Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
are the political attractions of being able to deliver improvements in traffic conditions
on strategic roads more swiftly and more widely than would otherwise be the case. The
initiative also appears to be an opportunistic coup in getting the Government out of a
hole it had dug for itself on national road user charging (discussed in the next section).
However the strategic implications or even the long-term rationale for this quite
dramatic change do not appear (yet) to have been investigated. The RAC Foundation
has voiced concerns that the decision to extend hard-shoulder running was taken on
the basis of just six months' data - a very short period for such a safety-critical issue
(LTT 481). It considered that ATM had a role to play in the short/medium term but
could not be regarded as a substitute for a properly planned and funded widening
programme. Conversely the Campaign for Better Transport (formerly Transport 2000)
thought motorway widening schemes should now be dropped whilst Friends of the Earth
regarded hard-shoulder running as motorway widening by stealth and considered the
Government should be trialling reduced speed limits without widening in some places.
Once more the future of the strategic road network and its relationship, if any, with
national road pricing appears to be up in the air and the policy context set as recently
as 2004 has already evaporated. A more strategic reconsideration is desperately needed
and hopefully will form a central feature of the White Paper which has been promised
during 2008 (since published - see 2008c).
23.3 National road user charging
The Government's 2004 White Paper was notable in bringing the possibility of national
road pricing explicitly into the official policy prospectus. It highlighted the 'strategic
choice' between continually deteriorating standards of service on the road network
and some form of road pricing policy. The expectation was that this would involve
distance-based charging utilising global positioning satellite technology which would
become standard equipment in cars over the subsequent decade (LTT 426).
As noted previously (15.4) the case had long been made in academic and professional
circles for revising the basis on which motorists are charged for road use so that this
better reflected environmental and social costs (through congestion etc.). This would
enable large-scale benefits to be achieved through more efficient utilisation of the
available roadspace.
These arguments were confirmed by further technical work undertaken by DfT
as part of the Eddington Study. This indicated that a national scheme could deliver
benefits totalling £25bn by 2025, although these would be offset by the costs of the
scheme which were as yet unknown. Eddington commented:
Given the scale of the congestion challenge I believe that there is no attractive
alternative to road pricing; without a widespread scheme by 2015 the UK will
require very significantly more infrastructure …
Importantly, given the pace of economic change, pricing also offers
considerable flexibility once in place. With pricing it becomes possible to respond
to unanticipated change through changing prices much sooner - and a much
lower cost - than bringing forward new infrastructure.
(Eddington 2006a paras 1.114 and 1.111)
Closer inspection of the details of such a scheme however reveals some of the
difficulties which would arise in gaining public acceptability. Two-thirds of journeys
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search