Grass roots organisations have a successful history of challenging road-building schemes that threaten the environment and health of local communities. Campaigns against the Newbury bypass and the M3 at Twyford Down in the 1990s made unlikely celebrities of protesters like Swampy, and have since passed into popular folklore.
Although both these roads were eventually built, the associated public outcry forced the then Conservative Government to axe over 100 planned roads from a policy billed as “the biggest road-building programme since the Romans”.
The Labour Government that came to power in 1997 pledged to reduce the number of car journeys. But it did not deliver. Instead, the upwards trend in the distance and frequency of car journeys continued, much of it rooted in unsustainable land-use planning that locks in car dependency by separating homes and jobs.
Now, policy makers are finding it increasingly hard to square a passion road-building with the need to act on climate change, and the way that road schemes are appraised is changing to factor in environmental costs.
The high financial cost of the roads programme has also drawn fire, as individual schemes run dramatically over budget. New roads are not proven to take back the time lost to traffic jams either. Congestion costs the UK economy around £19 billion year, but experience suggests that new roads frequently fill up with new traffic without improving journey times. A 2006 study of the Newbury bypass showed that the additional road capacity has fuelled traffic growth by nearly 50 percent, and that rush hour congestion is no better than prior to the bypass opening.
The same story is repeated at other traffic flashpoints around the country. Policy makers acknowledge that ever increasing traffic volumes are bad news for the environment and the economy. But until the public transport network is in better shape and measures to reduce demand for car travel are widely accepted, politicians will run shy of steps that could be construed as a ‘war against the motorist’.
Here, too, the local groups supported by the Manuka Club have an important role to play in public education, winning support for transport solutions that protect Britain’s countryside while providing the mobility people need.
