Marked slack off in road building
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• Sixty miles of new motorway will be opened in 1972 — the lowest for three years and less than a third of the 229 miles completed last year. The British Road Federation in a report published on Wednesday points to a continuing fall in the level of road construction in Britain as a whole. It says: El Only 13 miles of motorway have been added to the 1,000 mile network in the first four months of 1972, and only 71 miles are due for completion in the next six months. 1=1 The 180 miles of motorway now under construction is less• than half the work in hand at the same time two years ago.
El And latest estimates of the value of road construction show a marked fall from £580m in the first quarter of 1970 to £368m in the last three months of 1971.
The Federation's report says: "In road building some unevenness is inevitable in the flow of work and the rate of completion. But the amount of work now in hand shows how erratic the programme is."
With the opening this week of the seven mile "missing link" of M6 in the Midlands. Britain now has 1020 miles of motorway.