The economic costs of road traffic congestion

The main cause of road traffic congestion is that the volume of traffic is too close to the maximum capacity of a road or network. Congestion in the UK is worse than many, perhaps most, other European countries. More important, it is getting worse, year by year. Current official forecasts imply that congestion will be substantially worse by the end of this decade, even on the very favourable assumption that all current Government projects and policies are implemented in full, successfully, and to time. This is because road traffic is growing faster than road capacity. This is not a temporary problem: it will continue to be the case, in the absence of measures to reduce traffic, because it is infeasible to match a road programme to unrestricted trends in traffic growth. The effect, using the current Government method of measuring congestion, and a long established method of valuing it, would be that the widely quoted figure of an annual cost of £20 billion, would increase to £30 billion by 2010. Under current social and economic frameworks, there are no feasible policies that could reduce congestion to zero in practice, or that would be worthwhile