JK's export routes ire Europe's worst
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The report says that in the st 20 years the trunk road twork had improved drastilly, although gaps still need be filled if Britain's distribuin efficiency is to keep pace th the rest of the world.
Only the ports at Bristol and Lasgow have direct links with e motorway network while sewhere road schemes to iprove access to the ports we been "the victims of peated spending cuts or tve been held up by delays in arming and administration". The report cited various deoTed road schemes in Britain: e extension of the M3 has Ime to a halt because of incision over the Winchester ,-pass; and between rmingham and Oxford, the 40 is still delayed by disites over the choice of routes id inaction by ministers.
In 1972 the whole of the -ade route to Europe" from e Midlands to Felixstowe promised by 1976. At Jay's rate of progress some rk may not have started by 36.
The report goes on to say at lack of decisive action ;ulted in road schemes serig the ports falling to the tail d of the trunk road proarnme. The published plans the period up to 1986 inide most of the outstanding ink roads to ports. Some schemes are expected to slip further behind and others will be built at a lower standard than originally planned. Local authority road pibgrammes, of which most docks access schemes form part, have been even worse hit by cuts in public spending.
All this, says the report, is in marked contrast to the priority other West European countries have given to roads serving their ports. Antwerp, Le Havre and Genoa are linked with extensive motorway networks, it says.
East Anglia suffers particularly from poor access roads. Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft are still served from the South, Midlands and West mainly by poor single carriageway roads, and the planned improvements of both trunk and country roads are unlikely to be completed by the 1990s.
In neither case is access to the immediate port area adequate, and both must have another river crossing and, at Lowestoft, a new north-south spine road.