MOTORWAY WIDENING - G.A.M.E. ON

31-07-2007

Latest reports suggest the cost of widening the M6 between the West Midlands and Manchester could be £1,000 per mile making it the most expensive piece of tarmac in history. John Gale from the Group Against Motorway Expansion (or GAME) sets out the alternatives.

Rather than expand the U.K. road network, a more acceptable solution to the congestion of British roads, and the M6 in particular, would be a reduction in the amount of traffic.

To do that, in the long term, we’ll need nothing less than a wholesale restructuring of society; in the short term, there must be wholesale improvements to traffic management to ease the traffic flow.

At the moment, our planning policies allow developments that necessitate excessive movement of goods and humans.

What we should be doing is “planning out” the need for transportation as much as possible - so that we wouldn’t need as many roads.

Permission for future developments, for example, could be dependent on an audit of the likely carbon emissions of the end users.

This doesn’t help us deal with the problem we have now though - so how can we reduce the number of cars on our motorways?

One answer could be the temporary(?) introduction of a motorway-based National Coach Network similar to the one advocated by Storkey and Monbiot (link here)

These options give an acceptable solution that is greatly superior to the ridiculously costly and short-sighted regressive widening of the M6 motorway - provided they are enacted in their entirety as soon as possible.

Unless we aim to reduce society's transportation needs, the result will merely be a short term relief leading to an even more massive problem in years to come when the more severe effects of Climate Change will be combined with the difficulties caused by fuel shortages.

Climate Change is already having seriously adverse effects on the global economy and the global environment.

There have been flood refugees from numerous South Sea coral islands, and New Orleans (not to mention the recent problems in South Yorkshire and Gloucestershire)

We’re also seeing severe droughts around the world and as well as millions of starving humans, we now have hundreds if not thousands of Polar Bears starving due to ice melt.

It is widely predicted that there will soon be a global oil shortage, initially caused not so much by a shortage of oil in the ground but our inability to get it out and then refine it fast enough.

Should we increase our rate of oil extraction, then the 'oil peak' (i.e. time of maximum output) will take place before 2020.

In order to tackle both Climate Change and Peak Oil, the British government needs to introduce Tradeable Energy Quotas (http://www.teqs.net/).

TEQs is a system to enable nations to reduce their emissions along with their use of fossil fuels, and to ensure fair access to all.

The government should also be giving serious consideration to moving away from a fossil fuel based economy towards David Flemings 'Lean Economy' (link) - requiring that we generate less traffic.

And of course, we also need to persuade other countries to do the same.

To be on the GAME google list and thereby receive the latest GAME info, send your details (name, e-address and postal address) to nom6widening@googlemail.com

See Brendan Hawthorne's poem about the development here