Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
289-316)
Nick Lester, Councillor Cllr West and Garrett Emmerson
14 June 2011
Q289 Chair: Good
morning and welcome to the Transport Select Committee. Could you
please identify yourselves with your name and the organisation
you represent? This is to help our records.
Garrett Emmerson:
Good morning. My name is Garrett Emmerson. I am the Chief Operating
Officer for London Streets, which is the arm of Transport for
London that deals with managing the road network.
Nick Lester: I
am Nick Lester. I am the Corporate Director for Services at London
Councils.
Cllr West: I am
Councillor Catherine West, the Leader of Islington Council and
the Chair of the Transport and Environment Committee at London
Councils.
Q290 Chair: Thank
you very much. What would you say are the main causes of congestion
in London?
Garrett Emmerson:
The first thing is how you define congestion. We all talk about
congestion and we all think we know what it means, but it means
different things to different people at different times. It can
mean unreliable journeys in terms of the length of time that journeys
will take, taking 20 minutes one day, 40 minutes the next and
so on; it can mean that journeys are just too slow; or it can
mean that in times of exceptional disruption, roadworks or special
events and things like that, journeys are very different from
the way they normally are.
In terms of the causes, very generally speaking in
London, around three quarters of the delay to journeys across
the city is caused by volume of traffic. In other words, compared
to 2 am in the morning when there is no traffic on the roads,
journeys taking longer at peak time and so on accounts for around
three quarters of that delay. The remaining 25% is made up of
events and incidents on the network, whether they are planned
events in terms of managed roadworks or special events, particularly
in central London, or unplanned events like accidents, breakdowns,
traffic control failures or whatever it may be. That is the broad
makeup of congestion across the city.
Nick Lester: Could
I add to that the level of congestion, particularly in a city
the size of London? One also has to take account of the fact there
is a substantial amount of suppressed demand because congestion
in its own right encourages people to make journeys by other modes
to other places at other times, or not at all. Therefore, the
early ideas were that if you just provide a bit more capacity
then you will release congestion. Actually what it does is release
suppressed demand and brings the journey speeds back down again
until you can release all of that suppressed demand, which in
a city the size of London is probably impossible.
Q291 Chair: Councillor
West, would you like to add anything to that?
Cllr West: Members
do receive a lot of inquiries at the borough level, across the
boroughs, on disruption not just for business, clearly, but also
for people commuting, getting to school and hospital appointments
and so on. It just generally slows down the city.
As London Councils, we have a road management concordat
that encourages better cooperation between the utility companies
and councils. The permit scheme introduced in January last year
has gone some way to addressing the concerns, but clearly it is
something we would like to see ramped up in trying to get to grips
with the imbalance between the perception that people are not
using the time when they rent the lanes and that companies could
be much more efficient in the way that they use their time, perhaps
working different hours or working more efficiently in particular
spots rather than dragging out works for a longer period of time.
Q292 Chair: Do
you think that problems caused by street works are a major cause
of congestion?
Cllr West: Yes.
Q293 Mr Leech: Have
you ever done any assessment of the cause of congestion by people
breaking traffic regulation orders?
Nick Lester: There
was some considerable work done on this quite a few years ago
as local authorities were taking up traffic and parking enforcement
from the police. That showed that a significant proportion of
congestion was caused either by illegal parking or by vehicles
travelling in breach of traffic regulations. Since the decriminalisation
of parking enforcement and, more particularly, since the introduction
of decriminalised traffic law enforcement in London, there has
been a significant reduction in that, particularly on things like
box junctions, which during the criminal regime were not enforced
by the police. The local authorities and Transport for London
between them now do something like eight times as much traffic
law enforcement as all the police forces in the UK put together.
That has meant that there is a clear recognition of the effectiveness
of things like box junctions.
Also, the research that we did following the introduction
of enforcement on bus lanes has shown that as the message is known
that the chances of being caught driving in a bus lane go up,
the number of contraventions has come down very quickly indeed.
For the last four years, although more bus lanes are being enforced,
the number of penalty charge notices issued has come down so that
it is now at about a quarter of what it was originally. That is
entirely to do with better prevention of problems rather than
any other view of enforcement.
Q294 Mr Leech: Would
it be fair to say that camera enforcement has actually reduced
congestion?
Nick Lester: It
has very clearly reduced congestion.
Q295 Mr Leech: But
you have not done any assessment of what actual impact it has;
you just know. It is anecdotal.
Nick Lester: We
have the assessment on the number of PCNs and the number of contraventions
quantified, but, for the reasons that Mr Emmerson gave, what impact
you have on congestion depends on how you want to measure it.
It has almost certainly improved reliability—that is the
variation of journey speeds.
Q296 Mr Leech: You
said you had done quite a bit of work in the past on how people
breaking traffic laws had resulted in additional congestion, but
you have not done that recently. Has no consideration been given
to looking at how effective camera enforcement has been in terms
of impacting congestion as a means of potentially increasing your
level of camera enforcement?
Nick Lester: It
is not so much increasing the level of enforcement. The value
of it is for the highway authorities, when they are designing
traffic management measures, to know what can effectively be introduced
with some expectation that it will be either self-enforced or
respected in some way. It is at the design level. It gives the
highway engineers a much greater ability to plan and design what
they want to achieve on particular stretches of the road.
Garrett Emmerson:
It is one thing to be able to understand the effectiveness of
enforcement and to see that if you do effective enforcement the
number of offences comes down. Therefore, it is reasonable to
suppose that has a positive effect on managing congestion. To
be able to relate the cause to, or isolate the effect of that
from, all the other things that are happening on the road network
and then measure it against whatever measure you want to do is
very difficult indeed. At any given time on any given road, volumes
of traffic are changing either because of demand on the road network
or because different things are going on in the network. It is
only very recently that we have started to be able to measure
reliability with any degree of consistency across the network
and, even then, that is only on the major roads.
Q297 Mr Leech: Hypothetically,
though, if you wanted to introduce a certain measure, a waiting
restriction or whatever, in order to try and tackle a specific
pinch point of congestion, would you make a decision to have camera
enforcement at that particular location as a means of ensuring
compliance with the regulation and therefore ensuring that the
measures that were put in place to tackle congestion were actually
going to work, or would you simply add camera enforcement at a
particular location simply to catch people breaking the law?
Nick Lester: It
depends on what measure you are thinking of putting in, because
camera enforcement has value and works for some but not for other
types of traffic management measure.
Q298 Chair: What
does it work for?
Nick Lester: It
works for places where the rule is no stopping, for example, at
busy junctions where no stopping is allowed at all because the
camera can identify people stopping very easily. Where some forms
of parking and waiting are allowed, for example, for loading or
for blue badge holders, it is much less effective because you
do not know necessarily whether the vehicle that has stopped there
does or does not have a blue badge. For things like box junctions
and the moving offences, camera enforcement is very effective
because they are, by definition, moving offences. It is rather
more that you look at what you want to design, and, once you have
designed what you want to achieve, then you look at the enforcement
techniques necessary to achieve it. Sometimes that will be cameras;
sometimes it will not be cameras.
Q299 Julian Sturdy: We
have heard a lot in the inquiry so far about suppressed demand—Mr
Lester has touched on that already—and how if we build new
roads or we have extra lanes that will only serve to release suppressed
demand. How far do you think we can suppress demand?
Nick Lester: The
road network tends to work in an element of balance once it is
saturated, once you are at any level of suppression. There was
some research done about 15 years ago by the late Dr Martin
Mogridge that demonstrated how, at the margin, people choose the
mode of transport they are going to make for regular journeys,
either road or rail, depending on the door-to-door speeds of that
journey rather than the link speed. If the level of suppression
is sufficiently high, the only way you are going to improve road
speeds, in his view, was to improve the railway network. In a
way, in London, that is where we have got to, where you are looking
in the morning peak, for example, at something over 80% of those
working in central London coming in by rail. That is likely to
continue.
Q300 Chair: Councillor
West, what can be done about demand?
Cllr West: In London,
obviously, we have tried very much to encourage people to go by
foot because a lot of distances in London can be done on foot
but people do not really know the way. Often they will go on the
tube for two or three stops when they could have just walked for
10 minutes. We have tried very hard to address that through better
signage and so on. We have also tried, with council schemes, to
encourage the use of bicycles and so on. That is something we
can do, but we also have to recognise that people with caring
duties or with large families and so on will always need to use
the car for occasional trips.
Clearly, the other thing is cost. Now that the cost
of fuel is quite high and there are real economic forces against
having a car due to the economy, we are seeing people almost being
forced to use other modes of transport. We are trying to provide
for that in the London context, together with Transport for London.
London Councils and Transport for London do a lot of very good
work together to promote non-car transport options. But, clearly,
this is a national piece of work and there will be real issues
around other sorts of public transport. In some instances you
simply cannot use public transport for certain journeys. But in
London we can; we are fortunate in that regard.
Q301 Julian Sturdy: Do
you think that suppressed demand is always going to be there and
used as an excuse not to develop some of our road networks further?
Garrett Emmerson:
Suppressed demand will certainly always be there. I do not think
it is necessarily an excuse or a reason not to develop networks.
In developing an overall strategy, you have to look at the reasons
why you might want to look at additional capacity, and understand
and plan for the consequences of it. An area, in particular, like
east London and the lack of river crossings there, is where the
Mayor's Transport Strategy is actually proposing more capacity
in terms of looking at options for further river crossings. That
is being done through recognising the lack of capacity, the volume
of demand that is there and the amount of growth that is predicted
to come into that area over the next 20 or 30 years, which is
the period of the London Plan.
Also, the issue that we have not talked about is
the resilience of the road network and its ability to cope with
unplanned incidents and so on. Everybody knows the Blackwall tunnel
in London and has suffered at some point or other through travelling
along it. It is an example of a piece of road network that just
about works. It is at absolute capacity; there are something like
50,000 vehicles a day in each direction. It is at absolute capacity
for most of the day. It just about works until something goes
wrong even in a very small way, such as a broken-down vehicle
or an over-height vehicle gets stopped. While we might be very
quick at sorting the problem out, removing the broken-down vehicle
and getting it out of the way and getting traffic flowing again,
the knockon effects go on for much longer. So there is a
real lack of resilience in that network. As soon as something
goes wrong, there aren't alternative routes that people can look
at. That, to me, is a very valid reason for wanting to look at
enhanced capacity. You would have to look at that in terms of
the conjunction of the additional traffic flow it might induce.
But, again, you also have to look at the fact that if there is
going to be more demand if London is a growing city, there are
going to be more people living here and there will be more economic
development in future, we simply have to provide for it.
Q302 Chair: What
is the impact of that greater economic activity, more people and
changed demography going to be?
Garrett Emmerson:
Globally?
Chair: In London.
Garrett Emmerson:
We know that over the next 20 to 25 years, there are going to
be something over one million more people potentially living in
London and an extra 750,000 jobs. That is going to have a significant
knockon impact in terms of demand. We think that, potentially,
there could be as much as 14% more congestion and delay arising
from that demand over the period of the London Plan, over the
period of the Mayor's Transport Strategy. Whether that materialises
or not depends on how effective some of the policies are to encourage
alternatives—whether people choose to make journeys in a
different way from the way they make them now. We have had what,
I think, is a very successful traffic record over the last dozen
or so years in London, moving people away from car-based modes,
in particular; there has been something like a 7% shift away.
We have actually seen over the last decade gradually declining
levels of traffic. If that were to continue, you would say there
is not going to be a problem.
It is a question of whether those policies and their
impact continue to have an effect that takes away from that potential
growth. At the end of the day, even with the best will in the
world, as transport planners we are only trying to predict for
about 20 years what is likely to happen, how people's behaviours
will change and how demand will change. You cannot necessarily
predict how business may change, for instance. Twenty years ago
we might not have seen the impact that electronic communication
might have in changing the way we do business.
Nick Lester: One
of the key issues is the overall capacity of the transport system,
including walking and cycling, not just mode by mode.
Garrett Emmerson:
That is a very fair point. We are looking to put something like
30% additional capacity on to the rail-based public transport
network, with the addition of Crossrail and Thameslink and the
tube upgrades over the next few years. That will be a very major
capacity enhancement that is not on the road network.
Q303 Iain Stewart: I
would like to pick up on a couple of comments that have been made
about suppressed demand and the cost of motoring. In London we
have had the Congestion Charge for pretty much a decade now. It
has doubled in price since then. We currently have and we have
had high oil and petrol prices. To what extent do you think the
cost of motoring is suppressing demand or are other factors causing
that?
Garrett Emmerson:
I am not sure whether I am particularly well qualified to answer
that question. Clearly, the cost of motoring has an impact on
the amount of journeys we make, and we have seen, certainly over
the short term, that changing oil price levels does impact the
volumes of traffic at the margin. But, over the longer term, these
things always seem to come trending back to a normal level of
use, so people adjust their budgeting and the way they spend their
disposable income to cater for the amount of travel they want
to make.
Cllr West: Could
I just talk about my own borough for a second here, instead of
having my London Councils' hat on? Despite its cappuccino image,
Islington has 48% of children living in poverty; we have a lot
of very low income families. We actually have one of the lowest
car ownership areas in the country. About a third of all people
in Islington do not have a car and I do not think they will ever
be able to afford one in the current climate because petrol is
so expensive. Also, a lot of our homes do not have anywhere to
park a car. If you want to park a car, it costs you up to £400
a year, depending on the sort of car that you have, and then there
is the congestion charge and pay and display. There are a lot
of disincentives to owning a car in London. Certainly, for a lot
of people who live for brief periods in the inner-city areas like
Islington, if you have a bicycle you can get in to work and back.
There are parts of the country where car ownership
is low, either for economic or for practical reasons, i.e. there
really is no need to have one if you can manage without it. That
has an impact in certain areas, but I would not be surprised if
there are other parts of the country where it is just not financially
viable to have a car because you simply cannot afford it. There
is probably a pattern that you could predict across the country
in terms of income and being able to afford to get around.
That is why we also have to make the case for concessionary
travel; it is incredibly important. It is all very well some people
not being able to get around, but we have a responsibility to
get people from A to B, and that is why concessionary travel such
as the Freedom Pass, which obviously we manage as London Councils,
has to be a national priority. I would hope that you can somehow
feed that into your transport findings.
Nick Lester: The
balance between the cost of motoring and other issues is an important
one because we saw, with the introduction of the congestion charge,
that it had an immediate impact on the level of demand for road
space in central London, and that was entirely down to cost. But
at the same time there is the point that Councillor West made
about other practical issues. One of the areas in the country
with the lowest level of household car ownership is Kensington
and Chelsea, which is also one of the richest areas. Many of the
residents of Kensington and Chelsea have no problems in affording
a car, but they do not have one either because of pressure of
space or because they feel they do not need to.
Q304 Iain Stewart: May
I ask an unrelated question about the design of some of the streets,
particularly in central London? I have noticed, particularly in
the tourist areas, that there is a trend to narrow the width of
roads, extend the width of pavements and move what was a dual
lane into one single wide lane. Is that proving to be more effective
at managing traffic?
Garrett Emmerson:
It is a question of what you do with your road space, as it were.
All highway authorities anywhere in the country face conflicting
demands on their road space between the need to focus on movement
and get traffic around and the place functions that they meet;
the A23 through Streatham is a major strategic road but it is
also the community's local high street, so there is a conflict
there.
In central London, what you have seen is that the
creation of the benefits of introducing the congestion charge
in terms of reducing traffic volumes and congestion is being taken
in different ways now in terms of allowing more road space to
be used for pedestrians and things like that. So on any street
and with any highway authority, whether it is Transport for London
or any of the boroughs or anywhere else in the country, councils
and highways authorities are making decisions about how they best
use that space and how much space to give over to vehicular traffic,
pedestrians, cyclists, loading and unloading, and freight movements,
which is a key function that has to go on in those streets. What
you have seen in central London is a changing of that balance
that has been facilitated or brought about by the reduction in
traffic from the congestion charge.
Nick Lester: There
has been a tendency in the past to undervalue and underplay the
levels of pedestrian traffic in particular so that in some parts
of central London you have pavements which were heavily congested,
and that rebalancing that Mr Emmerson has talked about has now
started to take into account pedestrian flows in a way that did
not always happen in the past and does not always happen in the
rest of the country.
Q305 Paul Maynard: I
am glad we are now moving on to pedestrians because that is what
I wanted to try and address. In our first session we heard about
the Living Streets initiative that occurred on Kensington High
Street. I wonder what the general views of the panellists are
about it as a concept. Has it worked and what have the problems
been, if any?
Nick Lester: It
has been a great success in Kensington High Street. The fact that
Kensington and Chelsea Council is looking to do a similar scheme
on Exhibition Road and has looked in other parts of the borough
to replicate that is an indication of the success that they see.
It has to be looked at with care. There are issues, for example,
that have been raised by Guide Dogs for the Blind about completely
eliminating things like kerb lines that need to be designed with
some care. I suspect it would not be necessarily a universal panacea
for every location. It is going to be looking at the nature of
the street and what the purposes of that street are. Kensington
High Street is a shopping street and has to deal with traffic
as well so that balance may make that appropriate. If it was just
a major road further out, without those local facilities, I would
be surprised whether that was the right way.
Garrett Emmerson:
Kensington High Street is a very wellknown example of the
whole promotion of better streets and better urban realm. What
the Mayor has certainly done with the Transport for London road
network and the Mayor's Transport Strategy is to say there is
an approach here that can apply to the whole road network but
you are not necessarily going to apply it at the same level. His
Better Streets initiative has defined five levels of intervention,
from the most basic levels, where our priorities are purely around
tidying up, decluttering the street and making it look smart and
presentable, which might apply to an awful lot of the major strategic
roads like the North Circular and so on where there is not necessarily
the same place function, right up to those very high levels of
urban realm standard—the Kensington High Streets of this
world and so on. There is a role to play in terms of improving
street environments across all the road network but it is not
the same solution. You are not going to put the same Kensington
High Street solution on dual two and three-lane urban roads.
Q306 Paul Maynard: I
took a taxi from here to Euston last Thursday. I do not normally—I
get the tube—but I had too many suitcases. I sat there for
a good 40 minutes going up Charing Cross Road and Tottenham
Court Road. It was a very lengthy journey and not a very satisfactory
one. The main cause of the delay was not traffic movement congestion
so much as the impact of pedestrians disobeying traffic signals,
crossing at will or whatever. You had almost a de facto "living
street" on Charing Cross Road without having introduced one,
and that was a major cause of the congestion. Do you think the
time has come to have a pedestrian Highway Code perhaps?
Chair: There's a new one.
Garrett Emmerson:
It is a very interesting point because we have done some research
very recently on pedestrian crossing times and people's propensity
to cross, in relation to the work we are doing to develop pedestrian
countdown. One of the figures—I am afraid I do not have
the exact statistics in my head—is around the percentage
of people who do not wait until the green man comes on but take
a decision to cross after five or 15 seconds. Certainly, after
15 seconds the percentage of people who will have taken the decision
to cross anyway, regardless of whether the lights have changed,
is very high indeed.
Whether you would look at doing something more rigid
as other countries do and insist that people wait on the kerb
until the green man goes, I do not know. It could be a doubleedged
sword because that may mean you will need to allow more pedestrian
crossing time when they do cross, because they are taking their
own decisions to cross while the traffic flow lights are on, but
presumably they are doing it having taken their own decisions
about whether it is safe or not to cross. By preventing them,
we might end up having to dedicate more pedestrian time, which
would have a negative effect on the amount of time that traffic
has to flow.
Q307 Paul Maynard: Can
I finally ask Councillor West this with her Islington hat on again?
I read huge chunks of the Fairness Commission that your council
produced and found it very interesting. You have touched on some
of the social challenges your borough faces. When we address the
issue of congestion, we often think of it in terms of businesses
and people getting to and from work. When you were putting the
work of the commission together, did you look at all at how congestion
impacts on the more socially vulnerable and could you give us
a few examples of how it might do that?
Cllr West: I am
very pleased that within a week our Fairness Commission has been
quoted in Parliament. I am very pleased about that and how collegial
you are to mention it. Clearly, we did hear a lot of stories in
the period of the commission. It was a listening exercise to have
residents come and speak to a group of people, not just councillors
but a group of people across the board. Sixteen per cent of people
in Islington have a disability of some sort, and many people did
make the case that they want their neighbourhoods to be more pedestrian-friendly
or wheelchair-friendly. We have a large debate going on at the
moment with Transport for London about scooters on buses. Can
you get a 300 kg scooter on to a bus and what is the impact of
that and so on? It is a really big issue in London. We are still
fighting a campaign locally as well about stepfree access
in Finsbury Park and Highbury so that people can use the tube
network, because that is a really big concern for local people.
That is one far end of the spectrum around vulnerability.
But, clearly, with the small baby boom that we are
having as well, people want to get about with buggies. In general,
pedestrians, cyclists and non-car users are trying to express
the fact that they want their neighbourhoods to be more user-friendly
and have more of a neighbourhood feel to them. As you will all
be aware, during the royal wedding celebrations lots of streets
were made car-free and everybody was saying, "Imagine if
it was like this all the time. Children would be playing in the
streets again." I think that there is real room there to
look at some of those home zone schemes. They are very expensive,
but you do have a real sense, like the old days, that you can
go out and play in the streets and so on. I just wonder whether
we could look at promoting that through some of our traffic management
schemes so that we are allowing certain parts of neighbourhoods
to be completely car-free. We could try and promote community
cohesion through that by having spaces where people can go out,
particularly inner city areas, of course, where it is dangerous
to play outside because of the speed at which cars travel. You
will also be aware that we are the first borough to have 20 mph
zones in non-important roads—the neighbourhood roads. We
have a big problem with enforcement because, clearly, it is not
as high priority for the police as other inner-city problems.
But we are looking at that and seeing whether that can be extended
to other roads.
Paul Maynard: I am urging
Blackpool to follow Islington's lead.
Q308 Steve Baker: Bearing
in mind that there is competition for scarce road space, and we
have talked about the cost of owning and using a car, is there
a greater contribution that could be made by motorcycles and scooters?
Nick Lester: The
position of motorcycles and scooters is a difficult one because,
on the one hand, they are more efficient in using road space than
cars; on the other hand there is an accident problem. They are
statistically less safe than other forms of transport and there
is a continuing issue with emissions. If you were to produce a
hierarchy in those terms, they would be an intermediate between
people using cars, particularly if it is one person in a car on
their own, on the one hand, and people walking and cycling and
using public transport at the other extreme.
Q309 Steve Baker: Would
you say that people are reluctant to promote motorcycles and scooters?
Nick Lester: There
is a degree of reluctance as a result of that. At the same time
there is a recognition that growth is taking place in motorcycle
use and that has caused problems in some parts of London, particularly
with on-street parking provision for motorbikes, which has led
Westminster to introduce parking charges for exactly the same
reasons as they had parking charges for cars. It is just to manage
the demand.
Cllr West: It is
nothing to do with money, of course.
Nick Lester: It
is simply to manage the demand.
Q310 Steve Baker: Could
I ask if anybody else wishes to make a contribution on this point?
Cllr West: I was
just teasing and saying it was nothing to do with money; it is
nothing to do with income generation.
Q311 Julian Sturdy: I
am led to believe that TfL is working with the London boroughs
to identify traffic signals that could be turned off to improve
traffic flow. Do you think that is going to be an effective way
of reducing congestion or are there potential problems with safety
coming forward?
Garrett Emmerson:
It certainly has a contribution to make. At Transport for London
we have carried out a fairly high-level review of all the traffic
signals across the city, which is some 6,000 sets of signals.
We identified an initial list of about 145 where we did not think
that the criteria that were originally used to decide whether
you should put in signals in the first place were being met any
longer, so there is a question as to whether there is still a
need. Certainly, over time, traffic flows, land use flows and
pedestrian flows change and so on. It is not realistic to think
that once you put a set of traffic signals in, they are valid
and justified for ever.
The majority of these obviously were on borough roads
and some were on the Transport for London road network directly.
We have said to the highway authorities that they might want to
look at whether there is a continuing case to retain these signals,
whether there is no longer a need for them or whether there are
other forms of traffic control like replacing pelican crossings
with zebra crossings, or whatever it had to be, that could be
more effective. Boroughs have taken these suggestions up, with
varying degrees of enthusiasm, I suppose, depending on their local
circumstances. There are clearly safety issues and local community
issues that need to be taken into account that would not effectively
be factored into any sterile analytical assessment we would make.
It very much has to be done in a local context.
We have seen them taken out, and there are some particularly
good examples in Ealing that have robust "before and after"
analysis of the traffic and pedestrian impact subsequently that
has demonstrated you can do this and you can deliver a benefit
to motorists and motor vehicles in terms of reduced queuing, reduced
delays and a benefit to pedestrians in terms of easier crossing
times. If you do this and you get it right, you can deliver win
wins for both pedestrians and motor vehicles, but it is something
that we believe you have to approach with caution. That is the
approach.
Q312 Julian Sturdy: It
is a constant review, you think.
Garrett Emmerson:
Yes, I think so. Probably the other thing is being more rigorous
in our reviews of where we put new traffic signals in. I do not
think the traffic signals profession would shout at me too much
if I said that in the past there has been something of a culture
that says, "The answer is traffic signals. What is the question?",
sort of thing. We need to be much more robust in deciding whether
traffic signals are the right option in the first place where
we have new development and new demands on the road network, or
whether there are other better ways of managing traffic flows
and pedestrian flows.
Q313 Chair: Is
there a problem of multiple authorities managing the networks?
Is that a big problem?
Garrett Emmerson:
It presents its challenges at times, but we work together pretty
well. There is a clear difference in terms of the management of
the strategic road network—certainly the sections of the
network that we manage for Transport for London directly—and
then the intermediate level of the strategic road network that
are borough-responsible roads for which we have a strategic oversight.
But, certainly, the vast majority of roads are local community
roads and it is surely only right that they are managed and run
by local communities in boroughs.
Q314 Chair: Are
there any differing views on that?
Cllr West: From
the borough point of view, the point we would make is that, on
the whole, we get on well with Transport for London. There are
occasions when we have a differing view, for example, on traffic
signals. Most people in our area want to keep traffic signals,
because they walk a lot and they do not like the idea of traffic
just going along. There is the traffic flow concept the Mayor
talks about, which locally has been interpreted negatively, as
meaning that traffic can just go and we have to wait longer to
cross. They are talking about taking out signals. As a local authority,
we have asked Transport for London not to take out signals in
our area, but there are outer London boroughs where they have
been keen to have those taken out because they are more concerned
about traffic flow and speed of traffic. But, clearly, in the
inner-city areas, it is generally the opposite: "Please slow
it down. We want a neighbourhood which has fewer cars."
The other point of management, of course, is around
contracting procurement. We are trying to do quite a bit with
Transport for London. I personally think the boroughs get better
deals on their procurement around traffic, looking after roads
and so on. Could I just make the case for boroughs' budgets around
potholes, the state of roads and so on? I do not know whether
that comes into the terms of reference of this inquiry.
Q315 Chair: I
just want to focus for a moment on who is in charge of managing
networks and what the issues are.
Nick Lester: If
anything, the problem occurs not specifically about the road in
its own right but about the road in its surroundings. Where you
have, as Mr Emmerson mentioned earlier, somewhere like Streatham
High Road where TfL is responsible for managing the road and yet
Lambeth borough is responsible for all the neighbourhood—it
is a local centre—that can be more problematic than in another
town centre, say, Lewisham, where Lewisham borough is responsible
for both the roads and the town centre itself. So getting that
balance right also has to be taken into account. I do not think
you can consider the road just on its own, whereas if you look
at something which is more like a major urban road, the A3 Kingston
Bypass or something like that, then you can look at the road on
its own more easily. We generally work well together, but it is
a question of working well in those areas.
Q316 Julie Hilling: I
want to ask about traffic information and how effective that is
across the conurbation. I am particularly thinking about the outer
boroughs and whether more could be done to give realtime
information to travellers.
Garrett Emmerson:
Is this for traffic information for motorists effectively or vehicles
of any description?
Julie Hilling: Yes.
Garrett Emmerson:
It is an area on which we have done and are doing a lot of work,
but I still think it is an area, as you suggest, where there is
a lot more that we could do. The way we have attempted to characterise
it is that there are three points at which you can try and get
information to people who are making a journey on the road network.
The first and the most effective is inevitably before they travel,
before they get in their vehicle. Can you get information to them
in their homes, through IT, or in their workplace or in shopping
centres and so on that might influence when and where they travel
depending on the conditions of the road network? That is one area
where we look to do other work.
The second, of course, is when they get into their
vehicle. There you are very much focused on working closely with
the radio networks and making sure you provide information that
is as up to date as possible to be broadcast so that people can
make decisions en route, if you like.
The third and the final area is right in the vicinity
of an incident where you are looking at information on variable
message signs, the big signs on the sides of the road and so on,
which is the last point at which you can get to a motorist and
say there is a problem ahead before they cease to become part
of the solution in terms of being able to avoid it and then become
part of the problem because they are stuck in the queue, which
is where nobody wants to be.
We are trying to work on each of those levels. Depending
on what we are talking about, we are working with stuff we are
doing ourselves in terms of better information flow and development
of websites, working with the internet community, application
developers and satellite navigation companies and so on, making
sure that we can get information out there to them in a form that
they can use. One of the things we did last year through the London
Datastore was to make virtually all our traffic data information
publicly available for app designers and operators and so on.
There are a number of apps out there that, for instance, give
people live pictures from our CCTV camera feeds and information
from our traffic flow systems and traffic analysis systems.
It is fair to say that there is probably a lot more
that we think is yet to happen. We are working particularly closely
with some of the satellite navigation providers to try and integrate
our traffic information with the information that they obviously
get from their users and providers that give them realtime
information uploaded from individual vehicles.
One of the restrictions or limitations we often come
across is things like Ordnance Survey licensing systems because
most of our data is referenced through Ordnance Survey. Others
can only use it if they have similar licences and so on. There
is probably something in that area that needs looking at in the
longer term to see whether the way we license Ordnance Survey
and the way it relates to information is still relevant to where
we want to go in the future.
Chair: Thank you. We have
to close this session and move on. Thank you very much, all of
you, for coming and answering our questions.
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