Frustrations for Motorists
SIR,—Quoodle tells us in some sorrow that it took him one and a half hours to get round the North Circular to London Airport the other day and con- sequently he missed his plane—for the first time in his life.
Uncharitably, I felt little sympathy. He is not the first motorist on our wretched road system to allow an absurdly generous amount of time for a, journey and still come unstuck. The truth is that he has ' only himself and his colleagues to blame. They gave us in their thirteen years of office the most inadequate road-building programme of any major industrial power in Europe. Even tiny Holland (population 1,000,000) has more miles of motorway than we have.
For some reason, though vehicle growth in Britain has averaged more than 8 per cent a year, successive Tory ministers never really grasped •the urgency of a proper road-building programme. Poor Marples did his best, but on a totally inadequate budget. Money could always be found for un- economic frolics in aircraft and civil atomic energy, but for a vital economic necessity and blue-chip community investment like roads, only a pittance. Could it be that ministers in a hurry tend to get police assistance and so never really experience the acute frustrations of ordinary motorists? As a power-, ful inducement to future Tory governments to build roads, what about a Shadow Cabinet outing by charabanc to the seaside this summer, taking in the Exeter by-pass?
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