Times article on traffic congestion
Discussion
An article in today's Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2040880,00.html
This study clearly shows the waste to the economy (not to mention people's lives) of traffic congestion, yet this is ignored by the government. Instead, their solution to chronic congestion is to charge people more to drive. Perhaps we should take the same approach to NHS waiting lists? As far as this government is concerned, "Illness good, travelling bad".
Times said:
Jams today, jams tomorrow on most-congested highways
By Ben Webster
Study of traffic flow shows that drivers waste up to 26 minutes for every 10 miles travelled
The roads on which drivers experience the longest delays have been identified in the most comprehensive study of congestion to be published.
Motorists waste up to 26 minutes for every 10 miles they travel on England’s trunk-road network, according to figures from the Department for Transport, which compare actual journey times with those when traffic is flowing freely.
The worst traffic jams occur on the A556, south of Manchester, which is congested throughout the working day and becomes even busier at weekends.
The 50,000 drivers who use the four-mile stretch of road each day collectively waste half a million hours a year sitting in queues.
Yet the Highways Agency has no specific plan for relieving congestion on the road, which has been overlooked by the Government’s road-widening programme.
The A556 is followed in the congestion ranking by the A404 in Buckinghamshire, the M26 in Kent and the A453 in Nottinghamshire.
Thousands of sensors buried in roads were used to measure journey times on more than a hundred routes across the 4,800-mile network of motorways and trunk roads.
The Government set a target last year of “making journeys more reliable on the strategic road network” by April 2008.
But it avoided making a specific commitment to tackle the most congested roads and instead chose to focus on average journey time for the slowest 10 per cent of trips. In the 12 months to the end of July last year, the average delay across the whole network on the slowest 10 per cent of journeys was 3.5 minutes.
The Department for Transport admitted that the Government would be able to claim that it had beaten the target even if congestion worsened on the busiest roads. The Conservatives compared the congestion figures with the Government’s road improvement programme and found that eight out of the ten worst routes were still awaiting schemes that had been promised in 1997.
Chris Grayling, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said: “This is further evidence that despite its promises Labour has done nothing to relieve congestion on our roads.
“Traffic jams are getting longer and longer and people are having to spend more time travelling as a result.”
Across all roads, traffic rose by 11 per cent to 312 billion vehicle miles a year between 1997 and 2005.
In 2000 the Government pledged to reduce congestion by 6 per cent by 2010. But it abandoned this target in December 2002, saying that it had underestimated the growing demand for road transport.
Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, said that the congestion study underlined the need to press ahead with proposals to tackle congestion by charging tolls of up to £1.34 a mile on the busiest roads.
“Looking ahead we need to make tough choices. That is why I believe road pricing has an essential part to play. Make no mistake, simply building more roads cannot be the answer.” He said that tolls would be introduced in one area of Britain by 2011 to test whether the technology could be rolled out across the country. The AA Motoring Trust said that many queues could be avoided by giving drivers notice of congestion ahead and offering alternative routes.
The Highways Agency has a plan to install digital message boards across the network and link them to traffic control centres. But the AA said that this plan was three years behind schedule. A Highways Agency spokesman said that it was recruiting 1,000 traffic officers by the end of this year to keep traffic flowing by clearing roads more quickly after crashes.
This study clearly shows the waste to the economy (not to mention people's lives) of traffic congestion, yet this is ignored by the government. Instead, their solution to chronic congestion is to charge people more to drive. Perhaps we should take the same approach to NHS waiting lists? As far as this government is concerned, "Illness good, travelling bad".
Times said:
The 50,000 drivers who use the four-mile stretch of road each day
collectively waste half a million hours a year sitting in queues.
So at ten pounds an hour, that's 5 million quid a year wasted.
It seems that improving the road would pay for itself in a couple of
years.
Times said:
The Conservatives compared the congestion figures with the Governments road improvement programme
and found that eight out of the ten worst routes were still awaiting
schemes that had been promised in 1997.
Tchoh !
Times said:
Make no mistake, simply building more roads cannot be the answer.
WTF !
Building more roads most certainly IS the answer.
Getting the UK road network up to EU averages would be a step in
the right direction.
We certailnly need more roads - the tree huggers tell us to use other means of transport but the fact is that Rail/Plane/Bus use has risen as well, so we are all travelling more and public transport has benefitted from massive investment to cope. Its about time this shower got their act together and improved the daily grind for millions of heavily taxed motorists (rant over).
I must be a time traveller then - as my 10 mile trip to work takes 12 minutes - that's a saving of 14 minutes on what it should be taking.
I can understand it on the congested roads of London and the major roads into the capital, but Liverpool to Warrington at the time I leave is not a problem.
Still get the train to the capital though - even if it means 2 hours in a cramped & smelly compartment.
I can understand it on the congested roads of London and the major roads into the capital, but Liverpool to Warrington at the time I leave is not a problem.
Still get the train to the capital though - even if it means 2 hours in a cramped & smelly compartment.
I can pull out of the road near the large village where I live, and queue for 10 minutes because there is a T junction half a mile further down the road where everyone wants to turn right, but oncoming traffic makes that difficult.
Problem is, the road only leads to two places, and the road we queue on mainly comes from one other place, which is only 2 miles from where this "rat run" starts, and is served with a dual carriageway!
Basically, rat runs and dumb ass drivers are the problem. The same happens in Headingley. Every other driver storms down Victoria road from the Firkin pub, to join up with another road that leads back up to the original main road. Now, the light signals that take so long that they queue jump to get through quicker, are LONG because they have to cater for the amount of people coming from the minor side roads!
However, in my case above, a simple offset mini roundabout would do wonders, slow everyone down and keep traffic flowing!
Little things like left turns across oncoming traffic in rush hour are what cause most holdups on my run! Still a 15-20min commute and 12 miles ain't bad. However, on a night I can do it in 10 mins, so I still waste time commuting really.
Dave
Problem is, the road only leads to two places, and the road we queue on mainly comes from one other place, which is only 2 miles from where this "rat run" starts, and is served with a dual carriageway!
Basically, rat runs and dumb ass drivers are the problem. The same happens in Headingley. Every other driver storms down Victoria road from the Firkin pub, to join up with another road that leads back up to the original main road. Now, the light signals that take so long that they queue jump to get through quicker, are LONG because they have to cater for the amount of people coming from the minor side roads!
However, in my case above, a simple offset mini roundabout would do wonders, slow everyone down and keep traffic flowing!
Little things like left turns across oncoming traffic in rush hour are what cause most holdups on my run! Still a 15-20min commute and 12 miles ain't bad. However, on a night I can do it in 10 mins, so I still waste time commuting really.
Dave
Peter Ward said:
An article in today's Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2040880,00.html Times said:
Jams today, jams tomorrow on most-congested highways
By Ben Webster
Study of traffic flow shows that drivers waste up to 26 minutes for every 10 miles travelled
The roads on which drivers experience the longest delays have been identified in the most comprehensive study of congestion to be published.
Motorists waste up to 26 minutes for every 10 miles they travel on England’s trunk-road network, according to figures from the Department for Transport, which compare actual journey times with those when traffic is flowing freely.
The worst traffic jams occur on the A556, south of Manchester, which is congested throughout the working day and becomes even busier at weekends.
The 50,000 drivers who use the four-mile stretch of road each day collectively waste half a million hours a year sitting in queues.
Yet the Highways Agency has no specific plan for relieving congestion on the road, which has been overlooked by the Government’s road-widening programme.
The A556 is followed in the congestion ranking by the A404 in Buckinghamshire, the M26 in Kent and the A453 in Nottinghamshire.
Thousands of sensors buried in roads were used to measure journey times on more than a hundred routes across the 4,800-mile network of motorways and trunk roads.
The Government set a target last year of “making journeys more reliable on the strategic road network” by April 2008.
But it avoided making a specific commitment to tackle the most congested roads and instead chose to focus on average journey time for the slowest 10 per cent of trips. In the 12 months to the end of July last year, the average delay across the whole network on the slowest 10 per cent of journeys was 3.5 minutes.
The Department for Transport admitted that the Government would be able to claim that it had beaten the target even if congestion worsened on the busiest roads. The Conservatives compared the congestion figures with the Government’s road improvement programme and found that eight out of the ten worst routes were still awaiting schemes that had been promised in 1997.
Chris Grayling, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said: “This is further evidence that despite its promises Labour has done nothing to relieve congestion on our roads.
“Traffic jams are getting longer and longer and people are having to spend more time travelling as a result.”
Across all roads, traffic rose by 11 per cent to 312 billion vehicle miles a year between 1997 and 2005.
In 2000 the Government pledged to reduce congestion by 6 per cent by 2010. But it abandoned this target in December 2002, saying that it had underestimated the growing demand for road transport.
Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, said that the congestion study underlined the need to press ahead with proposals to tackle congestion by charging tolls of up to £1.34 a mile on the busiest roads.
“Looking ahead we need to make tough choices. That is why I believe road pricing has an essential part to play. Make no mistake, simply building more roads cannot be the answer.” He said that tolls would be introduced in one area of Britain by 2011 to test whether the technology could be rolled out across the country. The AA Motoring Trust said that many queues could be avoided by giving drivers notice of congestion ahead and offering alternative routes.
The Highways Agency has a plan to install digital message boards across the network and link them to traffic control centres. But the AA said that this plan was three years behind schedule. A Highways Agency spokesman said that it was recruiting 1,000 traffic officers by the end of this year to keep traffic flowing by clearing roads more quickly after crashes.
This study clearly shows the waste to the economy (not to mention people's lives) of traffic congestion, yet this is ignored by the government. Instead, their solution to chronic congestion is to charge people more to drive. Perhaps we should take the same approach to NHS waiting lists? As far as this government is concerned, "Illness good, travelling bad".
Peter, May I put forward a further argument.......
The "North" of this Island has been in decline for decades!........long before Thatcher.....and it continued to work it's way south ever since. As the "De-Industrialisation" progressed, the "commercial" pressures went south...aided by the switch from the Atlantic trade to the European trade. We have long since seen this comming....
Peter, until the South begins to "give back" jobs to the North, from which these were taken away during the Thatcher Era, then this Island is finished...
And so the future for the south is MORE concrete and smoke....
90% of our people live on our 10% of our so called "crowded" island, and "Rats in Traps" become Feral!....MMmmmh! That's just what I see our society becoming...
>> Edited by 8Pack on Thursday 16th February 04:11
A556 would benefit if the traffic lights were synchronised a bit more to allow a flow instead of stop start at the "posh" bit (Hale/Bowden/Dunham) per observation when we took kittens to some NT places (Tatton und Dunham)....
Und of course all those who live in Hale/Bowden/Altrincham areas - will be heading to Manchester to work - und tram ends in Altrincham --- und I hear bus und tram services into Manchester from this area are regularly cancelled from reading paper und from colleagues ...und the fares are not exactly budget price either...
Und of course all those who live in Hale/Bowden/Altrincham areas - will be heading to Manchester to work - und tram ends in Altrincham --- und I hear bus und tram services into Manchester from this area are regularly cancelled from reading paper und from colleagues ...und the fares are not exactly budget price either...
Peter Ward said:
An article in today's Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2040880,00.html
[quote=Times]Jams today, jams tomorrow on most-congested highways
...Yet the Highways Agency has no specific plan for relieving congestion on the road, which has been overlooked by the Government’s road-widening programme...
It's even worse than that.
They, in league with idiots in the council highways department, take steps to make congestion worse.
They add pedestrain islands where no pedestrian is seen from one month to the next (and where there is no path), they add pinch points, pedestrian lights on roundabouts, speed humps, fences leading up to roundabouts so you can't see ahead to filter in etc etc.
They truly are idiots.
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