Roads to Nowhere?

BBC NEWS | UK | �7bn scheme to tackle congestion

So New Labour have done a traditional Labour U-turn, and decided to embark on an orgy of road-building. Well, not quite.

I suppose I should be grateful that they're just widening existing roads rather than building a whole lot of completely new ones, and some of the more feared proposals (like the 12-lane M4 past my parent's house in Slough) aren't back on the agenda. From my perspective as a non-driver, new roads make my life worse. Why? Because as soon as somebody builds a new road, out-of-town 'business parks' and 'retail parks' inevitably spring up alongside them, sucking economic activity out of town and city centres and moving them to places that are a pig to get to by public transport. Just try commuting round the M25 by public transport and you'll see what I mean.

We'll get a lot of environmental protests, especially some of the controversial sections of the road along the south coast. I wonder how much the environmentally-insensitive routing by the dessicated accountants at the Department of Transport have to do with this. The reason so many new roads plough though local beauty spots is because their philistine calculations assign a zero value to such things as ancient woodland or downland, while they assign a much higher value to flat, unscenic farmland to which they'll have to pay higher compensation to the landowners.