Error parsing XSLT file: \xslt\FacebookOpenGraph.xslt Mark Sinclair's Blog: 17 December 2008 - Missing link
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Mark Sinclair's Blog: 17 December 2008 - Missing link

Date: 17 December 2008

Mark Sinclair is boss of leasing firm Alphabet

The 50th anniversary of the opening of Britain's first stretch of motorway garnered its fair share of press coverage last week.

In its way, tying the 50th birthday hoopla to the day of the opening of the final £174 million "missing link" upgrade to the M6 motorway north of Carlisle was a nice piece of spin by the Department for Transport.

But let's be honest about it. The popping corks and congratulatory speeches were actually "celebrating" the fact that it's taken four Labour and six Conservative governments half a century to finish the main road between London and Glasgow.

Comparisons, they say, are odious but it must be said that their Victorian forebears oversaw the building of the main west coast railway line linking the two cities in a mere 16 years. Moreover, they were working under considerably greater pressure. Well-heeled private investors watched every penny, while the engineers had to invent most of the necessary technology as they went along.

The railway route still went up at an average rate of 25 miles per year compared with less than four miles a year for the last 5.8 miles of the M6. And all that despite the fact the railwaymen of 170 years ago only had quill pens, spades and wheelbarrows to work with, rather than computers and GPS-guided road laying machinery.

M-way builders, like the motorways themselves, seem to be developing clogged arteries. Harold Macmillan apparently got the M1 built at the rate of a mile every eight days, using a veritable army of labourers sustained by industrial sized field kitchens every few hundred yards. Each mile was also cheap by modern standards, at £10 million - £15 million in today's money.

By contrast, the short stretch of M6 opened last week cost today's taxpayers over £30 million per mile. Admittedly today's engineers had to allow for relocating local wildlife and avoiding river pollution whereas it's safe to assume that such concerns would have been literally steamrollered 50 years ago.

But given yesterday's revelation the DfT has managed to lose £81 million on an internal efficiency drive that was supposed to save taxpayers £57 million, perhaps we shouldn't hold out too much hope for cheaper stretches of new tarmac in the near future.

Certainly the Irish, those world leaders in hands-on railway and road construction, have decided that 21st century motorway-building projects have turned into insanely expensive, bureaucratic nightmares. Ireland now has a law that allows its government to circumvent 99% of the cost, paperwork and hassle by designating existing roads as motorways.

So elegant. So simple. And who could resist the chance to drive down Europe's only single track motorway with passing places? Fortunately for Irish truckers, I'm told the new law only applies to dual carriageways.



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