Will Lane Rental solve roadworks?
I was talking to a regional bus company MD recently and they told me that their roadworks log typically stacks up 1,000 entries every year.
Roadworks are bad for drivers but terrible for buses. Where as car users blame ‘the traffic’, bus users blame ‘the buses’. As a result, roadworks cause traffic jams that can result in bus users becoming car users, even though both vehicles get caught in the same jam.
So doing something about roadworks feels like a good idea.
Why do we have so many roadworks?
Laypeople tend to lump them all together as roadworks (and for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to just use the phrase roadworks), but the main problem is actually what is known as ‘streetworks’ (i.e. utilities digging up the streets). Roadworks officially means works to the road itself.
The fundamental reason we have so many roadworks is that there is very little incentive on the utilities not to dig up the road.
The utility privatisations of the late 80s and early 90s were sweetened by making it as easy as possible for the newly created firms to access their infrastructure. The New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 only requires utilities to make ‘best endeavours’ to minimise inconvenience. Without clear rules or commercial incentives, utilities dig up the same stretches of road over and over again.
Lane Rental
Various solutions to this problem have been put forward, but the one I like is Lane Rental.
As with my enthusiasms for competition in the long-distance sector and national road pricing, I like solutions that create incentives as opposed to fixed rules.
If the incentives are powerful enough, people will figure out the solutions.
Lane Rental is a great incentive: it puts a price on the inconvenience utilities cause by digging up the road, thus incentivising them to find solutions.
And - theoretically - Lane Rental is just around the corner (though, unfortunately, the corner’s been dug up - so it may take us several years to get there…)
Limits to Lane Rental
However, while Lane Rental is - in theory - the answer, there are significant limitations in the way it is proposed.
Last month, the Government published its guidance on schemes it will approve.
The Government says that no more than 5% of a local authority’s road network should be covered, with the pricing calibrated to busy times. This is unfortunate. The explicit goal is to get utilities to undertake works at quieter times and on quieter roads, not to invest in technologies to minimise the need to dig up roads at all.
In Japan, technologies such as pipe jacking are universal. Here they’re not. But they won’t become universal if there’s no incentive to invest in them.
Moreover, the focus on the busy times ignores the fact that roadworks make a quiet time into a busy time.
A two-lane road turned into a single track road with temporary traffic lights will still cause a jam, even if it is 3pm on a Tuesday. And the delays at 3pm will knock straight into the evening peak, even if the works are gone at 5pm. Unlike cars, buses run to a timetable.
Indeed, the Lane Rental guidance is symbolic of the fact the DfT hasn’t quite absorbed the message of its own bus strategy. The National Bus Strategy calls for road space to be diverted to buses. The strong sense you get, reading the bus strategy, is that buses are meant to be the new kings of the road. But reading the Lane Rental guidance, one word that is missing throughout is the word ‘bus’. (Literally. In 24 pages of guidance, buses don’t make an appearance).
But far worse than the absence of an explicit mention of buses is the definition of congestion to be used. The Government insists that any local authority introducing lane rental MUST use the following definition of congestion to select the 5% of roads to which the scheme applies:
The total delay per link/road segment comparing average journey times with a free flow time counterfactual.
This is appalling. The Government - despite the goals of the bus strategy - is persisting in using its traditional measure of congestion; which is the speed of vehicles moving.
A bus (with 70 people on board) is treated in exactly the same way as a car (with 1 person on board).
If the Government is going to limit local authorities to 5% of their road networks, they must prioritise the roads that MOVE THE MOST PEOPLE. That means bus routes. But, no, the 5% to be prioritised will be roads with the biggest delays to cars.
Not only is the Government not instructing local authorities to prioritise buses; they have prohibited them from doing so.
The same problem applies to bikes; also the subject of another Government strategy. The Government is funding Quietways, which are dedicated cycle routes - often through Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. The standard - car based - definition does not work here either.
Conclusion
It is, obviously, a good thing that Lane Rental is coming. It’s been piloted in Kent and London, and appears to have helped.
But, as anyone who’s been on a bus in London recently knows, it’s certainly not a panacea.
The scheme needs to apply on more roads and for longer. The incentive needs to be to reduce roadworks, not simply move them about. The Government needs to remember that giving local authorities powers is pointless if the local authorities don’t have the officer resource to use them (as per this week’s post on bus improvement plans). And the Government needs to stop micro-managing - especially when that micromanagement is explicitly to prioritise cars at the expense of buses.
Lane Rental won’t solve everything. There are other solutions required. Incredibly, we’re still in the position where local authority budgets are awarded on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis, which means local authorities will often dig up a road in March in order to ‘start’ a project and avoid losing funding - and then leave the cones in place while they work out exactly what the project is meant to do.
So, overall, it’s great to see solutions being offered but expect improvements to roadworks to be stuck in traffic for a little longer.
