Over on the City Hall blog, our good friend Roger Evans, GLAM for Havering & Redbridge reports with some glee that the Western extension of the Congestion Charge has been scrapped.In my personal capacity I pointed out that Congestion IS in itself a charge on Business and asked what he and the Mayor propose to do about it.
A reply from “lucia” and Roger himself merely point to traffic management failures with “lucia” bemoaning “left-wing nannydom”.
I thought my reply to that deserved a wider airing so here it almost is!
I am no fan of “nannydom”, Lucia, from whatever wing it emerges! But neither am I a fan of anarchy.
I don’t know Leytonstone too well as a motorist, but I do know that there is a section of the M11 link road that can be seen from the Central Line and that almost as soon as it was opened the northbound carriageway became a car park in the evening rush hour.
True, some of the highways “improvements” round Barkingside leave me questioning my understanding of the English language. However, it is beyond doubt that traffic volumes have increased considerably since 1990 and that this must be a factor in the congestion that has arisen.
As I said, this is a Charge on Business and a drain on our Economy, not to mention the environment issues of unnecessary fuel consumption, air quality etc. and human issues of stress related illnesses and wasted time.
The question was how to deal with it, and pointing fingers at mistakes is not very helpful. What are the lessons of those mistakes?
I am now going to quote the former Conservative Deputy Leader of Redbridge Council [see previous post] on parking: “The principle that underpins the justification for controlling parking by charging is that of rationing space where the demand exceeds the supply.”
It is only a short step to apply this rationale to road time/space itself. However, I agree that all reasonable measures should be sought to improve traffic flow before it is considered. Some of these may not be immediately apparent [to some], for example “Living Streets” already implemented in places like Kensington with some success.
Some traffic [this applies to all types of traffic including telephone traffic] is randomly generated but it is mostly governed by our social structures. We simply cannot expect large numbers of people to drive at the same time and in the same place without causing congestion. I’ve not done this for quite a while but driving on the M6 through Birmingham on a weekday late afternoon [c. 4pm] used to take 3 hours, but at 10pm would take 10 minutes. Telephone engineers have the advantage of being able to stuff millions of telephone calls down one optical fibre, by stacking them one above the other, but that would be rather difficult with cars and roads.
BT is considered to be an expensive telecommunications provider, but that is because BT engineers its network for peak demand. So most of the time it’s assets are lying idle. Other companies may offer cheaper calls but you may not be able to get through when you want to. These companies make their assets sweat. This is the philosophy of the market. Now that telecommunications networks are no longer hard wired they can also manage traffic by switching to a different underused route [a rat run?] or block traffic before it even starts out [usually used for phone ins].
Unfortunately this does not appear to be a philosophy that can be applied to hard social infrastructure like highways unless we are prepared to pay for it, one way or another!
