Budget 2018

[mjr]

17. £30 billion to improve roads

A £28.8 billion National Roads Fund, paid for by road tax, includes £25.3 billion for the Strategic Road Network (motorways, trunk and A roads). The largest ever investment of this kind.

It will also help fund the new network of local roads (known as the Major Road Network), and larger local road projects.

Local authorities will receive £420 million to fix potholes on roads and renew bridges and tunnels, and there will be a £150 million to improve local traffic hotspots such as roundabouts.

…

Local high streets will benefit from £675 million to improve transport links, re-develop empty shops as homes and offices and restore and re-use old and historic properties.

My initial response: how the hell is the Major Road Network (which I think is A/B roads managed by councils) "local roads"? The pothole funding will have some uses, but that's damage mostly caused by motorists and neglect anyway. Probably that £30bn will only give cycling a few remedial schemes which will provide cycleways to avoid the motorists who are clogging things up.

There's some chance of some of the £675m to improve high street transport links might do something to help cycling, but local campaigns are probably going to need to be noisy and threaten objections to local council bids that don't allow high street cycling for that to happen.

In general, though, it looks like yet another missed opportunity - yet another budget with loads of money spent on things that reduce cycling and make things worse for cyclists and very few obvious ways that money might be spend on things that increase or improve cycling. The health/inactivity crisis will continue to grow and councils will keep failing to build their way out of congestion.

Please tell me I'm wrong!

[meic]

A £28.8 billion National Roads Fund, paid for by road tax, includes £25.3 billion for the Strategic Road Network (motorways, trunk and A roads). The largest ever investment of this kind.

The government themselves dont even know that that doesnt exist!

[mjr]

The government themselves dont even know that that doesnt exist!

*groan* I changed where I pasted the details from because the gov.uk summary page appeared and I didn't even spot that cluelessness-alert in there.

[LinusR]

No mention of cycling (or walking) in the speech... but it gets cheaper for drivers:

"…we will freeze fuel duties for the ninth successive year…

"…bringing the total saving to the average car driver to over £1,000…

"…and to the average van driver to over £2,500…" https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/budget-2018-philip-hammonds-speech

[Pete Owens]

Hardly surprising. This is the same Philip Hammond who was appointed transport secretary by Cameron in 2010 vowing to end the war on motorists. His "achievements" included ditching the previous governments casualty reduction targets, abolishing Cycling England, making it difficult to install speed cameras, restarting the road building programme (when everything else was being slashed in the name of austerity). He even attempted to ditch cycling from the DfT brief as he considered it trivial.

[pga]

Did I read correctly from a recent Cycling UK mailing that current spending on UK cycling was under £1 per head compared with £80 per head on roads? Alas, we have a government that seems completely oblivious to climate change and air pollution ignoring the latest reports from science and health leaders that we need to take immediate action.

[mjr]

Hardly surprising. This is the same Philip Hammond who was appointed transport secretary by Cameron in 2010 vowing to end the war on motorists. His "achievements" included ditching the previous governments casualty reduction targets, abolishing Cycling England, making it difficult to install speed cameras, restarting the road building programme (when everything else was being slashed in the name of austerity). He even attempted to ditch cycling from the DfT brief as he considered it trivial.

Yeah, I don't know why I hoped for better. He was rubbish on Top Gear too, deliberately crashing his bike on tram tracks!

[Richard Fairhurst]

I’d hoped against hope that they might fund the Gilligan Oxford/MK/Cambridge report’s recommendations. Of course they didn’t.

[atlas_shrugged]

Really really bad that so much money is to be spent on unsustainable transport. It is like watching a heroin addict spend all his money sticking needles into his arm. We are truly addicted to oil.

I can only find one MP (C. Lucas) mention the issue about sustainability and then only to do with energy, not transport:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2 ... esolutions

Sorry MPs I give you 0 out of 10 for this debate. You spend all your time pandering to supposed victim groups and nothing about action that will really help the people of this country in the future.

[Steady rider]

Cycling UK could published a 'Budget submission', detailing where benefits could be made for cycling. health and safety.

see https://www.bicyclenetwork.com.au/our-c ... bmissions/

[brooksby]

No mention of cycling (or walking) in the speech... but it gets cheaper for drivers:

"…we will freeze fuel duties for the ninth successive year…

"…bringing the total saving to the average car driver to over £1,000…

"…and to the average van driver to over £2,500…" https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/budget-2018-philip-hammonds-speech

I read somewhere that the fuel duty freeze has cost like £40bn so far, in money lost to the treasury; that's quite a subsidy for the motorists...

[MikeF]

A £28.8 billion National Roads Fund, paid for by road tax, includes £25.3 billion for the Strategic Road Network (motorways, trunk and A roads). The largest ever investment of this kind.

It will also help fund the new network of local roads (known as the Major Road Network), and larger local road projects.

Local authorities will receive £420 million to fix potholes on roads and renew bridges and tunnels, and there will be a £150 million to improve local traffic hotspots such as roundabouts.

Investment or expenditure? Presumably these new roads will soon be used by electric cars?

[mjr]

A £28.8 billion National Roads Fund, paid for by road tax, includes £25.3 billion for the Strategic Road Network (motorways, trunk and A roads). The largest ever investment of this kind.

Investment or expenditure? Presumably these new roads will soon be used by electric cars?

There's a whole method to figure out how many £ of benefit each £ spent on transport project returns and "DfT classifies any investment as having very high VfM if the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) is greater than 4.0, high VfM if the BCR is between 2.0 and 4.0 and medium VfM if the BCR is between 1.5 and 2.0" - has any road recently had a BCR below 1:1?

I wonder if the Ely Southern Bypass overspend pushed it over into costing more than it's worth? It was only "Medium" back when they thought it would cost £34m, so if that was a BCR of 1.5, the benefit would have been £51m... maybe that's why the cost now is claimed to be £49m? And BCR may have been at the low end because it's a pretty poor mile of single-carriageway road with terminal roundabouts that jammed up within 30 minutes of opening so not that big a benefit and costs include making the dodgy lumpy blind-junctioned mile-shorter-than-the-A10 rat-run through Queen Adelaide even busier now drivers won't have to deal with the station crossing/bridge and junctions.

This clearly isn't the whole story because the Cycle City Ambition Grants had an average BCR of 5.5, yet cycling had no investment from the budget.

[MikeF]

A £28.8 billion National Roads Fund, paid for by road tax, includes £25.3 billion for the Strategic Road Network (motorways, trunk and A roads). The largest ever investment of this kind.

Investment or expenditure? Presumably these new roads will soon be used by electric cars?

There's a whole method to figure out how many £ of benefit each £ spent on transport project returns and "DfT classifies any investment as having very high VfM if the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) is greater than 4.0, high VfM if the BCR is between 2.0 and 4.0 and medium VfM if the BCR is between 1.5 and 2.0" - has any road recently had a BCR below 1:1?

I've only quickly scanned this, but it seems to be based on predict and provide. Obviously we will have many more electric cars travelling many more miles by 2040 with this prediction as other methods of propulsion are being phased out by then. "The NTM forecasts that the impact of the RIS package is to increase traffic by 1.3bn vehicle kms in 2040 (around 0.19% across the SRN)" Also vehicles will have to reach the SRN to do this and be stored somewhere when they aren't moving.

[rmurphy195]

Did I read correctly from a recent Cycling UK mailing that current spending on UK cycling was under £1 per head compared with £80 per head on roads? Alas, we have a government that seems completely oblivious to climate change and air pollution ignoring the latest reports from science and health leaders that we need to take immediate action.

Don't we cycle on the roads then?