Our Road Infrastructure Is Abysmal
Friday, 31. August 2018
Things in the world of motoring are completely unbalanced when I find myself agreeing, more than once in a decade, with commentator Mike Rutherford. Not only that and just to show that I think about my blog, this item follows on from the last entry explaining that we are suffering a terrible underspend in our roads infrastructure in Britain.
As Mike points out we are around number 70 in the list of countries around the world when it comes to miles of road per capita. In this country, we have around 67 million inhabitants with a road network of jus 263,000 miles. In France, they have 66 million inhabitants with an eye-watering 640,000 miles of roads.
No wonder we spend disproportionate amounts of time sitting in traffic queues! Even Italy with a population of 61 million inhabitants has more miles of roads than us at 300,000. It’s an absolute disgrace that successive Governments have disregarded our roads.
Traffic jams cause increased pollution, make travel times longer and use more fuel but even worse is the way that it makes us all less efficient. The Government has expressed concerns about our efficiency but part of the problem is our road infrastructure. We can’t be doing anything if we are sitting in traffic for hours on end.
Getting back to the statistics, Spain has a population of 47 million with 424,000 miles of roads. Even Scandinavia with a population of just 10 million Swedes has created 330,000 miles of roads. 5 million Finns had a massive 282,000 miles of roads to speed along – that’s a population of 90% less than us with more miles of road than GB.
Australia with a bigger area but fewer inhabitants than GB has 500,000 miles of roads. Finally the US with a population of 328 million has 4.4 million miles of roads. As Mike points out this situation is not only a disgrace it is becoming a joke and extremely embarrassing. We are so bad we are behind Namibia and Estonia.
Now whilst some of the roads aren’t of the highest quality in some countries and some roads are pavementless we are lagging behind most other sophisticated countries buy a large margin. It can take years just to build a few miles of motorway so we really need to get our fingers out now and agree some heavy spending on our roads infrastructure or run the risk of the whole country grinding to a stop. By Graham Hill
