Will the General Election ease congestion on UK roads? Fleet Voice
Wednesday 5 May 2010: Fleet Voice Column
Do you know how many working hours are lost to congestion? Or what the cost is to business, or even what the main political parties fighting for our votes intend to do about our bunged up roads?
Research previously conducted by Trafficmaster shows that more than £600 million is lost by business every month due to drivers being stuck in traffic. With around 1.2 million drivers caught in roads chaos every day, it’s reckoned UK Plc loses approximately 20,000 working days every day of the business week.
Add all of this together and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reckons business is losing around £8 billion per year to congestion.
So, what are the solutions and how will they benefit fleet drivers who depend on the smooth running of our roads network to carry out their jobs?
In a rare moment of broad agreement, all three major political parties concur that a high speed north-south rail link is badly needed. That, however, is as far as the entente between Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems goes.
Labour and the Liberals believe the money should go into a rail link between London and the north of England and Scotland, while the Tories reckon we need to include Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds and join it all up with fast rail services to the Continent.
Only the Liberal Democrats have explicitly stated they want to see a major shift of freight from road to rail. The Conservatives say they want to cut congestion and make roads safer, while Labour states it will widen motorways to cope with more traffic and not introduce road pricing.
The Lib-Dems policy may put them on a collision course with the haulage industry, especially as they also want to charge freight operators on a pay-per-mile basis for using motorways. They also intend to charge the rest of us to use motorways and trunk roads with a not-for-profit roads charging scheme.
However, none of this will tackle the fundamental problems of congestion and the UK’s furred-up transport arteries.
The CBI has some far more radical proposals, and let’s hope that whoever emerges victorious on Friday morning has the sense to pay attention.
The CBI says there is too much tinkering around the edges of transport policy at present and measures such as increasing the number of bus lanes and city centre congestion charging merely delay the problems, not solve them.
Three main areas need to be tackled, says the CBI, and they are: changing working patterns, more capital investment in roads, and reforming the management and funding of roads.
The great shift to working from home that was predicted in the 1990s has not happened and many of us still rely on our cars as a vital working tool. What the CBI proposes is smaller changes to our driving habits and greater flexibility from employers.
A shift away from the traditional 9-5 working day would ease congestion at peak periods, reduce travel time for drivers and lower carbon dioxide emissions as cars are not stuck in traffic and are working more efficiently. This approach also includes a strong element of doing away with the school run, which accounts for 20% of peak time morning traffic.
It’s glib to say more money spent on roads will reduce congestion, but roads funding has shrunk over the past 15 years and it needs to be increased: just look at the state of most roads and the number potholes after the recent cold winter. We need good roads for effective business, even if funding has to come from the private sector and we have to stomach more toll roads such as the one around Birmingham.
The final prong of the CBI’s transport proposals is the most radical. It believes the Highways Agency should become independent of the government, in a similar way to how Network Rail operates.
This idea is fraught with problems, but it could result in a roads network far more directly responsible and answerable to its users – you, me and every other tax-paying driver.
It could also make the Highways Agency far more accountable for the £50 billion poured into the Treasury by Britain’s drivers. We don’t see anything like this amount returned in roads spending, so a reformed Highways Agency would have to balance the books far better than it currently does.
Such a system would be overseen by an independent regulator, which would make it much simpler for drivers to complain about congestion, roadworks and the state of the UK’s roads.
An independent regulator would also be in a position to set standards for roads maintenance and their impact on drivers rather than the buck-passing current set-up of national government, highways agencies and local government.
One further benefit of an independent Highways Agency is it would be able to make more far-sighted decisions without political expediency coming into the decision-making process.
Will the winner of this week’s General Election listen to these ideas? Who knows, but think about it as you sit in a traffic jam on the way to the polling station.
Alisdair Suttie
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