The 1990s paradigm shift - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 107

An element of the national roads programme which generated its own debate was
the role played by 'bypasses'. (There were about 700 miles of such schemes.) The
Department of Transport funded a series of projects designed to demonstrate how
new traffic-calming measures could be used to improve conditions on former main
roads once they were relieved of through traffic (DTp 1995a) . Such action was needed
in order that the environmental benefits claimed for bypass schemes were actually
achieved and not lost to a general increase in traffic.
Although laudable in intent there was the suspicion that this initiative was
being used as a public relations exercise for the roads programme as a whole (Potter
1993). Calls by local authorities to have responsibility for less important trunk roads
transferred to them (so that they could be integrated better with local planning
generally) were refused by the Conservative Government in its 1996 Green Paper
(DTp 1996b) although accepted only two years later by New Labour.
Worsening public finances at the beginning of the 1990s forced the Government
to forgo the increases in spending on national roads it had intended. But this did
not necessarily represent any fundamental change in policy. It could be presented
as simply deferring schemes and extending the programme over a longer timescale
than originally planned, as had been done on similar occasions in the past. The real
change began to be apparent when proposed schemes were dropped altogether. In
1993-94 these included the East London River Crossing, the M62 relief road west
and north of Manchester and the M1-M62 link in West Yorkshire. In 1995 the M25's
proposed parallel link roads were abandoned. The 1994 Trunk Roads Review scrapped
49 schemes altogether and a 1995 review reduced the size of the 1994 programme by
a further two-thirds.
More significant than the deletion of schemes which never got beyond the stage
of paper plans was the changing rhetoric used by the Government in support of
the 1994 and 1995 Reviews. In 1994 the reduced programme was claimed to be
'less wasteful … and … compatible with the principles of sustainable development'
whilst the 1995 Review asserted that 'the emphasis now … must not be on building
more roads, but on making better use of the ones we already have' (DTp 1995d
Foreword).
7.3 The new realism
In 1988 - before publication of the revised NRTF and Roads for Prosperity - the trustees
of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund (which sponsors transport research) came to the view
that it was time to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of the direction of transport
policy:
[We] were mindful that no overall view of the place of Transport in Society had
taken place since 1963 when Colin Buchanan produced his treatise entitled
'Traffic in Towns'. This clearly recognized the future problems that the unrestricted
growth of personal travel would cause. Today, some three decades later, despite
action that has been taken massively to increase the supply of road space and
other transport capacity, and great advances in the field of traffic management,
society faces many major problems in meeting its seemingly insatiable demand for
passenger travel and the movement of goods …. A new and wide-ranging report
on the subject was clearly timely.
(M Milne Foreword to Goodwin et al. 1991)