Oct 25 2007
Allow drivers to use the hard shoulder
This incompetent government has done so much to destroy belief and trust in monopoly public services. One of their worst areas has been the provision of road space.
For the first few years of this government’s reign they cancelled all new road projects and lectured everyone that we had to abandon our cars, vans and lorries and take the train. They were unable to grasp the fact that there was insufficient train capacity to absorb much extra traffic.
They went further, encouraging Councils and acting directly on the trunk and motorway network to cut the capacity of what roads we do have. Bus lanes. chicanes, bollards, lower speed restrictions, rephased traffic lights, lane removal, road closure and a variety of other traffic management? measures were deployed to reduce the capacity of our highway network, in the hope that this would drive more people off the road. These measures have remained popular with the government and many Councils, even though the government has now changed its attitude to new road construction and says it will build some extra highway.
They decided, against the evidence, that speed was the main cause of accidents and that deploying an ever more expensive and complex array of anti speed devices would raise road safety. They ignored the fact that speed is only a contributory cause in under 10% of accidents, and the even more inconvenient truth that our safest roads are our fastest roads, the motorways and dualled trunks. Having created far worse congestion, they then allowed Councils to tax us extra for the congestion they had caused by the inadequacies of their transport system.
They made most people in the country criminals. As someone in the public eye I have to try to keep to the speed limits, even though some of them are thought to be too low by most drivers. Travelling at 70 mph on a motorway I am nearly always in the slow lane, and am overtaken by a majority of the traffic on the road. Driving to a speed limit is also more dangerous than judging the right speed for the conditions, entailing frequent diversion of eyes from the road ahead to the speedo and diverting mental energy from anticipation of future road conditions to watching the speed.
Today we learn that they will go ahead with more possible routes where the hard shoulder can be used by drivers when the road is congested. It is a small blow for commonsense, given the complete failure to provide the transport capacity we need to lessen congestion.
They should also learn from those Councils who have now realised that restricting road capacity is often a bad idea. Birmingham Council has taken out some bus lanes, freeing traffic on busy roads. Barnet Council has done some good work on improving traffic flows by better traffic management and junction design.
In the short term the government does need to do much more to get more capacity out of the existing network. To do this it should change its guidance to highway authorities and take the following steps:
1. Remove the M4 Bus Lane, a symbol of the folly used by so few vehicles compared to the other two lanes.
2. Encourage Highways Authorities to review all junctions, where many accidents occur, with a view to creating a right hand turning lane where possible, and giving more priority to the main road where there are traffic lights and a major road crossing a minor road. The main road should always be green unless traffic sensors have picked up an approaching vehicle from the side road.
3. Remove chicanes, bumps, humps and other obstacles on main roads, and restore extra lanes where these have been removed for no good reason.
4. Allow turning left on a red light, where the red light has the same force as a Stop sign.
In the medium term government and Councils need to spend some of their large budgets on smaller highways improvements to get rid of bottlenecks and to provide safer crossing by pedestrians away from the traffic.
The government should also be willing to sell a franchise to private operators to run major national routes for a period of say 30 years. The terms of the franchise should allow the operator to charge variable tolls up to a specified maximum. In return the operator should take on full responsibility for maintaining the highway, and have obligations where appropriate to put on an extra lane or to remove specified bottlenecks and make junction improvements to increase flows and safety. Motoring taxes should be reduced to offset the tolls, paid for by the capital receipt for the sale of the franchise and the reduced public sector road maintenance and improvement budget. I am sure private owners would keep the road open more than the public authorities, and would not be undertaking such slow and incessant road works as afflict our nationalised highways network.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
And more new motorways along the M6 Toll model.
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John,
I agree with you apart from two points: -
1) Use of hard shoulder.
I would worry about access to accidents for emergency vehicles…time is often a critical factor in survival rates.
2) Private road operators.
I feel we pay more than enough tax on cars etc to have the best road system in the world. There just needs to be political will to allow the money taken from car related tax to be put back into our transport network including roads. I have no problem with private operators running new roads providing there is an alternative for those that don’t want to use them.
Speed limits in this country are set too low on many of our roads, however I support the Twenty miles an hour limit around schools….Just common sense. I cannot support the obsession with Forty miles an hour limits like the one suddenly imposed on the Forest Road from Warfield to the Wokingham side of Binfield.
The speed limits we have, were put in place over Forty years ago when vehicles were a lot less advanced than they are today. With anti lock braking and power steering our cars are far easier to stop and manoeuvre now than they were back then.
Motorways could have their limits raised much higher with a proviso in the legislation along the lines of, in an accident you must be able to justify your speed, For example, at three o’clock in the morning you could justify 120 mph on a clear dry road. However, during a downpour on the M4 at five o’clock in the afternoon, you could perhaps only justify a speed of 40mph.
I would like to see fewer speed cameras, which many see as a stealth tax as they seem to be more about raising money than road safety. I like the illuminating signs like the one near the three frogs that flashes “30MPH Slow Down!” Research shows these have as much effect on slowing down traffic as speed cameras….They just don’t generate the income.
I think the whole thing comes down to joined up thinking by government: if that is not an oxymoron in itself.
Reply: I agree they need to include stopping places beyond the hard shoulder and have snesible regulations over its use and speed. I am happy with 20 mph outside schools when children are going in and out but see no reason to extend this to other times of day to holidays.
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Oh gosh I hope they don’t do this.
The M42 becomes a nightmare where they use the hardshoulder at peak times, they slow the traffic down to 40 mph (controlled by speed cameras) in too many unnecessary instances causing the traffic to bunch up and tailgate one another, which in my opinion is more dangerous. At nearly every junction traffic has to move in and out which people don’t like to do, so many tootle along in the middle with traffic then trying to pass on both sides.
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Another pet gripe is when they leave traffic warning signs up way after the congestion has cleared, so people take alternative routes through town centres unnecessarily. I know of one instance a couple of weeks ago where a sign said ‘lane closed ahead workforce in road’ from the previous evening that had not been removed the following morning.
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It’s well worth looking at York’s response to congestion. Since no-one could imagine adding new roads (it would require demolishing bits of the medieval city), and since car numbers were rising along with the economy, they had a problem. They turned it over to the Maths dept of York University, who persuaded them to invest very heavily in traffic sensors. Many algorythms and packet-switching programmes later, the mathematicians produced a traffic-flow system for the city which is comprehensive and responsive. And it works - despite building no new roads, and traffic flow increasing, the city’s congestion is markedly better now than it was ten years ago. A triumph for the mathematicians and brainpower. (Though not the market - Hayek would be surprised, and so am I.)
Second, North Yorkshire is one of only two police authoriites which has refused to put in rent-collecting speed cameras. Good for them! In their place, we have speed-sensors at village outskirts which, if you are speeding, flash up a polite request/reminder to keep to the limit. These are good things, because the message is effectively an invitation to help preserve the community, it is in a small way an invititation therefore to share in the community. So you slow down, and feel you have benefited mankind and yourself too. It is the polar opposite of a speed camera flashing you and then fining you. By criminalising you explicitly it expels you from the community.
Reply: Sounds good - thanks for the ideas.
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I have a big worry with moving roads over to the private sector.
The private sector works very well where it is left alone, but as soon as it is given a monopoly, then it is just as bad as the public sector. How would you ensure that the choice element, which is what keeps competition healthy, is maintained?
There is too many examples of the public sector moving services over to the private sector, but not removing the shackles of bureaucracy. The reality of most of these projects is that the companies who take them over have a public sector mentality, regardless of their legal status.
Capita and EDS are great examples of this.
So, with this in mind, it would possibly make more sense to lease the road to a company for 30 years, who have to look after it. They offer usage of the road to the government on a annual contract. Within this contract, there is a service level agreement where the road cannot be closed for maintenance between 8-6 on any weekday. If this is broken, then the value of the next contract can be negotiated, with the government having the option of not having to hire it!
The cost of this contract would be paid out of the road fund licence.
What do you think?
Reply: The idea of passing a route over to private management works best where there are alternative “free routes” to provide strong competition. Even where a route has some monopoly characteristics it is still likely to produce a better result. Monopoly price exploitation would be prevented by law/contract, whilst the pattern of incentives would encourage the franchise holder to keep the route open and in better condition for use to maximise revenue.
Your system would be better than the current arrangement, but I suspect leaving them free to decide on the timing and phasing of works would produce a better answer than yours , as they can obtain significant revenue by keeping the road open after 6pm.
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I would suggest fitting HGV’s with a device allowing them to travel faster than 56mph when they are unladen. On a 44ton truck there’s a huge difference in stopping distances without a load, so I don’t believe there’d be any significant safety compromise. This would allow the faster empty lorries to pass much quicker and free up the middle lane of the motorway significantly. Particularly as, for some unknown reason, many motorists seem to have a pathological aversion to the outside lane.
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