Safe Speed Forums

I'd like to gather ideas for reducing congestion on our roads without road pricing:

- proper roads development / investment
- encourage teleworking
- encourage teleshopping
- school buses?
- restore road space (remove bus lanes, other traffic obstructions)
- remove some traffic lights
- encourage motorbiking
- force LAs to prioritise 'traffic flow efficiency'.
- remove 'anit-car' policies
- encourage off-road parking facilities to increase road space
- teach drivers to use motorways more efficiently (middle lane drivers)
- truck speed limiters cause elephant racing. Dump them.

Intelligent parking? I've heard that as much as 30% of city centre traffic may be looking for a place to park. How can we get them parked more quickly?

Intelligent routing? Provide live data to sat nav that would enable routing around traffic problems.

You could fit two Smart car sized vehicles in each normal parking space. (I don't know how much this helps.)

Could we work longer hours and shorter weeks? Like 4*10 hours instead of 5*8 hours? (That's a 20% cut in commuting.)

What ideas have you got? Which of these are big winners?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Another one could be to encourage local employment, I travel nearly 400 miles a week to work, and have done for the last 3 1/2 years.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

What happened to the (think it was called) "walking bus " ideas ??---Would help with the 8.00/9.00 workers and the school run clash.

I've always thought that clamping down on untaxed, uninsured and unfit (MOT-less) cars would be a good start. Just crush 'em.



Around here someone must have put in too many zeros when ordering traffic lights a few years back because we have LOADS and many sets within a few hundred feet of each other. The congestion gets bad because they look at our town centre as lots of little junctions rather than one big system. The phasing often means you can sit at one set of lights for several changes without moving because the lights ahead have allowed traffic in front of you with no where to go.

Perhaps REDUCE and RE-PHASE Traffic lights?

TMC (Traffic Message Channel )already exists on many Sat Navs but is only good on A roads and above. It is often used with the Sat Nav software to reroute around congestion but looking at Sat Nav forums it has many dead spots and the information can arrive late after the "event" has cleared. Also in towns it may help create "rat runs" which just shifts the congestion to areas that can't cope as well as the area they are running from.



A lot with regards to parking. Saw a lot of Smart cars in Rome being parked in one space.

Tax breaks for employers and employees for working locally. An easy way for companies to have company buses to move their workers around. My uni is looking into this but mainly as a way of reducing the amount of car travel off campus students do. They make up half the parking permit owners. Parking shortages is a serious problem as we have about half what we need and silly planning regulations won't allow adequate parking so you end up with highly paid staff driving around campus for up to half an hour looking for a space!

Longer days will lead to higher stress levels and lower productivity for a lot of people so it might be counter productive. The working time regulations insist minimum 11 hours break between shifts and one complete 24 hour period off each 7 days I think it is so that limits what you can do.

Mobile office technology is here so it would be possible for employees to work from home. Video conferencing works as we use it on one of our courses for a fortnightly lecture that can be at any one of the partner universities. VOIP would mean you could route telephone calls from the company to the mobile worker seemlessly (just got to sort out the security!) If you had this so every employee could say work from home either a day or two a week or a few weeks straight every so often then you get the benefit of home working but without the isolation. Also not all employees will have home suitable as they may have noisy children that would mean they would get nothing done.

Alternatively how about shared local office space. You'd have local office space which employees of several different companies could use with all the facilities shared in cost eg they'd have a laptop, VOIP connection and broad band here just like where they were but without the need for any of them to commute physically to their actual office. You could then divide the space into either open plan, shared rooms where same company employees could share or have it as a cubicle maze. Working men's clubs and other buildings spend a lot of time empty ditto church halls and the like. It might actually be a good use for them. Again you'd need some security to stop the local chavs from nicking everyone's gear or just walking in. A lot of companies scan in all their paper correspondence so you don't need to be physically there anywhere near as much. There are plenty of monitoring tools available to check on productivity so I don't think there is much excuse for not allowing this to happen.

Staffordshire has a walk to school scheme. It is designed to get parents to take it in turns herding local kids to the school rather than all taking them by car.

Making travelling by PT safe. I am sure the reduction in some street crime is because fewer people are actully walking around any more and they take the car as it is safer. My dad's friend was mugged recently at barcelona station so it is no wonder people choose to take their car or go by taxi.

Encourage cheap taxi fares for villagers that want to travel in a group into town intead of going by bus. Or more car share schemes so that those people with cars could take a few people into town when they go to save people using a bus which is less environmentally friendly than the same people going in a car which is already going where they want to go.

For non busy routes then why not have MPVs instead of buses? They'd have a much lower cost of ownership and running costs than having a purpose built bus.

You think? Got any evidence? 10 hour working days are normal for many, and especially so in high stress jobs (police / medical / etc).



My suggestion would be well clear of that directive, I think. Start at 9am, finish at 7pm, 4 days a week = 40 hours, or 36 hours with an hour for lunch. And between shifts 7pm to 9am is 14 hours.

I'd also say that I would certainly have jumped at the opportunity when I worked 9-5, 5 day weeks.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Abolish stamp duty, or at least have it in a properly banded system. It is absurd that a £119,995 transaction has no stamp duty, a £120,005 transaction suffers 1% duty on the whole value. That would make moving nearer the job much easier.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

:yesyes:

How about a tax exemption for those who live within X miles of their main place of work - or, better, a sliding scale? If this can't be afforded, how about an extra PAYE tax on distance from work - again on a sliding scael?

This would stem the tide of the Dinkies and Lombards * working in towns and buying up and hence escalating house prices in (not-so) local villages, preventing, say, farm labourers from having access to reasonably priced rental accommodation. It might even reverse it.

Dinkies = Double Income, No KiddiEs: Lombard: Loads Of Money But A Right Dickhead

ITYM: DINKYS Double Income No Kids Yet.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Maybe controversial, but in my view there's a strong case for taking control of all principal roads (i.e. anything with a white line down the middle) away from local councils and giving it to regional agencies funded by central government.

For all its faults, the Highways Agency (which runs the trunk road network) does at least apply proper signing, avoids the worst excesses of speed limit cuts, and does make some attempts (e.g. M42 hard shoulder running) to improve traffic flow.

These regional agencies should have a specific objective to minimise delays within the confines of the existing network.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Road works.

Award contracts on "time is of the essence" basis - Mandatory 24hr working on all A and M/Way works, with maximised "workmen per mile" on the job. Spot inspection & fines if road is blocked & no work in progress.

Charge contractors/utilities for blocking roads?

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Wake me up when the revolution starts
STOP the Toll Tax http://www.traveltax.org.uk

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

And include a job finished means just that contract - too often we see signs up telling us that so & so contract was finished x weeks ahead of schedule - and a week or two later one lane blocked for some sort of repair.

Roads are closed for far too long for crash investigation.

Perhaps a technical solution could help here - what about some sort of cross between a laser rangefinder and a camera to build a highly accurate 3d picture of a scene in a minute or two? (A sort of scanning rangefinder?)

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

,

24 hour working often upsets nearby residences though which is why it doesn't tend to be done that often. I definitely think making sure all contracts are done to the highest standard and within the shortest reasonable time should be enforced and contractors that have poor records should be refused permission to work on any government property, road works and be refused all tenders. Hit the idle gits in the pocket and they'll soon buck their ideas up.

They already charge utilities for going over time on contracts. Devon CC wanted it to be £750 a day to make them get on with it but the utilities lobbied govt and got it down to about £100 which is peanuts. They make more money taking their time and doing it badly than they would just getting on with it a reasonable rate. Unfortunately around 200 utility companies have the right to dig up roads and councils only have 2 years since work was done to find shoddy reinstatements. This is probably why roads have deteriorated so badly as the utilities are just doing crap jobs when they dig them up. Road life is shortened by a third when it is dug up. Utilities aren't paying for the damage they're doing. They should be actively contributing a couple of billion a year to compensate us for their shoddy work. Their roadworks cost the economy £8billion a year in congestion.

The dispatches programme about this was very interesting as it showed how utilities just made up how long they'd said they'd take to keep the cost down. Some of the work shown was appalling. They also showed contractors being on site all day and doing about an hour of actual work! There were some blokes right outside me during the summer. My webcam captured just how little they did. Turned up at 9, sat in the van till 10. Gaffer turned up. They had a tea break! Did a bit before lunchtime then sat round from about 12 -2. They went away. They came back mid afternoon and did about an hour of activity. I probably should make it into a silent film as one of them took about 15 minutes to get the motorised stomper thing running and it is pure laurel and hardy

Anyone digging up a road has to have permission from the council. They also have to make sure all the signage for diversions and such like is correct and doesn't create problems. Devon are really hot on crap contractors and prosecute 500 a year which is more than all other councils put together. If all councils followed Devon's lead then roads wouldn't be dug up continually. I also think utilities should have to share underground cabling, tunnels and such rather than always putting in their own stuff. It was much better during the days of monopoly in some ways.

They also showed a team from nottingham university that have created a system which uses GPS and overlays on a head up display so you can look around and see all the pipework running underground. Utilities are also very poor in releasing maps of where everything is. Once all pipework etc was mapped comprehensively then there would be a lot less of one utility drilling into another's stuff and causing problems that way.

24 hour working is also very expensive in terms of overtime etc. And this is not just navvies but also highly skilled management.

If traffic flows tolerably through the works without huge disruption, normal working patterns may well be more cost-effective.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Parking charges, in parts of London the parking meters and charges were supposedly brought in to help ease congestion by provision of parking facilities. Has never happened.

Likewise at one time if a parking meter was us it was free parking. Now the bays are suspended have seen a row of five bays suspended for a week because of duff meters so given the parking restrictions are 06:00 to 20:00 mon-fri at a maximum two hour stay I would say that's a minimum of 35 cars that could be parked of the road rather than driving round looking for a parking space.

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Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

Driving round looking for a parking space must be a major cause of congestion. IMV at least 75% of double yellows are unnecessary. They are far too often used to restrict parking rather than to aid traffic flow.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Transport Research Labs provide exactly this service as part of a fast response team. Perhaps there are not enough of them yet. http://www.trl.co.uk/content/main.asp?pid=83


And an article about it's use in the Midlands http://management.silicon.com/government/0,39024677,39151589,00.htm

To the original list I would add:

Improve visibility at Junctions. - I'm increasingly seeing road furniture in places that I'm sure is intended to stop traffic by reducing visibility. It may be intended to improve safety (by slowing everyone to walking speed) but I believe it to be counter productive and increasing low speed SMIDSY accidents. With improved sight lines I'm sure that many junctions would flow more easily and safely.