Our road system is badly run, delivering a poor service to all the people struggling to get to work, to drop children off at school and getting to the shops. It lets down delivery drivers, large trucks bringing essential supplies and business vehicles carrying people to do work in our homes and commercial premises.
It is a typical nationalised monopoly. It believes in keeping us short of roadspace on the bizarre grounds that if they built more roads we would use them more. Any normal business is delighted to expand when it hits on a popular product or service.
The highways authorities take special delight in making life as difficult as possible for their tax paying customers. They regularly restrict access, narrow lanes, increase junction delays and change rules on road use. They compound this by setting traps to get more fines revenue out of complex and changing regulations.
They fail to maintain the surfaces of many roads, letting potholes grow until more extensive and expensive repairs are needed. The state grossly overcharges for use of the roads, collecting far more in motoring taxes than it defrays in road costs.
They insist on putting cables and pipes under the middle of main road requiring digging up the road every time a repair, replacement or increase of facility is needed.
Why? We depend on the roads for so much of our lifestyle.
