Build them and they will come is a newly formed cliché that applies even more to roads than it does to baseball "parks". At least, that is the line that they take at the Campaign for Better Transport.
The CBT has just put out a new report, 'The Strategic Road Network needs Strategic Policy Appraisal', by the always interesting Phil Goodwin, Professor of Transport Policy in the Centre for Transport and Society, at the University of the West of England.
www.bettertransport.org.uk/system/files/Strategic-roads-planning-Phil-Goodwin-July09.pdf
Commenting on the publication, the CBT's roads and climate campaigner, Richard George, said: "No matter how wide we make our motorways, they'll keep filling up, so we have to start giving people alternatives to driving if we don't want the country to grind to a halt."
The study's main message appears to be that, in the CBT's words, "our transport planners appear to act as though traffic disappears once it turns off the motorway".
www.bettertransport.org.uk/system/files/Strategic-Roads-Planning-Briefing-July09.pdf
As Professor Goodwin puts it, "in all forecasts and appraisals, all traffic which is using the 'long-distance' roads is included indiscriminately, even if it is just making short hops on the motorway as part of a mainly urban journey."
The CBT offers some thoughts on how to break what you could call trunk-route fixation. They are, though, so broad-brush that it is hard to pin them down to things that don't require a blitz-type, or Olympic Games, redevelopment of an area. Governments are rubbish at devising and implementing grand plans of this sort.
Take the idea that we should set about "improving land-use planning so that essential services are near where people live and work, eliminating the need for long journeys on already busy roads". And how about "increasing support for advanced telecommunications systems, to help people work from home, shop online, meet via video-conferencing and improve the way councils manage transport systems."
Professor Goodwin sticks to roads when he suggests a "more genuinely strategic" approach that would "treat motorways and trunk roads not as a separate network, but as part of an integrated transport system which includes alternative methods of transport between the cities, and alternative local and regional policies within and around the cities". While he mentions public transport once or twice, the word "train" does not even feature in his report.
These are eminently sensible ideas, but governments find it hard enough to sort out trivial road issues, let alone plans to get public transport, planning and telecommunications to work together. To use a local example, here in the middle of Sussex, for more than a decade we have been waiting for a long-promised improvement to the A23 from London to Brighton, and are in the middle of a second, maybe third, round of expensive consultation.
Persuading transport ministers to work with those responsible for telecoms policy makes much sense and is what was once called "joined-up government" before the phrase became a meaningless and discredited slogan.
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