Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the accident rate (say, per vehicle mile) since, all other things being equal, more traffic
will imply more accidents? Should conditions be recorded at their face value or take
account of the secular trend (i.e. the combined effect of external factors) which will
be causing changes anyway? Again there is the temptation to choose the specification
likely to give the appearance of producing the greatest improvement in conditions.
With many issues difficulties arise in identifying indicators which accurately represent
their condition and for which it is practicable to generate the necessary information.
(Indicators are quantified measurements or some systematically organised form of
description and classification.) Road accidents are relatively straightforward and
comprehensive records are maintained by police authorities. At the other extreme issues
like personal security are very difficult to measure - there is no recognised methodology
and no generally available source of data. Adopting targets, or developing monitoring
procedures more generally, therefore runs the risk of focusing attention on issues which
are susceptible to quantification and/or on ones for which information is readily available.
Whatever aspect of an issue is chosen and however the target is specified there is
the conundrum that it will tend to skew expenditure and professional activity in that
field. If one of the purposes of targets is to focus effort on achieving particular outcomes
,inevitably aspects which are not the subject of targets will tend to suffer. This can
have unintended and sometimes rather perverse consequences. For example public
concern about road safety is not simply confined to actual accident reduction, but to
lowering the risk of accidents, and - even more important - lowering the perceived risk.
People campaigning for a particular road safety improvement will not welcome being
told that the accident record at the place concerned is not bad enough to justify the
expenditure involved. They are likely to interpret that as meaning they will have to
wait for somebody to be killed before anything is done!
Targets are likely to be most effective where they are closely linked to the problem
needing to be solved. Targets for reducing CO 2 or road casualties fall into this category,
but targets for, say, increasing public transport use do not. Such targets may 'miss the
point' if, for example, they succeed in increasing travel by public transport but do not
in fact reduce travel by car - and hence do not contribute to the end in view, i.e. to
reducing traffic congestion or CO 2 emissions. The Government adopted a similar line
of argument in rejecting the case for a national target for road traffic reduction (DETR
2000d).
Without sufficient analysis there is also the risk that the economic costs involved
in achieving a particular target may be more than the benefits derived. The balance
of costs and benefits can depend on local circumstances. Hence if targets are to be
set, they need to take account of these local variations. This reasoning underpinned
CfIT's approach to national traffic reduction in which they maintained that it should
be built up from local and regional assessments rather than applied 'top-down' (CfIT
1999). Finally the Government has commented that with issues which are not solely
transport-related it is more efficient to set targets across all policy sectors and not
specifically for transport. This leaves open its ability to choose between options which
in aggregate offer the most cost-effective course of action. This was - and continues
to be - the reason given for the Government's carbon emission targets being specified
across the range of relevant policy sectors and not for transport alone. In practice these
arguments have to be set against the political and management difficulties of trying to
function successfully in a particular field such as transport without targets.
The growing use of targets within a 'performance management' culture has been
one of the distinctive features of governance over the last ten years. It has been strongly
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