Sorry, this should have been sent yesterday. But I scheduled it for May 7th, apparently. My bad

Key takeaway: since local authorities have declared climate emergencies, 565 miles of road have been constructed in those authorities. Also, see the notes at the end to understand the slight changes to content for you as paid subscribers.

Over the last few years, many local authorities in the UK have declared climate emergencies. But it is simple to declare a climate emergency. It is even nice to have your plans assessed and deemed to be good. But there needs to be meaningful action, which poses a question: what authorities are taking it?

In transport, one sure fire way of increasing your emissions is to build new roads. There is a significant amount of carbon simply embedded in new infrastructure. New roads generate more traffic, and because transport has hardly been decarbonising at all, this is not a good thing.

In the UK, we can measure how many more public roads have been added to the network through the Department for Transport’s Road Length statistics. And as local authorities have primarily been declaring climate emergencies since 2019, and we have road length data up until 2021, we can see whether or not these declarations are having some early successes.

This data measures new public roads. This is not just new construction, but all roads that are ‘adopted’ by the local authority or National Highways – in other words become public highway. This can be through new roads being built, existing private roads being adopted, or developers building new roads that are subsequently adopted by the local authority.

These figures are likely to include roads for which decisions were made prior to the climate emergency being declared. But I still feel that it gives early signs of impact, especially places where the impact is greatest.

You can download the data and play with it yourself here. When I analysed the data, due to time constraints I had to remove the local authorities that were created since 2019, as their ‘additional’ highway network (or highway that was inherited from the old authorities) adds about 3000 miles of new public roads, which is not correct as it was there under the old authority. I will come back to this in a future post.

In all, there have been 565 miles of new public roads created in local authorities that have declared a climate emergency. The overwhelming number of which are minor roads (529.6 miles).

That’s a somewhat grim statistic, but perhaps not a shock. This would indicate that a significant percentage of this new public road is from new developments, which are typically adopted as minor roads. The 10.5 miles of new trunk roads were created by National Highways, and so local authorities can hardly carry the blame for that.

Believe it or not, there are 50 local authorities that actually reduced public highways, the most being Dumfries and Galloway which has lost nearly 18 miles of road. For reasons that a search on Google cannot fathom.

But they are outnumbered by the number of authorities who increased their road mileage. The worst offenders added 247 miles between them, with both Hampshire and Oxfordshire adding on over 35 miles each.

At this stage, there appears to be no identifiable causal link between declaring a climate emergency, and how the amount of public roads in the local authority changes. More years of data is needed to understand the changes in rates over time, but the early results indicate that the path towards net zero is not yet being trodden by transport planners in the UK.

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