My IEA article on local roads

As you sit in another traffic jam, try to work your way around another road closure, follow a diversion or sit at home  waiting for someone or some delivery that is late  to turn up, do you ever ask  if public sector roads  are the best answer? How much  of our lost productivity  and  squeezed small business sector is down to the costs and difficulties  of getting about?

In my first roads article I looked at the stressed and delay prone  nationalised strategic highways, our motorways and trunk roads,which  cater for a third of our vehicle miles  and two thirds of the truck miles on an  inadequate 2.4% of our roads. My second promised  article got delayed a week by a  Burnham  diversion  and yet more government anti driver actions. Today I look at that  cross roads of congestion, our major road network of A roads. These are nationalised under local authority  management but often  dependent on national government grants.  A further 43% of our vehicle miles take place on these routes on  just  4% of our roads. The remaining 93% of our  roads are local and handle only  23% of total  travelled miles.

The major Council A road network is crucial to productivity and jobs in the  UK. It is the main means for people to get to work, the main way to get to shops, for service companies  and deliveries to reach our homes and for children to get to school. It is sadly neglected by government, starved of cash for extension and improvement whilst millions more people in recent years come to live here needing  vehicles and deliveries. Over 20 years only 600 miles  of new road has been added to the major road network. Much more new road has been added by developers as they build new housing estates with plenty of local and estate roads to funnel more vehicles onto the overwhelmed major road system.

There are very few new road schemes planned  for the  A roads  to improve  capacity and reach with only a small national budget of £1.6 bn .  Government’s priority is to cut vehicle use, so plenty of money is spent on anti vehicle changes to roads. Active travel’s new  third strategy is backed by £4.5 bn to get 55% of all short journeys  in towns and cities onto bikes or on foot. The government in its usual way has a popular success story of personal transport on its hands, so it does its best to throttle it. It turns to rationing and to offering very expensive less popular choices buttressed by public  spending, tax breaks and over provision. We have plenty of near empty  trains apart from some  peak times and favoured routes,  and many unused cycleways.

As a result we face an increasing array of measures to slow, impede or stop road vehicle use. There are the 20 mph zones taking over urban areas. 20 mph is fine near  a school at times when children may be in the road, or on residential estate roads,  but not on a major A road route needed for heavy traffic. There  are a growing number of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods restricting access to and from residential areas altogether. There are chicanes and speed humps. On some roads now Councils  have  put islands or  barriers on one side forcing traffic  to stop and wait for a gap in traffic coming the other way, a particularly dangerous as well as vexatious intervention.  Many new traffic light sets are introduced. Vehicle lanes are reduced or narrowed to put  in bigger pavements and cycleways. Aggressive kerbs are popular to do more damage alongside the poor road surface  so motorists sometimes swerving to avoid the potholes hit a new super kerb. Tyres and suspensions are hammered by bad roads.

Junction design is often changed to slow and delay traffic. Light phasings sometimes ignore the need to give priority to the main road. Too few light sets have traffic sensors to trigger  timely changes of light phasing in accord with traffic demand. Drivers on the main road have to wait at red lights when little or nothing is using the green. Some light sets now have all red phases to allow the mythical pedestrian  wanting to cross both  roads  at the same time to do so. There are too few roundabouts which usually flow better. Some highways  Authorities  seek to cut flows at successful  roundabouts by narrowing the highway or by introducing  traffic lights and stop lines.

So why are our main local roads so badly run? Some of the changes are made as so called green policies, yet they lead to more congestion and vehicles burning more fuel whilst  making  little or  no progress. Some are made  to improve  safety, yet they often increase potential conflicts between vehicles , cycles and pedestrians by complex junctions, narrower lanes, and confusing instructions.Taking roadspace away from vehicles  to create a little  used cycle lane causes congestion and frustration, which some bad cyclists add to by riding on pavements or the vehicle  lane and shooting red lights in unpredictable ways.

Good Councils should  get to work to help drivers who pay so much tax for such a poor service. They should roll out traffic management schemes that improve  flows. We need more roundabouts and fewer light sets. All A road traffic  lights should  give  priority to the main road with traffic sensors to allow entry from side roads in a controlled way.They should pursue more small schemes to remove road blockages, allow selective widening and segregate A road vehicle traffic from bikes and pedestrians. They should not have 20 mph speed restrictions.

Each Council or Mayoralty should set out  a local strategic road network of the main through  A roads in their areas. There should be plans  to dual heavily  trafficked routes. The  national government needs to provide a better financial balance between good roads for vehicles  and good active travel alternatives away from the main strategic roads.

White van man and woman need a better deal .To save our High Steets we need  decent car access. To have more choice of services and deliveries to our homes  we need better roads.

Anyone wanting to grow this economy should want lower taxes and cheaper energy. They  need to follow that up with better main roads as highways for trade, services and getting to work. We lose both productivity  and business opportunity by sitting in traffic jams. Drivers pay far more  in vehicle and fuel taxes than they get in road provision.The plumber, the Amazon delivery driver , the builder, the employees  going to work and the families seeking entertainment all need to get there by road vehicle. Why does the  miserable government road  monopolist seek to delay them and lecture them on how not to bother? It even in some places  spends money on expensive signs to tell you to expect long queues and bad service, as if proud  of it.