Government To Improve Road Network
The UK Government has confirmed that Britain will benefit from improvements in the road network. Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon also said that there will also be restructuring of the rail and air networks, which is designed to support the economy and secure jobs in the long term.
The road network will receive a massive boost. Up to up to £6bn will be spent to increase capacity on some of the nation’s busiest roads will be spent – this will provide an extra 520 lane miles of road by widening and opening up the hard shoulder – as well as new plans to roll-out hard shoulder running across the core motorway network.
But Hoon claimed that this opening up of the road network would not dilute the work that the government are taking on carbon emissions. The Transport Secretary announced new measures to protect the environment and help ensure that Britain meets its climate change commitments.
One of the main aims is to spend £250m to get more ultra low-carbon vehicles on Britain’s roads, helping motorists to go green by stimulating consumer uptake and helping to reduce emissions from road transport and improve local air quality.
Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon said, “Transport is the lifeblood of Britain’s economy. In spite of record levels of investment over the last decade, increasing demand means that in many places our transport infrastructure is operating at, or very near, capacity. It is essential we take the right decisions now: for the economy, to drive down greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; and to support British jobs.”
Hoon added, “It is clear that many of our major roads also need more capacity and we are committing up to £6bn to improve the national road network – including extending hard shoulder running to some of the busiest parts of M1, M25, M6, M62, M3 and M4, providing much-needed relief from congestion.”
Following trials on the M42 motorway, the Government’s Transport Secretary has given the go-ahead for works allowing driving on the hard shoulder of the M6 motorway during peak hours. The investment package of up to £6 billion will be spent in the West Midlands in the following ways:
* Improving the key M1 junction 19 interchange with the M6 and A14 -with work likely to start by March 2012
* Introducing hard shoulder running on the M6 J8-10a north of Birmingham – with work planned to start in April
* Introducing hard shoulder running on M6 J5-8 around Birmingham – with work likely to start by March 2012
* Introducing hard shoulder running on M6 J10a-13 north of Birmingham – with work to start by 2015.
In addition, as part of the longer term strategy to roll out hard shoulder running across the motorway network the Government plans to implement this technique on:
* the M6 J2-4 (between Coventry and Birmingham)
* the remaining stretch of the M6 between Birmingham and Manchester
* the M5 J4a – J6 south of Birmingham
* the M1 J13-19 south of Rugby.
However, the Green Party has called the Government’s road network scheme is a farce.
The Green Party’s MEP Candidate for the West Midlands, Felicity Norman, claims this is ‘motorway widening on the cheap’.
Felicty Norman warned, “This really is motorway widening on the cheap, increasing capacity for more cars and more carbon dioxide emissions, although the countryside at least doesn’t have to take the strain with this kind of widening. What the Government should really be doing is looking at alternative modes of travel for stressed motorists and creating jobs out of increasing the public transport infrastructure. In the face of catastrophic climate change, the UK urgently has to step up to the climate change challenge and there is absolutely no way we can afford to increase the amount of traffic on our roads. Unless we can reduce demand on the current motorways, we do not have a chance of avoiding life-changing climate change and untold economic damage”.
Simon McBride
See also:
No comments yet
