Roads to prosperity
Page 21
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The news that completiQn of a further 10 miles of motorway will enable M5 and M6 to be linked by the early summer may be received in some quarters rather like the relief of Mafeking. Flag-waving is, however, premature. A sizeable length of the M6 link with M1 has still to be completed before the really important Midlands junction is achieved. But with a little over 600 miles of motorway in use and about 300 under construction the Government seems certain to achieve its target of 1,000 miles by the early 1970s. If some of this mileage comes just too late to be of benefit to operators struggling to reschedule journeys to meet the new, shorter driving and working day the prospects for, say, 1973-4 look very encouraging.
It is no revelation to point out that almost all the existing motorway mileage is north-south, and very little east-west, but in the north, M8 will eventually link Glasgow and Edinburgh, M62 will join Merseyside to the Yorkshire industrial belt, M6 will straddle the Midlands and put M1 in touch with the western M5/M6 -uprightwhile M4 will link London, Bristol and South Wales.
British trunk routes have traditionally been north-south orientated, often through radiating from London, and eastwest journeys by road (or by rail) have been tortuous and frustrating. The motorways to date have -largely strengthened this north-south bias—quite sensibly, in linking the big population areas. So when the lateral motorways are opened, their effect will be all the more dramatic. Picture the advantages of a gently graded allweather motorway over the Pennines (the M62 stretch from Worsley to Huddersfield should be open this year. For operators, all this cannot come too soon. In the meantime they must increase their pressure for an extension of the planned motorway network in place of some of the improved trunk roads in the glib Green Paper, which would restrict tomorrow's commercial vehicles to well below M-way speeds.