Postscript - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 439

as suggested in the previous section, they will need to be pursued more intensively. An
enhanced version of 'business as usual', following the established policy trajectory and
progressively extending best practice to all areas, is therefore plausible.
No such future beckons with inter-urban travel. As we have already demonstrated,
business-as-usual scenarios which seek to accommodate prospective traffic demand
over the long term are extremely risky, expensive and environmentally harmful. They
also conflict with, rather than complement, the land use/transport strategies which
will have to be followed in urban areas if sustainable development is to be secured
overall. Even national road pricing, were it ever to materialise, would only diminish
and not remove the problem. If one accepts that nothing new can be done to change
inter-urban travel behaviour then indeed the various combinations of congestion,
pricing and road-building presented in the RAC Foundation Study (24.6) are logically
the only choices available. None of these are attractive propositions. Hence something
new needs to be done and, as we will go on to argue here, can be done.
Currently 60% of car traffic occurs outside urban areas and 47% on motorways and
A roads. As Stephen Potter pointed out from his analysis of NTS data in the 1990s
only 1 in 7 trips is longer than 10 miles (and therefore likely to include an inter-urban
component) but they account for nearly two-thirds of the overall distance travelled
(Potter 1995). The proportion of medium and longer distance trips is increasing over
time with trips in the 5-10 and 10-25 mile bands showing the greatest growth in
volume and also the highest car mode share.
Even if the fuel requirement and emissions problems associated with this category of
travel were magicked away tomorrow, the problem of how to accommodate the traffic
physically (and reconcile it with restraint policies within urban areas) would remain.
The remarkable feature about the dominance of the car for medium and longer
distance trips is that, even from an individual's perspective, it holds no clear advantages
(other than privacy and carriage of bulky goods) over equivalent legs by coach or
train for the main inter-urban part of the journey. In fact for car drivers it has the
pronounced disadvantage that time and energy has to be spent driving rather than
working, reading, relaxing or whatever. This 'truth' is reflected in the common practice
of people using cars as a feeder mode to rail, even in situations where there is no
prohibitive parking regime at the destination. However outside London, it is only on a
handful of rail corridors that average train speeds and frequencies are high enough to
attract people with the option of car use.
If incomes continue to rise, train services improve and inter-urban traffic congestion
worsens then, as has occurred over the last decade (and as DfT modelling indicates)
train use will rise, subject to capacity constraints. However even if the growth in inter-
urban rail use was double that projected it would barely dent the forecast increase in
road traffic.
The primary attraction of cars for medium and longer distance trips is the way
that a single vehicle combines the very different functions of urban access and egress
(requiring individualised routeing and slow speed) with the main inter-urban function
(common routeing and high speed). In doing so it cuts out the inconvenience,
uncertainty and time losses involved in interchange. Intriguingly this 'dual-mode'
function is something of a historical accident with motor vehicles originally being
developed to supersede horse-drawn ones on local roads. Their longer distance
potential was only realised over subsequent decades through technical development
and the building of purpose-built motorways etc.