ROADS: What all the fuss is about
by Adrian Short

[Tel: 081 641 2867]

Twyford Down, Oxleas Wood, the "battles" for the George Green
and the Independent Free Area of Wanstonia in east London -
direct action campaigns against road building have been hitting
the headlines in the last couple of years. The struggle
continues at the M11, as well as at Solsbury Hill near Bath,
Leadenham, Norfolk and the M65 in Lancashire, and many more
are bubbling under due to go active when the dozers move in over
the coming months. Images of people scaling fences, jumping onto
earth-moving machinery, locking themselves to trees, shinning up
cranes and dodging police and hired heavies have invaded our
he popular imagination. Some
people have gone to prison over it; some are still there. But
why does anyone bother at all? Here's a layperson's guide to the
gripes against the government's monstrous #20,000 million Roads
Programme.


destroying the countryside - _road through the country will
destroy wildlife habitats, plants and trees, carve a visual scar
in the landscape and cause noise. Our furry, spiny and woolly
friends are often victims of the rolling metal boxes. Bizarrely
or perhaps sinisterly, new roads in the countryside are routed
through designated sites (Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty,
Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Scheduled Ancient
Monuments etc) which are the very best of our land and heritage.
Why? It's because as these sites are protected from everyone
else but the government, they have no commercial value.
therefore when planning a road these sites will cost nothing to
buy, and their zero cost is more likely to make a positive
result of cost versus benefit calculations done by the public
inquiries which decide whether the road can be economically
justified.

destroying towns and cities - ever larger and faster roads in
our towns put cars and lorries first, and lifeforms last.
Pedestrians are routed miles out of their way through subways
and over bridges-just to cross the road, they're penned in
behind railings  and channelled around the streets like
automatons out of some thirties sci-fi movie. Communities are
devastated as houses are compulsorily purchased and demolished
to make way for new or widened roads. In east London, the M11
will account for 400 home. many of which have now already gone.
Buildings beside roads trap in pollution and amplify noise. Not
nice.

pollution - a biggie, on which roads are multi-culprits. Carbon
monoxide, hydrocarbons, benzene, nitrogen oxides, ozone, lead
and particulates are responsible for drowsiness, cancer,
leukaemia, asthma, bronchitis, they increase vulnerability to
viruses, worsen hayfever, damage lungs and the immune system and
can retard mental development. Sadly, low-level ozone helps the
ailing ozone layer not one jot, and carbon dioxide from exhausts
is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect which causes
global warming. New Scientist recently reported that 10,000
deaths are caused each year in England and Wales by soot and
crap from exhausts. One in ten children now suffers from asthma,
in some areas it's one in three, and overall one child in seven
 has some sort of breathing problem. Catalytic converters can
reduce the level of some pollutants, but unfortunately increase
the amount of carbon dioxide. Run-off pollution, that is oil and
rubber being washed off roads) degrades water courses and
damages plants.

aesthetic shortcomings - they look crap.

roads kill - not just people, plants and animals from pollution,
but directly in accidents, and a few deliberates too. 5000
people die in Britain every year in road accidents, and another
300,000 are injured. This is bad news for the people concerned.
Road-hungry Tories and other maniacs can also be reminded that
medical attention for these people costs loads of money which
I'm sure they'd much rather be spending on nuclear power
stations or propping up repressive third world regimes.

squandering energy and resources - building roads, building
vehicles and fuelling those vehicles needs a lot of energy and a
lot of raw materials, most of which aren't renewable. Nobody
knows how much oil there is, but common sense tells us it won't
last forever. Why then base the entire transport system of the
world on oil-fuelled vehicles? The average car needs
substantially more energy and metal to build than the average
bicycle and definitely more than the average pair of legs.
Cycling is actually more energy-efficient than walking, and
buses and trains are more efficient than cars and lorries.

misusing land - a mile of motorway takes up 25 acres of land,
which could be more productively used for agriculture, housing,
recreation, or simply left alone. At present, land is being
taken from productive use and turned into roads. The current
Roads Programme will cover 36,500 acres of land in tarmac. Rail
routes can carry more passengers or freight on a third of the
land a motorway would take. Car parking also takes up masses of
space. In Britain, each registered car is provided with 372
square metres of parking across the country - the same area as
three houses. 25% of London's surface area is devoted to roads
and parking, and in Los Angeles it's a whopping 65%!

damage from quarrying - it takes 250,000 tonnes of sand and
gravel to build a mile of motorway, and extracting it causes
massive environmental damage. As road building expands, the
number and size of the quarries increases, and many of the new
"super-quarries" are literally turning hills into holes. In
recent years, quarries have damaged 26 Sites of Special
Scientific Interest, and current plans threaten another 100. Of
course, transporting quarry products is nearly always done by
lorry, and there are even cases where villagers have demanded
bypasses to relieve their area of quarry traffic.
Unsurprisingly, most quarries are owned by the road building
companies.

road building encourages more traffic - the biggest myth of all
and the one most commonly used to justify building or expanding
roads is that the extra space will be used to accommodate
existing traffic and relieve congestion. In reality, large scale
road building encourages more people to drive, by providing what
start out to be fast, free-moving routes. As the new routes
become congested with new traffic expecting a clear run, traffic
 moves back onto smaller local roads and congests those too. As
money is diverted from public transport and into roads, people
are encouraged to drive rather than pay expensive fares on
irregular bus and train services,

squandering public money - building roads is lucrative business,
with contracts often running into hundreds of millions of
pounds. As the building is carried out by private companies
rather than directly employed government workers, a large
proportion of the contract price ends up in the pockets of
directors and shareholders as profit. This might be seen by some
as good for industry, but in reality it's just another way of
turning taxpayers' money into private gain. It's often said that
building roads is called investment, and spending on public
transport is subsidy. The only difference is that with public
transport, all the money spent goes into improving the service,
but with road building much of the money gets pocketed with no
gain to the public whatsoever.

roads are anti-social - swearing and shouting at other drivers
who get in your way is considered socially acceptable behaviour,
hut trying to start conversations with other passengers on buses
and trains is not. Wierd value system, eh?

road building is discrimination - spending large sums of money
on road building at the expense of public transport is ignoring
and discriminating against the needs of non-drivers. That could
be children, the ill and disabled, those that can't afford to
drive, or people who just don't want to. 33% of households in
Britain don't have access to a car, and 52% of women and 22% of
men don't have a licence - that's a lot of non-drivers. As the
government tries to provide the "freedom to drive" for one
section of the population, it's restricting the movement of
another

some roads are illegal - direct action campaigns are often
criticised for being undemocratic or anarchic, ignoring
democracy, public inquiries and the law. All these charges could
be equally well applied to the government. Several major schemes
including Twyford Down, Oxleas Wood and the Mll break the
European law on environmental impact assessment which the
government is meant to follow. It only escaped prosecution by
the European Commission after some double-dealings in Brussels
resulted in the Environment Commissioner losing his job. More
schemes are planned or starting construction which still break
this law.

political donations abuse democracy - the Tory party is funded
by big business, including the construction industry, allowing
them to effectively "buy" the policies they want when the Tories
are in power. During the 1980s, one company, Tarmac, donated
#400,000 to party funds. It's hardly surprising then that we
have a huge road building programme and Tarmac get a lot of the
contracts.

public inquiries are misled and biased - when major projects are
being planned, the details of the scheme are considered by
public inquiries which decide whether the cost can be justified.
The inquiries are only allowed to consider financial aspects of
the scheme, but not the environmental or public health
 consequences. The Inspector of the inquiry, who acts as the
"judge" is supposedly independent but is in fact appointed by
the Lord Chancellor, a member of the government. Recently, the
Department of Transport has been misleading inquiries by
presenting new roads as bypasses for small towns and villages,
to relieve traffic congestion in the area. These bypasses are
really part of a major European motorway network for long
distance traffic which will attract more vehicles to those
areas.

If these bypasses are plotted on a map, it can be seen that,
mysteriously, they all link up. This is known as "road building
by stealth". When it was revealed by the BBC programme Panorama
what these bypasses really were, some inquiries which approved
those roads had to be re-opened because they had only been told
of the local, not the international use of these roads. In
actively misleading the inquiries and the public, the government
can hardly claim that the process is democratic, and often not
legal either.


So far, the protests have forced a review of the Roads Programme
- resulting in 50 roads being scrapped entirely and many more
postponed. It's a start, but there's still a long way to go.
Most of all, the campaigns need support from people like you to
peacefully oppose these destructive roads on the ground. With
large numbers of people, victory is possible, so even if you've
only got an afternoon to spare, get in touch and come along. You
could make all the difference.


Contacts

Road Alert' Tel 0703 237809 or send a large SAE to PO Box 371,
Southampton, SO9 7BS. Advice & training on direct action,
they'll also put you in touch with your nearest campaign.

Current direct action campaigns

London - No Mll Link Road. Drop into the office at 211 Railway
Arches, Grove Green Rd, Leytonstone, London Ell 4AJ or ring 081
558 2638 for details of the next action and to add your name to
the phone tree for emergency call-outs. Action every Monday.

Bath, Solsbury Hill: Tel 0225 481095

Blackburn, Lancashire M65: Tel 0772 626410 or 0524 848407

Wymondham, Norfolk: Tel 0603 631007 or 0603 484753

Leadenham, Lincolnshire: Tel 0522 50357 or 0602 851235

Coming soon

Newbury, Berkshire: Tel 0635 36797

Glasgow, Pollock Estate: Tel 041 552 8776

