Transport secretary Douglas Alexander has set out congestion targets for England’s 10 largest urban areas and an over-arching national target to limit the increase in average journey time over the next five years to 3.7%.
Outside the capital, the 2010 target rises to 5.2%.
The set of targets agreed with local authorities are two-pronged – relating expected travel growth on key routes to the extra time per mile a person might experience on an average journey in the morning peak. They show wide variations on both fronts between conurbations (see table below), and in the number and mix of routes, and even the time period covered by their indicators.
The overall growth in travel predicted on the 155 routes – ‘a representative set of the busiest roads’– is 4.5%. Transport ministers will meet their public service agreement target if average journey times per mile rise by 3.7% or less.
Only Greater Manchester is predicting no increase in travel delay, but its baseline for average journey times is the highest – at 4.63 minutes per person mile. At the other extreme, car and bus occupants in Greater Bristol currently enjoy a relatively quick trip time of just under 3.5 minutes per mile but will endure a 14% increase – double the 7% growth in travel – on nine key routes.
The sharpest travel growth is predicted for Tyne & Wear, at just over 12%, but passenger transport executive Nexus believes the rise in time taken can be limited to 7%. Alexander highlighted how three areas – London, Greater Manchester and West Midlands – accounted for two-thirds of the composite target set for the Department for Transport.
He also stressed that ‘major scheme bids, including for the West Midlands urban traffic management and control project’ were currently being considered.
The capital is given a surprisingly heavy 41% weighting. Transport for London expects travel to grow by 3%, with a journey time penalty of half that, at 1.5%. Strip out London, and the overall benchmark for the nine changes to a travel growth figure of 5.5% and an increase in journey time of 5.2%.
The DfT’s technical note states: ‘Different areas will start from different bases and will be faced with different growth scenarios over the local transport plan period’. Thus, the department and the Treasury were not expecting all areas to achieve the same rate of change.
Allowing for the uncertainties, it states that if travel growth diverges from the expected by more than 25%, local authorities would be able to set new targets.