Transport Insights

With the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) expected tomorrow, there are hints about what might be in it, but they are a bit contradictory and hard to make sense of.

The actual news is that the Treasury’s Northern Growth Strategy: Next Steps document refers to

£4.4 billion through the Road Investment Strategy, which will support…Major upgrades to key strategic roads such as the A66, M60 and A57.

Because these documents have a habit of recycling old spending, I asked the Treasury, who helpfully confirmed that this is a reference to RIS 3.

What it actually means in terms of spending on enhancement schemes (like the ones mentioned) or operations, maintenance, renewal, safety or environment spending remains to be seen.

Obviously, being a growth strategy, the document will focus on “major upgrades to key strategic roads”.

The draft RIS 3, published in August, promised “a greater focus than ever before on the maintenance and renewal of the network” but this was not quantified so could be more warm words.

In October, National Highways chief executive Nick Harris told Highways magazine that, having failed to meet its RIS 2 safety target,

What we’re looking at is perhaps more focus on A roads than on motorways, which is where we will probably have the greatest impact on improving safety.

He didn’t of course say that the company would put a greater focus on safety itself, just that it might go back to doing the stuff it was supposed to do in RIS 2 but couldn’t be bothered with.

Then, earlier this month, roads minister Simon Lightwood told the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation’s national conference that RIS 3 would ‘have resilience at its heart’.

More warm words perhaps but it is encouraging that Lightwood declared that

short-termism is no shield against extreme weather

just in case anyone thought it was.