I was talking to a regional bus company MD recently and they told me that their roadworks log typically stacks up 1,000 entries every year. Roadworks are bad for drivers but terrible for buses. Where as car users blame ‘the traffic’, bus users blame ‘the buses’. As a result, roadworks cause traffic jams that can result in bus users becoming car users, even though both vehicles get caught in the same jam.
So doing something about roadworks feels like a good idea.
WHY DO WE HAVE SO MANY ROADWORKS?
Laypeople tend to lump them all together as roadworks (and for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to just use the phrase roadworks), but the main problem is actually what is known as ‘streetworks’ (i.e. utilities digging up the streets). Roadworks officially means works to the road itself. The fundamental reason we have so many roadworks is that there is very little incentive on the utilities not to dig up the road. The utility privatisations of the late 80s and early 90s were sweetened by making it as easy as possible for the newly created firms to access their infrastructure. The New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 only requires utilities to make ‘best endeavours’ to minimise inconvenience. Without clear rules or commercial incentives, utilities dig up the same stretches of road over and over again.
LANE RENTAL
Various solutions to this problem have been put forward, but the one I like is Lane Rental. As with my enthusiasms for competition in the long-distance sector and national road pricing, I like solutions that create incentives as opposed to fixed rules. If the incentives are powerful enough, people will figure out the solutions. Lane Rental is a great incentive: it puts a price on the inconvenience utilities cause by digging up the road, thus incentivising them to find solutions. And – theoretically – Lane Rental is just around the corner (though, unfortunately, the corner’s been dug up – so it may take us several years to get there…)