Why opening up roads won’t relieve Hackney’s traffic congestion

​There are roads in Hackney which have long carried excessive amounts of motor traffic.  Think Graham Road, Dalston Lane, Balls Pond Road, or Homerton High Street. 

In fact, taking Graham Road as an example, residents there have been protesting the levels of motor traffic since at least the 1970s, and DfT say current traffic flows are actually below what they were at their last 'manual count' in 2018 (but still far, far too high).  44% of traffic on Hackney’s main roads is through-traffic that doesn’t start or end in the Borough. 

The exasperation of residents and bus users with the congested state of these roads is understandable, and desperation to find solutions can sometimes lead to people suggesting abandoning surrounding LTNs and opening up parallel routes. 

This seems logical, doesn’t it? More capacity means less congestion? But this solution would be doomed to failure. In this blogpost we explain why, and what should be done instead.
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When Transport Planners wanted to bulldoze Hackney for motorways

We have to start with a brief bit of history.  The number of cars on our streets has continuously risen since the dawn of the mass motoring age.  By 2019 there were around 12x more miles driven on UK roads than in 1949.  This situation is a result of policy choices that successive governments have made, sometimes without understanding their implications, to prioritise the car over alternative transport options. And when every policy prioritises the choice to drive, you can hardly blame people for choosing to drive in ever greater numbers.

In response to increasing traffic chaos in the 1960s, the government commissioned a report called ‘Traffic in Towns’, published in 1963, that set out how cities would have to change to accommodate the motor age.  The solutions were brutal:  Whole districts would need to be compulsorily purchased and levelled to make way for urban motorways to speed cars to their destinations.  A huge push to make driving faster, easier and more convenient.  

In light of this in London the GLC planned a new system of ‘Ringways’, urban motorways that would finally solve London’s traffic congestion. ‘Ringway 1’ the ‘North Cross Route’ (see picture below) would’ve been a huge urban motorway that ran along the alignment of, and then parallel to, Graham Road in Hackney.  It aimed to solve the increasing east/west traffic congestion.  It would have entailed huge scale demolition and left the whole centre of Dalston as a giant motorway junction. 

How Dalston town centre would've looked if Ringway 1 Had been constructed (Image: London Metropolitan Archives)

The route Ringway 1 would have taken in Hackney

​Thankfully this never got built, with only the ‘East Cross Route’ (M11 link to the Blackwall Tunnel) seeing the light of day in East London (incidentally a road which decimated the communities along it and created a bottleneck at the tunnel which even more recent roadbuilding at Silvertown has tried to fix).  

The East Cross Route looking north away from the city from 'Red Path' on the edge of Hackney - the part of Ringway 1 that did get built. This image was taken at a quiet time but the road is frequently congested. It did nothing to relieve wider traffic congestion in Hackney either, which continued to grow from the East Cross Route's construction in the early 1970s right up until it peaked in the early 2000s when London congestion charging and other measures were brought in (image: © Will Petty)

​The reason these plans were not realised in full was that people came to understand that extra road capacity can’t relieve traffic congestion in the long term.  Or at least not without unreasonable social harms, so the plans became deeply unpopular.  

This is an important lesson we need to keep in mind now, whenever there are attempts to fix the ongoing congestion on Hackney’s roads.  

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The reality of ‘Induced Demand’

All very interesting as a quirky bit of Hackney history, but how does this relate to roads policy in Hackney today?  Well, many of the same reasons that killed the ringways apply equally to other attempts to relieve congestion by increasing road capacity.  But the harms from other methods are just not always quite so glaringly obvious, and this can make them dangerous. 

The effect of leaving open parallel through-routes in residential areas has had exactly the same effect as adding lanes to major roads.  Over time, both the major A-roads and many minor roads too have become congested as traffic displaced by congestion on designated through-roads has spread to every alternative route it can.  LTNs are an attempt to put this displaced traffic back onto the major road network adapted to take it.

It is so tempting to think we could open up alternative new routes near our congested main roads and have glorious free-flowing conditions on both! Except we know in practice that just isn’t what happens when policy prioritises driving.  

Traffic is not like water in a pipe; it is not a fixed quantity which sufficient fixed capacity will carry.  It is the result of thousands of individual decisions as to when, how and whether to make a journey.  If you make driving easier, faster, and friction-free then of course more people will choose to drive.

So, if you open up new routes, for a short while you may get better conditions and easier car journeys.  But quickly the extra demand for driving this generates leads to more car journeys, swallowing up the gain over time until a new equilibrium is reached.  

Both roads end up congested. More car journeys are made overall, more pollution, more road danger, less active travel, neighbourhoods destroyed, and all for no meaningful relief for those on main roads.  

And when the new capacity doesn’t fix the problem, frustrated drivers usually just call for even more: ‘Just one more lane’ or ‘just one more through-route’ will fix it.

Wider Lanes, Better Traffic? © COTE cartoon nacto.org

​This effect is called ‘induced demand’ and is an important tenet of traffic engineering and transport planning.  It is so predictable there is even a formula to calculate the impact of increased traffic from new roads. 

It may seem counter-intuitive, and certainly inconvenient to those who want a simple solution, but essentially congestion will reach an equilibrium with whatever road capacity is provided. 

Congestion is an inevitable part of car-centric planning, and it can never be beaten in cities by adding more road capacity and opening up new routes.  

You can see the extreme of this by looking at places that did end up building their ‘ringways’ and designing cities around increasing convenience to drive. 

Surely, for all the massive social destruction this entailed, they at least solved the problem of traffic congestion?  
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Well no. They didn’t. Here is the Katy Freeway in Texas, which goes right into downtown Houston, 26 lanes yet still plagued by queuing traffic. 

(Fun fact: Despite the 26 lanes and massive use of public space, the Katy Freeway still carries fewer than half the number of people each day than London's Elizabeth Line, showing just how staggeringly inefficient transport by private car is).

© Smiley N. Pool / Houston Chronicle https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/politifact/article/World-s-widest-freeway-is-not-where-Turner-thinks-7248455.php

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​Or the urban highways of LA, one of the world’s most congested cities:

© SmartCitiesWorld https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/news/la-named-as-most-traffic-clogged-city-in-the-world-1402

​The evidence is clear; no matter how much capacity you build, you can never solve urban congestion by opening more lanes, more routes or more space for cars.  

The solution to congestion on Hackney’s main roads is not to open up more parallel roads.

But all hope is not lost!  There is another way, and it works. 


How to defeat urban road congestion

What is really interesting is that the opposite of induced demand is also true.  When road capacity is reduced, and driving made less convenient, the number of car journeys falls as people switch to relatively more convenient (and less harmful) modes.  This is backed by extensive evidence. It comes down to what you prioritise.

“If you invite more cars, you get more cars. If you make more streets better for cars you get more traffic. If you make more bicycle infrastructure you get more bicycles. If you invite people to walk more and use public spaces more, you get more life in the city. You get what you invite.”
-Jan Gehl

Streets can be designed for alternatives. Minor residential roads can be closed to through-traffic that has been displaced by congestion from the major routes and now harms an ever-wider area.  Fewer car journeys will be made.  

And by closing minor roads, conditions are created for alternatives to grow. Walking and cycling become more pleasant. Health and social inequalities reduce and access inclusion improves.  

We ask Hackney’s politicians to resist the idea there is any simple solution to main road congestion, and instead take the difficult decisions to limit the capacity and priority for motorists. 

The only way to defeat congestion and road harms is to invest in and prioritise alternatives.

See our manifesto and main roads page for how!

Join us here!