Road to ruin

We have got our priorities wrong when we find that adding just one lane to a motorway over 51 miles will cost more than £3bn, or £1,000 an inch. That would build at least six big new hospitals. It would give 80,000 NHS nurses a £400 a year rise every year for 10 years. It’s more than the annual budget of Botswana, one of Africa’s most successful economies.

Not surprsingly, the government’s road programme is being kept quiet. Labour came to power in 1997 with a commitment to cut back on new roads but is now presiding over a massive expansion of the network. In July 2000, a 10-year transport plan said £59bn was needed for new roads. In 2004, the Future of Transport white paper concluded that, before 2025, a further 2,500 miles of road carriageway needed to be built.

Not much has been said because there are no headline-grabbing new roads being pushed through countryside like the M3 extension through Twyford Down in the 1990s. But £13bn has so far committed for nearly 150 more or less damaging schemes. The Weymouth relief road threatens nature reserves and protected countryside in Dorset; there’s a new bypass planned through the Peak District national park and the proposed M4 relief road would plough through the Gwent Levels marshes, south of Newport.

Rather than build brand new roads, the government is mostly planning to widen what exists. Construction firms say this is the most expensive way to build roads. So far, the M1 widening is costed at over £5bn, the M6 at £2.9bn, £2.02bn for the M25, and £1bn for the M74 in Glasgow. Some of these are being done on PFI contracts, so the real cost to the taxpayer can be expected to be far more.

But road-price inflation is increasing costs by 7-9% a year, so we can probably add a lot more to the official figures. A study by pressure group Roadblock shows that, on average, motorways and trunk-road schemes end up costing 68% more than originally budgeted. The Commons transport select committee says that the Highways Agency has “lost budgetary control”.

But the real problem is that building more roads has been shown to add to car traffic, which in turn demands more money is spent on roads which means that there is less for bicycling, pedestrians, traffic calming, sustainable transport schemes, and getting people out of cars.

For the cost of the M1 widening project, Britain could buy enough cycle track to go four and a half times around the world. It could buy 5,000 new train carriages. £5bn is nearly the total annual budget on rail. It is the annual GDP of one third of the world’s countries.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transport seems completely detached from science and climate change. Government figures show that while greenhouse gas emissions from industry and commerce have been falling, annual CO2 emissions from road transport increased by 10% between 2000 and 2004 and are expected to increase 19% in this decade. You’d think that it was government policy to cut back on new roads for this reason alone, but it’s actually the opposite.

The real price of a new road may be far more than £1,000 an inch.

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