MOTORING expert Quentin Willson has slated the Government transport policies, describing the roads network as a “broken smoking ruin”.
He told GB News: “We’ve known this for years and as long as I’ve been writing and broadcasting about cars, they’ve been saying that this culture of hating the car – four wheels bad, two wheels good, and not building roads deliberately will have these consequences.
“And here we are, and what’s the backlog to repair the roads? If we started now, it would take 11 years and cost £14 billion quid. How has it come to this?
“I’ll tell you how it’s come to this, because back in 1997 when New Labour came to power they just cancelled a huge raft of road building projects.”
In a discussion with Ellie Costello and Martin Daubney, he said: “This kind of ideological hatred of the car and anti-car rhetoric seeped into government, into Westminster. And it’s been there ever since.
“The car was seen as this evil and there was going to be this miraculous modal shift to public transport and active travel. Well, that hasn’t happened.
“And you know, suddenly, we wake up blinking in the headlights, if you’ll pardon the pun, over the fact that our road system is a smoking broken ruin.”
He added: “I called the Department for Transport the Department for Trains, because there is this absolute obsession with trains.
“We don’t know why but they are obsessed with them and the money we have spent on the doomed HS2 project – if we’d spent just a tiny proportion of that we would have a much, much better strategic road network.
“You look at smart motorways, two people have recently died again on smart motorways, which were a way of building new road capacity on the cheap.
“This is just going to have to stop, otherwise we will have low growth in our economy because people will not be able to transport goods and people from A to B. It’s as simple as that.”
On the Government’s announcement of a £47.5 million investment boost for roads in England, Mr Willson said: “It is a raindrop echoing in an ocean, when you know the headline figure is £14 billion just to fix the potholes.
“We’re talking about tinkering around the edges as usual, and this isn’t just one party, I’m not knocking the Conservatives.
“It’s Lib Dems., it’s Labour – everybody’s had a hand in this mismanagement of our transport network.”
