Road pricing could save us from chaos

Just 10 years ago, at the height of the biggest road-building programme in the UK since the Romans, the old Department of Transport produced an artist's impression of a future 16-lane M25. It was the ultimate engineering solution for a predict-and-provide policy for our roads. And it was so frightening that it was never allowed to see the light of day.

Today Transport Secretary Alistair Darling is expected to announce that the M25, which started life 27 years ago with six lanes and crept up to eight, is now going to rise to 10 in places. But where do we stop?

As the road's history shows, its very existence has stimulated journeys that people would not have made before, encouraged long distance commuting and seen every extra square metre of Tarmac filled with new traffic.

It is a vicious circle which if allowed to continue unchecked will make that artist's impression a reality. Already some parts of the road carry 200,000 vehicles a day. By 2016 there will be 10 per cent more people and 34 per cent more cars in the area.

But there is a problem. The CBI says that traffic congestion costs the UK up to £20billion a year. The UK has Europe's worst traffic congestion and the longest car commuting times. It lasts longer and blights more of our roads than anyone else's. And 40 per cent of it is within the M25.

I understand why the Government thinks it has no choice but to create extra capacity to improve journey times and give better reliability. But this time we need to break the cycle, ensuring that demand does not continue its historic patterns until we need to widen the road yet again.

Traffic growth is accelerating again and is outstripping economic growth. With the Government forecasting that motoring costs are going to be falling a further 20 per cent in the next 10 years (on current trends, public transport fares will rise by about the same) there is precious little price incentive for people to switch to public transport.

The RAC Foundation has said that without congestion charging we will either have to raise fuel duty fivefold or build five times the number of new roads in the current building programme and go on doing so for the next 30 years. Neither policy is feasible or desirable.

In the circumstances the M25 study consultants found that the only way to seriously reduce congestion, noise nuisance and pollution would be to introduce widespread congestion charging.

With such a scheme, journey times would be 16 per cent quicker and reliability 32 per cent higher than by simply widening the road. Without charging constraints, the benefits of widening will just evaporate - people will simply travel further to work or to go shopping.

That would not just be bad for motorists and hauliers, it would make all of us living in London and the South-East more cardependentit would make public transport less viable and it would run counter to efforts to improve social inclusion.

It would run contrary to the vision of London - a vibrant world city where it is a pleasure to work, shopping becomes a more relaxing experience and the capital's heritage can be enjoyed at leisure.

Our transport monitoring report, published earlier this week, shows that London is punching above its weight in contributing to Government transport targets.

Charging has so far achieved its congestion reduction target and we are witnessing record growth in bus and cycle use.

All the research I have seen shows that it is the cities that have promoted alternatives to the car and provided the most peoplefriendly environments which are the most popular to live and do business in.

So don't be taken in by the more extreme motoring pressure groups: road pricing should be welcomed as a bold and serious attempt to call time on the traffic congestion that is blighting the South-East, giving motorists a better deal and Londoners their city back.