Motoring Boss Questions Whether U.K.’s £27 Billion Road Plans Can Survive Virus Crisis

According to lockdown-related mobility data released by Google on March 29, retail- and recreation-based motor traffic on Britain’s roads is down by 85%. If U.K. residents get used to reduced car usage it could have a greater impact on road transport than anything else transport related that has happened in the last 50 years, believes the President of the U.K’s Automobile Association, Edmund King.

He does not think motorists will go “binge driving” after the lifting of restrictions imposed to halt the spread of the coronavirus:

“Once this crisis is over, it could have the opposite effect—rather than everyone jumping into their cars, I think some people might begin to think, ‘do I really need to use my car every day?’”

He may be the head of a motoring organization—the U.K. equivalent of the U.S. “Triple A”—but he is acclimatizing to working from home, and driving less.

“I’ve got used to walking more, and I have found that I can work from home pretty efficiently. I don’t need to drive up to Birmingham [from London] to have that meeting, because technology has shown that I can share my screen, I can share documents, I can see my colleagues [via video conferencing].”

He’s gaining a greater understanding that driving to remote meetings at “great expense” is an “inconvenience” and a “waste of my time.”

While many people don’t have jobs that can be done from home, the coronavirus crisis is a lightbulb moment for some individuals and the companies they work for. And, after the crisis is over, if those people continued working from home that would have a noticeable effect on road use, believes King.

“[The lockdown] is showing that not everybody needs to be an office five days a week. And even if they work from home one day a week that would have an immense potential effect on traffic levels, on congestion, on air quality, on pollution.”

And if there are fewer people on the roads of the future there’s less need to build new ones, calling into question the U.K. government’s £27 billion road plans.

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“We will still need transport investment, but the question is, can we afford for it to be on the scale that it was before this crisis?” King told me by Skype.

“It will be interesting to see the traffic flows after this crisis [has subsided]. If it’s found they have changed radically, then investment [in roads] should be based on true reflections of what’s happening in the real world.”

The Department for Transport’s National Transport Model currently assumes that motor traffic will increase by up to 50% by 2050, and that therefore more new roads will need to be built to meet this supposed demand, and at great expense. This “investment” in roads may not seem quite such a necessity in the post-coronavirus future.

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With the U.K. government discovering in the last fortnight that there is, indeed, a “magic money tree,” ways will have to be found to pay for the branches being shook so vigorously. It’s probable that the long-awaited Spending Review, due in November, will scale back many pre-coronavirus political promises. And planning to splash £27 billion on new roads could be one of the casualties.

“We will still need investment in our transport infrastructure no matter what,” says King, who has been president of the AA since 2008.

“We still have potholes on our roads and there is still under investment by about £8 billion in terms of the infrastructure that is important to everyone, not just drivers, but people on two wheels, too.”

But King recognizes that the government will have some “tough choices” to make about spending priorities going forward and that the roads budget—based on projected travel demand that may not exist in the future—might have to be pruned back radically.

“A lot of extra money is going into the NHS to make it run more efficiently. There isn’t a bottomless pit,” he says.

“The majority of people are not going to get rid of their cars, but if they use them less, and use them more sensibly, then that’s better for all of us,” he adds.

Reducing car use is “something [the AA] has long advocated for,” says King.

“You may own a car, but you don’t need to use it every day. I own a car but I also have a bicycle. I also have a season ticket for the railways and public transport within London—I make [travel] decisions on what is the best decision for that journey.”