Someone at a senior level needs to be fired about this. Here is the evidence that councils and road planners really don’t have a clue about anything. Just read this article and the comments:

http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/mostpopular.var.2448528.mostviewed.traffic_still_slow_moving_on_spur_road.php

It is even flawed statistically. If you create a massive jam in order to record information, this is obviously going to distort whatever information there is to collect. As one of the contributors states:

“As any scientist will tell you, an experiment whose method seriously disrupts what you're measuring will not yield results that mean anything.”

And apart from the significant cost to enormous numbers of drivers, I understand this survey work has very high costs to the council.

We’ve been tracking vehicles automatically for years, why can it no be done to understand traffic flow?

And why struggle to understand what is happening when there are so many common sense things to start with that need doing?

 Who is actually responsible for this?