Friday 23rd July 2004

New Traffic Management Bill

More rules and regulations to speed things up

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The Traffic Management Bill, which will create new measures to tackle congestion caused by incidents on motorways and badly managed work by utility companies and local authorities, became law today.

The Act is designed to help local authorities and the Highways Agency manage roads more effectively and speed up traffic flow.

A new duty will be placed on every local traffic authority to keep traffic moving on their roads, and to work with their neighbours for the benefit of the road network as a whole. In London, Transport for London will have stronger powers to manage strategic roads.

Work is already underway to implement further measures next year. These include granting local authorities the rights to run permit schemes. Those wishing to carry out works in the street would be required to apply for a permit before doing the works, and would have to comply with stricter conditions (such as how much road space works could take up, and if there were times at which works must not take place). There would be fines for those who did not comply with the conditions.

The new Act would also allow the introduction of further powers:

Where a long succession of works by utilities has left roads in an unacceptable condition, utilities could be made to contribute towards resurfacing large sections of affected roads.

Utility companies that consistently failed to reinstate the road properly after their works could be made to fund a larger number of inspections of their works than those whose works are done to an acceptable standard.

 The Government will issue guidance to local traffic authorities on exercising the network management duty. Public consultation on a draft of that guidance is already underway. A copy of the consultation document can be found here .

[350matt]

Blimey!
On the face of it this looks like a good move - for once, of course I await the usual jaded comments....
Matt

[thirsty]

If this is true.. it's great day for motorists in the UK. It always amazed me that six months after a road was completely resurfaced, some utility company would come along and tear it up to lay in some new pipe, cable or something. I could never figure out why they didn't plan far enough ahead to do it before the road work was accomplished?

On a typical drive from Surrey to anyplace around the London area, it's not uncommon to go through several areas of road works. Just think of all that fuel being burned up by motorist sitting in idle traffic. Maybe it's a secret plot by the government to collect more tax from petrol.

How many times has it taken an hour to get through a traffic snarl, and then when you finally get through, you see that it's only two guys from the gas company digging a two foot hole with a jack hammer?