To lay the blame for the quality of London’s air on passenger car drivers is a ponderous whopper of some magnitude. Every transport usage survey going tells us that car use in London has actually declined yet congestion and pollution has risen. These facts alone should tell us that something is gravely wrong and to conveniently blame the car isn’t just factually inaccurate it side-steps a much more serious issue - the politicisation of London’s roads. The capital’s road system didn’t become the snarling constipated and polluted ruin it is today without considerable help from politicians and legislators. What we’re now seeing (and breathing) are the unintended consequences of decades of deliberate anti-car policies Over the last 40 years schemes for new roads have been largely abandoned and any innovations in traffic management have been hopelessly timid and ineffectual.
One-way streets, road narrowing, curb build-outs, speed bumps and parking enforcements have made the problem worse not better. In order to actively discourage car use, driving in London has been designed to be as difficult as possible. And the results of the daily lines of stop-start traffic and the countless regular and repeated applications of the brake and accelerator is a massive increase in tailpipe emissions. Traffic in standstill jams generate 70% more NO2 and PM10s than vehicles that flow freely.
And yet a mischievous argument has been constructed that this is all the fault of car drivers. But UK motoring consumers have no other choice. The car, in all its forms, is the only successful solution to mass transportation we know. Public transport, cycling and walking simply aren’t the transport answers for the millions of daily journeys needed in London.
Figures from the European Commission show that bus and train use across Europe averages out at 9% and 7% respectively with passenger car use running between 80% and 90% across EU member states. To achieve the much-vaunted modal shift from cars to trains is totally unrealistic. If just 10% of the 34 million UK car drivers travelled by train we’d need 50% more rail capacity - and that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Why then have a generation of London’s politicos ignored these European trends and argued for a mythical public transport system that the majority can’t use and would be impossibly expensive to build? Looking back trough the decades of London’s road transport decisions its clear that the blame for the pollution and congestion we now see and breathe lies not with drivers but with successive groups of London politicians who have steadfastly and willfully refused to improve London’s roads.
Sir Peter Hall, a pioneer of regional transport planning said in the 70s: ‘As long as the dispersal of homes and jobs around London continues so will conventional public transport fight a losing battle against the flexibility of the private car.’ Prophetic words indeed.
Back in the 60s there were plans to build several inner London Ringways - radial road systems to run at motorway speeds - but in 1973 the Labour held GLC cancelled the project on grounds of its considerable cost. The 2.5 mile Westaway flyover into Paddington - still the country’s longest stretch of elevated road - is the only section that was actually built. Piecemeal improvements were made to the North and South Circular roads through the 70s and 80s but little was done to genuinely improve traffic flow along their many complicated junctions and, unsurprisingly, the North Circular now features in the toxicity lists of London’s most polluted roads.
Back then the GLC didn’t like cars and preferred instead to invest in public transport. Derek Turner (Red Derek) and Ken Livingstone (‘I hate cars’) buried the idea of free-flowing freeways through London and came up instead with their Fair Fares initiative reducing London bus fares by 30% and subsidising the London bus fleet. The GLC’s influence at this stage was pivotal and began the domination of the London bus that we see today. Instead of a strategic road network we have 8,000 buses - of which 9 out 10 are diesel - producing 16% of the Capital’s NO2 in the centre.
Another historic opportunity for improving traffic flow into London from the West and the M40 motorway was the widening of the A40 near Acton and Gypsy Corner. In the 90s the Highways Agency spent £73 million buying and then demolishing 200 houses and commercial properties for the proposed A40 widening. In 1997 when Labour came to power, John Prescott famously cancelled 100 new road building projects, one of which was the A40 widening plan.
Those vacant and demolished sites have now been sold to developers - at an average 26% loss - and the Westbound A40 has become one of the most congested and polluted roads in London with morning and evening traffic delays that can often run to 90 minutes. This is the main feeder road in and out of London from the west bringing 20 million journeys a year mainly from business traffic and was dubbed by the Evening Standardas one of ‘London’s Most Scandalous Roads’. Average speed cameras and a 40 mile speed limit have done little to improve traffic flows. Many Londoners consider the cancellation of the A40 widening initiative a squandered opportunity that has been enormously badly handled.
London’s historic Congestion Charge of 2003 initially worked well with a drop in traffic of 20%. The system was difficult to use and based on having to pay in advance, (not retrospectively as is now the case) and the use of clunky street machines both of which acted as a significant and sometimes terrifying deterrent to car use in the early years. The draconian fine-based model of the system effectively bankrolled the scheme administered then by Capita who levied high administration costs of over 40%. The charge has since risen from £5.00 to £10.00 but income has fallen.
Of the £2.6 billion raised since its introduction the actual figure of cash going back into London’s transport system after costs has been only £1.2 billion or just 5% of the total of TfL’s revenue. The scheme hasn’t been the money maker everybody thought it would be. Congestion has increased because TfL admits this is partly due to ‘road space allocation to improve conditions for pedestrians, cyclists, public transport and the urban realm’ (whatever that might be). In simpler words, road lanes were reduced and surrendered to buses and bikes, footpaths widened at intersections and road capacity significantly reduced causing some of the worst congestion in London’s history. Volumes of cars coming into London are now lower than they were in 2001 and the latest report ‘Travel in London’ says that passenger car journeys into the capital dropped by 13% between 2001 and 2011 yet traffic speeds in the centre are now slower than before the Congestion Charge was introduced.
This is simply because the continued removal of road space in the last five years to favor cyclists and buses has caused a dramatic increase in congestion to unsustainable levels. Its worth noting too that 90% of the net revenues earned from the charge have not been spent on road improvements. For all its early benefits the charge has made congestion no better than before its introduction in 2003 despite a substantial increase in price. These facts should concern us all.
TfL’s increase in Private Hire Vehicle licenses has had an effect on congestion too. There are now over 87,000 PHVs vehicles in London (this figure doesn’t include the 23,000 black cabs). Intended to support the new ‘disruptive’ Uber transport model and break the black cab monopoly TfL increased the number of PHVs from 49,000 in 2010 to 87,000 in 2017 with a total of 117,000 PHV driver licenses currently issued. 18,000 private hire vehicles enter London every day which many say is tipping the fragile road transport balance in the wrong direction. Uber drivers are reported to come from all over the UK - often as far away as Bradford and Manchester - and this continuous circle of PHVs looking for work has caused new peaks of congestion particularly in London’s core centre in the evening.
The number of traffic lights have increased too - up 5% across the capital since 2008 with a current total of 6,252. The University of Surrey’s study Atmospheric Environment found that the amount of nanoparticles from passenger tailpipes is increased by a factor of 29 when stopping and then accelerating away from traffic lights compared to free-flowing traffic emissions. When cities across the rest of Europe are looking to actively decrease the amounts of lights in use it seems perverse that London has increased them.
So next time you read some specious environmental nonsense about London’s traffic dreamed up by a green politician in a lukewarm bath - just look at the figures. Less passenger cars are coming into London yet the road system is at a virtual standstill and pollution is at record levels. Nobody mentions the NO2 and PM pollution from domestic and industrial combustion, the increase of light van journeys or the emissions from trains, buses, HGVs, shipping or ground-based machinery like diggers and generators. The passenger car is, and always has been, a convenient and easy scapegoat. And here’s the thing - if we don’t stop politicising London’s roads this great city will decline and businesses, commuters and residents will simply go somewhere else.
This is the unforgivable and enormously expensive consequence of years of playing politics with London’s transport system. It really is time to vote for someone else.
Quentin Willson
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