The surest route to madness: driving on the M1
But that just seems to be the way of things: paying more and more in return for services which get worse and worse.
I am unlucky enough to have to drive up and down a stretch of the M1 fairly regularly.
I have been doing so for about five years now. Not once in those past five years have I ever driven on the sixty miles of road between London and Northampton without major roadworks driving me to the verge of apoplexy.
After earthquake which made Fukushima go KABLAMMO in 2011, a big chunk of the nearby Great Kanto highway was, to put it mildly, in need of repair. The tectonic ruptures beneath it had made it look somewhat like a tarmac-and-mud coloured cake that someone had stamped on vigorously.
Within six days, the road was fixed and reopened to traffic. The Japanese are a famously industrious bunch, of course, so perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us.
It is fortunate that we are spared from the kinds of earthquakes that are a regular occurrence in good old Nipon. Were one to strike and render our highways unnavigable, it would probably take about five years to get them sorted out.
It may, however, have the unintended benefit of shifting the greenies blocking whichever stretch of road they happen to be encamped on, their Waitrose-fed posteriors more swiftly shifted by the forces of nature than by our pussyfooted police.
This is not merely speculation. The reason for all the incessant delays on the M1 is the unsmart decision to turn stretches into a ‘smart motorway’. In total, twenty-three miles are being upgraded. The works began in 2018 and are set to continue until 2023. Five years! That is equal to 4.6 miles of motorway ‘upgraded’ per year. I’ve little doubt the chaps working on the Great Kanto highway could have it done in half that.
At a cool £373 million, the project works out at £16.2 million per mile, or £9,214 per yard, or £256 per inch of motorway. Call me sceptical, but I find the price a smidgen high: particularly given that ‘smart motorways’ are anything but, and all they are effectively doing is removing the hard shoulder; thus giving stricken vehicles nowhere to go in an emergency. Very clever stuff, indeed.
I wish I were smart enough to come up with the ruse of charging the public purse to downgrade all our motorways at stupendous cost.
But that just seems to be the way of things: paying more and more in return for services which get worse and worse.
