Effective road and traffic management

10. On the strategic road network (SRN), encompassing all motorways and trunk ‘A’ roads managed by the Highways Agency, the average delay experienced on the slowest 10 per cent of journeys in the year ending October 2010 was 3.56 minutes per 10 miles. While up slightly on the year before, this represents an 8.7 per cent reduction since the year ending March 2008 and is the equivalent of the average speed on these slowest journeys rising from 44.3 mph to 45.3 mph. Average delays experienced on all SRN journeys have also fallen by 4 per cent over the same period:

11. On locally managed ‘A’ roads in England we measure speed rather than delay due to different data collection measures. The average vehicle speed on these roads during the weekday morning peak increased by 1.5 per cent to 25 mph between the years ending September 2008 and September 2010. In addition, average morning peak person journey times – which take account of vehicle occupancies as well as numbers – on key routes in the largest urban areas became 4.5 per cent faster over the same period.

12. While recent reductions in traffic have had the short term impact of reducing congestion and increasing peak time speeds, in the longer term there is a risk that we will see a significant growth in congestion as the economy recovers and pressure on road networks increases. The Eddington Study estimated that the average time ‘lost’ per kilometre is forecast to increase by 30% during the period 2003 to 2025. Eddington estimated that direct costs of congestion to business could rise by £10-12 billion from 2003 to 2025 (in 2002 prices). Adding in the value of the lost time experienced by other travellers raises this figure to £23-24 billion per annum.

Public attitudes to congestion

13. In developing strategies for dealing with congestion, we think it is important to understand how people experience it, and the circumstances in which it causes them most concern.

14. The Department’s latest attitudinal statistics [3] show a marked difference between people’s perceptions of congestion and their actual experiences of how it affects their journeys.

15. When questioned in a recent survey, over 80 per cent of people reported that congestion was a serious problem in the country and over 90 per cent said that the Government should be doing something about it. However, when asked about their personal experiences, only 25 per cent of people said that congestion regularly affected them while a larger number, 30 per cent, said that they were rarely affected by congestion.

16. One of the key results from the survey was that people perceive the main problem of congestion to be not the average time increase caused but journey time unreliability. When asked why congestion was a problem three in ten said it was because of the uncertainty it created over their journey times while only one in ten said the waste of their time was a problem.

Our approach to reducing congestion

17. Our approach to tackling congestion is a practical response to the needs of motorists who travel on our networks every day, starting from the perspective of the motorist rather than that of the infrastructure provider, whether that be the Highways Agency or a local Highway Authority.  We seek to provide road users with access to the information they need when they decide to travel, when they plan their journeys, and to respond to conditions as they are travelling.  We seek to ensure that our current road networks offer a good service to those who use them, by doing a fully professional job of managing and reducing the impact of disruptive events on the strategic road network and giving Local Authorities the tools they need to do the same on their road networks, and by using capacity fairly and efficiently.  And, looking to the future, we are making best use of the funding we have available to mitigate the most serious congestion, safety or quality of life problems, by carefully targeted investments in management systems or capacity.

18. Only a small minority of roads are directly managed by central government – 98% of all roads are managed by local highway authorities. The Government has published a Local Transport White Paper that sets out the Government’s vision for a sustainable local transport system that supports the economy and reduces carbon emissions. A key part of this will be reducing congestion. It explains how the Government is placing localism at the heart of the transport agenda, and taking measures to empower local authorities when it comes to tackling these issues in their areas. The White Paper also underlines Central Government’s direct support to local authorities to achieve this.

Helping road users make informed choices

19. The Committee’s inquiry rightly recognises that the behaviour of individual road users has the potential to affect the performance of road networks in both positive and negative ways. Part of our strategy for dealing with congestion is to ensure that individual drivers have the information and tools they need to make well informed decisions about their own journeys. We also have a range of plans in place to support responsible, considerate driving.

20. Through our work on alternatives to travel and sustainable travel we aim to make people aware that they have a genuine choice about whether to travel at all. A reduction in travel demand would bring tangible benefits – reduced congestion, reduced carbon emissions, and improved quality of life. In order to facilitate this, the Government is taking steps to increase the speed and take-up of broadband across the country for both business and leisure purposes and holding discussions with bodies such as the CBI and TUC as to how a reduction in travel demand could fit with the needs of business. Businesses are being encouraged to consider measures such as permitting home working and staggering people’s working days as options which could increase productivity and reduce congestion.

21. As well as addressing the need to travel, we are also providing people with better choices as to how they travel. The Government supports congestion and carbon reducing sustainable transport modes both through investment in our public transport network and by helping Local Authorities embed sustainable travel measures in local transport planning. For example, a combination of improvements to infrastructure and services and better information provided to members of the public resulted in a 2-8% reduction in traffic in the recent sustainable travel towns project.

22. Where journeys do need to be undertaken by car, it is important that drivers have high quality information to support choices of route and timing. The Department, in partnership with transport stakeholders and technology providers, provides journey planning and travel information to the public via www.transportdirect.info. This portal provides road users with dynamic route planning, based on predicted traffic speeds at a given time of day, and including real time information about road incidents. The portal can plan the quickest route, which may not be the shortest or most obvious. This reduces both journey times for the user, and also congestion on the avoided routes.

23. Drivers also need access to information once they are on the roads. On the strategic road network, on-road traffic officers are backed up by regional and national control centres, which also keep drivers informed through real-time traffic information, by setting signs and by giving other service providers accurate travel advice, enabling motorists to make more informed decisions about how to avoid (and avoid adding to) congestion.

24. A new National Traffic Information Service (NTIS) is being introduced to replace the current PFI contract for the national control centre which expires later in 2011. The new service will provide the capability to capture and interpret traffic data and to deliver that to users of the strategic road network through a range of information channels, both directly, and indirectly through other organisations such as the travel news media.

Supporting responsible, considerate driving

25. The choices drivers make while they are on the road have a major impact on both the performance of the network and the experience of other road users. Our goal is to support responsible, considerate driving, thereby avoiding accidents that, in addition to tragic loss of life, can cause large amounts of disruption and congestion.

26. Great Britain has the safest roads in the world, and the Government is committed to seeing further reductions in the numbers of people killed or seriously inured on our roads. The Government will be setting out a new strategic framework for road safety by April 2011 setting out its vision and approach to road safety.

27. We are already improving road safety by strengthening the way people learn to drive and are tested, moving the focus to one of continued and lifelong learning. We have started a trial of a new learning to drive syllabus which focuses not just on vehicle control but also on the skills, attitude and understanding needed to be a safe driver. Independent driving has also been introduced to the practical driving test. We will not be publishing theory test questions in future, requiring candidates to have a deeper understanding of the Highway Code, rather than merely learning answers to published questions.

28. Many local authorities have implemented concerted programmes of work to improve road safety and in doing so have contributed towards Britain’s enviable road safety record. Some of these are engineering changes, e.g.  alterations to local roads, including signing, lining and surfacing changes, as well as revised layouts, and traffic calming. Local authorities have the power to introduce 20 mph speed limit zones. The evidence suggests that in residential streets, and in town centres where there is likely to be a conflict between vehicles and pedestrians, carefully implemented 20 mph zones can contribute to an improvement in road safety .

Managing Disruption

29. Effective road and traffic management is also about resilience. The Government is keen to ensure that motorists receive a good service on the roads, by making sure incidents are dealt with professionally. This includes clearing up accidents as quickly as possible when they occur, minimising the disruption caused by street works and selfish parking and managing the impact of the weather.

30. The Highways Agency’s Traffic Officer Service plays a vital role in achieving the aim of a swifter recovery of our motorways after accidents; it now attends a daily average of 375 incidents affecting ‘live’ lanes. Following dispatch, traffic officers arrive at over 80% of these incidents within 20 minutes, on the busiest routes during the day-time. Because we clear incidents more quickly, incident-related congestion is minimised and the chance of further incidents is reduced, thereby delivering substantial reliability and safety benefits.

31. A key action in the Department’s business plan is "to work with the Home Office to review police investigation/closure procedures for motorway incidents." The review is focusing on indentifying further improvements that could be made in managing serious incidents on the motorway network. The Department is working closely with the Association of Chief Police Officers, Highways Agency and Home Office in delivering the review which will be completed in January 2011. We are committed to ensuring that any improvements identified from the review are taken forward by December 2012.

32. Works in the highway (street works) are vital to maintain the supply of essential utility services on which households and businesses all depend, but impose costs on the economy and society estimated to amount to £4.2bn a year. Aside from the motorway and trunk road network, it is for local highway authorities to manage and coordinate works on their roads to support their wider network management duty, which was put into place under the Traffic Management Act (TMA) 2004. An initial evaluation carried out in 2010 concluded that the network management duty was proving effective, though there was still room for improvement [4] .

33. The TMA also included powers for local authorities to run street works permit schemes, which substantially strengthen authorities’ ability to control and coordinate works. Early progress of schemes in London and Kent has been encouraging, and local authorities will be responsible for evaluating their performance. As part of its commitment to the localism agenda and reducing bureaucracy, the Government will be bringing forward proposals by April 2012 to allow schemes in England to go ahead without the Secretary of State’s approval.

34. Building on existing permit schemes, we are also currently developing proposals to increase the financial penalties for overrunning street works (legislation brought forward by October 2011), and to pilot a "lane rental" approach for the most traffic sensitive roads (legislation brought forward by December 2011). Importantly, looking beyond regulatory levers, we believe that there is considerable scope for the utilities sector to deliver strong good practice initiatives, and we are supportive of the sector’s work to develop a transparent performance scorecard.

35. The responsibility for tackling selfish and disruptive parking also lies with local authorities, the vast majority of which have now adopted civil parking enforcement powers. We now want to help local authorities understand their performance, so we have recently provided a new self-assessment tool that enables them to compare their policies and services to those of the most effective authorities.  We are also considering proposals from English local authorities outside London for powers that would enable them to apply a wider range of penalty charges, and to help keep traffic flowing by enforcing a wider range of traffic contraventions.

36. In addition to these man-made causes of congestion on our roads, the environment can cause widespread disruption. Providing a winter service which ensures that the highway network continues to operate effectively throughout the season is a basic component of maintaining a road. Both the past two winters and the wintry weather that we have seen already in November and December 2010 point squarely to the need to plan. Both the Select Committee and the Government (as well as others) have examined the lessons to be drawn from the way in which transport networks coped with severe winters, but the Department believes that some local authorities have yet to put those lessons into practice in a fully effective way.

37. Following the last two winters’ severe weather the Government set up an independent review examining the resilience of England’s transport system, chaired by David Quarmby CBE. The review considered the resilience of our transport system to periods of severe winter weather and reported in two stages with the final report being published in October 2010. The Department has accepted all the recommendations, and where these apply directly to the Government they have either been completed or are currently being implemented.  The Government continues to encourage local authorities and other transport operators to take forward the recommendations that relate to them. Actions that the Government has taken include making arrangements for the import of 250,000 tonnes of salt, developing a monitoring portal which will help local authorities monitor how much salt stock they have and help to ensure that levels are managed efficiently, publishing a common sense guide to help shop keepers and residents who want to clear their paths without having to worry about falling foul of health and safety law.

38. In December 2010, David Quarmby was asked to undertake a further urgent audit of the performance of the highway authorities, as well as the railway and aviation sectors over the period of severe weather encountered in late November/early December 2010. This audit was published on 21st December.

39. Winters such as this year's and last have been rare in modern Britain and weather this extreme will inevitably have some impact on services. However, the measure of resilience is the speed with which we recover from these events and we need to consider whether we are now seeing a step change in our weather that might therefore justify further investment in equipment and technologies to reduce the impact of severe weather. We have asked the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser to provide advice on this subject.

Designing in better use of capacity

40. The paragraphs above set out a comprehensive package of measures to support motorists in planning their journeys and to ensure that local and national networks are as resilient as possible to events that can disrupt performance. But given the continuing predicted longer term growth in traffic, we will also need to ensure that we think flexibly and imaginatively about how additional road capacity can be delivered to road users in those places where it is most critically needed. In developing future plans, and in the light of funding constraints, it will be more important than ever to ensure that we are harnessing innovation in making the best use of our existing asset base, and ensuring that we adopt novel approaches to managing road capacity to meet the needs of the users.

41. As part of our future spending programme, we will be taking forward a number of managed motorway schemes across the country. The M42 pilot of hard shoulder running showed that the measure can improve reliability and reduce the number of accidents, delivering a substantial proportion of the benefits of conventional road-widening solutions, while securing cost savings of at least 40%.

42. Given that road capacity is often constrained by a small number of key bottlenecks, targeted interventions at these locations can make a critical difference. On the strategic road network, for example, future capacity will be needed at the Dartford Crossing and DfT is committed to embark upon a review of the options for future capacity increases at Dartford. Subject to consultation, we intend to increase charges for the Crossing in 2011 to fund any changes. At the same time, to better manage the traffic and to ease congestion, we will introduce free flow charging from 2012, and more immediately, we will lift the charges at times of severe congestion to aid flow through the charging plaza.

43. At a local level too, highway authorities’ decisions about road layout, the allocation of road space and other traffic management measures at key pinch-points (such as major junctions, river crossings, etc) are vitally important. Well-designed interventions at these critical locations can directly improve conditions for all road users, but they can also have other indirect benefits: where quicker and more reliable bus journeys encourage people to switch to public transport, overall traffic levels can be further reduced. Dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority for buses or trams can reinforce these positive impacts where local circumstances permit, but care needs to be taken to avoid unjustified adverse impacts on general traffic. The injustice of the M4 bus lane (see below) is a case in point.

44. The Department for Transport works to build up the expertise of traffic professionals by issuing evidence-based advice on road infrastructure and design. DfT’s advice seeks to help local authorities design streets in a way that achieves their desired outcomes. Our advice covers designing streets to encourage sustainable transport choices as well as how to accommodate various pressures on local road networks in a way that minimises delay and conflict between different road users.

45. In cities, we have seen benefits from consistent use of established technologies, in particular, the Urban Traffic Management and Control (UTMC) programme. UTMC systems use a common database to share relevant information between individual Intelligent Transport Systems, such as traffic signal control systems and bus priority, often all managed from the same control centre. These services can be provided individually, but greater benefits can be gained by integrating them into a UTMC system.

46. Finally, we are taking steps to put right management measures which are simply not making sense for motorists - our suspension of the M4 bus lane and opening it to all traffic in December 2010 ends the injustice suffered by thousands of drivers who used to sit in traffic next to an empty lane. We are monitoring the impact of the suspension over a period of 18 months, but our intention is to scrap the lane permanently once the London 2012 Olympic Games are over.

Investment in our roads

47. Despite the difficult fiscal climate, there is a place for targeted investment in our strategic roads within our strategy to improve congestion, safety and environmental benefits to users of our road networks on our roads, and to ensure continuing high standards of road maintenance.

48. In October, we announced 14 new schemes to start construction by 2015, and funding to complete a further eight. Funded projects included major improvements to the M60, M62 and M1 around Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, dualling the last stretch of single carriageway on the A11 to Norwich and completing upgrades to the M25 around London. Further schemes will go ahead after 2015.

49. Two of the 14 schemes are only affordable because of procurement efficiencies realised on the other 12. If we were not driving down costs, we would not be able to realise more than a billion pounds of public benefit. Eleven of the schemes are managed motorways, which were discussed in more detail above.

50. In addition to spending on our larger roads, we are intending to commit £1.5bn to local authority major transport schemes in the Spending Review period. Some of these will contribute directly to better traffic management, such as Urban Traffic Control technology schemes in West Midlands and Greater Manchester. Many others seek to reduce congestion both now and in the future and make journeys more reliable, including high quality public transport schemes that aim to make using public transport a real option for people.

51. The Government is also providing funding to help local authorities maintain their roads. The Department is providing £3.042 billion in capital allocations for highways maintenance to local highway authorities in England (outside London) over the Spending Review period. In addition, revenue funding from the Department of Communities and Local Government can be applied to highways maintenance. It is for each local authority to decide where maintenance is needed on their networks, and what treatments are appropriate.

52. Further funding will be available through a new £560m Local Sustainable Transport Fund. This has been established to support local authorities in developing sustainable transport packages which help build strengthened local economies and reduce carbon emissions. Guidance for local authorities on the Local Sustainable Transport Fund and how to apply to it has been published on the DfT website alongside the White Paper.

Conclusion

53. In this evidence, we have outlined how our approach to tackling congestion starts with informing effective choices for the individual citizen, supports effective network management, resilience, and intelligent use of capacity, and provides for targeted efficient investment of public funds. This approach – targeted, localist, and citizen-focused – ensures that the decision makers at each stage in the process have the tools and the information they need to play their part in managing or mitigating the impacts of congestion on the economy, environment and society,

54. For our part, we seek a new understanding with the motoring community, where we undertake to play our part in removing and reducing sources of frustration (from the unfair M4 bus lane to poorly managed street works) while expecting in return safe and responsible road user behaviour.

55. The Government welcomes this opportunity to submit evidence to the Committee’s inquiry, and looks forward to meeting with the Committee in the Spring.

January 2011