Life is full of mysteries. While many people love a good mystery on TV or in a book, the ones we encounter in real life can be far less entertaining. Take traffic congestion, for example. Why is it that we can sit in a motorway queue for half an hour only to find, when the traffic begins to flow freely again, that there is no indication of what caused the delay?
Official figures for 2023 show that the overall volume of traffic on our roads in the year to the end of September 2023 was 1.4 percent below pre-Covid levels from 2019. On A roads, an even greater reduction of 3.5 percent was recorded. Despite those lower traffic levels, average 2023 traffic speed on A roads and motorways was 3.5 percent slower than in 2019.
"In early 2024, the AA said that commuters were spending almost 5 percent more time in morning traffic and 7.5 percent more in the evenings because of traffic congestion.
Where's the problem?
Analysis by accident compensation experts Claims.co.uk revealed which UK local authority areas suffered worst from traffic congestion in 2022. The table below shows the 25 most congested areas ranked.
| Most congestion by local authority 2022 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | Local Authority | Total volume of vehicle traffic miles (millions) | |
| 1 | Hampshire | 9,232.28 | |
| 2 | Essex | 9,409.92 | |
| 3 | Surrey | 8,290.06 | |
| 4 | Kent | 9,165.25 | |
| 5 | Lancashire | 7,054.98 | |
| 6 | Warwickshire | 5,850.14 | |
| 7 | Staffordshire | 5,873.78 | |
| 8 | Leeds | 4,067.53 | |
| 9 | Derbyshire | 5,304.63 | |
| 10 | Leicestershire | 5,062.10 | |
| 11 | Birmingham | 3,583.94 | |
| 12 | Nottinghamshire | 4,766.51 | |
| 13 | Cambridgeshire | 5,012.84 | |
| 14 | West Sussex | 4,151.60 | |
| 15 | Norfolk | 5,278.74 | |
| 16 | Oxfordshire | 4,572.00 | |
| 17 | South Gloucestershire | 2,554.22 | |
| 18 | Worcestershire | 4,351.56 | |
| 19 | Devon | 5,771.43 | |
| 20 | Buckinghamshire | 3,939.52 | |
| 21 | West Northamptonshire | 3,652.70 | |
| 22 | Hillingdon | 1,431.37 | |
| 23 | North Yorkshire | 5,301.12 | |
| 24 | Gloucestershire | 4,248.66 | |
| 25 | Cardiff | 1,917.42 | |
What's the hold up?
On the face of it, that combination of less traffic but more congestion seems pretty mysterious. It has certainly baffled a few experts.
The RAC's Simon Williams said, "With more people than ever working from home at least part of the week and no growth in the number of cars on the road since then, we’re struggling to see what the cause can be other than roadworks."
Mr Williams was right to raise the subject of roadworks - more about that later - but other causes have also been cited as contributing factors to the fact that we are spending more time stuck in our cars.
National Highways said more vans and lorries on the roads were slowing traffic down. Oddly, that seems to contradict government statistics for 2022 to 2023 showed little change in the amount of van traffic on the roads (around 57.8 billion vehicle miles), and a 2.5 percent decrease in lorry traffic (to 16.9 billion vehicle miles) during the same period. Meanwhile, car traffic increased by 3.0% to 251.3 billion vehicle miles in 2023.
Some congestion is clearly seasonal: in the South West, major routes and local roads often creak under the flood of tourists heading for Devon and Cornwall. Music festivals can also cause issues as they attract many thousands of people into a small area. As most of those people arrive by car, congestion is inevitable. But even outside of holiday and festival season, we still sit in traffic queues.
Apart from the volume and nature of the traffic on our roads, commentators have pointed to speed-reduction measures and the woeful state of the UK's public transport networks as additional factors contributing to road delays.
Men at work
One, very obvious, and seemingly ubiquitous, cause of delays is roadworks. Government estimates put the total length of roads in the UK at approximately a quarter of a million miles (more than the distance from Earth to the moon). It sometimes feels as if most of those miles are being coned off and dug up.
A Freedom of Information request by breakdown service provider Green Flag showed that nearly 20,000 miles of road were subject to roadworks in 2021. Green Flag's research also provided a ranking table showing which local authorities carried out the most roadworks.
| Most roadworks by local authority 2021 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | Local authority | Proportion of roads work on | Total length of roads worked on (miles) |
| 1 | Camden | 44 per cent | 77 |
| 2 | Isles of Scilly | 42 per cent | 9 |
| 3 | Reading | 21 per cent | 52 |
| 4 | Vale of Glamorgan | 13 per cent | 73 |
| 5 | Stoke on Trent | 12 per cent | 66 |
| 6 | Hounslow | 9 per cent | 28 |
| 7 | Blackpool | 9 per cent | 25 |
| 8 | Renfrewshire | 8 per cent | 49 |
| 9 | Dorset | 7 per cent | 173 |
| 10 | East Riding of Yorkshire | 7 per cent | 142 |
| 11 | All Great Britain | 8 per cent | 19,148 |
We who complain about roadworks are often the same people who complain about the state of our roads. To be fair, we can't really expect road surfaces to be repaired and upgraded without roadworks. It's frustrating that, despite the constant digging-up of our roads, they still seem to be in a sorry state. That may be partially explained by the fact that not all roadworks are carried out for road maintenance purposes. Our favourite river and sea polluting villains, the water companies, regularly dig up our roads, as do utility providers, phone and internet providers and more.
A heavy toll
We should probably be asking why the state of the road network has been allowed to deteriorate so badly that most of it seems to be in need of repair. The answer will, no doubt, be cost. The harsh reality is that if we want usable transport infrastructure, be it roads or public transport, then it's going to cost money - a lot of money - and, one way or another, we're going to have to pay for it. How that is going to happen is down to politicians. They will be criticised if they divert funds from other areas and they will be criticised if they raise taxes. It's difficult to see quite how that dilemma will be resolved, but resolved it must be if our transport system is to function.
