We all recognise congestion when we see a traffic jam. But the real causes of congestion are buried beneath a great deal of disinformation and misguided ‘common knowledge’.
The seemingly obvious and widely accepted explanation for congestion is that there are too many vehicles for the infrastructure to cope with. But what gets left out of this view is that rate of traffic flow has indeed fallen in the centre of many UK towns and cities, but so too has the number of vehicles attempting to move.
The main hidden cause of urban UK congestion is the development of policies that effectively cut the capacity of public highways to accommodate the majority of vehicles on them. Deployment of bus lanes, traffic lights set at red for longer and road narrowing by pavement widening are primary examples of how this happens.
Protagonists of such measures have tried to hide the real causes of worsening flow rates behind claims that the intention is not to worsen congestion but to ‘encourage’ use of modes that would prefer us to use. And despite claims by fans of Congestion Charging that it reduces congestion the hard evidence reveals that flow rates in London are as bad as they were before its introduction…