- The Observer,
- Sunday March 31, 2002
She called her mother, Mary, and told her she would be with her in time for an early lunch. Six hours later the computer on the dashboard told her she had averaged a glacial one mile per hour - for the last five hours. She was one of 20,000 people stuck in one of the worst bank holiday motorway tailbacks in the history of Britain's congested motorways. A pile-up involving 100 cars had killed two people and closed the A40M on one of the busiest travel days of the year. At its height the jam backed up for 20 miles.
The only small consolation was that she was safe and not suffering alone. About 100 miles west another fatal accident had made the junction of the M4 and the M5 just outside Bristol 'the worst place to be in the country' in the words of Andy Bryant, an RAC officer at the organisation's West Country traffic monitoring station. It was the same story 24 hours later on the A1 in North Yorkshire and the M25 London orbital where a series of smashes slowed traffic to a crawl.
Across the country almost 100,000 cars - containing up to 300,000 people - were snarled up over two days. Four people were dead and more than 100 injured. As travellers wearily unwrap their Easter eggs today many will wonder whether trying to get away from it all for a few days is worth it any more.
The last three days have been the worst in living memory on the motorways - and around midday tomorrow the mayhem will begin again as millions of us head for home. Britain's roads are officially grinding to a halt and the gridlock is set to get worse.
New figures from the AA show that if traffic goes on growing at the current rate and roads and public transport are not improved, last week's chaos will become the norm every weekend.
Motorists are heading for half a million traffic jams a year - a rate of nearly 10,000 a week. Journey times of eight hours from the south east and the Midlands to reach the beaches of Devon and Cornwall will become commonplace. Ten-mile jams will become a permanent feature on the M1 and M6 as cars inch their way towards Manchester, Liverpool, Yorkshire and the Lake District. The M4 in south Wales and the coast roads west of Swansea will slow to a crawl and sections of the M25, particularly in Hertfordshire, will look more like a giant car park than an eight lane highway.
With more and more travellers trying to stagger their journeys or resorting to midnight flits and dawn runs, long stretches of road will be blighted by congestion virtually around the clock. The more heavy wheels and groaning axles that hit the tarmac, the more grooved and rutted carriageways will become. Regiments of day-glo traffic cones and signs barking 'No emergency phones' will spread across the country as contractors work day and night to repair the damage.
The motorway, which promised to speed Britain into a new era of mobility where freedom was only a drive away, is in crisis. As Richard Diment, of the British Road Federation, puts it: 'Motorways have transformed our lives but urgent action is now needed to ensure that the freedom to travel is preserved for generations to come.'
Few modern inventions have gone from being a much-loved symbol of progress to the curse of so many lives in such a short time. When Britain's first motorway - a 72-mile stretch of the M1 from Watford to Rugby - opened on a bright November morning 40 years ago last year, motorists were so impressed they picnicked on the hard shoulder to watch the new festival of speed. Stirling Moss, the Grand Prix and Mille Miglia legend, led a parade up and down the new road as some of the £19-a-week workers, who had cleared 20 million tonnes of earth and stone over the past 584 days stood at the side and cheered in their donkey jackets.
Charles Forte opened the first motorway service station the following year so the 'gin and jag' brigade could enjoy their hot dogs and fillet steak and chips for less than £1.
Industrial cities, notably Glasgow and Birmingham, ripped out their Victorian hearts and replaced elegant terraced homes and high street shops with mile after mile of virgin concrete. Nobody cared then about trees, fields, squashed barn owls, ozone depletion and childhood asthma. This was progress.
Not any more. As they try to calculate when they will actually get home from their so-called Easter break, many motorists are wondering how a country where Mr Rolls met Mr Royce has ended up with one of the worst road networks in the industrialised world.
Figures from the Government's own Commission for Integrated Transport show motorway and trunk-road building in Britain has slowed to a trickle in the last 10 years. In the same period, Britain's public transport has been starved of investment, forcing people into their cars.
Britain spends half as much on public transport as Germany, France and Italy. We also have some of the highest bus and train fares. Ageing rolling stock, vandalised buses and a Tube system where summer temperatures exceed the legal limit for transporting live animals make public transport the last resort for more and more commuters.
While it has been deteriorating, private transport has become the most comfortable - if slow - way of getting from A to B. The modern driver has more comforts at his fingertips than any bus or train passenger: air conditioning, a six-CD sound system, telephone, seats that massage your back, and enough air bags to stop a turbocharged rhinoceros. Small wonder we like driving in our cars.
Cars accelerate and slow down faster then ever, too. The more congested roads become, the faster we feel we have to travel when we hit a clear stretch to make it to the office, home or the beach on time.
Government research shows that more than half of motorway drivers speed and one in six drive at more than 80mph. Faster speeds can mean more serious accidents - which create even more congestion. Robert Gifford, executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, says: 'As cars become ever safer and more comfortable many drivers are becoming more careless.'
Nobody, not even Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, disagrees that the past year has been a disaster on the roads. New Labour has been promising to cut congestion ever since it took office, but nearly five years on, all the weary public gets is jams today and more tomorrow. But now there are some tentative signs of progress.
The Government has pledged to invest £180 billion in transport. Look 10 years into the future and, Ministers predict, there will be double-decker trains whisking commuters into the cities; high- speed bus and tram routes; stations at major motorway junctions so that people can leave their cars and jump on to frequent, high-speed train links to major towns and cities; and new communications systems to guide motorists away from jams. Congestion charging, which starts in London next year, will raise millions of pounds of new revenue to invest in public transport.
It is an ambitious programme. But after so many broken promises those on the front line of gridlock Britain say they doubt it will make any difference. Yesterday AA patrolman Tony Leader was listening to traffic reports coming into the organisation's roadwatch centre, in Stanmore, Middlesex. 'Heavy congestion on the M6 heading for the Lake District,' the radio crackled. 'Contraflow and heavy traffic around Greater Manchester. Traffic backed up on the M55 leading to Blackpool. M25 busy as day-trippers head for Bluewater shopping centre or the coast.'
As he packed up his van and prepared to make the long journey home to celebrate Easter with his family, he said: 'I have been a patrolman for 14 years and the traffic has just escalated in that time. Whatever anyone has tried to do to get us out of cars, we just carry on driving more and more.
'We are awfully reliant on our cars and the congestion is diabolical. Politicians come up with some wonderful excuses for why roads are snarled up. I would like to see more cars off the road, but I do not think I will see it in my lifetime. And, you know, I'm 47.'
Additional information:
· Britons drive 50 million miles each year on 1,675 miles of motorway.
· The busiest motorway is the M25 between junctions 15 and 14. It carries 165,000 vehicles a day.
· The M25 orbiting London is the world's longest bypass - 117 miles.
· The worst motorway traffic jam was on 5 April 1985. It stretched for 40 miles on the M1 between junctions 16 and 18. The cause: roadworks.
· 4,300 speed cameras watch motorists on the motorway network. One in two drivers regularly breaks the 70mph speed limit.
· The M1 was opened in 1959. On its first day it carried 13,000 vehicles; 100 broke down in the first 10 miles.
· In 1998 William Allen, 84, spent two days trying to find the right turn off for his daughter's house on the M25.
· In Europe, only Holland has fewer deaths per mile on its motorways.
Sandra Cole and Kerry Beadling
