Good news about UK transport is rare – so a fall in road deaths to below 3,000 for the first time since records began is definitely worth noting. Go here for a BBC summary, of the latest figures or here for the full-Monty DfT version. But, TC and a few others note that the latest stats also reveal that speeding is a causal factor in only 3% of accidents. This is equally good news for most of us. Go here for a Massey of the Mail report. A third year of ’cause’ stats to accompany traffic injury figures builds an increasingly clear and reliable source of facts to help balance road safety policy emphasis between speed limit enforcement and tackling the bad but non-speeding behaviour that causes most road fatalities in practice. The hard news on speed as a factor is however less good for some campaign groups, administrators, and safety/speed camera manufacturers who see speed reduction or limit enforcement as the best way to improve road safety. The facts as revealed by the latest stats place government on the horns of a thorny dilemma. The best way to counteract careless and bad driving on roads is by deploying patrols of experienced traffic police. But, in a nut shell, that is a cost for government to face and speed cameras offer a source of revenue… Road safety also has a social dimension. Links between higher death rates and deprivation are a focus of concern for this Guardian article.
26th September 2008
by Leon Mannings
Planning for the maintenance and development of transport is a crucial factor – but optimising the course and shape of plans is impeded by several critical factors.
First is the short term outlook of the politicians at the top of the policy-making process. Their term of control and responsibility for proposals is almost always shorter than the time it takes to implement change and objectively test whether it delivers the improvements that were promised in justifying expenditure of public funds.
The second major impediment to progress is the lack of specialist technical knowledge among politicians and indeed ignorance about the complexities of transport management and development. However, the impact of these factors depends on the extent that a nation allows its politicians to be involved…
A grand plan for the development of Paris was drawn up at the beginning of the nineteenth century and politicians were not allowed to interfere with its implementation during the ensuing decades. The British approach is at the other extreme where all major development plans are subject to a plethora of political interventions. These include grass roots objections by local campaigners who have little interest in the transport needs of the region or nation as a whole. They also include the impact that a particular political figure can have when exceptional circumstances allow them to exert an unusual level of have when they on the direction policy takes.
Prime examples of this in the UK are Barbara Castle, John Prescott and Ken Livingstone…
21st September 2008
by Leon Mannings
Skilfully selective reference to environmental concerns by policy-shapers has enabled governments to increase the extent to which use of motorised transport can be taxed in practice. Some critics of trends in transport charges in the UK go as far as saying that even the enforcement of speed limits by automated cameras has become little more than another motoring tax. See ABD, Safe Speed and Drivers Alliance to read more. Nevertheless, in theory at least, there are now two primary reasons for governments to levy charges and taxes related to transport.
The first is to raise revenue to fund infrastructure maintenance or development and to subsidise essential services that would otherwise not be economically sustainable. The second is to penalise violators of regulations and try to change travel behaviour by imposing charges designed to deter people from choosing to use particular modes at peak times of demand. Fees and fines relating to car parking and Congestion Charging – as in London and proposed for elsewhere in the UK are prime examples.
In theory, various existing and proposed charging mechanisms including fuel duty and road pricing are designed in accord with both types of justification for taxing transport usage. In practice there is very little evidence that charging systems delivery much in terms of tangible improvement to transport amenity.
An inadvertent consequence of this situation is that transport professionals with expertise in civil engineering are expected to achieve goals of social engineering. Another is that politicians are faced with the tempting prospect of charging as much as they feel they can get away with rather than setting charges in accord with costs to the state. Occasionally politicians get such judgement calls spectacularly wrong. This was well demonstrated in the UK in 2004 when a planned rise in fuel duty prompted protest that ground the nation to a halt – and forced Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the day to retreat from that policy direction.
5th September 2008
by Leon Mannings
There are two fundamental reasons why prevailing trends in UK traffic management fail to deliver improvement in solving the many problems arising from congestion, and increase costs in time and money for the majority of road users.
The commercialisation of traffic regulation enforcement is one. That source of policy-shaping rot began with the ‘decriminalising of parking enforcement’ in 1991, as the DfT explains here. Before then, the only goal for policing roads was to deliver tangible improvement in traffic flow and/or safety. Now, a primary driver for parking regulation enforcerment is to make sufficient profit from that activity to sustain a privately owned business – and provide a sufficiently high revenue stream to local government for the service provider to continue being the preferred contractor. The other is the redirection of aims for traffic engineers and highway designers away from optimising flow of the most widely used road modes – and towards prioritising movement by modes that facilitate the minority of movements for people and goods. And, as the former Vice Chair of TfL, Dave Wetzel reveals in LM’s research, the pivotal moment in that change of direction was when he and Ken Livingstone first took control of London’s government in 1981, and set up a “Sin Bin” for planners who persisted in trying to maintain or improve traffic flow. Up until then, throughout the 1970s, traffic volume increased dramatically in London but flow rates were maintained by the successful efforts of transport planners to improve the efficiency of the existing network. And, coincidentally, according to Wetzel, the ‘sin bin’ strategy was re-established during the second round of power for Livingstone and him when they took charge of TfL in 2000…
Frankly, if you can’t see how this has skewed the primary aims and objectives for UK traffic management away from improving transport for the majority of road users, and create a fine mess instead – you probably need more help than TransportCrucible.com can offer.
5th September 2008
by Leon Mannings
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…
5th September 2008
by Leon Mannings
