No tolls - and we're paying for it

Published on Monday 11 February 2008 20:23

ALL politicians must eventually confront one of the iron laws of the political universe, the one known as the Law of Unintended Consequences (LUC). It goes under various other guises; eg Murphy's Law, or If It Can Go Wrong, It Will. For instance, raising rail fares to fund safety improvements has a bad habit of driving folk back into their cars.

But as more people are killed on the roads than in (much rarer) train crashes, the investment in rail safety can actually lead to more deaths overall.

A good example of LUC being unpredictable was seen yesterday when the road tolls were removed from the Forth Road Bridge. The rationale for the removal of the tolls was clear enough – it would ease congestion at peak hours by ending the queues. So what happened on the first day with no tolls? There were tailbacks of up to 40 minutes – far worse than the normal rush-hour conditions when tolls were in force. Part of the reason for this contradictory result is that 1 million is being spent to remove the pay booths and road layout – installed only a year ago at a cost of 5 million – and that these works are causing the traffic disruption.

This is a prime example of another political law: department X never knows what department Y is doing. Why bother to remove the old pay booths in such a hurry? Why remove them at all? The only people out of luck yesterday were the motorists.