Beautiful in theory: Road Schemes

Beautiful in theory: Road Schemes

16th September 2011

Road Schemes and Pricing schemes was firstly recovered by previous Labour Transport Minister, Alistair Darling.

In principal the Road act sounded like a systematic and rather simple solution to current day congestion problems.

Later, the scheme was then scrapped with Gordon Brown coming into power.

In a desperate bid to tackle Road congestion, councils are dangerously playing with Taxpayers money on risky strategies, Transport Campaigners have stated.

They also said that the investment was relying on risky, expensive and outmoded road schemes.

However Darling was correct to be concerned, that the UK would be a country facing major  gridlocks across cities similar to those seen in America and that change did need to occur.

Implementing Road pricing is one measure, yet how successful could it actually be? If the UK cannot afford to build new roads to cope with the burden of heavy traffic then does the road pricing scheme actually economically and financially work?

The campaign for better transport recently collated data from the 45 major cities which are being considered for the £600 million government
share. This figure was originally £400m, Councils have increased their contributions to the schemes to improve their chances of receiving Whitehall approval, the CBT claimed.

However many of the bids are over reliant on the use of borrowing, which creates an unstable prospect in the long term. Where is
this borrowing going to from? A lot of it may be investing in the guarantee of lenders and assumption.

Perhaps adopting a life style suitable approach to how people commute could be a  prospective solution to battling congested road infrastructure, the new transport minister Norman Baker has suggested ideas based on employee work life, with more employers perhaps allowing staff to work from home to possibly ease road congestion and rush hour traffic.

 

 

 

 


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