Four out of every five traffic lights should be ripped up to boost the economy and road safety, according to a report.

A huge number of traffic lights, speed bumps and cycle lanes have brought roads to a grinding halt, a report by the Institute of Economic Affairs has claimed. It says that delays of two minutes to the average journey cost the economy £16 billion a year.

According to Richard Wellings, one of the authors of the report for the free-market think tank, councils have been taking the same approach as communist East Germany by “trying to force people out of their cars and on to subsidised public transport”.

Despite the number of vehicles on the roads remaining the same over the past ten years, the institute found that the number of traffic lights had increased from 23,000 in 1994 to 33,000 in 2014.

There was also a 20-fold rise in speed bumps to 60,000 over the same period, while signs for cycle routes rocketed from 1,572 in 1993 to 41,188 in 2013, and 100 more miles of bus lanes had squeezed out road space for cars.

According to the report, the surge in traffic regulation measures are an attempt to appease the green lobby but have instead “produced serious environmental costs”.

“From a green point of view you’re better off getting rid of all these traffic controls,” Dr Wellings said. “They actually increase pollution by delaying traffic and making car engines run less efficiently.”

His comments come as the Department for Transport’s own figures show that the average speed for a car at peak times has slowed from 25.3mph in 2012 to 23.6mph last year.

The report highlighted Germany and the Netherlands, as well as areas of the UK, where there was a fall in injury and accidents when “shared space” schemes were introduced. The increase in voluntary co-operation between car users and pedestrians led to a fall in congestion and reduction in noise and air pollution as “vehicles proceed much more smoothly”, the report said.

A spokesman for the Department for Transport said: “Local councils are responsible for managing their networks in such a way as to balance the needs of all users. We provide guidance on designing and implementing measures but it is up to the authorities to decide how best to implement them.”

Boris Johnson has announced plans to build the longest road tunnel in the world under London to combat traffic congestion.

It would run for more than 15.5 miles, east to west, beneath the city, diverting millions of cars, vans and lorries from the streets above. A second tunnel would be almost 11.2 miles long. The Laerdal road tunnel in Norway is the world’s longest, at 15.2 miles.

The mayor’s plan to ease congestion also involves a possible ban on HGVs at peak hours and a new charge on delivery vans to reverse the trend among office workers of ordering goods online and having them sent to their desks. One solution, he believes, is to make better use of “click and collect” facilities at Tube and train stations.

Traffic in central London is expected to rise by as much as 60 per cent in the next 14 years as the city’s population increases from 8.6 million to 10 million. Mr Johnson, who is due to step down as mayor in May, said the tunnels could be completed by the mid-2030s and would reduce congestion by 20 per cent. They would cost about £15 billion each and would be funded through toll charges.

The northern city tunnel would run from the A40 at Park Royal in west London to the A12 at Hackney Wick in east London. The more ambitious southern tunnel would run from the A4 at Chiswick in the west to the A13 at Beckton in the east. There are also plans for a series of small tunnels, or “fly-unders”.

Mr Johnson’s successor — probably either Sadiq Khan or Zac Goldsmith — might well opt to scrap the scheme, but will themselves be under pressure to resolve the congestion problem.

Mr Johnson said that a feasibility study would be carried out into plans to ban, restrict or charge lorries and vans from entering the centre of London. He told The Times: “At the moment, we have too many huge, heavy vehicles thundering through the streets without anything in them, and we can sort that out.

“We have got 45 per cent growth in white vans caused by internet shopping, and a colossal growth in minicabs caused by the arrival of new apps. So we have to manage both of those phenomena and it is not easy.”

He said he wanted “better use of click-and-collect facilities for internet shopping and making use of Tube stations and other facilities for picking up your goods, rather than everyone receiving goods door to door”.

• The number of people killed on the road in busy city areas rose by 10 per cent in the 12 months to September last year, the Department for Transport said.

A total of 1,780 lives were lost, 49 more than in the previous year or an increase of about 3 per cent. However, the number of deaths recorded on British roads with a speed limit of up to 40mph — officially classed as built-up routes — rose by 71, to 780.

Traffic levels across the country crept up by 2.2 per cent. Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said: “That might partly explain why the downward trend in road deaths has plateaued in recent years.”

They have racked up more than a million miles on the roads of California and Texas. Now Google’s driverless cars could become a common sight on a different test track — the winding highways of the Isle of Man.

The self-governing crown dependency is drawing up radical plans to become the world-leader in the development of autonomous vehicles.

Politicians on the island are preparing legislation to allow driverless cars to be used on its streets. If approved, the proposal would put the island at least 12 months ahead of the British mainland, where similar legislation is unlikely to be passed until next year at the earliest.

Google, which has been developing driverless cars since 2009, is believed to have approached the Manx government with plans to hold the first tests of its vehicles outside America on the 221 sq mile island.

Allan Bell, the island’s chief minister, admitted last month that Google’s overtures were initially rejected by civil servants. He said that the company was told: “We don’t do things like that over here . . . we are perfectly fine as it is.”

The Manx authorities performed an about-turn this week and insisted that they were investigating the possibility of allowing driverless cars to share its roads with conventional vehicles.

The environment and infrastructure committee has launched a feasibility study of the reforms. A spokesman told The Times that trials could start tomorrow if a driver were in the vehicle to take over if any problems arose.

It is believed that any final adjustments to the island’s laws could be complete by early summer. The Manx government is also said to be in talks with other companies interested in bringing driverless cars to the island, which has a zero per cent corporate tax rate and income tax of 20 per cent.

The move could prove attractive to Google, the world’s most valuable company, which has been embroiled in a mounting row over its complex structure used to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds worth of UK corporation tax.

Google refused to comment last night on any link to the Isle of Man. But in an official statement, Mr Bell claimed that the island’s plans could put it above the US and countries such as Sweden in the race to develop driverless cars.

The island is already home to arguably the world’s most famous motorcycle race — the Isle of Man TT, which has been run since 1907. It also has a thriving online gaming industry.

Britain is already trying to overhaul the rules of the road to allow driverless cars to be tested on public highways. Ministers said last year they hoped that legislation — including the requirement for all vehicles to have a steering wheel and mirrors — could be redrafted by 2017.

Ben Gardner, a commercial law expert at Pinsent Masons, said the Isle of Man could have the edge because of its small size and less cumbersome legal framework.

“They’re pretty willing to push through legislative changes quickly and you can draw a comparison with the UK government which is committed to changing the law by summer 2017,” he said. “To be honest, that appears to be a very ambitious target because the UK’s road traffic law is pretty wide ranging. It is probably going to take much longer than that.”

The number of people commuting to work by public transport is in decline as buses and trains fail to keep pace with changing working habits.

Figures from Centre for Cities, the urban think tank, show a drop in the proportion of commuters using buses and trains in more than half of areas as jobs increasingly move to out-of-town business parks.

The number of commuters using public transport declined in 34 towns or cities and rose in 29. The biggest falls were in Glasgow, Dundee, Sheffield, Aberdeen, Ipswich and Sunderland, which were down by between 2 per cent and 3.3 per cent.

An analysis of the data by the CityMetric website showed that almost all the areas that showed rises were in the southeast. Paul Swinney, from Centre for Cities, said: “More companies are in business parks out of the centre and it is difficult to serve many of these areas with public transport,” he said.

In London 44.63 per cent of workers commuted by public transport in 2011, up from 38.5 per cent a decade earlier