Holiday traffic queues to check-in for ferries at the Port of Dover, Kent, as P&O services remain suspended during the Easter getaway. Picture date: Friday April 15, 2022. PA Photo. Supplies of petrol and diesel at filling stations in some areas of the country are running at around half their usual level as the UK's travel network came under pressure ahead of the Easter getaway, new figures suggest. See PA story TRANSPORT Easter. Photo credit should read: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
Good morning, and if you have spent the weekend drowning in chocolate or stuck in traffic, solidarity.
After a weekend with more than 17m leisure trips expected on British roads; delayed or cancelled trains causing vast crowds for those persevering with the railways; and getaway-ruining gridlock continuing around the Port of Dover, today’s newsletter – with Professor David Metz, former chief scientist at the Department of Transport – looks at our perennial anxiety about bank holiday transport chaos, how bad it is, and what there is to be done about it.
Happy Easter, and here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Racism | More than a third of people from minority groups have experienced racially motivated physical or verbal abuse, according to the biggest survey of race inequality in the UK for over a quarter of a century. The survey found “strikingly high” levels of exposure to abuse across a wide range of ethnic groups.
Northern Ireland | The Good Friday agreement was “based on compromise”, Rishi Sunak has said on the peace deal’s 25th anniversary. Sunak called on Northern Ireland’s politicians to restore the power sharing agreement at Stormont as preparations continue for a visit by Joe Biden this week.
Monarchy | A green energy company set up by King Charles was investigated for numerous health and safety breaches after the unauthorised leak of more than 1,000 tonnes of global heating gases. The Health and Safety Executive issued a series of improvement notices after the 2020 leak.
Taiwan | China sent dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan for a second day of military drills in retaliation for the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, meeting the US House Speaker during a brief visit to the US. About 70 aircraft including fighter jets, reconnaissance planes, and refuellers went into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on Sunday morning.
Labour | Keir Starmer has defended a widely-criticised attack ad which said that Rishi Sunak “does not believe adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison”. In an article for the Daily Mail, Starmer said that he stands by “every word Labour has said on this subject”.
In depth: The underlying causes of holiday gridlock
There can be few greater testaments to the power of familial bonds than our determination to hit the road at Christmas and Easter to be with our loved ones. Every time, the warnings of miserable traffic escalation are the same; every time, we go and see them anyway, knowing as we do that we would almost certainly be in a better mood if we stayed on the sofa. Here’s a guide to how bad it gets and why. If you’re stuck on the M6, pretend it’s a fun activity and get your kids to read it aloud.
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How bad is traffic at Easter?
This year, the RAC suggests that UK drivers will have made 17m leisure trips by car by the end of today – meaning a 25% increase in travel times compared with a normal weekend. While the RAC also typically predicts increases in leisure travel at Christmas, and worsened journey times because of bad weather, Easter is probably usually a bit worse. “At Christmas, you have a longer break, which may spread the traffic more,” Professor David Metz said. “People anticipate delays based on forecasts and their prior experience.” Greater reductions in commercial traffic over the Christmas period also makes a difference.
That 17m number is down quite a lot on the RAC’s expectations last year, when it said that 21.5m leisure trips would be taken over the Easter break. That was predicted to be the busiest Easter for eight years, in part because of disruptions to rail travel from engineering works.
In any case, said Metz, however they feel when you’re stuck in them, occasional periods of heavy holiday traffic are not the priority for policymakers. “Peak flows like this don’t have major implications,” he said. “Arguments about investment are much more to do with regular daily traffic.”
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Is the same thing happening with train travel?
After a season of strikes, this weekend was free of industrial action on the railways. On the other hand, engineering works shut down the west coast main line, stopping rail travel between London Euston and Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. There were also delays on CrossCountry Trains in the Midlands, Chiltern Railways, and reduced services on many other lines.
The closure of Euston led to understandably apocalyptic descriptions of scenes like the one above at St Pancras Station in London on Friday: Ruaridh Pritchard, who took the photo, described the scenes there as “mayhem” and like “the last train out of Saigon”.
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What about travelling abroad?
10,218 flights were scheduled to leave UK airports between Good Friday and Easter Monday, the aviation analytics company Cirium said – up 11% on last year, but still 13% down on pre-pandemic levels. And while thousands of passengers were affected by delays and cancellations at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester last year because of staff shortages, there were no issues on that scale reported this year – although industrial action did force British Airways to cancel 300 flights in the run-up to Easter.
Maybe the worst-affected sector this year was ferries: after days of delays at Dover, in part the result of slower checks because of Brexit, holidaymakers waited in queues of up to 90 minutes at the port on Good Friday. While congestion was still down 30% on last weekend, Sarah Marsh and Rob Williams reported on Friday that the cumulative effect might mean that “Britain could be falling out of love with the continental coach journey”.
After 14-hour queues at Dover last weekend and with concerns growing about the longer-term impact of changes to the border check system, as well as climbing fuel costs, staffing issues on long European trips, and the ongoing availability of cheap flights, coach operators say that the future appears to be in domestic offers. “Lots of companies [are] pulling back from doing anything abroad,” says James Baker, who runs a coach company in the Cotswolds. “The risks are greater than the reward.”
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How could things be improved?
Overall, the Department for Transport predicts an increase in traffic of between 8% and 54% by 2060, with a “core scenario” of a 22% increase. So far, vaunted benefits from new road capacity and smart motorways appear to have been overstated, David Metz wrote in a submission to an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into strategic road investment. He points to evidence that instead of reducing traffic density, it simply brings more people on to the roads.
“In a way, congestion is self-regulating – there’s a feedback loop,” Metz said. “If you increase road capacity then traffic speeds up, but that attracts more people otherwise put off by delays. If you take away road space, that slows traffic down, and people make other choices, certainly if you have good public transport.”
That suggests that the economic benefits of road investment can be overstated – which is one reason the Welsh government recently halted most road building projects in a decision Metz calls “genuinely brave”. More generally, Metz said, “it’s always been the case that politicians are quite keen on adding to road capacity”.
He describes what sounds like a fairly perverse set of incentives for what you might consider the road-industrial complex: “The Department for Transport is happy to have a big budget, as is National Highways, as are the contractors and consultants who advise them. And for local authorities, it’s free money, a handout from central government.” But that approach also cuts against achieving net zero targets, he said.
Rather than bank on more motorways or the unknowable and distant impact of self-driving cars to mitigate the problem, Metz added, we might focus on expanding the use of the humble satnav: “I find it really surprising that none of the road authorities is acknowledging how powerful it might be. If they were operating more collaboratively with the providers, you could spread the drivers looking for alternatives to congested roads more efficiently. We all have the equipment on our smartphones or in our cars – there’s a lot more that could be done.”
So if you’ve used Waze this weekend, congrats. You represent a hopeful challenge to a future of robot drivers, belching carbon emissions – and endless jams at Easter forever.
What else we’ve been reading
For Saturday magazine, Tim Jonze (above) wrote an extremely frank, moving, and disarmingly funny piece about his reaction to a cancer diagnosis in his 30s. Tim’s story is about the devastating impact of serious illness on family life, but also how that life simply refuses to stop moving forward. Archie
Maintaining depth in friendships throughout adult life, as people move abroad or far away and start families, can be really difficult, Emma Beddington writes. So how can we all get better at it? Nimo
After Labour’s controversial ad claiming Rishi Sunak is soft on child sexual assault, Nesrine Malik argues that the strategy may be undermined by the decision to stop “presenting itself as an anti-austerity party”: as a result, she writes, “Labour can only really focus on crime as an issue of goodies and baddies, rather than a complex social problem”. Archie
“This is the Mattel Cinematic Universe”: Raven Smith writes for British Vogue on why Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is “a camp classic in the making”. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters
Archeologist Sarah Tarlow spent most of her life studying death, but nothing prepared her for finding her husband of almost two decades in his room, alone, dead after a long illness. “It has taken me time to remember that there was not just the anger and frustration of those last months, but that there was also love,” she writes. Nimo
Sport
Golf | Jon Rahm of Spain (above) came from behind to beat the American Brooks Koepka and win his first Masters by four shots. Rahm carded a three-under 69 to leave Koepka tied for second with his fellow LIV golf rebel Phil Mickelson. Andy Bull wrote that “for the first time in his life, when the heavy pressure of frontrunning in a major came down, Koepka’s game failed him.”
Football | Arsenal gave Manchester City hope in the title race after they let a 2-0 lead slip in a pulsating match at Anfield to draw 2-2 with Liverpool. Barney Ronay wrote: “This wasn’t just an incredible game of football. It was two incredible games of football crammed into a single running time.” Meanwhile, Crystal Palace came away with a 5-1 victory after Leeds crumbled at Elland Road.
Rugby league | A record crowd for women’s rugby league of more than 5,000 watched York beat Leeds by 34 points to 12, with a win bonus for York’s players making them the first WSL team to be paid. Participation among girls under 16 has increased by 200% in the five months since the World Cup.
The front pages
“UK ‘is not close to being a racially just society’, finds two-year study” – that’s on the front of the Guardian this Easter Monday. The Financial Times has “Global economy dodges big slowdown as growth outlook outpaces forecasts”. The Times reports “Labour will blame PM for crashing economy”, while the Daily Express says “Millions demand: keep our banks open” on a story about people wanting local branches rather than online services.
“GPs scrap services to cope with strikes” – that’s the Telegraph, while the i says “Pharmacists drafted in to offset hospital strike chaos”. The Daily Mirror has “Hospital trek scandal”, saying 999 delays mean patients are having to make their own way to A&E because they can’t get an ambulance. The top story in the Daily Mail is “Tory anger as Starmer stands by ‘every word’ of Rishi ads”. “Air con to the throne” – King Charles will ride in a “comfy modern coach” for his coronation, says the Sun.
Cotton Capital
Episode 2: the meaning of Success
The next episode in the podcast series follows Maya Wolfe-Robinson as she travels to Jamaica in search of the site of the former sugar plantation Success, once co-owned by the Guardian funder Sir George Philips. The latest Today in Focus, about Xi Jinping and the battle over China’s memory of the Cultural Revolution, is here.
Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett
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The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
At 55 years old, Rosemary Griggs decided it was time to retire from the civil service and travel central America with her husband, David. They bought a wooden house on stilts on 20 acres of rainforest in Belize and spent their time taking in this new world around them, until David became ill and their priorities shifted. Back in Devon, Griggs decided to take up a new hobby: making Tudor costumes at a nearby National Trust property.
Griggs became fascinated with the women of the era, writing a novel centred on one in particular, Lady Katherine Champernowne, and performs regularly for local history societies, WI groups and children, often accompanied by “peasant David”. “‘History’ says it all: it’s his story. I want to try to tell her story,” Griggs says.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
