Thursday 14 July 2016

Loopy

I attended a briefing this week about a planned "improvement" to a motorway junction and for me, it's a microcosm of how we simply cannot wean ourselves off predict and provide.

It doesn't matter too much where the scheme is proposed, but it essentially adds a single lane wide, grade separated loop road to an existing junction between a motorway and a trunk road to replace a turning movement on the junction's roundabout which is always stuffed at peak times. 

The road would be around 750m to 1000m in length (as best I can recall) and would have a budget of about £60m; or £96m to £128m per mile (ball park figures you understand). There are all sorts of costs involved including bridges, acquiring land, moving utilities and so on, but already it has a larger budget than the new CS3 in Central London which is about £2.6m per mile. Yes, I am repeating myself again as I am always going on about investment choices.

The issue here, though, is this; there was a time before this motorway existed (I remember it being built) and presumably the world turned. We built the motorway which took long-distance traffic out of the towns by the motorway which might be a good thing, but we didn't capitalise and change the towns to make them pointless to drive through. People quickly saw the motorway as a way to access to new markets further away and so got rid of their vans and bought lorries to transport more stuff, further away.

Some people saw the motorway and realised they could work further away from home and so they did (although two-thirds of trips are under 5 miles). Fast forward 20 years and the motorway is creaking under the amount of people using it, and the junctions are now approaching capacity. The junctions get extra few lanes bunged into them with wider slip roads which works for a bit, but it's not enough, so an extra lane gets added and things are lovely again. 

We then have to sort out a major river crossing and so we spend a bit of time tinkering with that to get traffic flowing and it sort of works, but not as well as the politicians have promised. Oh, and that lane we added, it attracts an 10% growth in traffic in a year. Rinse and repeat.

I asked about what happens then they sort the junction out and it spills the traffic up the back the next queue along the trunk road (which is stop-start for miles; has been for 20 years) and the answer was that another team were working on "improvements" (adding lanes in reality). There was talk about planning for growth, I said perhaps it was more like building to a policy, noting of course that this was a bigger and political picture. 

I kept my questioning professional and the presenters answered the questions well. I am sure one of them almost regretted using the phrase "induced demand" in an answer to me; I'm convinced there was a glimmer of realisation there somewhere. The people we met were working to the Government's £15bn road building plans and the scheme is a politician's "quick win" (in road building terms). I did make the point that the project budget was about 25 years of transport funding for my local area which raised a chuckle; although I was being serious.

My involvement here is utterly peripheral and to that extent I am not going to be in a position to influence anything; the scheme is a done deal as far as I am concerned and consultation is the tick box exercise you'd expect. As we can see all over the UK, consultation for modest schemes, even a simple filtering of residential street seems to be a pitched battle every time. Building big roads and adding to big roads seems to be a piece of piss by comparison.

It's been a funny sort of journey for me as an engineer, but never did I think that 21 years after graduating would I end up being an anti-road building highway engineer. Yes, there is still plenty of cognitive dissonance going on as I still have a car. To be honest, motorways and trunk roads are not my bag and I find no interest in them professionally. They are useful for long-distrance travel (for personal travel because trains and buses are variously expensive and crap), but my focus has to be urban areas. 

At the end of the day, we are generally not in a position to add motor traffic capacity in our urban places and we must focus on moving people. For me, that's where the future and the excitement for engineers lies. Am I loopy? Possibly, but no more than deciding to spend £60m on a single motorway junction; and certainly no more loopy than the bunch of people running our basket-case country. 

8 comments:

  1. No you are not loopy! And we have exactly the same scenarios happening here in Australia. Please keep going! I appreciate your ability to add the financial context to the issues of transport planning.

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  2. I find it somewhat loopy that you measure distances in metres, and in miles. Yes I'm Canadian and still sometimes say how much I weigh in pounds rather than kilograms but I try very hard not to.

    Wish me a happy 16th tomorrow. I wish you a happy, whatever age you are, be happy with it too. I hope that I pass my practical road test (as if there are things called impractical road tests).

    I suggest that we have a more decentralized nation. Well, as much as you can convince an Irishman, Scot and Welshman to be part of a nation with the English. Lots of small cities, but companies hire locally first, not British citizens I mean, but people who actually live in the town. Motorways are useful I guess, but they need to be well planned out and managed. Make the cycle network far more effective, the public transport system comfortable and fast with something like 250-350 km/h on the mainlines and 160-200 on other routes and we have a far more effective transport network where people have genuine choice.

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  3. Has the motorway scheme been justified on a dreaded cost benefit analysis? So a minute of reduced delay is equated to a benefit to the economy, then multiply this by a large number to get a large benefit? Of course, if it is neither here not there if someone is delayed by a minute then a million times nothing is still nothing.

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  4. Why not beat traditional road engineers at their own game? Reallocating street space to non private motorised modes adds enormous people-carrying capacity to transport corridors in urbanised areas, see Table 8 of Botma and Papendrecht here- http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/trr/1991/1320/1320-009.pdf
    9,000 people/hr in a 2.5 metre wide cycle path is over 4x more than the adjacent motor vehicle lane.

    Anybody can add car lanes with an unearnt multi-million dollar budget but as the saying goes, engineering is doing for a dime what anybody can do for a dollar.

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  5. Why not beat traditional road engineers at their own game? Reallocating street space to non private motorised modes adds enormous people-carrying capacity to transport corridors in urbanised areas, see Table 8 of Botma and Papendrecht here- http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/trr/1991/1320/1320-009.pdf
    9,000 people/hr in a 2.5 metre wide cycle path is over 4x more than the adjacent motor vehicle lane.

    Anybody can add car lanes with an unearnt multi-million dollar budget but as the saying goes, engineering is doing for a dime what anybody can do for a dollar.

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  6. You're not loopy at all.

    I didn't think I would end up opposing the dominance of everything by the car when I started using a bike as everyday transport 40 years ago. I didn't think I would end up questioning "road safety" ideology when I was knocked down 35 years ago.

    But I started reading a lot, then working in transport planning, and gradually became more critical of the kind of thing you describe.

    Keep up the good work,

    Dr Robert Davis, Chair, Road Danger Reduction Forum

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  7. I was in Cambridge yesterday in the crowds of people fighting for pavement space to avoid the cars. This is a city with huge cycling and walking nned, yet the space is still dominated by the cars, (not least because the central shopping arcade has a large car park, so roads have to stay open to allow access.) Yet the big money is going on widening the A14 further north so lorries (it should be trains) can get to the north from Felixtowe a few minutes faster.
    Please keep up the good work.
    Adam

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  8. Well, its all relative... Yes, you are loopy---welcome to the club. But `predict and provide' for such a resource hungry (and import dependent) mode is certifiably insane. Reviving motoring schemes which were cancelled twenty years ago on environmental grounds, having quietly kept them tucked away on a shelf and periodically updated [at considerable expense] instead of destroying the plans when they were comprehensively rejected---now that is pure insurrection! You see, your `industry' can do this when it wants to. It's just that it never wants to when it comes to cycling infrastructure :-(.

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