Motorways are dumb, so let’s rip them up

THERE never was and never will be such a thing as a ‘smart motorway’. Motorways themselves are dumb and we should never have had them in this country. We should plough them up and put railways where they used to run.

I suppose there might be a case for them in vast nations such as the USA, where they have more land than they know what to do with. Though even there the Interstate highways have destroyed what was once a superb rail network and carved up pleasant cities with hideous concrete scars. But in our small, beautiful landscape and our ancient, intimate towns there never was any place for these rivers of angry steel, snarling and growling through once-serene hills and fields and pouring filth and noise into the cities they invade.

In my short life I have seen these stupid things wreck so much of this country that I am perpetually amazed that there is no campaign to get rid of them.

Their original promise of easy, spacious speed has proved wholly false. Driving on them is a terrifying test of nerves, even where there is still a hard shoulder (I have driven in Moscow and on the Los Angeles Freeways. I know what I’m comparing them with).

Those who try to keep sensible distances or keep to speed limits are quickly bullied into driving badly like everyone else.

The man who imposed them on us, the 1960s Transport Minister Ernest Marples, was a nasty piece of work who owned a road-building company and actually fled the country (by train) to avoid a huge tax bill. Marples is a good symbol of the cheap, shabby, gimcrack era of concrete tower blocks and flyovers.

He was the man mainly responsible for destroying much of our railway network and filling our road system with enormous lorries carrying loads that ought to go by train. It is clear, looking back at this, that it was all a terrible mistake.

Yet the Transport Ministry is still in the hands of road fanatics, who pour billions into new roads which promptly fill up with cars and trucks, and who persist with the disastrous privatisation of the railways.

They could (and probably will) carry on building motorways until the entire country is covered in them, without solving our transport problem.