Effective road and traffic management

Written evidence from the Freight Transport Association (FTA) (ETM 47)

The Freight Transport Association is one of Britain’s largest trade associations, and uniquely provides a voice for the entirety of the UK’s logistics sector. Its role, on behalf of over 14,000 members, is to enhance the safety, efficiency and sustainability of freight movement across the supply chain, regardless of transport mode. FTA members operate over 200,000 goods vehicles - almost half the UK fleet - and some 1,000,000 liveried vans. In addition, they consign over 90 per cent of the freight moved by rail and over 70 per cent of sea and air freight. FTA works with its members to influence transport policy and decisions taken at local, national and European level to ensure they recognise the needs of industry’s supply chains.

Background

The freight industry is heavily reliant on the transport infrastructure that it uses performing to a consistently high standard. Distribution networks, delivery routes and schedules have been designed to achieve availability of sufficient goods at the point of consumption by business or consumers without the need for extensive and expensive stock holding. Operators build resilience into their operational planning to accommodate regularly encountered journey time unreliability in network performance.

In response to the Transport Select Committees inquiry into effective road and traffic management, the Freight Transport Association would like to offer the following evidence.

1. The extent to which the Government and local authorities should intervene to alleviate congestion and the best means of doing so.

Freight transport operators as road users; expect reliable journeys in return for the duties paid in taxation and other charges that are made for use of the UK’s road space. The UK road freight industry estimates it pays £8 billion taxation per annum in the form of vehicle excise duty and fuel duty. It is only right and proper that having paid such massive amounts they are provided with a road infrastructure which is reliable and that provision must be from government, their agencies and local highway authorities. Without reliable journeys industry cannot count on getting their goods to the market place and inevitably this does have an effect on UK efficiency and the cost of goods to the customers. Delays in journeys are a significant cost to the freight industry and it is estimated that the cost of delay in fuel alone is over £2 per hour per vehicle. In addition to fuel costs, whole vehicle costs have to be taken into account which dependent on the size of the vehicle can range from £200 - £400 per vehicle per day.

FTA members expect Government to play its role in delivering a high quality network of roads and implementing measures that reduce congestion and thereby improve reliability. Road safety is also linked with reliability and therefore road provision must ensure that it is safe to travel on by design and operation. It is with this in mind that we argue that it is government and local authorities that are the ones that can influence journey reliability with the provision of reliable, safe and sustainable roads.

Once we have the right infrastructure there is a need to ensure that the road users are kept informed of the conditions of the network so that they can make informed decisions on how and when to travel. The Highways Agency has for some years now been providing the travelling public with information about the performance of its network in making information freely available at the point of use. The value of the information must not be underestimated and in the freight industry there is now awareness that informed journey planning does make a difference to efficiency of road freight fleets and therefore has a direct effect on the UK economy.

There are however gaps in the provision of reliable and verified information of the Highways Agency Network in England and a particular lack of freely available information around local authority roads in the city region areas where congestion can be in the main predictable, however when it happens outside of the peaks travel hours, it can create significant problems for the traveller.

FTA believes that organisations such as Integrate Transport Authorities and local traffic managers would find benefit in establishing information flows on significant travel delays in their areas of responsibility. It would not only help the travelling public but would also help the management of incidents, in persuading road users to stay away from significant road delays. To an extent this is currently provided in road messages transmitted by local radio stations but the freight industry has a need to have information on a wider basis than just a local radio station transmissions.

The European Directive on the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems encourage this type of information exchange but to make it worthwhile it must be deployed on a consistent way across the whole of the network. Most road users are not concerned about who manages which part of the network and in most cases don’t understand the differing responsibilities of the Highways Agency and local highway authorities; neither would they recognise that there are differing sources of traffic information.

2. The extent to which road user culture and behaviour undermines effective traffic management, including the relevance to today’s road users of the Highway Code

Road users themselves can only look to see if a road journey is likely to be reliable (usually at the start of the journey) they cannot ensure that road conditions continue to be reliable as they travel.

Road users can prepare for journeys and there are some roads users who fail to do so. It is in this area that we believe there is room to change road user’s behaviour to improve traffic management. The freight industry generally looks to see that it prepares the driver and vehicle, ensures that there is an understanding of vehicle equipment and controls that the road conditions are understood both by the driver and their companies and that driver’s are prepared for incidents and severe conditions. FTA member’s road freight operators generally look to identify the areas where improvements would be most effective in the control of driving risk, reduction of stress and fatigue. We believe that adopting better public attitudes towards safe driving will bring about a lasting improvement to road safety and also by default help to improve journey reliability.

The Association believes that in certain areas there is a lack of appreciation of and compliance with the rules of the road, which leads us to believe that the Highway Code in road user’s minds has no relevance once they have passed their driving test. Many of the industries driver trainers have made the assumption that most road users have forgotten the majority of the rules of the road and the industry generally recognises the need for defensive driver training.

The issue of post test driver training is an area which is largely ignored by many motorists and we appreciate the difficulty of taking the issue forward but a fundamental point is that we need to remind the public about the reasoning behind the Highway Code and ensure through bookshops and other outlets what the latest version is and the rules that it contains.

We also believe that there is a need for better information on how to share the road safely with other road users including larger vehicles. There is provision of some information within the current version of the Highway Code but this is fragmented and we have argued for some years that there would be advantage in a dedicated section with the Highway Code on how to share the road safely particularly with larger vehicles.

3. Intelligent traffic management schemes , such as the M42, and their impact on congestion and journey times

While the initial view about the M42 pilot was suspicion about the real value that such a management system would produce, the freight industry now feels that it has proved to be an important milestone in driver control and behaviour thus providing benefits in journey reliability and safety.

The benefits of speed control and information while in the controlled areas that include hard shoulder running, encourage drivers to comply with instructions and in doing so they benefit in known journey times.

The initial safety concerns, expressed by many of our members, seem to be less so now with drivers and vehicle operators more aware of the significant control measures that are used by the regional control centres to identify incidents with the managed scheme areas and importantly deal with those incidents so that the motorists remain safe. There seems to be support on the control speed issue in other areas, where our members have reported improved journey reliability through major roadworks.

Traffic management schemes seem to improve journey times reliability and this is a fundamental benefit to freight operators. We do believe that other areas of motorway similar to the M42 pilot area will benefit from this type of infrastructure improvement. However we remain to be convinced that it is the solution for other parts of the network that do not have the same road characteristics and we believe there is still a case for full widening in areas that suffer from congestion but are on more strategy parts of the network such as the M6 north of Birmingham.

Clearing Incidents

One additional area of concern to our members is the length of time it takes to clear incidents particularly on the Strategic Road Network where delays of several hours are experienced when an incident occurs. It seems to us that even with high levels of traffic management when an incident does occur and involves casualties or other criminality where the police have to step in and deal with the incident we still get these very length delays which trap motorist in there vehicles for hours on end. While we sympathise that the police have a very difficult job to do and have to ensure that they have gathered all of the evidence that they need from the scene we believe that there needs to be a fundamental review of procedures used at such incidents to see how the incidents can be cleared quickly to get the road reopened and get the road users on there way.

March 2011