The Highways Agency this week invited tenders from potential contractors to widen to four lanes the remaining three-lane sections of the motorway, including the length between the M26 and Reigate. The single contract, worth £1.5 billion, will be to design, build, finance and operate the 63 miles of the M25 due for widening.
Responding to the announcement, Peter Ainsworth said:
‘When the Heathrow section of the M25 was widened, I warned that the work would cause massive short-term disruption with no long-term benefit, since traffic volume would simply increase to fill the new capacity. Regrettably, this has turned out to be true.
‘I fear the same will be the case for this new contract; all the evidence is that when you increase road capacity, traffic simply grows to fill it.’
Peter Ainsworth set out four main reasons why the M25 is likely to remain a giant parking lot:
- The underlying reason why the M25 is frequently choked with traffic is that the South East is already over-developed; Government plans to build many thousands more houses in the region will only make matters worse;
- Future increases in capacity at Heathrow, Stansted and possibly Gatwick will cause yet further increases in traffic on the M25;
- The planned scrapping of the Gatwick Express will add to traffic problems on the M25 and M23; and
- The massive bottleneck at the Dartford crossing will remain, and a wider M25 will just mean even bigger queues.
Peter Ainsworth continued:
“Ultimately this widening project will be pointless and counterproductive.
“£1.5 billion is a vast amount of our money to spend on a project that will create huge short term problems with the misery of road works and will offer no long term solution. If I had that money to spend, here are some of the things I might spend it on instead:
*Healing the chronic problems of our local health service;
*Keeping down the Council Tax and investing in public services;
*More visible and effective policing;
*Encouraging less polluting fuels to help tackle climate change.”
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