Speed Camera Racket and HS2 Costs

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The Daily Telegraph have published a couple of good articles today (13/11/2022). The first is entitled “The Great Speed-Camera Racket” and covers how 1.74 million drivers were caught speeding by cameras last year and forked out almost £46 million in fines.

The author describes how it is so easy to miss the new 20 mph limits in London and includes this comment: “If only speed limits were the end of it. But they’re not. Blundering into ever-expanding low-traffic neighbourhoods (fine), congestion zones (fine) or emissions zones (fine); bus lanes that suddenly rear out of the side of the road (fine); yellow box junctions set up like fiendish games of chance (fine) – it can all seem like a confusing, infuriating lottery in reverse. Instead of low odds you’ll win, there are high odds you’ll lose. Single streets – like Lansdowne Drive in Hackney – have earned councils more than £1m in just a few months”.

According to AA President Edmond King: “Most scandalous of all is a yellow box junction on Bagleys Lane and New King’s Road in SW6 where drivers cannot see if the exit is clear before entering the dreaded cross-hatched area”.

Comment: Certainly speed cameras, yellow box junctions and all the other restrictions on drivers are there to raise money and there is no evidence that they improve road safety. Road casualties in the last ten years in the UK have only fallen slightly and the reduction can be explained by better vehicle design, improved roads (with accident black spots being treated) and improved medical treatments.

There is no justification for all the expensive enforcement action that is now deployed with people innocent of any criminal intent being pursued.

Telegraph article on speed cameras: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/13/great-speed-camera-racket/

The other good article is on the cost of HS2. To quote from it: “HS2 will cost taxpayers more than the benefits it will deliver, the Government has admitted for the first time. Analysis conducted by civil servants found that the rail project will now deliver just 90 pence in economic benefit for every £1 it costs, raising fresh questions about its existence ahead of this week’s Autumn Statement”.

Comment: We have always opposed the construction of HS2 because it was never justified on a cost/benefit analysis and that was before construction costs ballooned to unaffordable levels. It was always a white elephant that benefits mainly wealthy Londoners while ridership figures are hopelessly optimistic. The money would be better spent on other projects and at present the country simply cannot afford over £100 billion on such vanity projects that are also environmentally damaging. It is not too late to cancel this project.

Telegraph article on HS2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/11/12/hs2-will-cost-taxpayers-economic-benefits-will-deliver-government/  

Roger Lawson

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We Are All Doomed…..Maybe

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The media reports on COP27 suggest we are all doomed as it is unlikely that we will keep to the target of 1.5 degrees of global warming. This is an unduly pessimistic outcome. A rise in temperature can actually be beneficial in many parts of the world, if damaging in others.

It is certainly sensible to try and reduce carbon emissions in the long-term but there needs to be a cost/benefit justification and a focus on countries that are the biggest carbon emitters – namely China, India, USA, and Russia. For the UK to aim for net zero makes no economic sense.

Meanwhile the UK Government has committed £11.6 billion to a “climate fund” to support a mix of energy transition, climate financing and forest and nature preservation measures. Some of these may be worthy objects but can the country really afford many billions on such projects when our own population is suffering from shortages of food and heating?

There is also a demand for “reparations” for the damage that has been caused by high carbon emissions that has resulted in floods and droughts. That is debateable to begin with and it ignores the benefits brought to the world by the cheap energy available from oil and gas. That has increased food production and enabled the world population to increase to a level that would otherwise have starved. See the book “How the World Really Works” by Prof. Vaclav Smil for the evidence on this subject. Reparations should certainly therefore be rejected.

I am certainly not supportive of the Just Stop Oil campaigners who are simply irrational and I will personally continue to invest in oil/gas companies but not in coal mining companies while I have been investing in alternative energy funds. Burning coal is a bad option in comparison with generating electricity from wind farms, hydro-electric schemes, solar arrays and other projects.

But we do need to reduce the world’s population if we are to improve the environment which is an objective most of the climate campaigners simply ignore.

How to stop the Just Oil Campaign who disrupted the M25 again today? One thing the Government could do to demoralise and undermine that campaign is simply to publicly announce that the Government will not be changing its mind and will continue to grant new licences for oil/gas production.

They should not just rely on tougher legislation and more active policing to halt such disruptive campaigns which I am sure the vast majority of people oppose. Those who think we can do without oil and gas are simply mistaken because they have not looked into the many uses of those products.

Roger Lawson

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Stopping Just Stop Oil

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The Just Stop Oil campaign is causing major disruption to the road network in London. This is in reality a terrorist organisation aiming to achieve their objectives by other than democratic means. But they now face a new measure to frustrate their activities.

Transport for London (TfL) have obtained a court injunction which is wide in scope to stop them – see https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/injunction-order-18

It covers blocking, slowing down, obstructing or otherwise interfering with the flow of traffic onto or along or off the specified roads for the purpose of protesting. The roads specified include several of the Thames bridges and major arterial roads such as Victoria Embankment, Park Lane, Elephant and Castle, Rotherhithe and Blackwall Tunnels.

This is a good step to stop these unnecessary and disruptive demonstrations as breaching a court injunction is a contempt of court to which severe penalties can be invoked. Protestors can be arrested if they breach the injunction and held until they appear in court.

It just needs the police to take vigorous action which for reasons that are unclear they have seemed reluctant to do in the past.  

The despicable activities of Just Stop Oil need to be stopped by all legal means possible.

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A New Money Making Wheeze for London Councils

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The London Borough of Wandsworth has obtained permission to enforce 20 Mph speed limits by the use of PCN fines. This will be a trial scheme for 8 months using an Experimental Traffic Order. The money raised will go to the Council so this is just another scam to extract money from motorists like the LTN cameras now being used.

Previously only the police could issue fines for speeding and the money then goes to the Government Treasury. Or the police could offer a speed awareness course which is a way they finance their own operations.

Wandsworth Council say that traffic studies found that one in four vehicles broke the speed limit in Priory Lane and one in five in Wimbledon Park Road. But that surely just demonstrates that a 20 limit is inappropriate for those roads or the roads need re-engineering. There is no evidence given of excessive road safety problems.

These were quotations given in the Evening Standard: “The AA has said that speeding should not be dealt with ‘like a parking ticket’. Speeding enforcement should not become “fishing trips” to secure money for councils,’ a spokesman told the Evening Standard. Drivers will be rightly concerned that speeding fines will be more about filling council coffers than keeping roads safe, Joe Ventre, from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, also told the newspaper”.

Residents of Wandsworth should submit objections to the Council but this scheme will undoubtedly spread to other boroughs if it is not opposed. It should never have been approved by central Government.

P.S. There is minimal information on this scheme on the Wandsworth Council web site and no Experimental Traffic Order related to it was obviously present on the London Registry as there should be so we submitted an FOI Act request to the Council.

P.P.S. The answers to my FOI request suggest that the Traffic Order was published in December 2021 in a local newspaper and in the London Gazette with only a few weeks allowed for objections, but not many people are likely to have read those sources. I am still looking into the legality of the Traffic Order.

Roger Lawson

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LTNs Don’t Work and Lunacy in Oxford

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An article in The Times today (24/10/2022) showed LTNs don’t work under the headline “London LTNs: Councils that closed rat runs now have even more cars on the road”. It said “Councils that implemented low-traffic neighbourhoods during the pandemic have seen bigger increases in car use than boroughs that did not, according to government driving statistics”.

The explanation is probably that when roads are closed off the displaced traffic simply takes longer routes and hence does more miles.

Meanwhile in Oxford a group called “Reconnecting Oxford” which represents several campaigns is mounting a legal challenge against the existing LTN and raising money for the fight – see https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-end-road-closures-in-oxford and here: https://reconnectingoxford.weebly.com/

But the Council is fighting back with plans to divide the city into six districts from next August with strict rules on how often motorists can drive outside their neighbourhood. Everybody who owns a car would need a permit and if they drive into an adjacent district more than a few times per year they would get fined.

This must be one of the most extreme anti-car measures implemented anywhere. A YouGov poll suggests that most people support these measures. But like all such polls the questions posed are misleading. Most people, including car drivers, would like less traffic but they are opposed to closing roads, particularly the ones they use.

Roger Lawson

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Fraudulent Traffic Counts and Enfield LTN

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The following article has been written by Michael De Haan, a local resident:

Do people enjoy being deceived by Enfield Council ? It turns out that the traffic surveys done by Enfield for their post LTN data applied a filter so that it did not count any vehicles moving at less than 10km per hour. The individual road reports show not a single vehicle on any road doing less than this speed. Given the congestion introduced by the LTNs this is highly unlikely. This means that the figure quoted for the percentage increase in traffic on the boundary roads should be close to double that reported in the Fox Lane Final Report.

These falsely low figures were also the ones used to generate the pollution models. I have been in contact with the manufacturers of the equipment used (MetroCount) and they say the equipment, which relies on two rubber tubes strung across the road, is recommended to only be used in FREE FLOWING traffic. When you introduce congestion, and vehicles stop with their wheels between or bridging the tubes, or they do not travel over the tubes fast enough, the vehicles are simply not counted. Preparing a report with a 10km filter from this raw data increases the number of vehicles not counted. In severe congestion, where cars only shuffle forwards a couple of car lengths at a time you will not count 25% of the cars (that’s one in every four). Even in milder congestion where cars move forwards 10 car lengths at a time you will miss 5% of vehicles (one in every 20). On 6th July 2021 Transport Survey Systems, the company employed by Enfield Council, did what are known as “Turning Surveys” at four junctions on four of the Fox Lane LTN boundary roads. These surveys video the traffic for 12hrs and the number of vehicles manually counted. This was during a week when the same company were also surveying the same roads with the Automatic Traffic Count (ATC) tubes. By comparing the data you can show the ATC tubes didn’t count nearly 3000 vehicles that were manually counted over the 12hr period. This represents 5.4% of the total traffic over this 12hr period that was simply NOT COUNTED. As there was an hourly breakdown of the figures you can show the number of missed vehicles increases in direct proportion to the level of congestion.

Nearly all surveying of LTNs over London use this method. If there is little or no congestion at the count points, pre LTN, the number of vehicles counted will be fairly accurate. If the LTN creates congestion at the count points then the post LTN survey will simply not count a proportion of the vehicles. Maybe this is what is meant by traffic evaporation?

Comment: It is well known that measuring traffic congestion based on traffic counts is a defective method. The only safe way to measure traffic congestion is to time a trip when there is no significant delays (e.g. in the middle of the night) and compare it to the travel time in busier periods. To allow for odd incidents or delays, the average of several trips needs to be taken. This was the method used by TfL when initially reporting on the effect of the Congestion Charge.

That showed that there was no benefit in the Congestion Charge in terms of reduced congestion and TfL subsequently ceased publishing similar reports for obvious reasons. See this web page for more analysis of the Congestion Charge and its impact: https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/congestion

Note that a campaign group  against the LTNs in Enfield are going to the High Court on the 25th October as part of a legal challenge. See https://www.gofundme.com/f/stop-the-ltn039s-fox-lane-amp-enfield and here: https://stopfoxlaneltn.org/

Roger Lawson

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ULEZ Money Generation

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We have always argued that the ULEZ scheme was mainly about generating tax money for the Mayor of London, not about reducing air pollution. And so it has turned out to be based on an analysis by the RAC.

They report that the income from non-compliant vehicles was £112 million in the eight months after the scheme was expanded in November 2021 plus over £130 million in penalty charges from those who don’t pay.

Head of Roads Policy at the RAC said “The expansion of the ULEZ has resulted in a much-increased revenue stream for Transport for London, notwithstanding the costs associated with introducing the larger ULEZ. Londoners living outside the current ULEZ will now be worrying about the prospect of further expansion……While we accept that action is needed to reduce toxic emissions from vehicles, the cost-of-living crisis is hurting drivers in the pocket and there is a risk that further enlarging the zone will be hugely costly for those with older vehicles who can least afford to change them for something newer”.

In April 2020 we said this about the ULEZ expansion: “It would be simply madness to proceed with the ULEZ expansion based on what we now know. But the Mayor is now so desperate for money that he might increase the proposed charge, expand the zone even further, or class even more vehicles as “non-compliant”. See https://freedomfordrivers.blog/2020/04/15/ulez-the-latest-information-including-poor-financial-outcome/ for the analysis done at the time on which those comments were based.

The ULEZ is another example of the financial incompetence of Mayor Sadiq Khan which is imposing enormous costs on Londoners.

Roger Lawson

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FFDF Web Site Redeveloped – A Big Improvement!

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The Freedom for Drivers Foundation web site (www.freedomfordrivers.org) has been redeveloped using Wix (see home page photo below). The content has not been revised but the layout has been improved and it now supports mobile devices much better. After 15 years this is a major improvement and will form a better basis for future marketing activities.

It has been carefully checked out but if you notice any problems with the new site or have suggestions for improvements please let us know by using the Contact tab on the new web site ( https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/contact ).

We will continue to oppose the unreasonable restrictions placed on law-abiding drivers and the ways local councils and TfL are extracting money from vehicle owners using false arguments.

The new web site is of course supported by news coverage on our blog, and our social media (primarily on Twitter and Facebook). But we also publish a bi-monthly newsletter which you can register for here: https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/newsletters . Registration means you will be sent emails on any new public consultations to which you should respond and information on meetings we are holding.

The web site development did cost us some money so please make a donation to support this and our other activities – go here: https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/donate . We need to continue to inform people about the duplicitous activities of politicians on transport issues.

Roger Lawson

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Transport Disruptions and How to Stop Them

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In the South-East of England we are suffering from major transport disruptions. First from rail strikes affecting London commuters and second by the activities of Just Stop Oil on the road network.

The RMT union have announced further strikes on November 3, 5 and 7 and are balloting their members on pursuing them for another six months. I issued a tweet yesterday which suggested the way to stop these strikes was to give an ultimatum to employees to either work normally or get fired. The problem is that train drivers are so highly paid that a few days out is affordable.

Rather surprisingly I got a response from the RMT which said “In your haste to sound draconian you’ve not considered who would staff the railway or train the replacements if you’ve fired them all? Nothing would move for years!!”.

My response was “Well it worked when Ronald Reagan did it for air traffic controllers, did it not?”. This refers to the events in August 1981 in the USA. To quote from Wikipedia: “After PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work [over a pay dispute], the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life. In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the difficult task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired. Under normal conditions, it took three years to train new controllers. Until replacements could be trained, the vacant positions were temporarily filled with a mix of non-participating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non-rated personnel, military controllers, and controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities”.

The US airlines continued operations with minimal disruptions and the Reagan move had a significant impact on union activities in other organisations effectively resetting labour relationships in the USA. Strikes fell in subsequent years. From 370 major strikes in 1970 the number fell to 11 in 2010, and it had a positive effect in reducing inflation.

Just as Margaret Thatcher handled the coal miners in the UK, Reagan’s firm resolve on facing up to the unions created a new and better culture.

As regards the Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaign the closure of the Dartford Bridge created enormous traffic jams and delayed people for many hours. The whole of south-east London was affected as many people commute around the M25. The Metropolitan Police tweeted they had “made 404 arrests linked to JSO activity. We have needed nearly 5500 officer shifts diverted from local communities in London, to deal with the serious disruption caused by this activity”. The total cost including the delays to people must be many millions of pounds.

The Police seem to be totally ineffective in stopping the activities of JSO. People get arrested but then released. Fines, if any, are minimal. There is a Bill currently going through Parliament that might assist – The Public Order Bill – see https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/bills/2022-23/publicorder . It creates a number of new offences relating to “locking-on”, obstructing major transport works and interfering with the use or operation of key national infrastructure. It also confers preventative powers for the police to search for and seize articles related to protest-related offences and provides for a new preventative court order, the Serious Disruption Prevention Order, to disrupt the activities of repeat offenders”. But will it be applied vigorously?

The Police already have considerable powers that are not used and JSO could be proscribed as a “terrorist organisation” as they meet the criteria. Let us hope the Public Order Bill is passed quickly. But it’s really down to the Government to take a lead on this matter even if they may be distracted by financial matters at present.

Peaceful demonstrations are OK but disruption to normal life should not be permitted under any circumstances.

Roger Lawson

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Holborn Gyratory Redesign and Public Consultation

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The Holborn gyratory in London has been the scene of some fatal accidents to cyclists so the London Borough of Camden is proposing some changes to improve safety. But the changes proposed are somewhat trivial in nature although they are likely to reduce the capacity of the roads and hence increase traffic congestion and air pollution. There is no information provided on any modelling of traffic flows that might have been done.

The changes include the right turn lane on Kingsway northbound being changed into a right turn only into Remnant Street which is surely a bit odd.

These changes might benefit cyclists but they prejudice all other road users. More substantive changes are surely required to really solve the road safety problems in this area.

Go here for more details and to respond to the consultation:  https://consultations.wearecamden.org/supporting-communities/high-holborn-drake-street-proctor-street/

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