Labour plans mean 25pc more traffic

Road building schemes approved by the Labour government will cause traffic to increase by nearly a quarter, new research reveals today.

The figures for the 129 bypass and road-widening schemes, including big projects on the M1, M5, M25 and key A-roads, will fuel criticism of the government's U-turn on its promise to axe major road building.

When it came to power in 1997, Labour stopped work on all major road schemes that it had inherited from the Conservatives, but it has launched its own programme of more than 100 projects.

'These figures are indicative of a government that has failed to realise that they can't build their way out of the UK's transport problems,' said Tom Brake, the Liberal Democratic spokesman on traffic.

The figures for major road schemes under way or given the go-ahead were provided by the Department for Transport and the Highways Agency in response to parliamentary questions by Brake. They forecast that when the schemes are completed traffic will rise by an average of nearly one quarter on those stretches of road.

The projections include a more than doubling in vehicles per day on the A64 Rillington bypass in North Yorkshire, the A421 from the M1 to Bedford, and the A429 Stratford Road in Warwickshire.

The biggest expected increase will be on the M25 where it is being widened between junctions 12 and 15. There traffic is forecast to rise from 200,000 to 250,000 vehicles per day - though at 20 per cent the proportional increase is below average.

The Observer also revealed this month that Britain's first toll motorway, the M6 Toll, is failing to cut down congestion and has generated many extra car trips, and that the government's official traffic forecasts were even higher than previously admitted.

Tony Bosworth, transport campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: 'When you widen a road there's more capacity, so people will make longer journeys, or it will realise suppressed demand - people who would have avoided making a journey or made a journey by another mode.'

However, the RAC motoring group said the increase in traffic showed how much the new road space was needed. Critics of road-building often point to widening of the M25 in the Nineties, which led to the extra lanes 'filling up' in less than one year.

'You shouldn't actually build new road space if it's not needed,' said Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation. 'Ninety-two per cent of traffic is by road, and the same is spent on rail which carries 6 per cent [of travel] - the reality is we probably need a bit more widening, not less.'

King also said some of the increase in traffic would be offset by decreases on smaller roads near by, and some was generated by development after the new road space opened, often supermarkets and other out-of-town shopping.

Government statements that benefits of extra road space should be 'locked in' - for example, by charging to use roads to stop big increases in usage - have not been matched by action, although there is a debate in progress about national road pricing.

The 'vast majority' of the 129 schemes are in the government's 'targeted programme of improvements', and so have been given the go-ahead, said a Highways Agency spokesman.