The motorway age (1955–79) - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 76

motor car industry in the UK was geared to the tastes of the middle class (a much
smaller social group than today) and this explains the received wisdom of the time that
car ownership would not extend to the mass of the population, with corresponding
limits to prospective traffic growth.
After the war the official position changed and the case was accepted for the
limited development of purpose-built motorways as an alternative to the improvement
of existing routes. A proposal put forward previously by the County Surveyors' Society
was used as the basis of an announcement by the (Labour) Transport Minister, Alfred
Barnes, in 1946 to construct an 800-mile network. This formed the core of the
motorway system developed subsequently. The powers to build such roads, excluding
certain classes of traffic and without frontage access, were obtained in the Special
Roads Act of 1949.
Post-war restrictions on public expenditure meant that motorway construction was
delayed until after 1956. The first major route - the 75-mile section of M1 between
Watford and Crick, near Rugby (replacing the traditional A5 route between London
and Birmingham) - was opened in 1959. At its opening the Minister of Transport,
Ernest Marples, commented:
This motorway starts a new era in road travel. It is in keeping with the bold,
exciting and scientific age in which we live.
(quoted in Hamilton and Potter 1985 p. 52)
Over the next decade construction continued at a rate averaging 100 miles a year.
Significantly this first phase proceeded without any of the vociferous campaigns from
environmental groups which characterised later phases. Proposals for new roads and
road improvements outside urban areas did not normally involve substantial property
acquisition or environmental damage to local residents as route alignments could be
chosen to minimise such effects. Difficulties could arise however where the quality of
the natural environment over a wider area was inimicable to road building. Within
the first phase of the national motorway programme the section of the M4 between
Maidenhead, Reading and Swindon was notably delayed because of problems in
agreeing the alignment which had the least environmental impact.
An innovative economic assessment was made of the use of the initial section
of M1, comparing the time and cost savings of its users against the capital cost of
construction (Coburn et al. 1960). This provided a demonstration of the economic
value of the development and helped establish the motorway programme as a legitimate
item of public expenditure in the eyes of the Treasury. These 'cost-benefit' techniques
were developed subsequently to explore the relative merits of alternative versions of
individual schemes and then to rank competing schemes as candidates for inclusion in
the national road programme.
By the end of the 1960s the original plan for 1,000 miles of motorway was
nearing completion. The Labour Government put forward proposals for the next
stage of development in a consultation paper 'Roads for the Future' (MOT 1969).
This emphasised the importance not merely of building individual motorways but
of improving the standard of the nation's inter-urban network as a whole. In the
following 1970 White Paper a target was set of a high quality 4,500-mile network of
motorways and other dual carriageway roads to be completed over the following 15 to
20 years (MOT 1970). In essence this strategy was carried forward by the incoming
Conservative Government a year or so later (DOE 1972b).