If you’ve ever watched Top Gear yopu know that buslane on the M4 is one of their bugbears, prime evidence of Labour’s war on the motorist and like Boris did with the bendy buses, the new ConDem(ned) government listens Top Gear and now wants to remove the lane. Stable and Principled shows why this is a bad idea. The money quote:
What was the result of the bus lane’s introduction? Well, the TRL report [PDF] on the scheme showed precisely what you’d expect – off peak journey times (unconstrained by the capacity problems of the elevated section) increased as a result of the speed limit, while peak journey times decreased by an average three minutes due to the removal of the merge – at peak times the traffic rarely gets near 60mph, so the reduced speed limit has no effect. At weekends the lower traffic volumes result in the speed limit becoming the limiting factor again, resulting in slower journey times. Overall, the peak hour reliability improvement more than cancels this out, however.
What, then, is the effect of removal? Well, unless they increase the speed limit, weekend and offpeak journeys will be the same as at present, while with the merge restored to the Piccadilly Line bridge, the peak journey times will extend and become less reliable as the road won’t be able to cope as well with perturbations due to the loss of capacity at this point. This, in fact, is precisely what you’d do if you wanted to declare war on the motorist and make my life more miserable.
Ideology trumps reality once again. Because The Sun and Top Gear hate the M4 buslane as a piece of motorist hating nannystate-ism, the Tories treat it as such, evidence be damned. So much for any hope that this new government would not be ruled by the tabloids.