Try starting a sentence about road investment with ‘Why don’t we just…’. The problem is finishing such a sentence.

Steve Gooding & I have been chewing this over. Steve’s career history is steeped in dealing with road investment, notably as former Director General (Roads) at the Department for Transport (DfT), United Kingdom. I had the privilege of being a member of the Wales Roads Review Panel (https://lnkd.in/enVpaNtb). Together we initiated & led the Road Investment Scrutiny Panel (RISP) which reported in January (https://lnkd.in/evDMZbhq).

Here are a few points drawn from our slide deck:

👉 In 1957 the UK didn’t have a motorway, now it has a quarter of a million miles of roads overall.

👉 With a climate emergency & a huge asset to maintain, building more road capacity may not be a good idea.

👉 Views change – “we must try to plan our towns so as to give the maximum use of this great and beneficial invention, the motor car” said the Minister of Transport in 1963.

👉 Road investment faces winds of change with the rise of the digital age, the climate emergency looming large, & legal challenges to road investment & expenditure plans.

👉 The RISP has posed 7 key questions for road investment, It also highlighted the need for more transparency to allow scrutiny of decisions & a more clearly coherent approach to decisions that are well-informed and draw upon a diverse range of perspectives.

👉 Government should publish a projection of the change in vehicle miles by carbon-emitting vehicles necessary or prudent to stay within an acceptable carbon reduction trajectory (& transparently explain how this can be achieved).

👉 It is far from clear that the draft revised National Networks National Policy Statement is going to provide improved guiderails for smooth passage of proposed schemes through to granting of development consent & delivery.

👉 If only we could simply answer these questions: (i) Where, & by what means, should we create additional road capacity?; (ii) How should we manage the consumption of the road capacity that we have?; & (iii) How should we look after the road capacity that we have?

👉 Unfortunately, road investment evades the clutches of technocractic governance, leaving subjective judgement (whether by technocrats or politicians or both) in the face of conundrums.

👉 Between the questions above & their answers are two conundrums: (i) What makes you confident that the nature and extent of benefits you seek to achieve will be realised?; and (ii) What future is best for society & why?

👉 Perplexing though this situation may be, even doing nothing is really a decision to carry on regardless.

👉 Steve & I *judge* that there is now a strong argument for re-calibrating our public policy attention away from capacity enhancement & toward capacity preservation (maintenance & resilience) & management (road space allocation).