Written evidence submitted by Cycling UK (SRI0051)

 

About Cycling UK

 

  1. Cycling UK was founded in 1878 and has over 70,000 members. Cycling UK’s central mission is to make cycling a safe, accessible, enjoyable and ‘normal’ activity for people of all ages and abilities. Our interests cover cycling both as a form of day-to-day transport and as a leisure activity, which can deliver health, economic, environmental, safety and quality of life benefits both for individuals and society. We represent the interests of current and would-be cyclists on public policy matters. We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Transport Committee’s inquiry.

 

Key points

 

  1. Investing in additional road strategic road network capacity is inconsistent with achieving the Government’s ‘net zero’ targets. There is no clear evidence that it supports other objectives such as promoting economic growth or ‘levelling up’.

 

  1. The 3rd roads investment strategy (RIS3) should be smaller than its predecessors. Transport funding overall should be rebalanced towards cycling and other solutions which reduce car-dependence, as these are seriously underfunded at present.

 

  1. Budgets for highway maintenance should also be rebalanced towards maintaining local roads and paths. Cycling UK has previously submitted evidence to Transcom showing that cutting local road maintenance has significantly greater costs than for major roads, probably because this is more likely to endanger pedestrians and cyclists, causing more personal injuries rather than just property damage.

 

  1. Within a reduced budget for the Strategic Road Network (SRN) itself, the emphasis should be on maintaining existing roads, and overcoming the environmental, safety and severance problems caused by the existing road network. Major roads and junctions severely deter most people (especially children, older people, women or people with disabilities) from even attempting to travel from A to B by cycling or walking. Hence they are a serious barrier to the Government’s aspirations to normalise cycling and walking (see its ‘Gear Change’ vision).

 

  1. Given Cycling UK’s support in principle for action to address these adverse impacts of past road-schemes, it is deeply frustrating that National Highways (NH) lacks evidence that the Designated Funds (DF) programme (which was intended to do just this) have delivered positive outcomes. NH can document the amount of money spent and the numbers of schemes delivered (i.e. the ‘outputs’), but not the ‘outcomes’ of the DF programme, e.g. whether it has increased cycle use or improved safety for cyclists.

 

  1. That in turn is because NH (and its predecessors) have for years failed to develop indicators - and the monitoring systems these would require - for assessing the impact of their DF and wider Roads Investment Strategy (RIS) programmes on levels and safety of cycling along and across the corridors of the SRN (n.b. the same goes equally for walking). Therefore, besides giving much higher priority to tackling the SRN’s adverse environmental, safety and severance impacts, we also urge NH to make much stronger efforts to monitor its performance in doing so, and specifically in boosting cycling and walking usage and improving safety for cyclists and pedestrians travelling along or across SRN corridors.

 

Investment in additional roads capacity is inconsistent with ‘net zero’ and does not support other policy objectives.

 

  1. The case that building additional Strategic Road Network capacity would be incompatible with the Government’s ‘net zero’ targets has been well argued in the response to this inquiry from the consultancy Transport for Quality of Life (TQL). Decarbonising surface transport is particularly important, given that it accounted for 24% of UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. It is therefore now the largest-emitting sector, as other sectors (notably power generation) have markedly reduced their emissions, while surface transport has made virtually no progress in doing so.

 

  1. TQL’s analysis suggests that the current (i.e. second) Roads Investment Strategy (RIS2) is inconsistent with the UK’s carbon targets, whereas the Department for Transport’s (DfT’s) analysis underplays RIS2’s carbon impacts in ways that is potentially misleading. They also point out that none of the scenarios presented in DfT’s 2022 National Road Traffic Projections are consistent with the Committee on Climate Change’s pathway for reducing CO2 from surface transport, or with DfT’s own Transport Decarbonisation Plan (TDP).

 

  1. The TDP itself has been questioned by Prof Greg Marsden of the University of Leeds. Highlighting a graph on p25 of the TDP which purports to show the TDP policies achieving ‘net zero’ by 2050, Marsden submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request for the scenario assumptions underlying this graph. When DfT rejected his request, he successfully appealed to the Information Commissioner, who ruled that DfT should release the data. Even then, DfT initially sought to overturn this ruling before releasing the data. Marsden and others are now analysing it to assess what future levels of road traffic are compatible with reaching ‘net zero’. However it is likely to involve a significant reduction. Hence a roads programme which creates significant additional capacity is likely to end up becoming a ‘stranded asset’.

 

  1. TQL’s response also points to evidence which casts strong doubts onto claims that roads investment helps achieve either economic growth or ‘levelling up’ objectives. Other evidence indicates that new roads can as easily suck economic activity out of an area as bringing it in, and that investing in local transport systems (rather than strategic roads) may have more positive economic benefits.

 

Transport investment should seek to reduce car-dependence, not entrench it further

 

  1. Aside from the climate costs, car-dependence has several other economic costs:

 

 

  1. The Government’s approach to transport spending, as well as its spatial planning policies, should therefore focus on:

 

 

  1. Whilst the Government’s roads programme attracts significant criticism for its climate and other adverse environmental and societal impacts, healthier and more environmentally benign forms of transport are seriously underfunded. The Government has refused to release an assessment it commissioned into the funding needed to meet its targets to double cycling and increase walking trips by 2025. However Cycling UK understands that it found that this would require spending of between £6bn and £8bn over the five years to 2024/5, not just the £2bn announced by the Government in 2020.

 

  1. Indeed the Government has recently acknowledged that the minimum amount needed to reach that target was £4.4bn, plus another £5.5bn to meet its targets to increase cycling and walking to 50% of short journeys within towns and cities by 2030. Yet, for the second year running, it has announced annual spending from the promised £2bn funding pot of just £200m. At this rate, it is unclear whether it will manage to spend even £1bn of that promised funding. The underfunding of buses reflects a similar story.

 

  1. This is despite the Government’s own evidence that investment in cycling and walking represents “very good” value for money, with an average benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) of 5.62 : 1. This is far better than for most road schemes.

 

  1. Hence there are very strong economic (as well as environmental and health) arguments for investing in clean and healthy travel, rather than substantial increases to the capacity of the Strategic Road Network.

 

Maintenance funding should be rebalanced towards local roads

 

  1. Cycling UK has previously presented written and oral evidence to the Committee, showing (among other things) that cuts to local road maintenance budgets have a markedly higher economic cost than cuts to major roads maintenance budgets. We suspect this is related to our own evidence that maintenance-related damage pay-outs to cyclists are on average 13 times higher than those made to drivers, presumably because those involving cyclists are much more likely to involve personal injury, not just property damage – and the same would apply to pedestrians’ claims.

 

  1. DfT estimates that spending on motorways and trunk roads in 2021/2 was £1.172bn compared with £4.168bn on local authority roads. In other words, local authority maintenance spending was less than 4 times the spending on trunk roads and motorways, even though the length of the local road network is around 42 times greater. Maintaining the local road network in a safe condition for walking and cycling (as well as driving) is also likely to have greater health, safety, environmental and social inclusion benefits. The Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey for 2022 suggests that there is now a £12.64bn backlog of carriageway repairs in England and Wales, that will take nearly a decade to complete.

 

The focus of RIS3 should be on maintaining the existing network and overcoming its adverse safety, environmental and severance impacts

 

  1. Within the reduced overall budget that we recommend for RIS3, the emphasis should be on maintaining the existing SRN and on overcoming its legacy of adverse environmental, safety and community severance impacts. The latter aim has been the focus of the ‘Designated Funds’ (DF) programmes run by National Highways (NH, previously Highways England). In RIS1, there were DFs for (i) the environment, (ii) air quality, (iii) cycling, safety and integration (CSI), (iv) innovation and (v) growth and housing. In the current RIS2 period, the DFs cover (i) safety and congestion, (ii) environment and wellbeing, (iii) users and communities and (iv) innovation and modernisation.

 

  1. Cycling UK supports the general approach of the DF programme and believes it should form a much larger proportion of the overall RIS3 budget. There is a huge need to create new pedestrian, cycle and equestrian crossings of the motorway and trunk road network, or safer provision at junctions between motorways or trunk roads and the local road network. At present, motorways, trunk roads and the junctions associated with them present huge barriers to safe travel by walking and cycling. This can make it impossible, for instance, for children in rural areas to walk or cycle to schools in nearby towns – or for families in those towns to go out for walks or cycle rides in the surrounding country – due to the severance effects of the SRN and the junctions associated with it. Overcoming these effects should be given much greater priority in RIS3.

 

Need for new indicators and much better monitoring of cycle / pedestrian use and safety, for travel along and across SRN corridors

 

 

  1. Unfortunately, Cycling UK’s willingness in principle to support the general approach of the DFs is undermined by the lack of evidence that DF schemes have delivered their intended outcomes. Taking the example of the DF for cycling, safety and integration (CSI), National Highways has data on how much money was spent and how many cycling, safety and integration schemes were delivered via the fund. However they have been unable to provide any evidence on whether these schemes actually increased the number of cycling (or indeed walking) movements made along or across the corridors of the SRN, or whether it improved safety for those undertaking these movements.

 

  1. This is symptomatic of a wider problem. National Highways (or Highways England) has for years been failing to adopt meaningful indicators for pedestrian and cycle usage and safety, despite being told to do so back in 2014, in DfT’s Performance Specification for RIS1 (see p25, or p26 of the online PDF). At that time, DfT set indicators simply to measure pedestrian and cycle casualty numbers. Cycling UK objected to this, arguing – as DfT had itself acknowledged in its 2009 consultation ‘A Safer Way’ (not available online) – that simple casualty reduction targets can create a “perverse incentive” to reduce cycling and walking, in order to reduce cyclist and pedestrian casualties. ‘A Safer Way’ therefore adopted ‘rate-based’ indicators (i.e. for the risk of a casualty per 100,000 km walked or cycled), in order to incentivise more as well as safer cycling and walking.

 

  1. Hence DfT’s Performance Specification for RIS1 accepted that simple casualty reduction targets but required Highways England (as it then was) to develop better indicators during the RIS1 period. Clearly though, setting a rate-based indicator involves having reliable data on walking and cycling usage, as well as pedestrian and cyclist casualties. Yet, during the RIS1 period, Highways England made no efforts to improve its monitoring of cycling and walking activity. Indeed, they only recruited consultants to advise on how the impact of the CSI fund could be monitored about 2 years after starting to spend money from that fund (i.e. too late to be useful). Even then, they failed to act on the consultants’ recommendations.

 

  1. The result was that Highway England was still unable to set meaningful ‘rate-based’ indicators for pedestrian and cyclist usage and safety for RIS2.

 

  1. Even now, National Highways has still not developed (let alone allocated budget for) a cycle and pedestrian monitoring programme. Hence there is a growing risk that the problem will recur for a third time in RIS3. We urge the Committee to demand action to avert this situation. It is all the more important if RIS3 is to give higher priority to overcoming the barriers to safe pedestrian and cycle movement, as we hope it will.

 

February 2023