Mr. Gareth Llewellyn:

Demand management can involve a mixture of things. I am thinking specifically about the M50. If there are nearly 1,200 incidents per year on that motorway, about 22 per week, and the average time for which traffic is disrupted is nearly half an hour, with some incidents lasting more than three hours, there is serious work to do there. At the moment TII can only put up advisory signs, as the Senator will probably know, and people's general view of advisory signs is that their advice is optional and that there is no enforcement behind them. You need to put power behind that because if there is a broken-down car in a particular lane, you need to be able to get services to that car very quickly to guarantee the safety of those people and get the traffic flowing again. It is the same when it comes to adverse weather. Then demand management at peak times is important because, otherwise, you effectively just create a bottleneck for people and delay them getting to their destinations.

If something is not done about demand management, it is worthwhile thinking about what the consequences will be. You will see more safety issues so, effectively, you are saying you are prepared to tolerate people being injured or killed. That is not a good thing. If you want to avoid that congestion, the only other option is to build more motorways. It seems to me that building more motorways in that context would represent poor value for money because all you would be doing is trying to build a new motorway to increase capacity at peak times. It would not be needed at any other time of the day. That form of demand management through enforceable, variable speed limits and dynamic management is very important. The dynamic bit is important, of course, because you do not know when it will be required, where it will be required or for how long. That could take you across jurisdictional boundaries, so it is important to understand the role TII has there in the context of being a road traffic organisation. I hope that helps.