Getting to the root of the problem

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Last week, the BBC reported on the ‘cost’ of traffic jams to Welsh businesses following an analysis by a private company of 30,500 traffic jams on Welsh roads during 2017.  There is undoubtedly a cost to traffic jams – that is beyond dispute.  There is the direct cost to businesses and individuals of the fuel used whilst vehicles are stopping and starting repeatedly, or even simply operating at below optimal speed.  I’m a lot less certain, though, about the approach to costing the time involved, which is based on some assumptions about the amount of time ‘wasted’ sitting in traffic. 

Merely multiplying the number of hours involved by the salary per hour of all the individuals is a difficult enough calculation in the first place, involving as it must some assumptions about salaries, purposes of trip etc.  But the value of that time to employers isn’t necessarily the same as the cost of it – indeed, if it were, then the viability of employing the individuals concerned would surely be a question which they should be asking.  In theory, any individual spending an hour at work should be generating more – significantly more – income for the employer than the cost of that hour to the employer.  But on the basis of observation and experience, to say nothing of the application of the Pareto Principle, let alone the culture of presenteeism which seems to pervade business, I seriously doubt that the reapplication of the hours involved to other activity would make as large a difference as is being assumed.

Leaving that aside, I’m more interested in the sub-text to this type of report, which is that eliminating traffic jams (presumably by building more roads – the picture of the Brynglas tunnels in the report and the emphasis on M4 bottlenecks gives us more than a small clue to the BBC’s agenda here) would somehow recover all this lost time and turn it into productive and profitable activity.  That in turn implies that the delays and obfuscation by governments in road-building are the ‘cause’ of all this lost time.  It isn’t the only possible conclusion though.  How much of that time is being lost, in truth, not because of lack of road capacity but because of hundreds of individual decisions to drive rather than take the train?  Is this ‘lost’ time all the fault of government for poor planning and execution of road construction, or is it the fault of people and businesses who insist on using roads rather than rail?