Proposals to drastically cut traffic jams including road pricing, autonomous vehicles and a single National Roads Authority have been set out by the Centre for Economics & Business Research (CEBR).

 

Its new report highlights that advances in technology present an opportunity to put an end to congestion while cutting the cost of motoring by around a third and reducing accidents by 90%.

 

Two clear technological trends are currently emerging when it comes to road usage, the document says. These are the shift away from fossil fuels as an energy source and the move towards autonomous self driving vehicles.

 

Together these will lead to reductions in the cost of driving and cut payments of fuel duties, opening the way for a new system of road pricing to be introduced which could ‘surge’ with congestion. A charging rate averaging about 8p per mile for a car should be introduced over the next 20 years, the report suggests.

 

CEBR predicts that under this model road users will save money overall because of reduced depreciation, fuel and insurance costs, while total spending on roads increases to at least £20Bn a year.

 

The report also encourages the establishment of a politically independent National Roads Authority to which control of the entire road system would be passed. This body would receive the charges levied on road users and reinvest them in the road system, it is proposed.

 

Furthermore the report suggests that non autonomous vehicles could start to be phased out on motorways as early as the 2030s. By the 2050s it adds that virtually all roads should be autonomous only while cyclists and pedestrians use fully segregated routes.

 

“We believe that apart from making roads less congested, cleaner and safer our approach should boost GDP by up to 3%,” the report concludes. “This prize is sufficiently large that we ought to be working hard to eliminate the obstacles to the solution so that these huge benefits to road users and non-road users can be achieved.”

 

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