The existing M6 Motorway in Cheshire is exceptionally busy.

Two plans for improvement were muted, one, a new road, possibly a toll road, running somewhere alongside, taking long distance traffic, leaving the existing failing infrastructure to bear the brunt of the more local traffic.

The second plan is to simply widen the existing road to include a new additional lane. The second plan will require extensive contra flow while traffic is shifted away from the present paths to enable construction traffic to do the work while I understand building a new motorway would not impinge on the existing traffic flow. I had to write another letter...

Letter to the Guardian Newspaper:

Dear Editor

I am saddened, mystified and downhearted at the short-sighted ineptitude of the highway planners. The M6, particularly between junction sixteen and junction nineteen is over crowded in the extreme. Watch the daily delays to understand the existing three lanes each way system simply cannot cope with the numbers of vehicles parking, sorry, using it.

I am not even sure that to introduce a new motorway running parallel would provide sufficient resource to ease the flow of vehicular traffic in the next ten to fifteen years. Unravelling local traffic from long distance traffic would ease the situation and lead to fewer accidents and delays.

Any work capable of impinging upon the present traffic flow will exacerbate the delays, lost hours and proportionally increase the pollution. What noodle suggests adding contra flow for ten years while additional single lanes are added to the existing lanes? I can assure you, in the future, if the current plans are adopted, a single vehicle breakdown will not just block three lanes of traffic while the emergency crews attend to the grisly task of collecting body parts, but will block four lanes each way. The result is a vehicle count in excess of twenty five percent will be parked waiting for the ability to move on. At least with another road, half the traffic would be positively unaffected by an accident on the existing road.

Such lunacy is, I am afraid, typical of today’s quick fix society with the ability to practically design for the long term being something we failed to inherit from our Victorian predecessors. The invisible victims are going to those users of the A50 and other parallel roadways as the delayed motorway traffic tries to find alternate solutions during the ten year construction plan, poisoning the local population with NOX fumes and maiming our children as they excitedly meander to one time safe schools dotted around our wonderful countryside. Living alongside the existing, and failing, M6 has taught me through personal experience, NOX fumes are unpleasant and unrewarding as well as exceptionally detrimental to our health.