It may seem very hard to comprehend but the RAC Foundation are saying that the UK road network has seen little improvement since the Romans left our shores around one thousand six hundred years ago!
This has led to a call for the entire road network to be looked at and where necessary updated to accommodate the pressures of today’s traffic. However they do also say that if it was not for the Romans our road network would have been a lot worse if that is possible.
The foundation said:
The motor vehicle was not a legally recognised mode of transport until 1896
By 1910, a total of 140,000 cars were travelling on UK roads making driving a tax option for the Treasury
A National Road Board was set up in 1910 and ran for nine years, putting aside taxes for road improvements
The Ministry of Transport replaced the board in 1919
Economic difficulties in the period after the First World War and the Second World War itself created five false starts to the ministry's road programme
Thirty-eight years after the ministry was founded, the first motorway was built in 1957, a century after turnpikes had ceased to exist
Despite a poor road development programme the ministry developed many of the rules and regulations governing road use today.
The acting director of the RAC Foundation, Sheila Rainger, said: “Badly-planned, poorly-configured, piecemeal road-building programmes should be a feature of our country’s past. Road-user charging could be part of the future solution, but recent debate has shown this idea to be less popular than turnpikes.
“To avoid roads to ruin we need to learn from these mistakes, and develop stronger planning frameworks and more powerful delivery organisations with a clear duty to develop and manage the strategic road network. This will ensure we have a transport infrastructure fit for the 21st century.”
One thing is for sure the road network in some places needs immediate attention, but where the money is going to come from to pay for all of these improvements is anyone’s guess.
Source [Auto Trader News]
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