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Government congestion index reveals traffic and electric vehicle improvement
Date: 25 June 2013 | Author: Tristan Young
A new traffic congestion index from the Highways Agency has shown that 77.2% of journeys during the rolling year to April 2013 were 0.1 percentage points higher than for the rolling year to March 2013.
However, rather than attribute this to network improvements, the Highways Agency believes this is mainly due to poor weather, particularly rain and snow, in the previous reporting period.
Monthly figures showed that during April 2013 81.7% of journeys on the motorway and A-road network were 'on time'. This is 1.6 percentage points higher than the equivalent figure for April 2012.
A Highways Agency spokesman said: "The annual reliability measure consistently increased from (the year ending) March 2011 up to March 2012, but decreased in each of the following 12 months to March 2013, to its lowest point since the measure was introduced in 2010/11.
"The changes in reliability over this period are believed to be predominantly due to changes in rainfall and periods of heavy snowfall relative to the previous year."
The Department for Transport simultaneously released vehicle licensing figures for the first quarter of 2013, which revealed ultra low-emission vehicle registrations were up by 53% year-on-year.
They still count for small numbers, but 837 full-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles were registered before 31 March compared with 546 in the same period in 2012.
