Featured in the Future Transport London Newsletter January 2025
Organisations should collaborate to campaign against the proposed Lower Thames Crossing, which would be a very costly mistake. The government has postponed until May a decision on the proposed road and tunnel between Essex and Kent, current cost estimate £9 bn. Business organisations hope the crossing will relieve congestion at the Dartford tunnel and bridge. However it would not open until 2032. As numerous studies have shown, providing additional roads merely generates more traffic. Potential journeys which had seemed too inconvenient when a road was congested are undertaken once a new road has been built. Two to three years after the M25 was widened, traffic had increased up to 23%, and speeds did not increase.
Cars constitute 58% of vehicles using the Dartford crossings. Congestion would be reduced far sooner, and much more effectively, by discouraging car mileage. This is vital; evidence that various carbon sinks are currently much less able to store carbon underlines the urgent need to protect our climate. Transport causes nearly 40% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. The latest National Travel Survey shows that 45% of car miles driven are for leisure and higher income families drive four times further than poorer households. The government should take steps to reduce this mileage considerably. A substantial majority of Britons support taxing pollution. The Climate Change Committee recommends a cut by 2035 of 72% in surface transport emissions. It pointed out that new sales of electric cars and vans are not increasing fast enough. Emissions have reduced much less than it expected as many more people are driving heavy SUVs. New roads like the Lower Thames Crossing would increase emissions and damage the government’s pretensions to international climate leadership.
There is plenty of scope to discourage the amount of driving. Nearly 80% of of drivers have said they would use public transport more if it was better. No less than 97% of drivers want cheaper rail fares. 88% have either taken steps to reduce the amount they spend on fuel, or plan to do so. Of these, three-quarters have reduced the amount they drive, while over half say they plan to do so in future. This underlines that it is important to make public transport a cheaper and more convenient option than driving. Fuel duty has not been increased in line with inflation since 2010! Yet the budget raised bus fares, while train and London Underground fares are to increase by 4.6%. It is much more cost-effective to invest in better public transport, and raise fuel duty, thus discouraging driving and reducing congestion. Rises in fuel duty should be balanced by reductions in
a) income tax for people on low incomes, so they would not be worse off provided their mileage is not excessive, and
b) council tax for rural areas, where public transport is less convenient.
At present only 7% of freight is transported by rail. The government must take account of the fact that rail freight has only about a quarter of the carbon emissions of the same weight of goods carried by lorry. One train can move the same weight of goods as up to 129 lorries, thus also reducing road congestion. For these reasons the previous government’s consultation of stakeholders led to adoption of the target to increase rail freight by 75%. In pursuing this target the government can build on the success of the Mode Shift Revenue Support scheme, which in financial year 2022-23 helped remove 900,000 lorry journeys from the roads.
The Lower Thames Crossing proposal ignores the priority of tackling the climate emergency. If the government decided to build it using private finance, this would reduce the pool of available finance for effective decarbonisation, such as promptly upgrading the National Grid to accommodate as much renewable power as possible.
Tim Root
Comments