Few will disagree that Britain’s roads are in bad condition. Many will say that they are worse than bad, with dire, shocking and appalling being more accurate. Some even think that, in part at least, it is a deliberate plot to drive us off the roads. (Anyone care to write an article on that for Conspiracy Corner?). In any event, things are bad, and set to get worse.
And it’s not just our road’s surface condition that is unacceptable. Everything about them is rotten. They are often badly built, almost always badly repaired and, it seems, managed by incompetents. And of course there are not enough of them, or of other infrastructure like bridges and tunnels.
There is an old Chinese saying, “If you want to get rich, build roads first.” China built roads, millions of miles of them, and is now the world's largest economy (by PPP). Deliberately or not, our useless ruling class seems to be working on the opposite tack: don’t build roads and let those you have rot and make people poorer. They would obviously prefer to send our money abroad to build roads in Spain and Sri Lanka.
Here, they get everything wrong, as symbolised by the idiotic decision – years too late in 1975 - to build an orbital motorway around London (the M25) with only two lanes (three in a few places) . Entirely predictably, it was soon unable to cope with the volume of traffic, and earned the nickname of being the world’s biggest car park. It has had to have more lanes added, very expensively, over the years and still struggles to cope. The approaches to the Dartford Crossing often see ten-mile tailbacks and more. Yet they have learned nothing, the same petty-minded, parsimonious, penny-pinching approach is still evident in everything they do. In comparison, Beijing has seven orbital roads, each with a minimum of three lanes, six in many places.
Here, everything takes an age to complete, planning, construction and repair. Largely this is because of bureaucratic regulation left over, and often enhanced, from the EU, though that said you rarely see the never-ending roadworks on French roads that you see here. And if you do see roadworks, you don’t have to pass three miles of road restricted by traffic cones to get past thirty yards of ‘work’ where, more often than not, no work is being done. And the quality of repairs is atrocious, patches on top of patches on top of patches. We have all seen sections of road dug up by an electricity company, filled in as cheaply as possible, only to be dug up a few weeks later by a gas company who does even worse work. Come the winter, water gets in the cracks, expands when it ices, and breaks the road up again. No quality control, no supervision, nothing, just a free for all that can cost lives. Do councils care? Not that we can see.
And does anyone doubt that our roads are used to generate money for the State, with road tax and fines raised from speed cameras that have not been reliably proven to prevent accidents? Cameras that, in the opinion of many, serve no other purpose, certainly not improving safety. Obviously, speed is easy to measure and so fine. Bad driving, which is really what causes accidents, is much harder to capture on camera, so they don’t bother. And no doubt soon they will force to by mileage as well.
Our masters came up with the idea of ‘smart’ motorways. To nobody’s surprise they are smart at one thing only, fining motorists. And there is no mercy, no excuse is tolerated, no reason given consideration. They want your money and are determined to get as much of it as possible. And yet these smart roads are dangerous. Even the police say so. A police and crime commissioner from South Yorkshire wrote to the government, after a coroner found that two men had been unlawfully killed on a "smart" section of the M1, to say that they are "inherently unsafe and dangerous and should be abandoned". The cloth eared incompetents at the Department for Transport asserted that "smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones".
The Department of Transport that presides over this mess is demonstrably incompetent, if its brief is to properly maintain Britain’s roads and keep traffic flowing. Traffic lights are on red more often than not, and often no traffic is moving at all. And those variable speed signs on motorways seem to cause problems rather than avoid them. And they are often left on long after any traffic problem has disappeared. And speed limits are idiotic. Seventy miles per hour on an empty motorway is far too low, as demonstrated by the fact that they think it safe to do sixty on the lane below, where it is impossible for two cars to pass.
And the police? Worse than useless, as they always seem to make matters worse, doing nothing and caring less about traffic flow.
And politicians? Worse than the police, for they do nothing and care less, but are also ultimately responsible for the mess. We have an election coming up, but has anyone heard a politician talk about the state of our roads, or any other of the myriad of ‘minor’ matters that make our lives miserable?
The infuriating thing is that it’s all so easy to avoid. More roads should be built, paid for by cutting the welfare scams, hand outs to politicised charities and the woke industry, stopping immigrants coming here and sponging off the taxpayer, and cutting the civil service down to size.
Those left should be on performance related pay – with the public the judge of performance. Roads should be planned for maximum foreseeable capacity with 25% in-built redundancy and built to last with minimum repairs. Road repairs should be planned properly, supervised with strict quality control with penalties applied to utility companies and others who take too long and do shoddy repairs. We should look into replacing cables and pipes with standard module ducting, maybe accessible by robots. And we should scrap all these health and safety rules about miles and miles of cones and so on.
And don’t forget or forgive the politicians who take our money and waste it, and who couldn’t care less about inconveniencing the public.