Re: £2.8m of tax is wasted on traffic radio

David Allan wrote:
It would be interesting to know just how useful traffic news is to
your average driver and whether holdups would be that much worse if
it was discontinued.

In my present job, I have been driving around the northeast of
England on a daily basis for the past 20 years and it was only on
Friday gone that I heard a traffic warning on BBC Five Live that
actually resulted in me being able to take action to avoid a holdup
caused by an overturned lorry... as I say, that's the first time in
20 years!


I think the subject of how many people benefit from traffic updates on the
radio has been discussed on here before - or maybe it was a different
newsgroup. Some Radio 4 programme had apparently tried to estimate the
percentage of people on the road that would be affected by information in
traffic updates, and they came to a figure of about 20%, if I remember
correctly.

I've no idea how they estimated it, but I think they were wrong, and IMO
only a tiny percentage of all the people driving in the rush hour would be
affected by the info in traffic updates, so I think they're pretty much a
waste of time.


I have tried setting the radio so that BBC local radio interrupts with
traffic news when listening on FM, but get infuriated by the fact
that they babble on about nothing, before getting down to the nitty
gritty. Then, more often than not, seem to take ages before they
flick the switch to return you to your original station of preference.


Yeah, you'd have thought it would be a simple enough job to flick a switch
at the right time, but apparently not.


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - digital radio news & info

The BBC's "justification" of digital radio switchover is based on lies


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