M25 Junction 10 to Junction 16 Smart Motorway

[Chris5156]

The DfT and HE are stuck between a rock and a hard place since London became a devolved area with the Mayor. Especially the new incumbent who would rip up all roads in the city, the likelihood of any proper improvements with the TfL are long gone. So the M25 has to take cross London Traffic.

Do you have any evidence that Sadiq Khan wishes to "rip up all roads in the city"?

It's not like his transport policy are radically different to that of his predecessors; in fact, what's notable about London since the Mayor and GLA came into existence is that its transport policy has remained remarkably stable despite the political stripe of the administration changing twice. Before the GLA existed there had been no plans to substantially increase capacity for road traffic in London since Cecil Parkinson's plans were thrown on the bonfire in 1990.

The A406 could have been a great road but like the recent upgrade at Wood Green, half cock tripe on a grade separated road either side.

I get a bit tired of saying this, but TfL did briefly pursue a tunneled scheme that would have provided free-flow along the A406 through Bounds Green. It went nowhere because the Treasury (under Alistair Darling) refused to fund it.

[Herned]

The DfT and HE are stuck between a rock and a hard place since London became a devolved area with the Mayor. Especially the new incumbent who would rip up all roads in the city, the likelihood of any proper improvements with the TfL are long gone. So the M25 has to take cross London Traffic. The A406 could have been a great road but like the recent upgrade at Wood Green, half cock tripe on a grade separated road either side.
How do the French, Germans and Spanish build so many good roads in urban and even areas of outstanding natural beauty, so they have the balls to the economic interests of their county in front of nimbys and greens.

The French and Germans certainly aren't any more. I'm not sure how Spain manages to build so much infrastructure at much lower cost than anything we can manage here, driving round the M30 in Madrid last year nearly saw me weeping from jealousy

[Glom]

Speaking of badly marked junctions, the anticlockwise offslip to junction 12 really bugs me. Two lanes are dropped and one is marked for the Londonbound M3 while the other is for the countrybound, which then splits into two lanes for the whirlpool link road.

But the vast majority of traffic is going to the countrybound.

What should happen is that both dropping lanes connect seemlessly into the link road to the countrybound while there is a left exit for the Londonbound.

[Bryn666]

Speaking of badly marked junctions, the anticlockwise offslip to junction 12 really bugs me. Two lanes are dropped and one is marked for the Londonbound M3 while the other is for the countrybound, which then splits into two lanes for the whirlpool link road.

But the vast majority of traffic is going to the countrybound.

What should happen is that both dropping lanes connect seemlessly into the link road to the countrybound while there is a left exit for the Londonbound.

Exactly what annoyed me a few posts back

[Glom]

I've probably said it multiple times but it continues to annoy me.

[Phil]

The DfT and HE are stuck between a rock and a hard place since London became a devolved area with the Mayor. Especially the new incumbent who would rip up all roads in the city, the likelihood of any proper improvements with the TfL are long gone. So the M25 has to take cross London Traffic. The A406 could have been a great road but like the recent upgrade at Wood Green, half cock tripe on a grade separated road either side.

Not so...

HM Government LOVE having a London Mayor to dump their problems on but provide no funding to do anything about it.

Road building within London has long been a vote loser (even the pro roads Conservatives of the late 1980s / early1990s had a hard time getting stuff built) so passing the responsibility for road building to someone else takes the heat off MPs who can gleefully say 'nothing to do with us guv'

It also may have passed you by, but before he left Boris Johnson agreed that HM Treasury could scrap any road related grants being given to TfL.

As a result ALL ROAD MAINTENANCE IN LONDON IS 100% FUNDED BY TUBE, BUS, UNDERGROUND TICKET SALES! (all of which run at a loss other than the tube)

TfL are thus in no position to fund anything - and with the delays to Crossrail plus Mayor Kahn's fare freeze even regular maintenance is being pared back to 'safety critical' stuff only.

As others have alluded to the only way further road building will get done in London is if HM Treasury bankrolls it (which won't happen unless (i) the country is flush with cash and (ii) both the Mayor and the UK Government are of the same political party).

[jackal]

^ The UK govt doesn't much fund roads in London because they're not TfL's priority. Hence £5bn from central govt for Crossrail, but the North Circular etc are left to rot.

[Chris5156]

^ The UK govt doesn't much fund roads in London because they're not TfL's priority. Hence £5bn from central govt for Crossrail, but the North Circular etc are left to rot.

And they never will be TfL's priority. First, because TfL is primarily a public transport operator, and second, because supporting road building in London has been a consistent and reliable way to lose elections for a solid 50 years now, so no Mayor is going to direct TfL to change their focus.

The only way I can see for this to change would be to trunk the major roads in London, handing them back to Highways England, who would have the remit to do something about them and the detachment from politics necessary to make some progress. But I still don't think it would be realistic, even in that scenario, to envisage anything more adventurous than capacity improvements to the roads that are already decent dual carriageways. The A40 might be just about salvaged, but the South Circular would never be fixed. And I doubt Highways England want the job anyway.

[Big L]

...As a result ALL ROAD MAINTENANCE IN LONDON IS 100% FUNDED BY TUBE, BUS, UNDERGROUND TICKET SALES! (all of which run at a loss other than the tube)...

Does the congestion charge money not contribute then?

[Chris5156]

...As a result ALL ROAD MAINTENANCE IN LONDON IS 100% FUNDED BY TUBE, BUS, UNDERGROUND TICKET SALES! (all of which run at a loss other than the tube)...

Does the congestion charge money not contribute then?

I looked into this for a blog post that I never wrote.

The Congestion Charge raises £250m a year - I thought that sounded a bit steep, and might include the total of fines, LEZ payments and other charges to the motorist rather than being CC alone. That £250m figure is the lion's share of everything TfL's roads division brings in as income; I'm not sure what the rest is but I suspect it owns property alongside roads that is rented or leased and it earns some money from advertising space, things like that. Its total revenue stream is £327m a year. However, the CC actually costs nearly £85m a year to operate and administer, so about a third of the money the Congestion Charge raises is spent on itself.

The maintenance budget for TfL's road network in 2016/17 was £853m, and that was the last financial year in which the General Grant was paid to TfL by the DfT. In that year there was also a £246m capital budget for roads, of which half was renewals and the other half new projects. That would have covered things like replacing life-expired bridges, drainage, retaining walls, and the installation of new signals, cycle lanes, that sort of thing. All that work has effectively stopped as of 2017.

So the simple summary is that yes, the Congestion Charge raises some money, but not even nearly enough. Capital expenditure on roads in London has stopped, as of two years ago, with even basic asset renewal now deferred indefinitely (see the A40 Western Avenue crash barrier saga in the other thread), and maintenance has been cut to the bone, because sustaining the previous level of spending on roads would put TfL £700m a year into the red. I suspect that even now, with things cut back as far as they are, TfL is still bringing several hundred million pounds a year across from the farebox to maintain roads like the North Circular.

You can say what you like about TfL but they are, I believe, the only highway authority in the UK who receive no grant funding for maintenance of their classified road network, and the result - that public transport passengers are having their fares spent on basic highway maintenance - is absolutely bizarre.

[Bryn666]

Indeed; if anything TfL are borderline broke and something will catastrophically give because of it.

Maybe the Amazin' Graylin' can fix it........

[Berk]

Does anyone remember that incident a few years ago when Boston Manor viaduct was closed for several days?? Next time it could be Chiswick, or parts of Westway.

Let’s see how removing the grant will work then.

And for all the modal shift you could possibly ask for, some things rely on road connections. All utilities services. Ambulances. Getting those buses delivered, and serviced, and providing those hundreds of daily services.

Some of them are going to use roads with GSJ’s. It won’t be acceptable (politically or socially) for them to be subject to extended delays for months due to extended emergency roadworks.

[Bryn666]

One of the reasons Boris wanted the Hammersmith Tunnel was because of the chaos the repairs caused.

It was about as locally popular as being sick on everyone's head.

There is no point having a massive road system in a city with no space for car parks. Journeys have an end point. Zone 1 stations carry millions of passengers a day. No car parks can match that.

Driving into London and parking is astronomically expensive and difficult. Frankly only a fool with too much money or employed somewhere that doesn't audit expenses claims would advocate it.

[jackal]

^ No tube station has millions of passengers per day!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_b ... d_stations

I will refrain from posting the usual stats showing that a majority of journeys in London are by road...

[Bryn666]

Journeys per day. Or do people not go back home?

Journeys in outer London are made by road where there is ample scope for more public transport and cycling. The car park problem still remains.

Still if in an era of worsening air quality and ever rising fuel prices along with flatlining road safety statistics you feel car parks and car commuting are the way forward you'll never be convinced otherwise

I'd rather use my morning more productively than sitting in a traffic jam.

[Chris5156]

Does anyone remember that incident a few years ago when Boston Manor viaduct was closed for several days?? Next time it could be Chiswick, or parts of Westway.

Let’s see how removing the grant will work then.

The Hammersmith Viaduct was closed for an extended period in 2012 because of partial structural failure, and unlike the elevated M4 that is a TfL road. However, something like that would surely count as emergency repair work and would get pushed to the top of the priority list; the result would likely just be that TfL would cut back less urgent maintenance elsewhere to make up the difference. There might be some extra complaints from TfL that they're short of money but I don't think it would leave the DfT or the Treasury particularly troubled.

There is no point having a massive road system in a city with no space for car parks. Journeys have an end point. Zone 1 stations carry millions of passengers a day. No car parks can match that.

Driving into London and parking is astronomically expensive and difficult. Frankly only a fool with too much money or employed somewhere that doesn't audit expenses claims would advocate it.

Yes and no. I agree there's no point developing London's road system to provide new radial capacity into the centre. That's futile and will only encourage more journeys by unsustainable means that will make radial routes and the central area worse.

However, London (or rather, Greater London) is a polycentric conurbation, and the further you get from the centre the more reliant people are on driving, because the demand for travel and the range of possible journeys are much too widely varied to be catered for by public transport alone. In outer areas, failing to provide capacity for journeys by road is not always going to encourage modal shift, it's often just going to frustrate and prevent travel.

There's obviously a balance to be struck, but I think there is significant value in providing capacity for orbital movement and journeys in outer London, and it's those places that (as so often) miss out because of the priorities TfL has been given to work with.

[Glom]

If you look at the A40 junctions, they all lead to rather low key roads little different from other local streets. There is no distribution system.

[Bryn666]

There is no point having a massive road system in a city with no space for car parks. Journeys have an end point. Zone 1 stations carry millions of passengers a day. No car parks can match that.

Driving into London and parking is astronomically expensive and difficult. Frankly only a fool with too much money or employed somewhere that doesn't audit expenses claims would advocate it.

Yes and no. I agree there's no point developing London's road system to provide new radial capacity into the centre. That's futile and will only encourage more journeys by unsustainable means that will make radial routes and the central area worse.

However, London (or rather, Greater London) is a polycentric conurbation, and the further you get from the centre the more reliant people are on driving, because the demand for travel and the range of possible journeys are much too widely varied to be catered for by public transport alone. In outer areas, failing to provide capacity for journeys by road is not always going to encourage modal shift, it's often just going to frustrate and prevent travel.

There's obviously a balance to be struck, but I think there is significant value in providing capacity for orbital movement and journeys in outer London, and it's those places that (as so often) miss out because of the priorities TfL has been given to work with.

Well yes, the A406 certainly needs to be kept as relatively free-flowing as is practical within political acceptance. However, I think anyone who thinks Ringway 3 will rise from the dead and be taken seriously is probably on some sort of narcotic

South London on the other hand is a lost cause and should just be filled in and a country park put in its place.

[Chris5156]

Well yes, the A406 certainly needs to be kept as relatively free-flowing as is practical within political acceptance. However, I think anyone who thinks Ringway 3 will rise from the dead and be taken seriously is probably on some sort of narcotic

I think there's a middle ground somewhere between that and doing nothing that could have productive results - I am thinking of interventions TfL and the boroughs could reasonably make that would improve quality of life and make access to parts of suburban London less of a headache. Carefully planned and engineered relief roads or small-scale urban bypasses to stop major shopping streets having to also be major traffic arteries, for example.

[Bryn666]

Well yes, the A406 certainly needs to be kept as relatively free-flowing as is practical within political acceptance. However, I think anyone who thinks Ringway 3 will rise from the dead and be taken seriously is probably on some sort of narcotic

I think there's a middle ground somewhere between that and doing nothing that could have productive results - I am thinking of interventions TfL and the boroughs could reasonably make that would improve quality of life and make access to parts of suburban London less of a headache. Carefully planned and engineered relief roads or small-scale urban bypasses to stop major shopping streets having to also be major traffic arteries, for example.

And as always probably a lot of tinkering with paint would help. Getting rid of artificial choke points in this way will work wonders.

There has to be a smarter way of ending the dual carriageway bit of West Hill than this: https://goo.gl/maps/t3CiPp3M4RB2