No more roads in Wales

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IvanV
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No more roads in Wales

Post by IvanV » Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:24 pm

Major road building had already been put on hold in Wales, in mid-21, for a review, on environmental grounds. And apparently (BBC news) the review has now confirmed that decision.
The Welsh government said all future roads must pass strict criteria which means they must not increase carbon emissions, they must not increase the number of cars on the road, they must not lead to higher speeds and higher emissions and they must not negatively impact the environment.
There is practically no road you can build which will ever satisfy those criteria, except in quite unusual and curious conditions - I'm sure someone can devise an example if they try hard enough. But rarely. If you have 0 roads and propose to build 1 road, it will fail to satisfy those criteria. If you have 1 road and propose build a second road, it will fail to satisfy those criteria. And, to all intents and purposes, all the way from there to the present road network. Is 0 roads the right number of roads in Wales?

So, what about the latest roads that was built in Wales? Like the Heads of the Valleys road? By those criteria, it shouldn't have been built. Should it now be dug up, because it was inconsistent with these road-building criteria? And when they have dug those up, perhaps they should carry on until they have none left. Because practically every single road they have ever built fails to satisfy those criteria.

This is no basis for deciding whether you should build roads or not. It is, rather, a statement that translates to "no roads ever anywhere". It appears to justify a policy, but in fact makes no sense at all. The only purpose of building roads is to allow traffic to go along them. But they have adopted a statement that denies a road the only purpose it should have.

Wales is for the most part a region of relatively uncongested roads, and low population growth. So it can impose a long term freeze on road building at relatively little economic cost. Wales rejected every feasible plan to deal with much its worst road bottleneck - the M4 past Newport. So, if that was their decision in that case, perhaps it is not so hard to decide to reject everything else too. And maybe you can find some way of justifying that, in a way that doesn't suggest that much of the existing network should be dug up. But not with a statement that translates to "no roads ever anywhere."

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by dyqik » Tue Feb 14, 2023 4:44 pm

It's pretty trivial to come up with new roads that do meet the criteria. If it reduces the emissions required to travel a popular route, but maintains the current throttling of use of that route, then it meets the criteria. For example, a bypass that avoids a steep hill or uses a tunnel to avoid a winding climb, or which replaces several traffic light controlled junctions with flyovers and slip roads (thereby avoiding acceleration and braking), but where the route usage is still throttled by a road before or after the section it bypasses.

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by IvanV » Tue Feb 14, 2023 5:25 pm

dyqik wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 4:44 pm
It's pretty trivial to come up with new roads that do meet the criteria. If it reduces the emissions required to travel a popular route, but maintains the current throttling of use of that route, then it meets the criteria. For example, a bypass that avoids a steep hill or uses a tunnel to avoid a winding climb, or which replaces several traffic light controlled junctions with flyovers and slip roads (thereby avoiding acceleration and braking), but where the route usage is still throttled by a road before or after the section it bypasses.
Clearly you can build replacement roads that take just as long to travel as existing roads. Or any other improvement that doesn't deliver a travel time saving.

You describe improving a road between bottlenecks, without relieving the bottlenecks. I suspect that may not always quite work, because bottlenecks are usually only bottlenecks for part of the day, especially in most of Wales where peak hours are relatively short, and where certain bottlenecks are mainly associated with seasonal tourist season.

National Highways, which is responsible for trunk roads in England, recently made a number of junction "improvements" which turned out to extend travel times. The waiting times from waiting at the new traffic lights was longer than the journey time savings from better capacity utilisation at the junction. Probably there are similar things you can do.

Probably some road improvement on an outer island in the Shetland Islands, where hardly anyone goes unless they have to, would be OK.

As I said, you can come up with roads that meet the criteria. But it would rarely be a road someone would actually propose to build.

There are some roads that it probably would have been better to build somewhere else on environmental grounds. You could build a replacement, close the original, and deliver no travel time saving that would attract additional traffic. (I can think of about 2 places where a road was dug up or abandoned after a replacement was built - not counting road straightening, etc.) The trouble is, it would never pass spending criteria to do that. Environmental benefits rarely add up to anything like the cost of building a road, at the unit valuation rates in the UK appraisal guidelines.

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Gfamily » Tue Feb 14, 2023 5:38 pm

Wales is being quite pro-active on trying to reduce harm from road traffic, with speed limits reduced to 50mph on dual carriageways that pass close to urban areas.
Also, further west, in areas that are generally less built up, they are applying 20mph limits on A and B roads where they pass through towns (and not just by the schools).
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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Herainestold » Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:41 pm

Seems like a good plan. Will other jurisdictions follow?
I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures like restrictions on vehicle ownership and driving licences.
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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Gfamily » Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:49 pm

Herainestold wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:41 pm
Seems like a good plan. Will other jurisdictions follow?
I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures like restrictions on vehicle ownership and driving licences.
Given that we live in a democracy, the wrong thing to happen would be for restrictions to be arbitrarily applied, so does this mean you
- would like to see these measures applied ?
- think they will be applied as if we weren't a democracy ?
- don't really think about the rights and wrongs of it?
- regret that we live in a democracy?
My avatar was a scientific result that was later found to be 'mistaken' - I rarely claim to be 100% correct
ETA 5/8/20: I've been advised that the result was correct, it was the initial interpretation that needed to be withdrawn
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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by IvanV » Wed Feb 15, 2023 9:57 am

Gfamily wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 5:38 pm
Wales is being quite pro-active on trying to reduce harm from road traffic, with speed limits reduced to 50mph on dual carriageways that pass close to urban areas.
Also, further west, in areas that are generally less built up, they are applying 20mph limits on A and B roads where they pass through towns (and not just by the schools).
And reducing harm from road traffic is a worthy cause.

But let's have a clear articulation of it that recognises the trade-offs that are inherent in all such infrastructure. Failing to acknowledge those trade-offs, you tend to end up doing some foolish things.

I suspect that the long-term error has been failing to understand quite how large the harms from traffic are, so failing to incorporate that into the project appraisals. If Wales wishes to apply particular high costs to various traffic harms, and that would be a logically sensible thing to do, then why not do that explicitly? Though of course if they then applied that consistently to other areas of policy, like steelworks, then might find that inconvenient.

If you read further down the BBC article, it is clear that not all road schemes in Wales are cancelled, some will still go ahead. It is not clear how they meet the criteria set out, and I rather suspect they don't.

There has been a dismal history across Britain of asserting that various road schemes wouldn't generate traffic, when of course they would, I suspect largely to pacify the people opposed to them. Or maybe what happens is that the business case forecasts no traffic growth because it didn't need to - it satisfied a value-for-money test with no traffic growth, and would only satisfy it even better with some growth. And that gets conveniently misconstructed as a positive forecasts of no traffic growth.

Maybe that's kind of business-as-usual will go on. Actually this road scheme would be sensible, and of course it won't generate traffic, we don't promote road schemes that generate traffic. But that kind of non-transparent decision-making doesn't lend itself to good decision-making, but rather to murky political games and preservation of vested interests.

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Herainestold » Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:47 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:49 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:41 pm
Seems like a good plan. Will other jurisdictions follow?
I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures like restrictions on vehicle ownership and driving licences.
Given that we live in a democracy, the wrong thing to happen would be for restrictions to be arbitrarily applied, so does this mean you
- would like to see these measures applied ?
- think they will be applied as if we weren't a democracy ?
- don't really think about the rights and wrongs of it?
- regret that we live in a democracy?
A Climate Emergency requires emergency measures. A moratorium on new roads is good place to start.
It should be a goal to discourage private vehicle use, without restricting citizens rights to travel. Money saved on road projects should be spent
on railroads and buses and zero emission transport of all types.
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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by nekomatic » Fri Feb 17, 2023 12:16 am

I’m just catching up on Private Eye from the beginning of January - which is the last one of the gift subscription we got for Christmas before last and which I’m not renewing because I don’t get round to reading them - and there’s a piece on the forecasting methods used by the DfT to assess the business case for new roads - I assume in England if such decisions in Wales are devolved - which alleges that some of the assumptions involved are transparently wrong e.g. that both fuel and electricity will get steadily cheaper for decades to come, and the effect of this is to massively overstate the benefit of road building. So it’s not necessarily as if the Welsh assembly has waded in and mucked about with a previously sane and rational system.
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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Gfamily » Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:11 am

Herainestold wrote:
Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:47 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:49 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:41 pm
Seems like a good plan. Will other jurisdictions follow?
I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures like restrictions on vehicle ownership and driving licences.
Given that we live in a democracy, the wrong thing to happen would be for restrictions to be arbitrarily applied, so does this mean you
- would like to see these measures applied ?
- think they will be applied as if we weren't a democracy ?
- don't really think about the rights and wrongs of it?
- regret that we live in a democracy?
It should be a goal to discourage private vehicle use,
Yebbut - are you proposing to restrict ownership and licence to drive vehicles?
Is that how you would execute that 'goal' - or are you some sort of wimpy kid who says "we need to do this"!, without the will to do the nasties required to make it happen?
My avatar was a scientific result that was later found to be 'mistaken' - I rarely claim to be 100% correct
ETA 5/8/20: I've been advised that the result was correct, it was the initial interpretation that needed to be withdrawn
Meta? I'd say so!

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Herainestold » Sat Feb 18, 2023 5:10 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:11 am
Herainestold wrote:
Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:47 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:49 pm

Given that we live in a democracy, the wrong thing to happen would be for restrictions to be arbitrarily applied, so does this mean you
- would like to see these measures applied ?
- think they will be applied as if we weren't a democracy ?
- don't really think about the rights and wrongs of it?
- regret that we live in a democracy?
It should be a goal to discourage private vehicle use,
Yebbut - are you proposing to restrict ownership and licence to drive vehicles?
Is that how you would execute that 'goal' - or are you some sort of wimpy kid who says "we need to do this"!, without the will to do the nasties required to make it happen?
I would be okay with it, but I realize it might be politically difficult.
You cannot restrict citizens rights to travel, but you affect the mode of transportation. There is no right to own and operate private vehicles.

If road projects were strictly evaluated as to their environmental consequences, especially carbon emissions, it would force governments and people to put more emphasis on public transportation. I really think stopping new road construction is a good start. We have to do more.
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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by EACLucifer » Sat Feb 18, 2023 5:13 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:11 am
Herainestold wrote:
Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:47 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:49 pm

Given that we live in a democracy, the wrong thing to happen would be for restrictions to be arbitrarily applied, so does this mean you
- would like to see these measures applied ?
- think they will be applied as if we weren't a democracy ?
- don't really think about the rights and wrongs of it?
- regret that we live in a democracy?
It should be a goal to discourage private vehicle use,
Yebbut - are you proposing to restrict ownership and licence to drive vehicles?
Is that how you would execute that 'goal' - or are you some sort of wimpy kid who says "we need to do this"!, without the will to do the nasties required to make it happen?
He likes to bootlick for authoritarian nations, so he's probably salivating at the idea of doing the nasties required to make it happen. And of course the impact on people with limited mobility is something he doesn't care about, just like he doesn't care about Beijing's genocide in the Dzungarian Basin.

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by IvanV » Mon Feb 20, 2023 12:59 pm

In Singapore, there are a limited number of vehicle licences available, and they are auctioned. Or at least that used to be the case in the past. And there is road pricing designed to limit the level of traffic. Petrol is also a lot more heavily taxed than in neighbouring states, to the extent that if you drive across the causeway to/from Malaysia you are required to have a relatively empty tank on entering (<1/4) and a relatively full tank on leaving (>3/4), or be taxed on the difference, to avoid petrol tax arbitrage. Or at least that has been the case in the past.

Singapore isn't a perfect democracy, but I think people recognise these are relatively sensible measures to manage a small city state. And being a small city state, there is public transport everywhere, or you can ride a bicycle to where there is from outlying kampungs. But there is high inequality in Singapore, higher than Britain. So to some considerable degree car-ownership is priced out of the range of quite a large sector of society. Though perhaps you can say the same of Britain. But probably most people would consider that you are economically better off being a working class person from Singapore than from most or even all other countries in that region.

Clearly Singaporean policies do not make sense somewhere with the geography of Wales. Nor is it reasonable to expect public transport to provide much service to the many remote scattered small villages of Wales. Or Yorkshire for that matter.

In theory transport investment decisions do take into account environmental effects. The DfT's Transport analysis guidance (that was a surprise, it was called Transport appraisal guidance until recently) includes methods for quantifying the environmental and other detriments of transport schemes. And the TAG data bookTAG data book puts unit costs on many of those environmental detriments. Though there are some detriments, like damage to landscape and culture, which it mentions and is unable to offer a method of quantification, and/or is unable to offer a unit cost.

One big issue is to really to what extent the unit costs given to these detriments, like gaseous and chemical pollution, noise pollution, etc, are sufficient. Another issue is the detriments not valued. One large detriment I feel isn't even mentioned, except perhaps indirectly. And that is that of the things I feel is that traffic itself is a kind of pollution, even before the other detriments like noise and gaseous pollution are mentioned. The mere fact of traffic travelling near you is a kind of pollution that impacts on you, even if it were clean, silent, and avoided accidents. The indirect measure of some of that is transport severance. But it is unusual to see any kind of attempt to quantify and value severance, except where it is clearly a major issue, like a big road going through the middle of something, or an explicit scheme to reduce severance. Another concept that is sometime recognised within this idea is street hostility, but I don't think there is any view of how to quantify and value that yet.

So environmental costs are explicitly and routinely taken into account in assessing transport schemes. But probably the environmental costs are substantially underestimated by those methods.

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Re: No more roads in Wales

Post by Herainestold » Mon Feb 20, 2023 1:49 pm

Some good thoughts here.
Traffic as a form of pollution in and of itself, and traffic severance.
So environmental costs are explicitly and routinely taken into account in assessing transport schemes. But probably the environmental costs are substantially underestimated by those methods.

Do you think a working class person in Singapore is better off than a working class person in Wales?
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