• "Some of this country's worst planning gaffes have occurred
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in transport." This was written by the Sunday Times business news editor Roger
Eglin, who forecast that last weekend — one of the busiest of the year as Britain pours away on holiday — would expose the inadequacies of the motorway system, No truer words were spoken, as any transport man will attest if he was unfortunate enough to be on the roads during our busiest suitcase day with its neverending traffic jams, etc.
Castigating the motorway "system" (a word which, he says, is a misnomer) he points out that it is still impossible to drive from the north or Midlands to the Channel ports by motorway without encountering some obstacle. -.co go east of London means battling through the Dartford tunnel (who in Whitehall forgot to arrange its widening when the M25 was conceived?) To go west means using M25 and M20 — a run that is still interrupted by a stretch of ordinary road and ends at Folkestone, leaving a slog over the steep back-road to Dover, gateway to Europe."
He suggests that anyone who has sampled West Germany's autobahns knows that in Britain it is not just weekend holidaymakers suffering from an inefficient transport system, but the economy as a whole, and he suggests that there are already fears that the tunnel's fast transit of the Channel will be negated by traffic jams inland.
He makes the point that one of the reasons for not building sufficiently wide motorways is the cost, if the planners had got it wrong and there was, after all, no call for, say a three lane motorway.
"Personally," he said, "I would be willing to pay the notional cost of a little excess capacity in our transport system."
And so say all of us, Mr Eglin, except that most hauliers would argue that they are the one sector of the community which is already paying overthe-odds "notional" costs.