Effective road and traffic management

Written evidence from Stephen Plowden (ETM 34)

Introduction

The com mittee has chosen a very important subject. If the term "traffic management" is widely interpreted, it is, and has been for decades, the most important issue in transport planning. A wide interpretation would cover not only the rules, including but not only pricing, governing how people behave when driving, but also what drivers and vehicle s are allowed to use the roads at all. Reforms to the regulatory and fiscal framework would remove the case, such as it is, for investment to produce a general increase in road capacity (some local increases, especially to serve new development, would still be justified ).

Reforms to the rules for the use of the roads would have a profound bearing on rail policy too. At present, roughly half the cost s of the railways are borne by user s and half by the taxpayer – a huge and regressive subsidy. A principal justification for the subsidy is that rail causes fewer external costs than road, so it is desirable to encourage people to choose rail rather than road . This is a "second best" argument for subsidies. Road externalities can and should be drastically reduced by changes to the user rules. If that were done, this argument for rail subsides would disappear, perhaps entirely, at least in very large part. In some areas, however, rail subsidies can be justified on social grounds, which would still apply.

Because time is pressing this reply is very short. Another reason is that I have made the same points in various earlier submissions to the Transport Committee: Keith Buchan’s and my reply to your inquiry on road pricing i n 1995, my own submission on the same subject in November 2004, my submission in December 2001 to the inquiry on speed, my submission in February 2008 to the inquiry on road safety , and most recently my reply last September to the inquiry on transport and the economy. I t will become apparent next month whether this last reply has been heeded, but none of the others were and I very much doubt whether they were read. Despite this discouraging experience, if the committee has any queries on any of the points raised in any of these documents, I would be happy to answer them.

Alternatives to road pricing

The wording of the c ommittee’s inquiry sugges ts that it holds two beliefs, that congestion is a n especially pressing problem, and that it would be very difficult to deal with it without road pricing . These beliefs are , indeed, in line with those traditionally he ld by advocates of road pricing. Until recently, their discussions treated congestion as if it were the only problem , and either failed to consider alternative ways of dealing with it at all or else dismissed them as clearly inferior.

Congestion is, of course, an important problem, but most people probably now accept that combating global warming is the most important task , and I would argue that road safety, seen as reducing not only crashes and casual ties but intim i dation as we ll, is also more important than tackling congestion. However, there may not be much point in prioritising these tasks , since much the same policies are required to deal with all of them. The excessive emphasis on ro ad pricing , to the neglect of more promising alternatives, is a more serious obstacle to progress. Here are two recent examples of the mind set .

There are a range of policy options to tackle congestion, other than road user charging. They include regulations designed to move traffic efficiently, such as one-way streets, parking restrictions and zebra crossings, and restrictions on certain types of vehicles in city centres. Yet these approaches have obvious limitations. As a market-based solution to tackling congestion and reducing emissions, road pricing has the potential to provide clear, transparent, yet strong signals to drivers about the true costs of motoring .

Jeegar Kakkad and Ann Rossiter , Road User Charging: A Road Map, Social Mar ket Foun dation, 2007

Most disappointing of all is the Mr Hammond’s determination to ignore the overwhelming evidence that the best way to tackle congestion is by traffic restraint on the most grossly congested parts of the strategic road network. That is best done by price . . . by ruling out road pricing, he has ensured the continuance of a Soviet-style command economy on the roads in which scarce space is allocated haphazardly by queuing.

Adam Raphael, Mr Hammond is ducking the issue of congestion, Transport Times, November 2010

The commercial equivalent of saying that pricing is always better than other approaches would be to say th at pricing policy is always more important than policy on product design, which as a general remark would clearly be ridiculous. This is a good analogy. To cycle on a cycle path or on a traffic-calmed street would be to experience a different product than to cycle in the present maelstrom of traffic, and one that would fetch a lot of people out of their cars. Driving a light, low -powered ( and therefore low- polluting ) car on road s on which low speed limits were properly enforced would be very different , in particular much less intimidating, from driving on present roads , where limits are muc h too high and are not enforced. A nd so on.

The most important single reform on roads of all classes is not mentioned in either of the above extracts, to set and enforce lower speed limits. The crucial role of speed control has been shown over and over again, but successive governments have been amazingly cowardly both about setting lower limits and about enforcing even th e existing limits. Lower speeds would reduce traffic (vehicle k ilometres ) and nuisance rates (crashes, fuel consumption, emissions, noise) per vehicle kilometre simultaneously, whereas pricing, by increasing speeds , though it would redu ce vehicle k ilometres would usually put up these rates. The assumption that the distribution of incomes is fair, on which the validity of an approach based on pricing depends, can hardly be defended at t he present time.

In towns , the alternatives to road pricing are so rich that it would not much matter if road pri cing for cars were not available at all. (There could, however, be a case for road pricing for light goods vehicles as well as for HGVs.) Various towns all over the world have tackled their problems with some success without road pricing – it is astonishing how road pricing advocates have managed to close their eyes to this experience , while always appealing to that of the handful of towns th at have introduced road pricing . The main ingredients of an alternative approach are lower speeds, the reallocation of road space (including banning all motor vehicles, and possibly cycles too, from town centres and bans on HGVs and powerful motorcycles on some other streets) and parking controls. On-street parking restrictions are now firmly established, even though sometimes there is an over supply of metered space because local authorities are reluctant to give up the income they bring, but they should be supplemented by more control over off-street parking spaces. Many people commute by car only because they have free or highly subsidised parking at their place of work. Whether or not workplaces have such spaces is a matter of chance, and where they exist their allocation is more often based on seniority than on tra vel need. Parking spaces at supermarkets can also affect travel and traffic patterns in un desirable ways. Local authorities now have the power , which very few have used, to tax workplace parking, but they need to be able to reduce the number of private non-residential parking spaces of all kinds, not just to tax them.

More comprehensive traffic restraint in towns would have a feedback effect on roads outside towns. Otherwise , t he main method of restraint outside towns , in addition to road pricing for HGVs, should be lower and better enforced speed limits. In our report Cars Fit for Their Purpose , published by Local Transport Today in December 2008, Simon Lister and I calculate d that enforcing the 70mph limit on motorways properly would reduce car mileage on them by between four and five per cent and enforcing a 55 mph limit properly would reduce it by some nineteen or twenty per cent. The same formu la suggests that the reduction from a strictly enforced 60mph limit would be some thirteen per cent.

If it should turn out that a significant degree of congestion on motorways and selected A roads remained after these measures had been taken, then it would be sensible to institute a simple system of charging for driving on those roads. That would be easy to do because of the limited number of points of entry and exit.

Recommendations

I hope the committee will urge the government to take the following steps.

1. Increase spending on speed cameras.

2. Commit itself, and use its influence in Europe to get the EU also to commit, to the principle that all new vehicles should be fitted with variable speed limiters W ith the EU undertake research on the best type of variable speed limiter. S tudy the costs and benefits of a programme to retrofit vehicles already on the roads with variable speed limiter s. O btain permission from the EU to make it mandatory for British registered HGVs to be fitted with variable speed limiters in advance o f their b eing made mandatory for other vehicles .

3. Change the default urban speed limit from 30mph to 20mph.

4. Conduct trials with properly enforced speed limits on certain motorways, dual carriageway A roads and sing l e carriageway A roads. The speed limits to be considered would range f r o m the existing 70mph to 50 mp h for motorways, from 70mph to 45mph for dual carriageways , and from 60mph to 30mp h for single carriageways. The effects to be studied would include traffic volumes by type of vehicle, crashes and casualties by severity, fuel consumption and emissions, noise, driver stress and acceptability.

5. Introduce legislation to give local authorities powers over non-residential off-street parking, including the power to reduce the number of such spaces already in existence. Conduct demonstration projects with selected local authorities , if necessary in advance of these powers being made available to all local authorities, on the use of these powers.

6. Study the extent to which telecommunications are already acting as a substitute for personal travel, distinguishing by journey length and journey purpose (principally c ommuting, business, shopping), what developments can be expected in the future, and what transport or other polices could reinforce these trends . Asses s the likely effect on travel volumes and patterns by road, rail and air.

February 2011