26 November 2004
The drive to alleviate motorway congestion is advancing as slowly as a car on the M25 in the rush hour, government auditors said this week.
According to the National Audit Office, the Highways Agency has been too timid about introducing anti-congestion measures that are widely used in Europe.
The NAO's November 26 report found that innovations such as dedicated lanes for heavy goods vehicles and ramp metering – where traffic lights control the number of vehicles joining a motorway – are used only to a very limited extent in England.
Auditors also criticised the failure to use the hard shoulder to increase road capacity. The agency feared that a hard shoulder running scheme could block access to accident sites.
Public Accounts Committee chair Edward Leigh criticised the agency's 'timid and irresolute' attitude. 'The agency is rightly concerned about the safety of road users; but research abroad has not found any reduction in safety following the introduction of measures such as hard shoulder running,' he said.
The agency is now testing the procedure, but there was concern that testing of other initiatives had been poorly managed and confined to a very small number of sites.
Motorists were also found to be unhappy with the quality of on-road information they receive. Many want updates on congestion levels before they join a motorway, but only a limited number of trunk roads are served by such messages.
'The Highways Agency's own thinking needs to start flowing freely,' Leigh said. 'It must adopt a more pragmatic and visionary approach to new technologies, so that the best of them can start to be used to tackle traffic jam misery.'
PFnov2004
