How do you go about establishing the cost:benefit of upgrading the A303 to dual carriageway?
How do you determine if the cost is affordable?
What do we actually mean by "cost" and "affordability"?
These are more than just semantic questions because, to a large extent, they should underpin the entire A303 feasibility study now underway.
We would argue that while both "cost" and "affordability" clearly have major financial components, there are many other non-financial issues that need to be taken into consideration when determining the feasibility of any solution to the A303's problems. This is a topic we will be re-examining from time to time over the coming months, but this week, we've had the opportunity to look at a couple of the issues - financial cost and national infrastructure resilience, in a slightly different way. Why? Well, Network Rail were able to reopen the main Exeter to Penzance railway line, through Dawlish, to South Devon and Cornwall after the damage wreaked by the February storms.
The line was closed for 8 weeks and the repairs are said to have costed £35 million - but what does that really mean.
Shortly after the first storm ripped the coastal track apart, two other events happened that impacted on travel to Devon and Cornwall from the rest of the UK. First there was flooding and a crash on the A303. Because of flooding on many of the roads to the north and south of the A303, there were no alternative diversions. The only option for westbound travellers was to backtrack to Wiltshire and head north for the M4.
Then the unthinkable happened - a crash on the westbound M4 closed that as well. We spoke to some fairly senior Highways Agency chaps a couple of weeks ago, who volunteered that the agencies involved in clearing this accident from the carriageway had been put under an immense amount of pressure to do so - and to do it damn quickly. Mother Nature and Murphy's Law had combined to make the point that the national transport infrastucture to the west of England was not exactly resilient. For a couple of hours there was no usable, direct east-west route across the south of England. OK, it was only for a couple of hours, but even that ought to make people sit up and think seriously about transport resilience. Every time the A303 is at a standstill, one third of the strategic routes to the West Country are not operational. The same is true for the rail route and the M4/M5.
So what financial value do these routes have? Is it possible to make a stab at the financial impact the rail closure has had? Well yes, it is and folks in Devon and Cornwall have been doing just that. Visit Devon reckons that the tourist industry in Devon has lost around £31 million over the eight weeks closure. Visit Cornwall reckons the loss to the Cornish tourist industry has been around £18 million.
The financial loss jusst to the city of Plymouth has been estimated at £1 million pounds a day - another £50 million. Plymouth has a population of over quarter of a million. As the population of Devon runs to over a million souls and Cornwall another half a million, then the pro-rata costs of losing the Exeter to Penzance line for 8 weeks has probably been in excess of £400 million, or £50 million a week. So the financial value of 1/3 of the strategic routes into the West of England is £50 million per week - just for Devon and Cornwall.
If each of the three routes is equally valuable, then the same thinking could be applied to the A303 - which also passes through Wiltshire and Somerset and the problems on it affect both those counties too. Lets be conservative though and halve the financial impact of the A303 on the residents of Somerset and Wiltshire, as we have more alternative north/south routes. That would increase the "value" of the A303 to the economy of the West of England to £70 million per week: £10 million per day.
So, as most traffic uses the A303 during the hours of daylight, the working day, that's roughly £1 million per hour. Next time you get delayed or stuck on the A303 for an hour or two, just think of what that delay is costing the economy - and then add in your own and your fellow travellers costs - and a sum to compensate for the inconvenience, the added pollution, the stress, and the list goes on.
Now, let's be honest here. We've taken figures snatched out of the air by others with no idea of their reliability, mixed them up with some fairly accurate demographics and then made a sweeping assumption about relative values of road and rail routes - at best a SWAG ( a scientific, wild-arsed guess). But if decisions are going to be made about the future of the A303 on "cost" grounds, then these are the very types of numbers that we should expect Government to be able to present - but in their case, with a full audit trail.
Anything less won't cut the mustard.
No comments:
Post a Comment