It is hard to find anyone excited by the publication of Sir Rod Eddington’s long-awaited transport study. Even the amiable Australian’s most loyal admirers admitted that it lacked a certain fizz. On first reading, the government-commissioned report on the long-term needs of Britain’s overloaded transport network was more notable for what it rejected than the measures it recommended. Eddington particularly disappointed those who believed Britain should build a 190mph railway line from London to Scotland. “The evidence is very quiet on the scale of the resulting benefit,” he wrote, his diplomacy barely concealing his contempt for the idea.
Given that the £30bn line had been supported in the Labour manifesto, Tony Blair had cause to be grateful to the man he had recently knighted for rescuing him from a budget-breaking commitment. The former airline boss didn’t just dismiss big rail schemes. He argued strongly against the whole idea that extremely expensive “grand projects” were the solution. Even his kind words about Crossrail had to be wheedled out of him at the report’s launch by supporters of the project in the audience.
He dashed the hopes of dozens of civil engineering companies with the sentence: “Ambitions and dreams of extensive new networks – that will only ever make only marginal improvements to the domestic connectivity of the UK – should be put on hold.” Yet a closer reading of the 400 pages reveals a vision for our future mobility that is both bold and optimistic despite being couched in careful language. He says we have the basic transport system we need, but goes on to say we must use demand management and technology to get the most out of it. “The key strategic economic challenge is to improve the capacity and performance of the existing network.”
Immediate measures
These are the principles that are now guiding the government’s whole approach to transport. We should remember that Eddington had an elite team of ten Treasury and Department for Transport civil servants working with him.
While his endorsement of national road pricing captured the headlines, he also supports a variety of more immediate ways of squeezing extra from existing networks. He found traffic control measures, such as high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes for cars carrying at least two people, had a substantial effect on improving journey times. For example, on the busy A4714 Avon ring road, the proportion of cars carrying just the driver dropped from 80% to 69% in the peaks after an HOV lane was introduced. Journey times fell by 70% on the HOV lane and 40% on the rest of the road.
The Highways Agency needs to move quickly to introduce HOV lanes. The government believes they may help prevent widened motorways from quickly filling up with extra traffic, as has happened on the M25. The first major motorway HOV lane will open next year on a stretch of the M1 being widened to four lanes, between junction 7 near St Albans, Hertfordshire and junction 10. The Agency is also testing the use of the hard shoulder as an extra lane in peak periods on an 11-mile stretch of the M42 southeast of Birmingham.
Concerns about access for emergency services and the safety of stranded vehicles have proved groundless since the scheme began in September. Speed is limited to 50mph and strictly enforced when the hard shoulder is in use. Drivers who break down can use lay-bys positioned at 500-metre intervals. But while cheaper than motorway widening, “hard shoulder running” is still expensive because of the need to build gantries and install CCTV cameras and variable message signs to direct and monitor traffic. A study last year found it would cost £900m to introduce hard shoulder running on the M6 in the West Midlands, one of Britain’s most congested motorways.
Yet Eddington’s study concluded that the economic benefits in terms of reduced delays would still be double the costs. He also suggested that the technology costs were likely to fall. Ramp metering is another method of controlling congestion, which is steadily being introduced on major motorways. Traffic lights at junctions prevent vehicles from entering the motorway until there is a gap in the traffic, thereby avoiding the tailbacks caused by sudden braking. Trials on the M6 showed ramp metering increased the speed of vehicles by at least 14% and the total number of vehicles carried in a given period by 5%.
