Weekend Column

If you have the misfortune to have to use it, the widening of the M27 to make it into a smart motorway will probably have nearly as much impact on your life as Brexit.

How do I know?

Because I regularly had to travel up the M3 when they were doing the same thing to that, a few years back.

The coned area was about six times longer than the works, or so it seemed, which appeared to proceed with all the rapidity of a dead snail.

Adding to the jams and general stress – most journeys took at least 45 minutes more than they should have – the area was peppered with yellow vulture cameras, measuring every long and horrible mile.

And I’m still waiting for the awful day when some poor, broken down motorist gets splatted by a lorry whose driver has momentarily forgotten that we don’t have a hard shoulder anymore...

Let’s face it, road policy in the UK is a bigger joke than Boris Johnson.

Roads are supposed to be the way people with cars get to work and get around. They are the way most of the things we eat and buy arrive in the shops.

Yet, to many in government and local authorities it would appear they are yet another way to fleece cash from the public, via speed cameras, petrol taxes or parking fees.

We are taxed when we buy cars, taxed on petrol, we pay road tax to drive on the road, pay the congestion charge in London and to park almost everywhere else.

In fact, if you are parked in London, there is every likelihood you will have paid five times to use the same bit of roadspace. Meanwhile, potholes tear our tyres to shreds but not one, living soul can tell us exactly how and where the motorist’s dollar gets spent.

When there is an accident police appear to conspire to close the roads for as long as they can whilst piously informing us they are investigating to see if a crime has been committed. Even if it’s a prang. Even if thousands of people are caught up in the queues.

I recently returned from driving 4,000 miles round America, a nation whose entire prosperity is connected to being able to travel long distances on the road.

I have never seen so many road upgrades and replacement programmes. Even Highway 50, the loneliest road in the USA, was being repaired with the minimum disruption.

US fender bender laws mean that far from some officious officer closing the entire dual carriageway because there’s been a shunt, it’s their and your legal duty to get the pranged vehicle onto the hard shoulder and keep the traffic moving.

School rush hours are mitigated by the free and simple School Bus, a brilliant service which must take at least 30 cars per coach off the roads.

Why don’t we have this system here? Because, let’s face it, we all notice how easy it is to drive to work when the kids are on school holiday, don’t we?

All we seem to get instead are ‘walking buses’ and exhortations to busy parents to ‘Park and Stride’ (notice they never tell the town councillors and government ministers to do likewise.)

What the councillors and people who promulgate this nonsense don’t seem to understand is that, JUST LIKE THEM, parents are going to work, too.

And in order to get there they generally don’t have the time to faff about with walking and hi vis jackets and sobbing, recalcitrant children and all the rest of it because they’ve got to be in work or they might get fired, or their pay docked.

Yet, when the A338 works on the Bournemouth Spur Road began to bite this week, it appeared that the best official advice was to travel at different times. Great.

On Tuesday evening it took me two and a quarter hours – and a detour via Salisbury – to get home, a journey that normally takes 45 minutes, thanks to an accident at Cadnam. The jams extended to Ashley Heath. As I came up the Spur Road I could see the jam building backwards from Bournemouth to the same roundabout, too.

According to local businesses the Spur Road works are damaging retail and I can believe it. I know of people preparing to cancel memberships of the Littledown, because they can’t get there.

And that’s only the little stuff.

What about the ambulances?

The doctors battling to get to work to save people’s lives?

What about the drop in productivity as thousands and thousands of unrecoverable hours are lost in traffic jams which, in this area, can only increase as work starts on Monday at Poole’s Hunger Hill?

As bus services are cut and ridiculously-priced train journeys become the privilege of the wealthy, more and more people are forced into using cars, especially those who live rurally.

Which means the roads are getting busier even as councillors merrily grant planning permission for thousands more houses in the countryside, claiming ‘people need to live somewhere’ but doing nothing about the practicalities of moving those people around.

No one has the nerve to point out to Mrs May and her government that their lack of any coherent transport policy is choking the country and never mind Brexit. Just like no one has the nerve to point out to Jeremy Corbyn that his train policies are a very fine thing for city folk and those that live near stations but won’t be a blind bit of use to anyone else.

I wouldn’t be taking lessons from America about how to get the best president, or how to deal with migrants and all the rest of it.

But their road policies seem, in the main, to be plain and good old fashioned common sense and I wish we’d start looking at them.