John Redwood is a former Secretary of State for Wales and MP for Wokingham. He writes regularly at his diary
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 per cent 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 per cent of our vehicle miles take place on these routes on just 4 per cent of our roads. The remaining 93 per cent of our roads are local and handle only 23 per cent 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 per cent 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 Streets 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.
What we’re reading
The unspoken truth about wildfires. Matt Ridley argues in The Spectator that, despite the awful headlines from the continent, the cumulative land area burnt in wildfires across Europe is far below the 2012-2025 average. Although politicians like to blame climate change for their failure to take precautionary measures, controlled burns are the most important factor in preventing the build-up of tinder. In Britain, government policy against controlled heather burning gets in the way of good practices.
Why wealth taxes fail. Over at the Cato Institute, Chris Edwards and Adam Michel write that taxes on wealth target accumulated savings such as business assets, which benefit society with investment and job creation. Most European countries that imposed wealth taxes eventually repealed them since they were counterproductive, leading to capital flight and tax avoidance. Current proposals to create wealth taxes run counter to the lessons from recent experience.
Mamdani’s subsidized NYC grocery stores face lawsuit: As Lisa Fickenscher reports at the New York Post, a group of business owners will sue New York City’s “democratic socialist“ mayor, Zohran Mamdani, over his taxpayer-funded supermarket scheme. The group’s spokesman says the subsidized stores, which are meant to sell groceries at steep discounts to market prices, would have an unfair advantage over their private competitors. It might amuse Mamdani that the business group suing his attempt at state-owned retail distribution is immigrant-led. It is called the Multicultural Business Coalition.
A wise old fox once told me that we had enough roads - just that everybody wants to use them at the same time :) Sir John does not say it directly, but the whole road system should be sold off (almost pay off the national debt?) and demand managed by road pricing. Objectors - if you don't wish to be tracked - you can pay ... say ... a fixed cost of £3k a year to retain your anonymity ... but remember to stop using a phone or drive past ANPR cameras or ....