Motorways will grind to a halt in 20 years

CHRISTIAN WOLMAR

Transport Correspondent

Large sections of the motorway and trunk road network will be severely congested at both peak and off-peak times in 20 years time, according to maps produced by the Department of Transport and released yesterday by the RAC.

The maps show that at present there are only a few "hotspots", such as the M25 and parts of the road network around Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds.

Using Department of Transport projections which suggest traffic growth of between 83 and 142 per cent from the late 1980s, the maps suggest that by the year 2015 - even on low traffic growth estimates - large parts of the motorway network in the South-east will experience long periods of congestion.

All strategic routes, the whole of the South-west and large areas of the Midlands and the North will have severe congestion problems.

The maps are based on the assumption that there will be no road improvements beyond those now under construction, such as the Newbury bypass and the M11 link roads.

The roads programme has been hit badly by the past two budgets, with a total cut of over a quarter from the 1994/95 peak. No new big starts are scheduled for the forthcoming year because of overspending on past schemes and a reduction in the money available.

The RAC says that the maps show that the present lack of a coherent government policy on transport has disastrous long-term consequences. Edmund King, campaigns manager of the RAC, said: "We have been stuck without a long- term transport policy for years. The Government has not come up with any idea on what to do about congestion, but it has been happy to slash the roads programme. This just doesn't add up." Mr King says the details contained in the maps "condemn the motorist to at least 10 years of chaos and increasingly severe congestion".

The maps will be seized upon by both sides of the transport debate as evidence of failed policy. The environmentalists argue that even with massive spending on roads there would be little improvement as the congestion crisis is growing faster than any feasible road programme Britain could afford.

Roger Higman, a transport campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "This just shows that we need policies to stem the growth in traffic, not to try to accommodate it by concreting over large sections of Britain."

The pro-roads lobby suggests, however, that the roads programme must be reinstated to its former levels. Mark Glover, spokesman for the British Roads Federation, said: "Unless we are prepared to increase road capacity, users will have to pay a massive cost in terms of congestion."