LONDON'S GREEN GRIDLOCK
Londoners were shocked to find their streets so gridlocked that traffic was moving at walking speed, 2.9mph according to an Evening Standard survey (27 August). But it is rarely understood that this is not an accident but a deliberate policy initiated by central government.
Former Metropolitan Police traffic head Kevin Delaney told the Standard that 'within the last two to three years, engineers and politicians have tampered with well-proven junctions and altered traffic lights and the roads are becoming a disaster.'
It would be easy to dismiss Delaney as an old grump. Surely the reason for the congestion is the increase in car use (three billion extra miles travelled by car in the UK in 2001, Times 30 August).
At least it would be easy to dismiss Delaney if it was not the determined policy of the government to reduce car use by slowing down the traffic. Under the 1997 Road Traffic Reduction Act local authorities are empowered to narrow roads with bus- and cycle lanes, as well as re-phasing traffic lights to cause maximum congestion.
Amazingly this is the policy that has had the immediate impact upon London. Mayor Livingstone re-set the traffic lights so that they minimise mobility, throwing London into gridlock. This policy is no more than a London-wide equivalent of that undertaken by local authorities like Islington and Camden individually.
All over London there are cycle lanes painted onto the road that run just long enough to prevent two lines of traffic at a junction, bus stops set on widened pavements so that traffic has to wait behind the bus while passengers alight. As every driver and cyclist knows, these bus and cycle lanes are barren deserts while the rest of the road is awash.
The rationale behind the policy is the proposition - taken from neo-classical economics - that as long as supply (of roads) increases, so will road use. This might make sense in the rarefied mathematical formulas of 'rational choice theory', but it bears little relationship to the real world. Still, campaigners like Transport 2000 have made the theory an article of faith in road policy.
On the roads, demand is not infinitely elastic, but determined by very specific social changes. The first and most obvious - a cause for celebration one might have thought - is that many more women drive than did in the past. The family wage is a thing of the past, and so is the family car.
Not surprisingly the biggest single increase in car use is the 'school run', much bemoaned by policy-makers who would not dream of giving up the time to walk a child to school, even though they think that working mothers should jeopardise their jobs by doing it.
The 1997 Road Traffic Reduction Act is a bizarre experiment with ordinary people's lives that has already disproved the dogma that people will abandon their cars if traffic is slowed down. Instead car use is increasing. But the policy makers' dogmatic belief in the theory is not based on reason, but on the prejudice that ordinary people have no business being mobile.
On the other hand, the Labour Party in London is recoiling from the consequences of the policy, even if they are unwilling to accept that the reasoning behind it is wrong. Trevor Phillips, Chair of the London Authority, while declining to stand in elections for Labour against the incumbent Ken Livingstone, did take a sideswipe at the Mayor's plan for congestion charges. According to Phillips these will clobber the motorist. But that is just what the Labour Party has empowered Livingstone to do under its 1997 Act.
-- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'