derek wrote:

All what roadbuilding? The motorways in Scotland were complete (all
but 15 miles) before 1970. That's to all intents and puposes 35 years
ago. As I said it's like driving round the old East Germany. And now
like any old system maintenance is a big source of downtime. Let's
face it every other system that's tried to run using 35 year old
infrastructure has bitten the dust (The Mills, The Mines, The
Steelworks, USW, USW.)


The extension of the M74/A74(M) south to Gretna largely took place in the
1990s. Likewise the building of the M77. And the upgrading of the A90
between Perth and Aberdeen.

You were saying?

--
http://www.speedlimit.org.uk
"If laws are to be respected, they must be worthy of respect."

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 19:28:55 -0000, "Clive George"
wrote:
I thought you wanted cheap labour from abroad?
Quite but people who are willing to earn their keep not people who can
only say Benefits Agency in english when they arrive .
Grant .

To continue to build roads will continue the problem. The answer is
puvblic transport, but public transport cannot cater for all journeys
and therefore over time journeys will need to become more
corridored.

What exactly do you mean by "more corridored"? Most long distance journeys
are already corridored into the rail and motorway networks.

For example go into any city during the am peak and the tidality
of the flow is there to be seen.

Yes, commuting into city centres is probably the only thing that public
transport *can* cater for.

Without cars on the urban road network public transport would be
faster and more reliable.

Indeed it would. However, the current situation we have is that public
transport routes rarely cater for where you want to go. For example, to do
my route to work I would have to get a bus all the way into the city centre,
then another one out again at a different angle - taking well over an hour,
when my destination is just 7 miles away but in a direction not catered for
by the bus network.

We know that building more roads is
a) environmentally damaging

How so? Surely free flowing traffic is using fuel more efficiently, and thus
polluting less, than a traffic jam with thousands of cars hardly moving at
all?

b) increases usage so essentially provides no longterm greater net
capacity.

Usage does increase, however that usage tends to come off local residential
roads, thus making life far more pleasant for residents.
For example, you could argue that the M60 completion in Manchester filled up
to capacity almost on the day it opened, which may be true - but if you look
at the bigger picture and how much quieter local streets in the area are,
surely it's worth it.

So where do you stop, when the whole country is one great network
of asphalt???

Don't be silly, we're nowhere near that. I don't think the motorway network
even takes up 1% of the land in this country, there's plenty of space for
more.

Look at a map of Germany, and compare it to a map of this country. They have
motorways all over the place, yet they still have plenty of countryside to
enjoy.

When labour came to power the country had no money. It was in a
huge deficit.It has taken time to gather the money for spending.

Au contrare, Labour has increased the national debt since it came to power.

Large road building schemes are NOT the answer. it has been proven
that traffic grows according to network capacity. So we build another
M25 result more traffic

Yes we should build an outer M25. One of the main reasons the M25 is so
congested is that it serves as a local London ring road, and also as a
London bypass.

If the North/South Circulars had been built properly as 3-4 lane motorways,
people living in London wouldn't need to use the M25 to get from one part to
another, and it would do what it was designed for - cater for long-distance
traffic.

Yuppies were synonimus with the 80's its a known FACT. FACT She sold
off all of the national utilities, which now make huge profits for private
shareholders instead of such funding going back into th coffers. All that
MT ever did was to lower taxes at the expense of everything else.

What has that got to do with anything? I'm not debating Thatcher's social
policies, this is a transport group and they're irrelevant. No matter how
bad things were with Ms Thatcher, you have to admit that she did actually
invest in the motorway network.

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 21:36:52 -0000, "Chris Jones"
wrote:
No matter how
bad things were with Ms Thatcher,
Did you say BAD I never had it so good things certainly went down hill
once Major moved into No 10 .
Grant .

"Chris Jones" wrote the following
in:

If the North/South Circulars had been built properly as 3-4 lane
motorways, people living in London wouldn't need to use the M25 to
get from one part to another, and it would do what it was designed
for - cater for long-distance traffic.

The North Circular's not that bad. Apart from a few dodgy bits where it
gets very congested or narrows down to single carriageway, it's
generally alright.

"Paul Weaver" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 12:46:18 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:


It took 15 years of Hell before Junction 8 on the M62 was finished. The
Trafford Centre fares better, however the metro doesn't go there.

The Trafford Centre only received planning permission on the basis that the
Greater Manchester LRT System (Metrolink) would reach the Dumplington
complex *before* the centre opened, in order to reduce the traffic chaos.

Either they've broken the rules (perhaps this was changed after the public
inquiry) or they widened the M63/M60 instead?

"iantheengineer" wrote in message
...

"Chris Jones" wrote in message
...
Just look at the roads around any Ikea store, for instance.

Absolute rubbish. all large developments require transport impact
assessments. The DEVELOPER pays for these to be carrioed out and the are
examined by the councils or the prevailinbg highway authority. all
junctioons and link roads are examined for capacity and the impact that
traffic will have. The examinations are robust with factors of safety
built
into them. If the junctions start to cause a proble or reach 85% of the
capacity within the (normally) 10 years following development. the
DEVELOPER
pays for the improvement works.

I should know I write TIAs on regular basis

Does this apply where the development and the access road lie within two
different authorities?

I quote the case of IKEA Leeds, which is actually in Kirklees
(Huddersfield), and the main access point of the M62/M621 comes under Leeds
City Council.

On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:31:32 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
Don't be silly, we're nowhere near that. I don't think the motorway network
even takes up 1% of the land in this country, there's plenty of space for
more.

Motorways take about 50 square miles of the UK - 0.05% of the total land
area.

On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 22:48:45 +0000, Robin May wrote:

The North Circular's not that bad. Apart from a few dodgy bits where it
gets very congested or narrows down to single carriageway, it's
generally alright.

Traffic lights