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?
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