Shelve Major New Roads To Fix Potholes Instead, U.K. Parliament’s Transport Committee Tells DfT
forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2023/07/26/shelv...
forbes.comPosted Jul 27, 2023, 8:11 AM UTC
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forbes.comAs long as highway maintenance teams communicate with water companies etc so the same roads aren't dug up multiple times. My road had new gas pipes put in last year which meant the road was dug up and relaid were now getting new water pipes put in, digging up part of the newly laid road!
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This is so common, I wonder why it isn't investigated for impropriety - as in if the same contractors are doing the same job twice etc and what are their connections...
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Probably because one of the councillors owns one of the companies involved in the process...
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its no council related, it all goes through central government so of course there's no communication with local councils.
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If it's the same contractors doing it then yeah it's impropriety. If its different companies then it's just capitalism - lots of separate companies doing their own thing. In theory councils should be co-ordinating it all better, and there'll be an element of that probably, but private companies aren't obliged to tell councils all their future plans. A council may get an application from Virgin one year, ok it, then British Gas the next etc. They're supposed to coordinate, but they're not actually in charge, there's no bigger picture.
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We've had 4 different fibre companies dig up our road in the last 2 years. Quite why the council couldn't put in ducts and charge all the companies to use them I have no idea.
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The council's have two slight issues.
Lack of capital to do such a thing
Lack of crystal ball to know if such a thing will pay off in the long term (IE will they be able to attract firms to use their ducts)
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also Openreach have ducts all over because they own all the historical cabling network from when BT was owned by the public and before that the Post Office network.
You can rent space in their ducts to run your fibre if you want to, but obviously none of these new fibre companies want to do that.
To be fair, in residential areas a lot of Openreach's stuff is on telegraph poles. Still though, this just shows another reason why private ownership of public infrastructure is just a total waste of money.
4 different providers doing 4 different runs all to serve the same set of houses.
What should happen is what they did with Openreach's copper network in the early 2000's and unbundle it at the exchange. Thats how you could buy broadband from Sky or Vodafone or Plusnet, it was simply switched to their network in the exchange building.
Fibre optic should be exactly the same.
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You can rent space in their ducts to run your fibre if you want to, but obviously none of these new fibre companies want to do that.
That is oddly what Cityfibre have done to access my house, early 2000's estate
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Also they should be made to relay with the same materials.
Lots of pedestrian areas are laid with expensive blocks or local stonework, and then a telco comes along and lays black tarmac right through the middle of it.
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If new pipes are being put in; it bypasses any Section 58 protection you can put in aka due to the fact that a lot of our problems are due to utilities being under the carriageway in a lot of cases that are constantly having to be dug up and repaired it effects the integrity of the carriageway. Section 58 usually protects a carriageway for 3 years - with the essential get outs being new services or threat to life (e.g. loss of water, electricity, gas etc.).
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More money needs to be spent on roads full stop instead of white elephants like HS2.
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HS2 was a much less stupid plan when it actually went to the North. It’s not about how fast you can get to Birmingham, it’s about separating out long-distance high-speed train traffic from shorter-distance stopper trains.
Right now there’s a pattern of fast trains departing from a terminus and then the stopper trains leaving 5 minutes behind them. The next fast train then has to be timetabled so it doesn’t arrive at the stopper train’s terminus (or passing station) before the stopper train, and that’s why major routes only run one train an hour. With HS2 you can run a high speed train every ten minutes if you want, and you can run a low speed train every ten minutes as well.
Look at it this way: a lot of other people want to use the train and if the government makes it easier for them then you won’t be stuck in traffic behind them, and the roads will need repairing less frequently. Don’t you want other people to use trains so that you can have a good time on the roads?
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How much money was wasted on HS2 that could have been spent on roads? Just a few pennies!
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A wrong take. HS2 in full is about the only sort of thing that can move people away from cars and thus take pressure off the road network.
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move people away from cars?
LOL.
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Also can we stop half arsing the repairs? Most of the repairs done round here in the last year have already failed again. If the repair fails within an unreasonable length of time the company should be fined 100%+ of the job cost.
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My Wife and I report repairs on our councils site, they do go out and do them, but they'll find the one pothole of 7 that is deepest, do that, and ignore all the others within a few metres of it that will be just as deep in a few months time.
Whilst they're there they should just do the entire stretch rather than coming back individually, taking far more resources and time in total.
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Depending on exactly what you meant by do the entire stretch (e.g. did you mean fully resurface or just fill all the potholes?) - you have the difference between Planned (e.g. I'm planning to resurface this road) Maintenance and Reactive (that's a big hole that wasn't there last week!?) Maintenance. With Reactive you then have grades of repair (temporary e.g. that needs a fix now just to stop really bad from happening ASAP which usually then leads to a permenant so that they don't have to come back any time soon).
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They'll send a team of four to fix one pothole then complain they aren't given enough money by the council. It takes one person to fill a potholes the other three just stand and watch!
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To right.
I was in France not so long ago and witnessed them dig up and relay a road which was in a condition I think we'd describe as "very good" in this country. No doubt it is done pre-emptively, getting it relayed before it starts to deteriorate.
Not surface dressing, completely relay the road.
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It amazes me how fast France can resurface their motorways. Done in one continuous rolling process from start to finish and only close off the area they're working on.
Where in the UK we get miles of cones and limits, specs cameras on stretches not being worked on. Or you get a 50yard stretch where they're doing work then a few miles of nothing, then another 50yards of more work, then nothing. M42 is currently like this (well, was last time, I avoid it now).
Also the crack/fissure repairs done on trunk roads using sealant before they open up into pot holes. Why don't we do this?
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I work for a road maintenance company and we tell councils that the type of repair they want won't last, but they won't pay for the proper fix. We have to get agreements from them that the normal warranty period won't apply to the cheap version they want.
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Might be related to councils having their central government funding savagely cut by ~40% over the austerity decade?
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Yes that is likely the trigger but whoever settled on the "half arse it and do it again inside of the same year" idea has not saved anybody any money. We need to stop doing it because it does not work.
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Or it’s down to the council not realising by paying the cheap price it will cost them more in the long run. Public fund mismanagement again!
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Not to mention the utility companies, that spend forever digging up a road then do the shittest repair job imaginable. I get the impression that no one from the council even bothers to check.
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That's not the councils remit, allowing utilities to rip up roads is handled at central government level not councils.
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You’re forgetting the classic utility A digs up the road for a new housing development, then utility B digs it up again a couple of weeks later. Just down from me the road was dug up 6 or 7 times in the space of a few months for a small development of a dozen or so new builds. It’s crazy
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The best part is when they do it in city centres on high quality paving material, only to fill it in with tarmac and abandon it.
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we had a patch job that was back to its original state, if not worse, in like 3 months. They might as well have not bothered.
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Potholes are often because the concrete foundation of the road has failed, if you just fill in the hole then the concrete below is still damaged and will continue to sink down into the ground generating another pothole.
The solution is to rebuild the concrete road foundation which isn't cheap!
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The UK Parlimentary Transport Committee reccomends not expanding the road network due to our inability to maintain the current network and necessary role of traffic reduction in climate targets. Some highlights, with emphasis on the most important lines:
An influential group of British MPs has told the Department for Transport (DfT) that “future investment [in major roads] should focus more on maintenance and renewal rather than brand new projects.”
Instead, the Tory-led transport committee recommends “cancelling complex and costly enhancement projects.”
Transport remains the biggest greenhouse gas contributor in the U.K.
In its Strategic Road Investment inquiry, published July 27, parliament’s transport committee said: “Given increasing costs of projects, net zero commitments and ageing strategic road assets the [committee] calls on the Government to ensure that future Road Investment Strategy portfolios are deliverable and prioritize day-to-day maintenance over complex expansion projects.”
Glenn Lyons, who also gave evidence to the inquiry in his role as Mott MacDonald Professor of Future Mobility at UWE Bristol, told Forbes.com: “The committee’s report recognizes that the Government is gambling with our future when it comes to decarbonization. The committee is asking the Government to show greater stewardship over the future by also entertaining the need to maintain or reduce traffic on the strategic road network in England.”
“Major road building projects are controversial because the process used for designing and approving them is faulty. Appraising, scrutinising, giving approval and finally deciding often leads to increasing division, not a build up of consensus. The process does not give voice to the seriousness of genuine scientific and public concern about the environmental and economic impacts of the growth in traffic and the schemes to provide for it.”
Professor Goodwin added: “There is never full consideration of viable alternatives, such as public transport improvements and management of demand, or the significance of alternative futures for travel demand or the climate.”
Leo Murray, co-director of climate charity Possible, also flagged the inquiry’s focus on climate risk:
“There’s no way of meeting our climate commitments if the Government pushes ahead with their destructive road building agenda. The committee is saying what transport experts have been repeating for decades— that you cannot build your way out of congestion.”
Murray added: “The billions of pounds earmarked for this environmental disaster would be much better spent helping people cut car use in cities by investing in active travel and public transport.”
The transport committee is comprised of six Tory MPs, four Labour MPs and one Scottish National Party MP.
Committee chair Iain Stewart, the Conservative MP for motor-centric Milton Keynes South, said: “We also received evidence raising concerns about the switch to electric vehicles happening swiftly enough to mitigate the added carbon emissions that will come from the predicted increase in traffic on the strategic road network. We advise the Government to model and report on options for managing future congestion levels rather than only enabling its growth via [road] expansions.”
The Government views the Strategic Road Network—4,300 miles of motorways and major A roads—as a key driver of economic growth, but its road investments could impact its ambitions to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, stated the Strategic Road Investment inquiry report.
The Government’s strategy to decarbonize the sector relies on a rapid switch to zero-emission vehicles.
However, DfT forecasts that major road traffic will increase, and there is a big risk that the uptake of clean vehicles will not be fast enough to mitigate this increase. The DfT’s plans to accommodate this demand through new roads and clean vehicles rather than considering steps to manage demand was called into question by the report.
The report adds that the road haulage sector was enthusiastic about road building plans but that the “majority of individual road users would prefer maintenance and renewal of the existing [road network] to be prioritized over its expansion.”
“In the face of increasing costs, looming net zero commitments and an ageing network in need of maintenance, the Department [for Transport] needs to ensure that future Road Investment Strategy portfolios are deliverable,” stressed the transport committee’s report.
The committee is far from the only part of officialdom to be wary of more and more road building. In a written submission to the inquiry, Oxfordshire County Council stated that “we are concerned that a large programme of road capacity improvements does not tie with decarbonization objectives and targets at local and national level.”
In 2020, the government’s Committee on Climate Change recommended that motor vehicle mileage needs to be reduced to meet zero-carbon targets, even with full electrification of the vehicle fleet.
Last month this climate change committee published its 2022 progress report which was critical of the lack of specific ambition of the Government to limit traffic growth.
“In a world where the only thing we know for sure is that the climate is changing and we are not on track to insulate ourselves from the most extreme impacts, the context for assessing the value of road investments has totally changed compared to even a decade ago,” said Jillian Anable, Professor of Transport and Energy at the University of Leeds.
She added that future road building plans will likely “carry over many proposed road schemes that were based on decisions made in a totally different context several decades ago and any new schemes will use an appraisal process that is even older than that.”
Traffic levels in England and Wales are projected to grow by as much as 54% by 2060, predicted the DfT last year.
In a projections report issued in December 2022, the DfT also said road delays could rise by 85% to 2060.
Laying down generous amounts of asphalt has always stimulated motor-vehicle use. (Electric cars get snarled in traffic just as quickly as non-electric cars.)
The rise in road traffic could be as low as 8% by 2060, stated the DfT’s projections, with the likeliest increase being 22% higher than today. The 54% growth in road traffic is the upper limit, predicted DfT modeling.
The 54% increase involved the adoption of autonomous vehicles, which “assumes increased trip making for the elderly and increased driving license holding for all.”
Higher fuel prices could reduce such demand. The DfT’s analysis calculates that a persistent 10% increase in fuel prices reduces traffic by 3%.
Since the 1960s, successive governments—of all political persuasions—have wished for more car travel, so have provided for it by building more roads.
The U.K.’s Strategic Road Network has grown like Topsy because building capacity for motorists is usually included in any political boasts about expanding infrastructure.
In 2013, the so-called “greenest Government ever” promised the “greatest investment in our roads since the 1970s.”
It seemed this was ignorant of a similar 1989 pledge made by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. With the Roads to Prosperity report, Thatcher promised her government’s road-building program would be the “biggest since the Romans.”
Some of Thatcher’s roads got built—including the M25 freeway around London, which, at peak times, is now more of a car park than a fast motor road—but the program was halted when it came to be understood that building more roads leads to more congestion.
This was a radical idea when floated by anti-roads campaigners, but it became an orthodox government position—briefly—following advice to government from the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA) study of 1994.
The then Transport Secretary Dr. Brian Mawhinney—a Conservative— told parliament that the Department for Transport “recognized that, as economic growth over the last 15 years has greatly increased traffic levels, the number of congested areas has gone up and with them, the cases where a road scheme might bring costs as well as benefits.”
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He admitted that “roads do, to some degree, increase traffic.”
Urbanists have a pithy phrase to describe this induced demand: “Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity.”
This quote was paraphrased from a 1955 article by Lewis Mumford. Writing in The New Yorker, the great urban planning specialist suggested that “[experts believe congestion] can be solved by increasing the capacity of the existing traffic routes ... Like the tailor’s remedy for obesity—letting out the seams of the trousers and loosening the belt—this does nothing to curb the greedy appetite that [has] caused the fat to accumulate.”
Mumford was describing the as-yet-unnamed concept of induced demand in transport.
This theory was described in detail in 1969 by J.J. Leeming, a British road-traffic engineer and county surveyor. He observed that the more roads are built, the more traffic there is to fill these roads.
Leeming’s description idea was conceived shortly after German mathematician Dietrich Braess released the Braess’s paradox which demonstrated that “selfish” motorists can not be relied upon to consider the optimal travel times for all rather than just themselves, leading to delays for all.
While Leeming’s study has become an accepted theory among most transport academics, induced demand was known about long before 1969.
Writing in 1866, surveyor and engineer William J. Haywood, one of the builders of London’s Holborn Viaduct, said the new thoroughfare would attract more travelers: the “facility of locomotion stimulates traffic of itself,” he wrote.
His solution? Build more roads.
This was also the conclusion of Sir Charles Bressey’s Highway Development Survey for London, published in 1937. In his report, Bressey wrote: “As a typical instance may be quoted the new Great West Road which parallels and relieves the old Brentford High Street route. According to the Ministry’s traffic census extracts … the new route as soon as it was opened carried four and a half times more vehicles than the old route was carrying. No diminution, however, occurred in the flow of traffic along the old route and from that day to this the number of vehicles on both routes has steadily increased…These figures serve to exemplify the remarkable manner in which new roads create new traffic.”
Writing in 1932, the British town planner Thomas Sharp accurately described how some motorists would only be satisfied once every inch of land was capped with asphalt.
“A motorist is apt to complain of the ‘overcrowded’ condition of the road if he finds he has not continually got a whole mile-long stretch of it to himself,” wrote Sharp.
“He will declare there is no pleasure in motoring under such conditions. He will search his map for some alternative route by quiet lanes where he can speed along with the road to himself. And when others find that alternative route and all further alternatives are exhausted, he proceeds to demand a new road system so that his motoring may again become a pleasure.”
Last year an official from the U.K.’s Department for Transport wrote to local authorities warning them that budget cut-backs will mean major road schemes, previously considered dialled-in, wouldn’t be funded from central government if they are likely to increase carbon emissions. The schemes may also be cancelled if they do not cater for active travel, such as cycling and walking, or public transit.
Philip Andrews, Head of Road Investment, Policy and Pipeline Development at the Department for Transport, wrote that the government that “will not have sufficient funding to continue to fund all the [major road] schemes currently in the programme to the current scale or timing.”
He pointed that there have been changes to government policy around transport investment, analytical requirements on carbon emissions, and “effects of Covid on delivery and future demand.”
English local authorities were invited to “reconsider the schemes in the current programme.”
Andrews suggested that “certain schemes may no longer be a priority because they have increased in cost, cannot be progressed in a timely fashion or no longer fit with the local authority's latest transport objectives.”
Going forward, local authorities will have to give more weight to whether new road schemes offer “value for money ,” or VfM.
“Is the scheme likely to be low or poor VfM?” Andrews asked, suggesting that, if so, local authorities might want to reassess them.
The benefit to cost ratios (BCRs) of road building schemes are often poor, while the BCRs for low-carbon, health-promoting transport schemes are generally high.
In a 2013 report from the Department for Transport it was revealed some cycling schemes have off-the-scale BCR’s of up to 35 to 1.
To put this into perspective, the government’s Eddington transport study of 2006 said the BCR for trunk roads was just 4.66, and that figure is likely to be much lower now.
In his letter to local authorities Andrews said that the “importance of decarbonisation has increased since May 2019 so consideration of whether the scheme is likely to make carbon worse and lead to a lower VfM.
He added that new calculations will be necessary “now the cost of carbon has been increased substantially.”
He further stated that “active travel and bus improvements are also issues that have grown in importance and any opportunities to promote these in major schemes should be reflected, where possible.”
It’s unlikely that the national government will pay heed to the transport committee’s recommendations. In addition to announcing the recent go-ahead for the Stonehenge tunnel the government today called in the decision of Oxfordshire County council’s planning and regulation committee on a $450 million road expansion in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
Speaking at a public meeting, Green Councillor Emily Kerr of Oxford City Council said: “This road was conceived nearly a decade ago when less than 3% of people worked from home. E-bikes were a nascent industry. Traffic forecasts were from 2015/2018. The world has changed since then. People want good public transport.”
Labour councillor Charlie Hick of Cowley said building the road would contradict the county council’s own policies: “We have a target to reduce car trips by 2030 by 25%. This smashes through this.”
The council’s planning and regulation committee voted to refuse the application for dualling the A4130 road but now there will be a review by the government-appointed planning inspectorate and the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities who will take the final decision about whether to approve the application.
A public inquiry will be held before a decision is made on this road scheme but calling in the decision usually means the decision will be reversed by national government.
The current administration seems happy to ride roughshod over climate concerns.
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Do both. Also also rethink "traffic calming" measures which just force drivers into brake-accelerate cycles.
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which just force drivers into brake-accelerate cycles
If you are referring to speed bumps, I disagree. The problem aren’t the bumps but the drivers who accelerate to 30mph only to brake down to 10mph in front of the next bump 100 feet away. Instead, all you have to do is to keep steady 15mph to 20mph speed and you can drive through without any issues.
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Instead, all you have to do is to keep steady 15mph to 20mph speed and you can drive through without any issues.
Or buy an SUV of the sorts:
- Redditors utterly detest
- Normal people seem to love
They'll happily coast over speed bumps at 30, if not more.
The problem aren’t the bumps but the drivers who accelerate to 30mph only to brake down to 10mph in front of the next bump 100 feet away
Ultimately you can either design policy and infrastructure in accordance with how people actually behave or in accordance of how you wish they behaved if only there were such good and moral people you are.
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So while I appreciate you are being flippant, SUV's just seem like a vehicular arms race.
Everyone I know who bought one exclaims how great it is to see over other cars.
Which works until everyone has one.
My personal annoyance isn't so much the small SUV's that are basically the size of something like a VW Passat only taller, but the giant pickup truck things like Ford Rangers that seem to have spawned everywhere.
The things are absolutely huge and seem to only ever have a single person in them. I just don't get it.
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Everyone I know who bought one exclaims how great it is to see over other cars.
They just need to cruise over speed bumps at 40 mate.
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Do both.
There isn't the money budget or carbon budget to do both.
Also also rethink "traffic calming" measures which just force drivers into brake-accelerate cycles.
This only has this effect on drivers who are stupid, with no ability to look beyond their own bonnet. The only real practical remedy here is massively increasing the density of speed bumps to leave no acceleration room. Well, that, or massively increase the price of fuel to 'encourage' people to drive more efficiently.
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This only has this effect on drivers who are stupid
Ah yes, let's design infrastructure and policy around how we wish people would act rather than how they actually behave. Good one.
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Ok, so then the second two options. Massive increase in fuel costs and use the money to fund one speed bump every six feet along all calmed roads.
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Nah to both.
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Or we could design roads in order to stop drivers being fucking stupid and punish drivers for being fucking stupid. Rather than trying to enable them being fucking stupid.
A big part of the point behind infrastructure design is precisely to influence behaviour in the first place.
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nah
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The report seems to miss a few important points. Firstly a new road might reduce the overall maintanace bill by shifting heavy traffic from the town onto bypasses which can be cheaper and certainly less disruptive to maintain. On induced traffic it is not as simple as many people seem to think. You don't build a road and induce the exact amount of traffic to bring the system up to gridlock again. The levels of induced traffic can vary wildly (usually depending on how much demand was suppressed by congestion). For example, the Welsh town of Newtown had very bad congestion until the bypass was built. Did a fast flowing bypass in rural Wales magically generate enough cars to jam itself? Of course not. Thirdly it is not always possible to provide a public transport scheme that will relieve congestion, especially to a satisfactory extent, and in less urban settings. Public transport schemes are often far more expensive as well. This isn't to say they aren't the correct solution in some contexts.
Overall, just scrapping road building ignores the fact that every scheme has different aims and requirements. There are plenty of towns in the UK that have waited decades for a road scheme where there are no viable alternatives e.g. Mottram in Longendale, and to pull the plug now would sentence these towns to at least 25 years of constant pollution and congestion.
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The climate change committee has already said we basically cannot build any new roads.
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More railways and cheaper train tickets instead please!
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Highway companies need to start being held accountable for every pothole that fails in a certain timeframe
Why am I paying my taxes towards a bodgejob repair that will fail next winter?
It you're gunna fix it, fix it properly
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They already do, but often the councils want the cheapest repair and the construction companies will then rufuse any warranty on the work as they are telling the council up front that the repair is temporary.
Councils can't have it both ways. They either pay for the proper job to be done or they pay for cheap patching with no warranty.
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Well then councils need to be held responsible
They already get, to be blunt, a fucking fortune to repair the roads.
If they aren't spending that money to do it properly.. are they just pocketing the rest? What's going on here
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The councils that have seen budget cuts of 40% over the last few years?
The aren't spending the money to do it properly because they are working within their budget for the year.
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This definitely is not contained to being 'a last few years' problem.
It's a problem with the mentality of the entire government
Just keep short-term fixing everything for a long term instead of actually resolving the problems
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Most roads are the responsibility of local councils rather than central government anyway. It's pretty much only motorways and major A roads that are maintained centrally, while most potholes are on smaller roads. So unless they're proposing to give councils more money, cutting major road schemes isn't going to help with fixing potholes.
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You do a road but wont last 2 weeks because thames water looks at that and just has to come dig it. Then 6 months later their patches turn into gravel and pot holes
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