Road pricing scheme stalled

Road pricing scheme stalled

The government has shelved a national road pricing policy in favour of introducing car sharing and pay-as-you-drive lanes on motorways.

Motorists' groups welcomed the U-turn by the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, who announced a significant change in roads policy by declaring that all new motorway lanes will be considered for high occupancy vehicle schemes, toll charging and other congestion relief programmes.

Asked if she no longer considered road pricing to be inevitable, Kelly said: "I would describe this as a nifty overtaking manoeuvre to get past stationary traffic ahead. We have been trapped in this sterile debate about road pricing. There are real, practical things we can do today to tackle congestion."

She added that national road pricing raised concerns over privacy and fairness that had not been answered: "We're still some way from having all the answers to these questions."

Advertisement starts

---

---

Advertisement ends

Under the road pricing policy, motorists faced a blanket charge of around £1.30 per mile to use the busiest roads.

Today's announcement allows drivers to pay to use a single motorway lane in order to ensure a quicker journey, or they can opt out and sit in normal traffic in the three other lanes.

Edmund King, president of the AA, said the announcement was a "dramatic change" in a government policy that triggered one of the biggest public rebellions of Tony Blair's premiership last year, when nearly 2 million people signed a petition criticising a nationwide pay-as-you-drive scheme.

"I think this is quite a U-turn. Ruth Kelly has made a pragmatic decision to say 'we cannot do a national scheme but let's look at what else we can do.'"

Kelly confirmed that a trial scheme to convert the hard shoulder on a stretch of the M42 into an extra lane would be rolled out to other motorways by 2010.

Plans to build an extra lane on the northbound M1 between the east Midlands and Leeds will be abandoned in favour of a hard shoulder running.

A Department for Transport study released today identified 500 miles of motorways in England that would benefit from hard shoulder running: the M6, M62, M27, M4, M5 and motorways which feed into the M25 such as the M20 and M3.

"Where new lanes come on stream, we should think of using them in the right way," said Kelly, who said hard shoulder running would allow the creation of High Occupancy Toll lanes, which are free for vehicles carrying passengers and levy a charge on lone drivers.

"It gives [motorists] a real choice without having to change their route. More capacity comes online and instead of filling it up we can manage it over time."

According to the DfT, converting hard shoulders into motorway lanes is much cheaper than widening schemes.

The M42 experiment cost £6m per km whereas widening it would cost between £18m and £25m per km.

Peter Hendy, chair of the Commission for Integrated Transport, said: "We are particularly pleased that they are making new capacity available and letting people exercise a choice about whether they pay for the certainty of a short journey time – or use the road without paying, It's astute."

However, green campaigners said today's proposals, which will be firmed up in a green paper to be issued later this year, were a short-term solution to Britain's traffic problems and did not represent the death knell for road pricing.

"There is going to be a need for road pricing and the government needs to be more proactive about introducing schemes," said Stephen Joseph, of Campaign for Better Transport.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008