Roads & Traffic

Roads have a poor reputation, but they are important: the vast majority of goods and people movement in this country occurs via road.  The point was made in chapter two: our roads are congested and unsafe.  Furthermore, under a ‘business as usual’ scenario, this will only get worse since traffic volumes in  all categories are expected to continue growing.  

But our road system comes under criticism from every direction.  Traffic volumes have grown year on year, far outstripping the growth in road capacity.  Much of the investment in this country’s highway system was made in the 60s and 70s; since then investment has stagnated, not only in road capacity but also in road maintenance.  The motorcycle lobby is especially vocal on this latter point—they feel the bumps on the road, with potentially fatal consequences.   Congestion ironically also creates capacity problems, due to lower travel speeds and the domino effect of incidents.  Just when the road network is asked to perform optimally, it performs at its worst.  

The highway network is criticised for its lack of redundancy.  If one of the main E-highways is closed due to an incident absolute chaos results since there are no suitable alternatives.  Drivers switch on their GPS en mass and within minutes clog up the secondary N-routes.  In recent years it has become increasingly common to observe the entire system come grinding down to a halt.  

In trying to come up with solutions, one can address both supply (infrastructure) and demand (for mobility), but either way one needs a solid understanding of demand (in order to design an optimal supply).  This too is an issue since the various ‘causes’ of demand all blame each other for being the main culprit.  Some stakeholders resist the expansion of Antwerp’s Port because the container traffic will cause gridlock on the Antwerp Ring.  But according to the Port’s own statistics, less than 5% of today’s traffic on the Ring has anything to do with the port.  Many people point to freight as the problem but the official statistics show that the personal car is still by far the dominant vehicle on the road.  The Federal Planning Bureau, in its analysis, expects the car to be the main cause of traffic growth toward 2030 (freight will grow rapidly too, but comes from a smaller base).  Yet others point to transit traffic.  Indeed the Brussels and Antwerp Ring roads are major international cross-roads, but the statistics for the network as a whole show that only about 14% of freight traffic (in km-ton) (1)  is pure transit.  Finally, a number of experts bemoan the absence of data in the mobility area, arguing that there is a lack of transparency in the way the various stakeholders go about collecting and analysing their data.  This is turn has led to (or is the result of) government policy that is more ideologically inspired as opposed to being scientifically informed.

Modal shift is the classic response to the road problem: shift freight to water and rail, and people to public transport.  To date, that approach has not been very effective.  Water, rail and public transport have succeeded in attracting more users, but in the bigger picture, market shares have not budged much.  This is partly because overall traffic volumes have increased significantly, but also—according to many stakeholders—because these alternatives have not managed to compete effectively against the low cost and flexibility of road transport.  Ironically, the fact that road is becoming a victim of its own success is increasing the cost of road transport for the user.   This is an important point to consider when assessing the possible merits of new road infrastructure or road pricing.  But first things first: what are the solutions being proposed today?

Today stakeholders look upon two broad approaches to tackling the road challenge: traffic management and new infrastructure.  Over the first there is a fair degree of consensus, over the second there is not. 

In the realm of traffic management various methods are currently being used and proposed to optimise the performance of the existing road network and, eventually, to manage demand for the road network.  The best equipped part of the road network today is the Antwerp Ring (Ghent is currently being equipped; the Brussels Ring is being studied).  According to the Flemish Traffic Centre, the key opportunity for traffic management is incident management.  Given the tremendous domino effect of incidents during congestion, it makes sense to introduce measures that help avoid and manage incidents more effectively.  Traffic management technology has been shown to be especially useful in preventing secondary incidents (accidents that happen in the tail of a traffic jam that itself was caused by an accident).   Technology can be used to spot incidents quickly (automatically) and to subsequently divert traffic proactively and reduce speed further upstream in the flow, so as to reduce the impact of the primary incident’s shockwave.  Lanes can also be freed up quickly to give access to emergency services.  Indeed, since the installation of the necessary detection and signalling equipment along the Antwerp Ring, the incidence of secondary accidents has almost disappeared.