Motorways’ value questioned in Britain

Press, 12 October 1976, Page 20

Motorways’ value questioned in Britain

By

LAURENCE MARKS

in London

‘"Motorway madness” is a catchphrase for the irrational urge to speed that seizes some motorists on fog-bound or ice-bound roads, causing multiple pile-ups in the winter months. Recently, Britain’s environmentalists have adopted the phrase to describe what they regard as an equally irrational urge: the transport planners’ dedication to road construction. It has become the slogan of the vociferous anti-motorway rebellion that is causing angry scenes at local planning inquiries. The emotionalism of the label, the sense of panic it connotes, is a response to the physical destruction created in a densely populated island by the 2000-mile network of strategic roads built in the last 15 years. Every mile of open countryside invaded by the highway engineers is begrudged. Urban motorways linked by “spaghetti-junctions” have

carved a swathe through the centre of many of the larger industrial cities, banishing the pedestrian to a bewildering maze of underpasses. Only London has resisted the trend. Three years ago, public opposition compelled the regional government, the Greater London Council, to abandon an inner ring-road that would have laid waste several graceful Victorian neighbourhoods. Outside the capital, the motorway programme continues. The Department of Transport’s objective is to expand the strategic road network to 4500 miles by the end of the 1980 s. This is based on traffic forecasts that 45 per cent of the population will own cars by the end of the century. The leader of the motorway rebels is Mr John Tyme, a diffident, slightlybuilt college lecturer from Sheffield with the lean, intense look of a Protestant martyr. He travels the coun-

try, advising groups of objectors on tactics at local planning inquiries into road construction projects. These are . üblic hearings at which an inspector, sometimes on the staff of the department, sometimes a practising barrister, hears arguments from the road planners on one side and from the objectors on the other before making a recommendation to the Minister of Transport. Since it is the Minister’s officials who have planned the proposed road, and since the Minister is free to ignore the recommendation anyway, the procedure does not inspire confidence in many objectors. It is now being reviewed by a council set up to study administrative tribunals.

However, the procedure does force the planners to explain their decisL.i-mak-ing publicly, and the publicity has sometimes enabled objectors to defeat a particu-

lar road proposal or to have the road removed to a less damaging route.

The weakness of the procedure is that, until recently, it allowed objectors to challenge only the route of a road, not the need for it — for this would mean extending what is a local inquiry to the basic assumptions of national transport policy. Mr Tyme’s advice to objectors is that they should insist on the right to do just this, turning up in sufficient force to disrupt the proceedings if their claim is denied.

At Aire Valley in Yorkshire, a local inquiry had to be abandoned indefinitely after 14 days of uproar. At Wincjiester, a county town of unassailable decorum, conservative to its Roman foundations, the headmaster of one of the country’s most fashionable boarding-schools was escorted out of an inquiry by police. Mr Tyme’s tactics have begun to pay off. Inspectors have taken to hearing the general arguments about transport pol-

icy, and Mr Tyme has become the hero of the motorway rebels.

Their argument goes like this:

National transport policy is formulated by civil servants, not politicians who lack the technical knowledge to form independent judgments about it. So Parliament exercises no real control.

The civil servants rely heavily on information and ideas fed to them by a network of well-financed organisations representing car manufacturers, road haulage operators, the construction industry and the oil corporations, who need more and more roadspace to maintain growth, as well as motoring lobbyists like the Automobile Association and the Royal Automobile Club.

This information, coming from a commercial lobby, is biased, so the civil servants become convinced that more and wider roads are inevitable. Most of those in the Department of Transport are employed to administer roads, so there is an occupational bias in favour of building them.

Once the civil servants have accepted the principle of investing public money in roads, the logic of building or widening any particular section of the network is inescapable, because the growing system is generating ever more traffic, and alternative means of transport like railways and canals as well as more economic uses of road space like bus services, are not being developed.

The rebels argue that the department’s traffic forecasts are based on the assumption that Government policy will continue to favour road transport as it has done in the past, thereby begging the question of what that policy ought to be. The forecasts may be self-fulfilling, predicting a need for roads which are built and which traffic then expands to fill.

Professor Colin Buchanan, a distinguished planner whose report “Traffic in Towns” in the early 1960 s led to the development of the urban motorway in Britain, is credited with the aphorism: “If you dig a hole in the sand, it will fill with

water; if you build a road, it will fill with trafife.”

The rebels also point out that an encyclopaedic discussion document on transport policy published by the Department earlier this year failed to establish any evidence to support the road lobby’s basic tenet: that the strategic network is vital to industry and trade. "Lorries.” states the document “are and will remain a relatively small percentage of total traffic, and their contribution to the case for justifying new roads is correspondingly modest. .

Cost-benefit analysis has shown in Britain the benefits of new roads are: the saving of accidents (20 per cent), and the saving of time (80 per cent). But the saving of accidents is only real if the roads reduce accidents overall, not merely accidents per vehicle mile. In reality, thev increase the volume of traffic, increasing the total of accidents.

So the principal justification for the network is the saving of time, very largely for traffic other than lorries. Of the 80 per cent, 29 per cent is non-working time. So the environmental damage is being created in order to save time for private motorists, many of them on leisure journeys. Stated like that, the 'motorway programme contributes a good deal less to national economic survival than the road lobby tends to claim.

The rebels argue that objectors cannot afford the research data that would encourage the civil servants to listen to' them on these and other arguments, and they cannot match the presuasive power of industry at a time when the Government’s biggest headache is how to encour ? growth in manufacturing industry. So they must use local inquiries to challenge the decisionmaking process. In essence, the motorway rebellion goes beyond the question of public investment in various means of transport to a more fundamental current British concern: the power of large corporations (trade union as well as industrial) to influence Government policy out of reach of the elected representatives. — 0.F.N.5., Copyright.