Turnpikes for Britain again?

This evening I attended one of the Fellows Lectures at the Institution of Civil Engineers in Westminster – the topic Fifty Years of Motorways in Britain. The lecture was given by Professor David Bayliss. We both worked at the GLC in its dying days – he in transport planning and I in land use planning. He went on to London Transport to develop, among other projects, the Docklands light railway.

His main thesis was that although Britain led the world in road building in the eighteenth century, with our turnpike roads, we have not kept up. His contention was that on any calibration: roads per person; per income; per area; or, per vehicle travelled we were either at or near the bottom of the developed nations. This position was the same for railway development and transport infrastructure generally. He said that at current rates of development if we carry on as we are our transport system would seize up.

In the case of roads, his proposal was for an upgrading of the strategic road network using funding from a road-user charging programme. The mechanism would be to use a national road corporation with the responsibility for the supply and maintenance of a high quality road network.

The remarkable feature for me was that his solution was the same as the position held by the ETA since the early 1990s. The one big – no vital – difference being that he would see a massive road building programme whereas we would recommend the same tools to emphasise demand management.

The interesting aspect is that transport professionals are slowly coming over to the ETA’s position in how transport issues should be tackled. Together with the transport professionals we can begin to persuade the politicians and the public for the need to change and the method to do it. And the debate between environmentalists and transport professionals can be more on the emphasis we give to the environment in the road-user charge itself.