England’s economic success depends on this network. It’s less than 3% of the country’s roads, yet it carries four million journeys a day, a third of all traffic, two- thirds of all freight, and three times more passengers than the entire rail network.
Our network connects every significant economic node in the country – major cities, centres of industry, ports, airports, railways and homes. Every pound invested in the strategic network produces more than two pounds of benefit to the economy.
When we set out our approach to how we support economic growth, one of the four areas we identified was providing efficient routes to global markets through international gateways.
We are investing in several road connections to international gateways to ensure they fulfil their economic potential. Our current delivery plan has a number of schemes across the country that will bring direct benefits to ports and airports. And through our regional teams, we support and work closely with individual port and airport operators.
Ports and airports across the country have significant investment programmes of their own. Port-centric developments and port capacity enhancements have the potential to reduce traffic on our roads, the former by moving the supply chain closer to ports and the latter by imports and exports entering or leaving the country closer to their final destination.
Ports and airports in particular are important employment locations in their own right, with the larger gateways employing several thousand people. As a result they are also catalysts for wider economic activity.
Since 2015 we’ve tackled 54 of the country’s worst congestion and safety hotspots and eliminated a total of 134 million hours of delay every year. We’ve also:
- added more than 300 lane miles to our network
- built 101 cycling schemes
- sponsored 93 innovation projects
- delivered 109 biodiversity projects
- created 951 noise reduction schemes
- and enabled the construction of 38,000 new homes
Since becoming Highways England we have delivered 40 schemes to date, network availability is above 98% and we’re clearing 88% of motorway incidents within an hour.
What does the future hold? In the 2018 autumn Budget, the Chancellor announced the Government’s intention to invest 40% more in the Strategic Road Network than in the first road period – £25.3 billion, funded by the National Roads Fund 2020-25.
Four million journeys are made on our roads every day, and usage of those roads is forecast to grow by 21% over the next two decades.
Congestion on our network costs an estimated £2 billion every year – 25% of this resulting from incidents. So, cutting congestion and helping traffic move freely creates economic benefits for the country, as well as improving safety and cutting emissions from traffic using our roads.
So, how can we possibly improve traffic flow when demand for road space continues to grow? To meet this growth and change in demand will require more use of digital technologies in the way we manage it, the way we communicate with vehicles and their users, the way we construct and use our infrastructure, and the way we manage capacity.
We cannot continue to limitlessly build new roads, so we must also make them work better. This includes adding more than 4,000 miles of extra capacity through upgrading motorways.
