The Highways Agency has detailed 58 further schemes to reduce congestion on England’s motorways and major A-roads, in the third and final stage of the 123-scheme pinch point programme originally announced in autumn 2011.
The 58 schemes, which represent an investment of £98m, will all be delivered by March 2015 and bring the total investment for the programme to £317m, including the extra £100m announced by the chancellor in his 2012 autumn statement..
Twenty-six of the new projects have been developed in conjunction with local enterprise partnerships and local authorities to promote economic growth by supporting the delivery of new jobs or homes. They include improvements to Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction. The remaining 32 will install new technology to improve driver information, signage and accident clear-up times, including new electronic signs, CCTV cameras and a queue protection system from junctions 30-32 of the M62.
A full list of all the new schemes can be found on the HA website.
A spokesman for the HA told motortransport.co.uk the new schemes would bring an estimated £1.4bn of economic benefits over the next 30 years in faster travel times and reduced accident clear-up costs.
While the new schemes will not deliver much in the way of new road capacity, he conceded, this isn’t the main point of this particular programme. “The clue’s in the name – the pinch point programme is about smaller scale improvement schemes to relieve congestion at known hotspots,” he said.
Different schemes will be delivering about £2bn of road improvements across the country by 2015, however, including the recent opening of the Hindhead tunnel on the A3 in Surrey and the upgrade to dual carriageway currently being carried out on the A11 in East Anglia, he said.
