Effective road and traffic management

Written evidence from Surrey County Council (ETM 11)

We are grateful to the Transport Committee for investigating effective road and traffic management. Surrey County Council believes that this is one of the most important tools we have to tackle congestion, reduce the impact on the environment and make journeys easier for both the public and businesses.

Surrey’s highway network is extremely busy. The county contains a long stretch of the M25, as well as parts of the M3 and M23. We experience a large amount of through traffic, especially vehicles bound for London, Heathrow and Gatwick, all of which are close to our borders.

Despite these pressures, traffic levels in Surrey have barely increased over the past decade. We seem to have reached a level of traffic saturation which is getting appreciably neither worse nor better. The advantage of this situation is that Surrey residents and employers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way that they travel and do business. We have high levels of working from home and flexible tele-working. We know when the busiest periods occur and generally we aim to avoid them. Surrey residents use trains and buses more than the average.

The disadvantage of having a saturated road network is that we do not have spare highway capacity to deal with unforeseen problems, such as accidents, road-works and poor weather. On a "normal" day, our road network works tolerably well. But when problems occur they can have long-lasting consequences and cause very long delays. A blockage or a lane closure on the M25 can mean that an unsustainably high level of traffic often diverts onto local roads.

The county also has a number of congestion hot-spots where antiquated and overloaded road layouts cause bottlenecks in the highway system. For example, there is considerable peak time congestion at most of the junctions with the M25. Most of the county's small to medium sized towns do not have bypasses. As a result, each town can suffer from high levels of congestion due to the high level of through traffic flowing through the centre of town. We also have severe congestion problems around some of our level crossings.

Because of this, the issue of congestion is one of the top concerns of local residents and businesses. However, we do not believe that building more highway capacity is, on its own, the right solution to the problems of congestion. A new road or the widening of an existing road can generate considerable additional traffic and put more pressure on the surrounding road network. Road building needs to be carefully assessed and targeted, for example to ease bottlenecks without generating higher levels of traffic and therefore congestion.


Our policy approach to transport is that journeys must be effective, safe, sustainable and reliable:

        effective transport means transport that succeeds in getting people to their objectives, whether this is to travel to work, school, leisure or shopping. We must not forget that transport is, first and foremost, about allowing and helping people to meet their travel needs.
        safe travel is important to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured on our roads.
        sustainable transport emphatically does not always mean a modal shift away from the car. For many journeys, the car remains the most practical means of transport. We do encourage mode shift where journeys can be made by alternative means, such as when short journeys could most sensibly be made on foot or cycle. When car travel is unavoidable, we are working to encourage people to make shorter journeys, to travel outside the peaks and to choose more efficient vehicles, including electric cars.
        reliable transport is transport that is relatively consistent, when journeys take approximately the same amount of time on different times. This enables our residents and businesses to be able to have faith in the transport system and to plan their lives more effectively. This approach places much more emphasis on journey time reliability than on speed of journeys. We believe that our customers would prefer journeys that they could rely on rather than infrastructure improvements which shave a few seconds off their journey time.

Surrey’s approach to congestion is therefore to look for a mix of traffic management solutions. This includes demand management, integrated land use & transport planning, network management, traffic management, freight & goods management and behavioural change.

Our activities are coordinated by a dedicated Network Management Information Centre, located in Leatherhead. We would be delighted to welcome the Transport Committee to visit this centre and see first-hand how we use technology to manage traffic.

We place a high priority on proactive network and traffic management to deliver reliable journey times and assist the network to recover from major disruption.  Not only does this approach help to keep traffic flowing, but it can also be used to manage demand from other network users such as buses and pedestrians.   At the same time, it provides up-to-date information to both those already travelling and those planning their journeys, whether this be deciding either when to leave for the commute home or when and how to travel for irregular or one-off trips.

Key to this approach is proactive partnership working, and Surrey is fortunate to already have good working relationships with other agencies such as the Highways Agency and the Police.  Transport is coordinated by Transport for Surrey, an innovative voluntary partnership to bring together different transport partners with the common interest of improving transport in the County.

Surrey County Council has been working with the Department for Transport and the Highways Agency on a demonstration project known as Integrated Demand Management. This project was designed to coordinate the traffic management of the national road network (principally the M25) and the corresponding local road network. This involves aspects such as:

· real-time monitoring of the whole network;

· a more complete shared picture of the whole network in terms of road works, events and incidents, and congestion and performance;

· the development of operational processes and plans and strategies to control traffic and to inform network users to optimise available capacity;

· a common agreement as to how the two organisations will work together to manage the network proactively.

If successful, this demonstration project would deliver a low-cost toolkit of traffic management measures which could be applied more widely across the country.

At the time of writing (January 2011), we do not know if this project has secured ongoing funding following the Comprehensive Spending Review.

January 2011