likely consequences of continuing your journey, and we will
present that. We are rolling out the signs as part of the National
Traffic Control Centre's contract, and I would expect them to
do that relatively soon. What is a challenge, of course, is being
able to anticipate what everybody coming past and reading that
sign might want to have as their decision, so when you talk about
it being in your car and personal to you then I go on to talk
about another generation of technology which people can already
see in the sense of satellite navigation systems matching with
information coming from a National Traffic Control Centre and
giving you, ultimately, your personal decision, but that is some
way away because the in-car technology and the transmission of
it is not yet ready.
Q29 Mr Curry: But there is at least the
hope that at some stage I will have the information to make those
decisions as I am actually travelling, which saves me the frustration
and irritation and saves the planet warming just that tiny little
bit?
Mr Robertson: Yes, we are very
conscious that congestion causes unproductive emissions.
Q30 Mr Curry: What are the rules for
access to some of the roads? This is going to become a personal
travelogue, I am afraid, but driving up the M1 the other day—and
Gerry has talked about lorries driving past each other (I wish
they would drive past each other at 70 miles an hour, it is driving
past at 40 miles an hour which is the problem)—one of the
reasons for the delay was a fleet of lorries going down the inside
lane carrying locomotives, probably to Doncaster. Does it not
strike you as being slightly curious that locomotives should travel
by road?
Mr Robertson: One of our challenges
is making sure that we schedule abnormally or heavy loads (a)
to minimise the disruption to the travelling public but (b) also
to make sure that the roads are still in a workable condition
after.
Q31 Mr Curry: Could you extend that to
military vehicles which go in convoys whose top speed appears
to around 30 mile an hour?
Mr Robertson: I would need to
check whether they are covered, but the principle would be the
same if they have a very heavy load—[1]
Q32 Mr Curry: Sometimes they are not
carrying loads they are just driving extraordinarily slowly.
Mr Robertson: The risks we are
trying to manage are safety in terms of if they are wide loads
and they project into the next carriageway or if they are very
heavy loads.
Q33 Mr Curry: There are two points you
raised in your initial reply to the Chairman, which I think will
be interesting to explore. You said that the Dutch took a different
view of the use of funds, or some expression like that. What did
you mean by that?
Mr Robertson: If we take ramp
metering as one of the things that we have spent a lot of time
talking to each other about and trialling, it is quite evident
that the way that Riskswaterstaat in Holland have progressed
is to look at the potential of the ramp meter and do some sort
of evaluation that says "Yes, that looks like it might be
a runner, let's get a few of them out there and then let's tune
them to get them right." They will have a business case at
one point but we do not think they do a separate business case
for every installation, and they cannot tell us what benefit they
are seeing relative to the cost of the build, whereas we would,
following normal government rules, put together a quite stringent
business case and our people would be expected to provide quite
a high level of confidence—
Q34 Mr Curry: Tell me about the business
case. If, like Mr Steinberg, I am stuck on the M1, basically,
I am not massively interested in the business case, I just want
to get to where I am going. If, as a result of my being stuck,
I get to London averaging, let us say, 36 miles a gallon as opposed
to 38 miles a gallon, and it takes me four-and-a-quarter hours'
driving as opposed to three-and-three-quarter hours' driving,
that is a very small statistic which ought to go into your business
case; the savings for everybody—from me personally, the
taxpayer and the planet—of my getting there economically.
How do you work out the business case for this sort of thing?
Mr Robertson: Almost exactly the
way you describe, inasmuch as the time value of travellers and
the commercial value of freight is included in the calculations
that are done, as are any safety improvements, and these are offset
against the cost of the installation and the likely effectiveness
of the tool—in this case ramp metering. What is really difficult
to see, as far as that one is concerned, is the difference in
perception between us and our Dutch colleagues as to how effective
that tool is.
Q35 Mr Curry: I want to find out what
that actually means in practice. There is what I would regard
as a common-sense point of view; if a motorway is screwed up—and
one of the reasons it is screwed up is because of people merging
from another road or it may be screwed up but people are still
coming in from the other side—common sense would seem to
say, "If the damned thing is overflowing then do not pour
anything else into it for the time being." That is simplistic,
is it not?
Mr Robertson: That is common sense,
but if you do that, of course, you jam up all the local roads.
So you need something rather more sophisticated that decides—
Q36 Mr Curry: If you do that there is
no point in just having your signals on your entry ramp, you have
got to start having indicators way back from that, so that people
approaching that point—on to the M11 over the 404, for example,
or the M25 where you have got that spectacular set of roadworks
on the M11, at the moment, helpfully regulated by speed cameras,
which I thought might be used more usefully elsewhere. How far
back do you take that process of management to make it work?
Mr Robertson: We operate in the
same way as most of our overseas colleagues; we only have one
set of lights which is on the entrance to the main highway and
then you have detector loops in the road which detect how far
back the queue is going. If it is going back as far as threatening
local roads then the machine automatically changes the lights.
Q37 Mr Curry: That is a sort of traffic
tautology, is it not, really? The motorway is screwed up and you
stop people coming on, but when it looks like that is going to
screw that up you tell them to go on to the motorway but the motorway
is already screwed up so they cannot go on to the motorway.
Mr Robertson: There is only one
way to defeat the arithmetic at the end of the day and that is
to put in more capacity, and things like ramp metering do not
put in more capacity they smooth the flow by controlling the rate
at which traffic from the side road goes on to the motorway. We
successfully do that in some of our locations, we just have not
been able to justify doing it as often as we would like.
Q38 Mr Curry: One final question, which
again is just one of the bees in my bonnet, is that you approach
roadworks and you have a sign which says "Please use both
carriageways". However, you will always find some helpful
lorry driver who has decided he is going to become the local gendarme
and he will halt his vehicle alongside another lorry and they
will proceed, side-by-side. There can be miles of open road on
the outside carriageway in front of them but is he going to give
way? No, because he has determined that he is the local policeman.
What are you going to do about that?
Mr Robertson: That is an enforcement
matter, I am afraid, and one I can only refer to the police. I
do not have any enforcement role, as far as that is concerned.
Q39 Chairman: Although, as we see at
paragraphs 4.19 and 4.20, the Agency is taking over from the police
responsibility for clearing motorways after incidents and accidents.
What difference is that going to make?
Mr Robertson: At the moment, the
police have responsibility for clearing accidents. Although that
responsibility is not written down anywhere, their principal responsibilities
are to deal with a scene of crime, if there is one, and to ensure
the safety of the road. As far as the police are concerned, a
road with nothing moving on it is a safe road. We do not subscribe
to that view, of course (and I am sure none of us here do), and
the responsibility we have is to get traffic moving; also, to
get diversions in place quickly and, also, if there is a really
serious incident, to get people across the road and back on to
the network somewhere else. Basically, to get detritus off the
road and to clear cars that have broken down. A lot of hold-ups
on roads are not great big crashes, they are a car that has broken
down on the outside lane, and it does not need four or five policemen
to take care of that, it needs a traffic officer, and that is
what we will do.
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