Panel secretary – and CIHT’s climate change associate – Andrew Crudgington explains how RISP’s new report, which was funded by the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, is designed to be a ‘high-level checklist’ for transport professionals.

“The Panel was looking for issues that we felt were important for a robust and credible approach to roads investment and spending, but weren’t being picked up by decision-makers as thoroughly as we’d like,” Crudgington says; offering his insight on each of the report’s seven key questions for the transport sector.

Q1 What would make us feel confident that decisions on future road investment, at both the scheme and aggregate level, are consistent with the legal obligation to deliver a credible pathway to the decarbonisation of the UK economy by 2050?

Andrew Crudgington (AC): “There is quite a lot of ambiguity about the role of the overall volume of traffic in achieving transport decarbonisation – do we need absolute reductions? Are we making decisions using forecasts of traffic growth that are consistent with hitting the net zero target? Ultimately if we can’t show that decisions are consistent with a credible path to Net Zero, the whole system is going to be bogged down in legal challenges. The Panel makes some suggestions for how this could be tackled.”

Q2 What would make us feel confident that the policy imperative and opportunities to promote biodiversity enhancement are being recognised and pursued on their own merits, as opposed to biodiversity being ‘accommodated’ in pursuit of other goals?

AC: “Biodiversity is not consistently seen as a first-order objective, despite biodiversity loss and climate change being two sides of the same environmental crisis; it's often more of a ‘nice to have’ benefit. But there is a massive opportunity for the road network because we’re talking about a huge parcel of land. If people are serious about improving the biodiversity of the country – and we have just signed up to some very challenging targets at December’s UN biodiversity summit, we should be taking the case for greater investment much more seriously.”

Q3 How can we be persuaded that the health and social impacts of road spending experienced by individual people and communities are well understood and given sufficient weight at all stages of decision-making?

AC: “If Mrs X, from place Y, suffers a massive health impact because she lives next to a dual carriageway, does her situation get lost because we are making decisions based on an aggregate calculation of benefits and disbenefits? Also, if developers promise that building a road will create jobs, have they thought if it actually benefits the people already in that area – and what else needs to happen for local people to be able to access those jobs?”

Q4 What would give us confidence that appropriate financial provision is being made for operating, maintaining and optimising the performance of the existing road network?

AC: “With the Roads Investment Strategy we’ve got a process for establishing how much is spent on looking after the strategic road network, but there isn’t an equivalent for the local roads – and that's 97% of the network! Alongside better maintenance we also need to think about how we optimise the network, which means thinking much more about how we use our roads, for example who should be able to use which roads and why.”

Q5 What would persuade us that options for investing in improving road safety are being identified and weighed appropriately?

AC: “Despite all the recent progress, too many people still die or are injured on the roads. The Panel was worried that we tend to default to engineering solutions and physical infrastructure schemes for answers, but other options – such as enforcing the speed limits – might get better results. Greater use of technology to manage vehicle movements could also create opportunities.” Are decision-makers giving full weight to these options?”

Q6 What would persuade us that road investment and expenditure decisions - at the scheme and programme level - are the result of serious consideration of a genuinely broad range of options and their merits?

AC: “There is always a risk of group think, which can lead to every transport problem looking like something that needs an engineering solution. So, how can we make sure that a much wider range of options are considered.  For example, post COVID, can digital connectivity play a bigger role in providing access to work and leisure? When can demand management be a real alternative to building more capacity? A lot of this is about people. The processes that transport decision-makers use to select a preferred option need to be opened up to a much broader range of voices from different professional backgrounds.”

Q7 What would persuade us that road investment and expenditure decisions are likely to represent value for money over the long term?

AC: “Road investment costs and benefits play out over 10/20/30 years or even more – so they are inevitably subject to all sorts of uncertainty about technological change, population growth, where economic activity will take place and so on. There's a relatively new process inside DfT, where options are tested against 7 Common Analytical Scenarios – though it’s not clear how widely this is being used. More importantly, are the scenarios considering all plausible futures? For example, none describes a world in which traffic volumes fall – but over the long to medium term, it’s plausible that a successful decarbonisation programme will achieve just that – or more darkly, that an accelerating climate change will cause levels of disruption that will also reduce overall volumes. If we aren’t thinking broadly enough about the future, we are in danger of making investments that won’t offer value for money or achieve our goals.”

The eight professors who have come together as RISP to voice their concerns for the future of road investment are: Glenn Lyons (UWE Bristol –Panel chair); Steve Gooding (UWE Bristol – co-convenor); Jillian Anable (University of Leeds); Nicola Christie (University College London); Zoe Davies (University of Kent); Stephen Glaister (Imperial College London); Phil Goodwin (UWE Bristol) and Karen Lucas (University of Manchester).

Next steps

Read the Road Investment Scrutiny Panel (RISP) report.

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