To think our roads are no longer fit for purpose because they are too busy?

[Itisnoteasybeingdifferent]

Yestday we took a trip from Essex to Hampshire to collect some goods we have ordered. According to the route planners it should have been three hours each way.

Leaving before six the traffic was slow all the way. There was an accident on the M1 causing huge tailbacks onto the M25. Thousands of people were late for work causing millions of pounds of lost work. Goods will have been delivered late causing expenses. There was a monbile crane on it's way to a building site. That job would be halted and people unable to work agqin huge costs for someone. Later the advice signs were informing of 90 minute delays between J7&J6. That was increasing to 120 minutes and more. The journey took over four hours each way. I averaged 40 mph. The journey was motorway and dual carraige way for almost all the way. I should have averaged over just under 60.

That is a 30% reduction in efficiency and output for anyone who was stuck in the traffic. This is a huge economic drain and loss of ability to work. I was pretty tired at the end of the day.

We need a huge invetment in transport.

People are way too dependent on their cars these days. I despair tbh. I don't get my car out that often and walk 40 mins to work each day (inc school run) because I'm too lazy to deal with traffic.

poor people can use the bus

all those car jobs lost could be replaced with bus related jobs

araiwa,
Busses are not an option here. All the housing estates have only one access road so a bus cannot drive through picking up passengers. Likewise the industrial estates are all dead ends so again busses can't service them. On top of that most people work in another town or commute to London after driving to the railway station because bus services are inadequate for completing the journey.

I heard an interesting segment on R4 a couple of weeks back, a researcher was saying that they've worked out that roads, once expanded to accommodate greater capacity, quickly revert to their previously congested state.

In other words, people will use the roads/drive up to the point of congestion in all cases.

This guy was from a group with a green bent, so possibly a bit of bias, but it was a perspective I hadn't considered before.

Make every able bodied adult walk 100000 steps a week to before they can use the car the next week.
We would still all have cars but behaviour would change to stop short hops in the car.

Or make all roads double story!

Your premise is wrong though OP.

It is not the roads which are too bust, it is the concentrated times the vast majority of people use them. If all the users were evenly spread out each 24hr period, then there wouldn't be much/if any issue. You were the traffic you complain of yesterday.

I deliberately commute out of hours and I sail along roads which an hour or two later/earlier will be often gridlocked. Yes I am fortunate to have a job where I am not stuck to rigid shifts, but I made it that way over incremental changes over the years because I realised the benefits it brought me.

Before I moved, I even used to get up an hour earlier that sparrow o'clock to go to a 24hr gym before work. So that would be deserted, the roads would be fine and I'd have done a workout, and a morning's work by the time most people were having a cuppa!

It's only going to get worse. My city is dreadfully congested, it only takes one minor accident on the motorway at rush hour, taking out one lane, to bring the city to it's knees. Add in bad weather and it's even worse. Lots of the traffic is school run, over protective parents not letting teens walk to school. Mine all walk, one used to walk 2.5 miles - 45 minutes each way, even in the rain. He was fine!

Are our roads really that congested by international standards?

The solution would be cheap or free bus (paid via tax of cars). and train travel and limit everyone to one car one house. This will never happen. Only the very rich would be able to afford a car and what about classic cars. If buses were cheaper id certainly use them more but at £4.90 return to town its silly. Car parking is £2 for 3 hours. I walk to the village or use the car.

I though this was stating the obvious, but nobody's said it yet: buy your goods from a local supplier, not one bloody miles away.

As with most things, depends where you are. I'm in rural Scotland and the roads are pretty empty most of the time! Drove 35 mins to the large district hospital the other week, leaving home at 8.15am, and probably came across about 20 other vehicles or so, until I got to the hospital itself. It's great to have empty roads, but that also comes with having few shops and other amenities ...

Often..show me where i can within walking distance. Id love to get things locately. We have a superdrug who is now reducing their stock of toilet rolls etc so now i cant even get those bits. The banks are closing and i dont do internet banking.

Where I live all the main roads are 60 or 70 mph - traffic's unheard off outside school rushes

Rach - agree that walking distance is expecting too much, but surely there's somewhere closer than a 6-hour round trip (which the OP says was an underestimate anyway)?

In my big village i have a very limited and expensive tiny marks and spencer, Superdrug and lots of charity shops and closing banks. I cant afford to do a shop at marks and even if i did its very limited so no choice. Had no chicken the other day!!. Good for sos milk. I shop at ldll which is a drive to the town.

I definitely think if train services were better and cheaper, more people would use public transport. I'm down in the South East where we have bloody Southern rail and you just can't rely on it. There are whole towns, like Seaford, which went months without any trains over the winter, because of the strikes and the incompetence of the rail company.

DH has a 1hr drive to work and it's not busy at all because it's all back roads, unfortunately the roads are still not fit for purpose because there are so many potholes, it makes it so dangerous because you have to go wide round corners and if someone else is speeding in the other direction you're doomed. DH witnessed a horrible crash on his way home last year and now we live in constant fear that one day daddy just won't make it home

He could get the train but they're so unreliable, would add another 15 mins or more to the journey, and a season ticket would be several thousand a year so it's not worth it.

Fair enough, Rach, but your drive to Lidl isn't 3 hours each way?

Empathise with anyone struggling with poor local amenities, but expecting the govt to waste money on road-building just because you insist on shopping halfway across the country is ridiculous. And as PP have said, research shows that traffic expands to fill the road space available.

But why did you drive to pick the goods up? If they'd been sent by a courier or mail then one lorry would have transported multiple goods between hubs which is more efficient. That's using resources more effectively.

My suburb has a half decent bus service that will take you to the city centre only. Trying to connect to any other part of the city will take at least an hour. Therefore in order to do something like food shopping two miles away the choice is drive 10 minutes each way or catch two buses taking an hour each way. Walking is not an option as it's along a 60mph road with no footpath. For localised journeys, public transport links are poor.

25 years ago my parents could do a 100+ mile journey to the home counties in 1h 35 to 1hr 45 often at a continual 80mph (plenty of stopping distance) depending on the the traffic. Today it's a minimum of 2hrs nose to tail at 60-65mph when not caught up in lengthy road widening works.

There's plenty of road layouts near me that were sufficient to a lower volume of traffic, but have become more dangerous with higher volumes of traffic meaning quick dashes out in small gaps and rapid acceleration to join the flow of traffic.

Would also prefer to see any investment being made in public transport rather than on roads. In my experience it's been either - there isn't any, as in where I live now, or there is, but it's much more expensive than driving and paying to park - eg last place I lived, a bus went past my house to the town 10 miles away. Great, I thought, but it was £6.50 return fare! Cheaper to drive and pay for car park, even for just one person. This was about 7-8 years ago so can't imagine what it costs now.

In our borough, the forecast is that the roads will become so heavily congested over the next ten years that home working will have to be an option for most people, supported by legislation.

There are three main issues. 1) the increasing population, 2) the difficulty in reopening old branch railway stations and lines closed by Beeching, and 3) the fact that many of our towns and cities are built on, at best, a road infrastructure that dates from the Victorian period.

What we really need in Britain is a national infrastructure review and scheme of inward investment. We've problems with water supply, sewage capacity, power grid capacity, and flooding, to name a few. Basically, the population has been allowed to expand without adequate consideration as to facilities and amenities.

This is generally because we have a political culture that is very narrow-minded and that perceives government as being about "schools and hospitals" alone, a perspective that is a legacy of the Blair years.

Excessive focus on schools and hospitals may go back to Blair, but start of general decline of government interest/investment in basic public infrastructure was under Thatcher in 1980s. Too little, too late ever since.

no, people wouldn't just be unemployed if you couldn't commute by car, but people wouldn't buy houses in places that werent' serviced (or couldn't be serviced) by public transport. Houses have been built in many parts of the country based on the assumption that people will go places by car.

People don't move to live near jobs anymore (or rather, people look for jobs further than their own local area now), so many people say "I couldn't get to work without my car" what they often mean is "I couldn't live in this house and work in that location without a car."

The distances we assume we should be able to do daily are huge compared the past.

I'm in the NW (near the Lakes but outside the National Park), having lived almost all my life in the SE. It's blissfully quiet on the roads here by comparison. A couple of main tourist routes get busy in the holidays, but apart from that it's great. I really hate the traffic when we visit family down south now. The everyday in town traffic makes the M6 seem like a doddle.

Legislation to facilitate working at home where possible could make a huge difference. I do as much from home as possible. Less commuting time, less fuel and parking costs, less pollution etc.
Obviously a lot of jobs do need to be done from a particular location but if roads were clearer and parking less in demand that would benefit them too.