Transport minister Lord Macdonald denies he is doing a U-turn on cars and road building. He is. The government is now saying there will be no reduction in the volume of vehicles using the roads until 2010 - because the economy is growing so fast. But stating "we can't stop the growth in traffic" (Lord Macdonald yesterday) is to abandon John Prescott's core policy of cutting car use.
Demand management on the roads has been the order of the day since 1991, when a seminal report from Oxford University's transport study unit showed road-building was not able to keep up with demand. Policy was producing a nonsensical situation. Roads were getting steadily more congested despite millions being spent on enlarging them. The Tories accepted the logic of the analysis and greatly scaled down their roads programme. Till then, policy had been to build in step with the predictions in the government's national road traffic forecasts (predict and provide, as it is known). The Tories concluded, not unreasonably, that if supply cannot meet the demand, then the demand must be reduced to fit the supply.
Labour continued the new policy with a different political emphasis: it envisaged switching money from road building and allocating it to improving public transport, slowing the increase in the demand for road transport.
It ought to be possible to start a virtuous circle. By making cars less attractive and buses and trains slightly more attractive, a small shift to public transport can be achieved. This would marginally reduce congestion, thus speeding up public transport and generating a further transfer from cars.
Unfortunately for Labour, the standard mechanisms to reduce demand are all very unpopular. Fuel pricing, road charging, restricting road space with bus lanes, speed bumps, parking charges - all smack of the nasty medicine that will do you good. Improvements to public transport, such as new buses and priority schemes, involve considerable public spending.
Neither extra spending nor nasty medicine are particularly New Labour in flavour. So far the government has avoided setting overall targets for traffic reduction, supposedly while it waited for regional targets. Parking and congestion charges have now been sidelined, shunted off to local authorities, together with any blame, and there will be a long delay before any of them can be implemented.
Excuses for the change in tack are both interesting and curiously misleading. For some years a link has been noted between traffic growth and the economy. Roughly speaking, when the economy booms, traffic goes up; when it goes into recession, traffic goes down. This coupling was clear up to and during the 80s. Recently, the department for environment, transport and the regions has been arguing that there are signs of de-coupling. Traffic has now been growing at a steady 2% since 1994-95, despite an economy that has gone up and down several times. Despite the boom since 1997, there does not seem to be a corresponding traffic increase. To say one inevitably follows the other (Lord Macdonald's line) so nothing can be done sounds lame. Should the Blair boom falter before 2010, the government's current justifications will look a very poor excuse if traffic growth continues.
This historic coupling of economic and traffic growth may not hold because recent booms have been caused by growth in services and mobile phones rather than man ufactured goods needing transportation. Traffic growth is driven by the rise in the inefficiency of the transport system, requiring ever-greater movements to shift the same value of goods.
The claim that increasing numbers of train passengers show policies are working may be misleading. Perhaps the unexpected increase in rail travellers, over and above what had been predicted, may simply come from motorists squeezed off the roads by increasing congestion.
Either way, the result will put paid to transport's contribution to reducing the UK's overall production of greenhouse gas, pledged at Kyoto. Although transport is only third on the list of culprits (behind power stations and domestic heating) it is still a major emitter of carbon dioxide. With road and rail traffic rising and no marked shift to more efficient modes of transport, a slightly reduced increase in emissions registers as a gain - but one that may easily be lost in increased congestion.
The emphasis on new bypasses and relief roads in the government's thinking may not be a return to the old days of predict and provide but its plans for years to come are suspiciously vague. The chart shows the spending plans of the Highways Agency, which does most non-local road work, and how it divided its spending this year. After demand had been controlled, building small bypasses might make sense. It alleviates bottlenecks and removes through traffic from small towns, improving their quality of life. Building roads without seeking to cut demand makes no sense at all: roads simply get more congested.
Sadly, the one announcement that appeared to be a great leap forward - John Prescott's 10 year commitment - was probably just an excuse in disguise. Transport planners have long said they wanted long-term solutions but that politicians would never think beyond the next five-year term. The Prescott plan has a lot to do with making the budget look impressive and disguising the fact that not much is happening. Andrew Probert is at the Judge Institute at Cambridge University
