[A-List] UK infrastructure crisis: roads to nowhere

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Fresh from rendering the BBC a pliant poodle for the executive, "Lord"
John Birt, the man with a "mission to explain" and thoroughly enmeshed
within the UK state apparatus with all his former buddies from London
Weekend Television (Peter Mandelson, Greg Dyke, David Aaronovitch,
Michael Maclay, to name just a few), has come up with a "brilliant" idea
to solve the UK's transport crisis -- more roads! Except these are to be
private "super" roads...



Birt toll road plan lacks PM's support
By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
The Independent, 20 May 2002

Plans by Lord Birt to create a network of toll "supermotorways" looked
doomed last night after it emerged Tony Blair had already dismissed the
idea as too expensive.

Motoring organisations and environmentalists joined yesterday to attack
the proposals, drawn up by the peer in his role as the Prime Minister's
adviser on transport.

Lord Birt wants to create "premium" pay roads between England's major
cities with few exits, to repeat the success of the French peage system.

The former BBC director-general, brought in by Downing Street to engage
in "blue skies thinking", ran into immediate opposition, not least
within Stephen Byers' Department of Transport, when the plan was leaked
at the weekend.

But the biggest obstacle is likely to be Mr Blair himself, according to
Edmund King, the RAC Foundation's executive director. He revealed
yesterday that he had suggested a similar network to Mr Blair earlier
this year. "When we had a meeting with the Prime Minister and put
forward that 'high highways' option, the Prime Minister's exact words
were: 'That's a lot of dosh'," he told BBC Radio Five Live's Sunday
Breakfast.

The RAC Foundation is not opposed to tolls, but believes the Government
should consider widening current roads instead of building new ones. Mr
King said a recent report by the foundation showed that creating a
special road network would cost up to £750bn over the next 50 years
and would be logistically and environmentally difficult.

Last week a survey for the RAC Foundation showed three-quarters of
drivers would support tolls if they were combined with road
improvements.

Downing Street said the peer's advice to the Prime Minister was
confidential and stressed Government policy was set out in the ten-year
transport plan.

Tony Juniper, policy director at Friends of the Earth, called on the
Government to "reject this nonsense immediately". "This plan seems to
have come from the same John Birt patch of blue sky that brought so much
harm to the BBC," he said. "Building a network of supermotorways across
the countryside would be an environmental disaster."

Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat transport spokes-man, said: "It would
be crazy to build more roads, an approach that all the evidence shows
creates more traffic, without first addressing the urgent need to make
significant improvements to public transport."