Project Petrolhead

As my wheel thuds down into yet another pothole, sending a jarring bang through the suspension (and my spine), I’m forced to come to the conclusion that the condition of British roads might be worse than anywhere else in Europe. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword really, because the incessantly inclement weather that gnaws chunks out of our roadways is the same weather that gives us that ‘green and pleasant land’ that Vangelis was always on about, so surely, we must be able to deal with it by now, right?

Well, yes and no. You see wintertime in the UK also brings the season of roadworks, when tarmac enthusiasts nationwide don their ceremonial hi-vis and descend on the unsuspecting British motorists, erecting temporary traffic lights, esoteric diversion routes and the dreaded ‘Average Speed Check’ zones. I wouldn’t normally whinge about roadworks – to me, that’s up there with Mother-in-law jokes and “An Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman…” – but it has become a blight for me recently. There’s one single road closed at the moment near my house, but it’s singlehandedly turned an 11-minute journey across town into a 45-minute bumper-to-bumper slog as everybody gets diverted down the same busy, narrow streets, entirely unwilling to make any sort of allowances for any of the other motorists they share a road with.

You might think that, being as it is snuggly sat in the highest road tax bracket (naturally, because I can’t ever have nice things), that the Jag and I must subsidise a decent chunk of all the roadworks in Britain, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. You see, despite the name “Road tax” gets divvied up quite a lot. About a third of it gets shoved in an envelope and posted to the Right Honourable Mrs Reeves of No. 11 Downing Street, another third goes to the Department for Transport (we’ll come back to them in a moment) and finally, whatever’s left gets to go to local councils to finally be put to use resurfacing the roads… That’s ALL local councils, by the way. Yep, it doesn’t matter where you live, at least some of your road tax is going toward fixing the road outside Wayne Rooney’s Cheshire mansion.

The Department for Transport then, what are they up to with all that dosh? Well, that’ll be Smart Motorways and HS2. You know, Smart Motorways. The ones that get rid of the hard shoulder (the lane that used to be reserved for safety reasons like breakdowns and the Emergency Services) and replace them with a series of variable speed limits and, at best, a bunch of overworked and underpaid staff in a traffic control centre somewhere , or at worst AI cameras like Surrey County Council have just decided to invest in. Hooray…

And then there’s HS2. Rather than upgrading our outdated rail network, or maybe finally doing something to stop the private rail companies from exploiting passengers, the UK government decided that what the nation actually needed was an all-new rail line between London and Manchester. And how’s that going so far? Well, the project was announced in 2012, and with every review in the intervening years, the route has become noticeably… shorter. First, it was from London to Leeds, then London to Manchester, then London to Handsacre… And now it’s just London to Birmingham. Admittedly, this is a bit of a personal gripe, as the HS2 route that is currently under construction just so happens to broadly follow the route I have to commute for work, which means that a good half of my mornings and evenings are spent in a 40mph average speed zone, looking at the concrete monstrosity that used to be rather pleasant countryside.

What to do then? Well, aside from voting me in as Prime Minister, there’s not a fat lot we can do except grin and bear it. It would be nice if I could choose what services my taxes get spent on, but I can already see that a system like that might end up doing more harm than good. Then what about Mr Cameron’s £98 Billion train set? It’d be career suicide to cancel the project this far in, so there’s no way we’re going to see the back of these endless roadworks any time soon. But just remember, as you’re getting irate on your morning commute, waiting for the temporary lights to turn green, none of this is the fault of men in hi-vis. They’re just doing the job laid out for them by the people in charge, and the people in charge of the people in charge. We’re all stuck in the same traffic jam, so just try to calm down about it, maybe?