19 Years' Wonder •
Page 29
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Despite the Motorways Plan, the Road Programme Still Lacks Urgency and Imagination
NINE years after Parliament granted powers for the construction of motorways, the public are offered a distant view of about 345 miles of road built exclusively for motor traffic. Only 53 miles, from St. Albans to Dunchurch, near Birmingham, will be started within the foreseeable future.
The Minister of Transport last week gave the period as two years, and expressed the hope that the whole 345 miles would be completed in 10 years. It will then have taken nearly 20 years to nibble at the problem of moving goods and passengers quickly and safely on two trunk routes—from London to Doncaster, and Birmingham to Preston. What of the rest of the country?
Eighty-four miles of the 345 miles of proposed motorway represent seven short lengths of road, ranging from six to 21 miles. All they will do is to relieve local congestion. The programme is not, therefore, as impressive as it sounds, and will certainly not stem criticism by the Parliamentary Opposition of the Government's arrangements to deal with a pressing problem.
Caesar's Mantle "For five miles before turning westwards towards Birmingham, the [London-Yorkshire] motorway will follow a route used by transport through the ages," the Minister said. "The Romans went this way when they built Watling Street." The attitude implicit in that observation has characterized the approach of Governments of the past 50 years to road building. What was good enough for the Romans is good enough for us, they have, in effect, said. The mantle of Caesar still cloaks the Ministry.
The details given of the first stretch of motorway from St. Albans to Dunchurch suggest that the design will be the best that experience in America and on the Continent can devise. It is extraordinary, therefore, that the Minister should have said that, in the first place, commercial vehicles using motor roads would be restricted to the speed limits generally applying to them at the time. He took obvious pride in announcing that." the motorway has been designed to allow an interrupted flow of traffic." What, then, is the object of destroying that work by creating artificial obstructions to other vehicles, which the Minister admitted "will be moving at high speeds"? What greater danger can there be to traffic travelling at 70 m.p.h. than lorries lumbering along at 20-30 m.p.11-.? This archaic attitude makes it difficult to know whether motorways are intended to be practical measures to speed up transport, or whether they are political sops.
Complementary Problems The Minister said that plans to deal with congotion in the cities into which the motorways would funnel high-speed traffic were separate from those of the motor roads themselves. To the ordinary road user, the two questions of accelerating movement in rural and urban areas are complementary aspects of the same problem, and they should be tackled together.
Despite the advance in vehicle design in the past 25 years, there are many inter-urban bus services, operating mainly through rural districts, on which, because of traffic congestion on the short town sections, it has been impossible to speed up schedules for a quarter of a century. This is proof of the inextricable relationship between conditions on town and country roads, and a plan that speeds up traffic on one section of a route, only to clog another part, lacks imagination.
Despite the schemes for road improvement and construction announced in February, and last week's elaboration of the theme of motorways, the Government will have to produce greater evidence of a sense of urgency if they are to be credited with an earnest desire to solve the road problem and with the enterprise to get on with it. A scheme for 345 miles of motorway would be welcome as a short-term experiment, but as a 10-year plan, even taken with the other road works announced so far, it will not unravel the knots into which traffic daily ties itself.