There is nothing I hate more than traffic jams. Sure, better public transport would help. Major projects like High Speed Rail will make a big difference, yet will take time to come on line. And even longer to change the fact that the average person goes nearly 6,000 miles a year in a car, but just 1,000 miles by public transport (see table 11.4 here - little changed on the late 1990s as shown by table 10.6 here).
But it’s more than the tedium of sitting in traffic queues for an age while the kids scream in the back. It costs us money. Lots of money. £20 Billion a year according to the CBI. And there’s an environmental cost too. We are not talking about a carbon footprint here, it’s more like a giant carbon boot. An hour in a jam results in about 2.36 Kg of Carbon according to the AA. So traffic jams are an all round bad thing.
I write this as while stopping off on a trip recently I saw how things can be done better. The (clickable) picture shows road workers busy on a Sunday. A team was scraping off tarmac on one side of the road while on the other they were resurfacing. The whole operation was being done at incredible speed. Often we see one person do the work while one or two others look on. Not here – everyone was hard at it and very well organised. Which made me think how an incoming Conservative Government could do much to tackle traffic jams and congestion. Here are some ideas:
- Works on busy roads should be overnight or on days where road use is lightest. Motorway works should only be done overnight unless there is a very good reason not to;
- Rent a lane should be used as much as possible to encourage contractors to get a move on;
- It should only be possible for utility undertakers to dig up a road once a year in co-ordination with other undertakers except in real emergencies;
- Traffic lights should be phased to minimise jams and keep traffic moving; and
- The necessity for traffic lights that cause hold ups should be reviewed – anyone heading to Norwich by road lately will have noticed that the lights on the A11 through the Thetford Forest routinely cause long tailbacks polluting the forest . . . could a roundabout not make things go more quickly? There are lots of examples like this up and down the land.
We know that money will be tight for a Conservative Government. These ideas are not about big money – they are about how we can do more for less. And do more to protect our environment at the same time.
