Motorists are losing out thanks to a ‘misguided transport policy’ that has allowed investment into rail to outnumber road expenditure by ten to one, two campaign groups say.
New research produced jointly by the Drivers’ Alliance and the TaxPayers’ Alliance reveals that despite the huge amounts of tax paid by motorists, for every £10 of investment into rail, just £1 spent on roads, when actual usage is taken into account.
The alliances argue that this proves that while Westminster is focused on rail, road users are in fact being massively neglected. With public spending cuts looming large in the political agenda, the two alliance groups say that the case for prioritising cuts in rail expenditure over road spending, is necessary in order to keep congestion to a minimum.
Crucially, the research in based on the number of passenger kilometres travelled (and the number of tonne kilometres travelled in the case of freight transport), which means they take into account the number of people travelling and the distance of their journeys, to accurately reflect how the two modes of transport contribute to keeping Britain moving.
Key findings include that in the year 2007-08 spending on rail came to £8.2 billion and total road spending was £8.3 billion but during the same period only 59 billion passenger kilometres were travelled by rail, compared to 749 billion by road. This meant total spending per 1000 passenger km was £138.7 for rail and £11.1 for road. Therefore rail transport received 10 times more spending per passenger km compared to road transport.
There was a similar pattern in freight transport, where rail received eight times more spending per tonne kilometre.
Motorists pay £30.3 billion in Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty, £18.4 billion more than the combined total cost of road transport greenhouse gas emissions and road spending, the research concluded.
Peter Roberts, Chief Executive at the Drivers’ Alliance, said:” We desperately need to prioritise roads before rail if congestion is to be tackled. Adding road capacity is cost effective and provides genuine savings in journey times for the majority of individuals, goods and services. Spending vast sums of drivers’ taxes on extravagant rail projects will not address the immediate transport problems we have in the UK.”
Jennifer Dunn, Policy Analyst with the Drivers Alliance and the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Motorists are getting a really raw deal thanks to the Government’s misguided transport policy. Drivers suffer a double whammy – they pay huge amounts of tax, and only receive a disproportionately small share of transport spending. Continuing to neglect the road system and tax motorists to the hilt cannot be an option if we want to stand any chance of having a decent transport network.”
However the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) slammed the call for cuts in rail spending and for more roads. Stephen Joseph, the organisation’s executive director, said: “Cutting railways back would be the worst possible way of helping motorists. Without railways, many of our cities would grind to a halt and there would be many more juggernaughts. And all the evidence is that road building projects are incredibly expensive and lead to more traffic. This is a recipe for more congestion, casualties and pollution.”
The CBT criticised the new research, stating that it ‘ignores and omits’ several key points, including that rail spending is high at present because of ‘historic underinvestment’, which is now slowly being put right. Additionally several road costs are not included in the calculations such as the cost of casualties, pollution and policing, as well as the cost of congestion itself. On these figures, ‘road users are undertaxed rather than overtaxed’ the organisation said.
