Introduction
The British motorway system is important to the transportation of goods across England, Wales and Scotland. With limited air cargo within the UK, the road network is vital to the movement of goods. The current motorway system began with a small 8.26 mile section of motorway, which included twenty-two bridges, called the Preston By-Pass. The first motorway was built at a cost of just less than 3 million GBP ($4.7 million) was opened on December 5th, 1958 by the Prime Minister at the time, Harold MacMillan. But the history of the British motorway system dates back to before the Second World War.
Planning for the Future
Before the First World War the British government created a body called the Road Board to deal with the increase in motor transport. The Road Board’s main tasks before 1914 were to tax motorists and use the funds on surfacing and improving the small existing road network. In 1914 the Road Board completed a survey of the needs of motor transport and to identify where improvements to the road network were needed. After the First World War, the government disbanded the Road Board and created the Ministry of Transport which classified the British road network and gave Britain its first road numbers. Between the wars, some new roads were constructed but these mainly were in the London area. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War the Institution of Highway Engineers did produce a plan for a network for a motorway system, which does resemble the current motorway system, while other organizations such as the County Surveyors' Society proposed a system of 1000 miles of highways connecting the major population centers in England, Wales and Scotland.
The First Motorways
After the end of the Second World War, the rebuilding of the United Kingdom was the primary concern of the government. As part of the renewal process, the government passed the Special Roads Act of 1949 which allows the construction of roads that only allowed vehicular traffic, which was the definition of the motorway. Seven years later the government gave the green light for a small experimental motorway, which became the Preston By-Pass, opened in 1958. The next motorway to be built was a sixty mile stretch of road from Berrygrove, Hertforshire to Crick in Northamptonshire. The motorway was called the M1 and was opened in November 2nd, 1959. The next phase of the M1 north from Crick to Kegworth in Leicestershire opened six years later in November 1965.
The original sixty-one mile stretch of the M1 was a six lane highway with a design capacity of 14,000 vehicles per day. Fifty years later the same stretch of motorway is mostly unchanged and has a volume that is ten times that original estimate.
Motorway Safety
When the motorway system was launched in the UK, the original motorways had no speed limit, as well as no crash barriers on the four and six lane highways. The M1 saw a number of fatalities in the early 1960’s where major crashes occurred in areas with fog that were blamed on high speed. The vehicles of the day were far less safe than today’s cars and trucks with no mandatory seatbelts and very little safety for occupants during a crash. The increasing number of fatalities led the government in 1965 to impose a speed limit of 70 mile per hour on motorways which has remained unchanged.
In 1958 at the time of the first motorway there were 4.5 million cars on Britain’s 191,146 miles of roads, but there were 5970 road accident fatalities. At the time of the introduction of the speed limit in 1965, the number of fatalities had risen to 7,985. By 2008 there were 28 million cars on 246,000 miles of road, 2,200 of which are motorways, but road accident fatalities had fallen to 2,946.
Future Development
In 1997 the new Labour government decided to move away from road construction and concentrate on road improvements for areas that caused major bottlenecks. This meant that major road construction work on the extension to the M65 as a second Pennine crossing was cancelled. Although the government has modified its stance on road construction, the last major motorway project was the twenty-seven mile M6 Toll in the West Midlands which was opened in December 2003 at a cost of 900 million GBP ($1.4 billion).
