HARD SHOULDER - SOFT OPTION

12-09-2006

The Stirrer is unimpressed by efforts to relieve congestion on the M42 by opening the hard shoulder at peak times.

“Predict and provide” they called it - the Tories' disastrous transport policy of the 1980's which threatened to see Britain covered in tarmac.They simply looked at existing trends in car use, extrapolated how much capacity might be needed in the future, and then sent in the bulldozers.

Swampy might have become a national hero for resisting the Newbury by-pass, but the protests there and elsewhere were squashed like so much roadkill as Britain hitched a ride on the highway to hell.

New motorways were laid more often than Joan Collins as motorists relished the chance sit in queues where they'd never sat in queues before - on the M25, M40, and the M42.

The sad truth was that for all their investment in infrastructure, the government simply ended up making more jams than Hartley's, not recognising that better roads encouraged yet more drivers to make yet more journeys in yet more cars.“Provide and predict” they should have called it. Provide more roads, and extra congestion is utterly predictable.

Labour sensed a shift in public mood when they came to power in 97, and immediately suspended much of the Tories' road programme.It was a crowd-pleaser and their landslide victory gave them a golden moment, a once in a lifetime opportunity take charge of the agenda.

They could have re-nationalised the railways, taken buses out of private ownership and committed to a future driven by public transport.But no.

Labour's friends in big business - at Railtrack and Virgin and Stagecoach - were given ever bigger handouts from the public purse but without any apparent improvement in the service the public enjoyed.

It took a series of tragedies on the tracks to restore safety to levels we had previously taken for granted.

Meanwhile bus use declined, and the road system simply stagnated.

Fast forward to 2006.

We have buses and trams that no one with a choice wants to travel on; trains that can't cope with the number of people wanting to use them, while the motorway network is as clogged as ever.

So where next then, after nearly 10 years of dithering?Toll roads for pay-as-you-go motoring?New routes for drivers as we head back to the future?Or a wholesale commitment to drive us off the road for anything other than essential journeys.

Ooh, nothing as controversial as that.

Instead, we are allowed to use the hard shoulder at peak times on the M42.

Unless someone breaks down of course. And until that too becomes crammed to its limit.

But what then? Who knows?