648kbRecent Transport Research
The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and the Countryside Agency (one of Natural England's founding bodies) jointly funded research into the post-opening evaluation of road schemes.
The research looks at three case studies, the Polegate Bypass (East Sussex), Newbury Bypass (Berkshire) and the M65 Blackburn Southern Bypass (Lancashire). Researchers compared the information in the appraisal of each scheme with the actual impacts that occurred following scheme opening, focusing on the roads’ impacts on landscape, traffic flow and development. In addition, the study team examined ten of the twelve existing ‘one year after’ studies undertaken by the Highways Agency on other trunk road schemes.
The research concludes that road evaluation and policy are failing to learn from the experience of past schemes, and that road building has impacts on landscape, traffic flow and development that are not accounted for when schemes are planned and appraised.
The research found that there is a lack of resources and priority that is given to post-project evaluation. In 2004/05 the total cost of evaluation by the Highways Agency is only 0.1% of the £507m spent on road improvements, and many of the reports currently remain unpublished. Evaluation data from local authorities is also hard to come by. This makes the chances of such studies informing transport and roads policy slim.
Careful analysis of the data from the case studies and ‘one year after’ studies shows that monitoring and evaluation should have a higher profile, for there are important lessons to learn.
Traffic flows in all three case studies were near or higher than those predicted for the road in 2010. Re-distributional effects of traffic caused by the construction of bypasses were undermined by overall increases in traffic. The consultants conclude that damage to landscapes can be ‘severe’ and lasting, while new roads can help generate development pressures which are often not anticipated in spatial plans.
The report contains specific proposals for improving the profile of road evaluation studies, ensuring they are made available to all and ultimately reach Ministers’ desks.
Both the summary and full report are available as PDFs, which can be downloaded by clicking on the link at the top right hand side of this page. The summary report is also available from CPRE.
