The House of Commons Transport Committee is carrying out an inquiry into the Major Road Network.   I had submitted a memorandum and on 20 May attended by invitation to give oral evidence.   The points I made reflected some of the ideas set out in ‘The Limits to Travel’.   

One of my contentions was that road pricing was unlikely to be the solution to traffic congestion on the national road system.  Quite apart from the technical difficulties, political unpopularity would rule it out.  Such unpopularity was to be expected since those priced off the network by the charges would experience a loss of access and choice of destinations, and so would vote against, as in the recent referendum in Manchester.   So what do we do about congestion?  Recognise that the main problem is uncertainty about journey time and deal with that directly by using IT to provide travellers with sufficiently accurate predictions before they set out on their trip (see Chapter 8 of ‘The Limits…’).

Recently I met John Holland and Richard Jelbert of Journey Dynamics, a UK firm in the business of providing traffic and travel information that would meet this very purpose.  This technology is claimed to provide journey time predictions with 90% accuracy, taking account of individual driving style and incidents on the road network.  Interestingly, historic traffic data suffices, without the need for real time data.  It seems to me that this and similar technological approaches have considerable promise.