7 The Agency's decision to widen the M25 has the potential to deliver benefits. The M25 sufferes from high levels of congestion and poor journey time reliability, and the Agency's objectives include improving these. It intends the widening to increase average speeds in the opening year by 10 miles per hour, and reduce the accident rate by 1.5 per cent. These benefits are assessed as approximately £2.3 billion.
8 In 2003, the Agency and the Department decided to widen the M25 rather than adopting a flexible procurement strategy which could also accommodate other solutions. The Agency wanted a clear solution to address congestion on the M25. At that time it had insufficient evidence of the effectiveness of alternatives to widening, such as hard shoulder running. Hard shoulder running allows drivers to use the hard shoulder at times of peak congestion, providing additional capacity, although this is likely to be less than that provided by widening as speed limits are needed to ensure safety. This technique, which was first trialled in Europe in 1996, is cheaper as it requires less construction; it also delivers fewer benefits. The Agency had announced its intention to trial this technique in 2001 and, in 2003, let a contract for the development of a trial section on the M42. A procurement strategy for the M25 project that kept both widening and hard shoulder running as serious options would have given more scope for a full assessment of both solutions before a contractual commitment.
9 We reported in 2004 that the Agency had been slow and too risk-averse in testing new congestion measures. We recommended that the Agency should carry out more trials at more sites to increase its chance of success with new methods.1 The Agency continued its trial of hard shoulder running but, as it did not have the trial results, it decided in 2005 to specify a road widening solution when it advertised the procurement competition for the M25 contract.
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1 Tackling congestion by making better use of England's motorways and trunk roads, HC 15, November 2004.