I laburisti hanno esortato a eliminare i progetti stradali del Regno Unito come il Lower Thames Crossing da 9 miliardi di sterline

>Campaign groups have urged the government to cancel major road building schemes

Campaign groups doing what campaign groups do. This is non-news

All this country does is scrap things.

HS2? Let’s scrap it and divert money to roads.

Roads? Let’s scrap it and divert money to trains.

Trains? Let’s scrap it and….

Do both. We need to move to more rail overall but roads will still be needed and pretending it’s one or the other is just another excuse to be caught in this perpetual cycle of anti-infrastructure campaigning. We need to stop pandering to groups who want to say No.

The Lower Thames Crossing has been needed for a decade already. The M25 anti-clockwise is in constant gridlock. It’s the busiest motorway in the UK connecting the south side of the river, from where European freight traffic comes from, to most of the rest of the country including most of London. A lot of the traffic wants to join the north circular so the idea of this crossing is to take them off the M25 and lead them onto the north circular without going under the Dartford tunnel.

The counterargument to this is usually that traffic increases to fill the road space available so it’s counterintuitive to build roads to address capacity. I would normally agree with this, I would oppose adding another lane to the M25 for example, but we’re talking about a vital piece of infrastructure in one of the busiest areas of the country that uses a tunnel that predates the motorway it serves. It’s a problem that should have been addressed when the M25 was completed in the late 80s or when they built the QEII Bridge in the early 90s.

We should be moving new traffic onto rail and encouraging more existing traffic onto the network but that doesn’t mean we need to neglect acute problems on vital infrastructure just because it’s a road. Let’s have some nuance here and take each project on it’s own merits.

>The campaign groups have both highlighted huge savings from axing parts of what the Conservative government had billed as the biggest road building scheme in a generation when it launched its road investment strategy a decade ago.

Sorry, are we using the same roads? My journey to work is like driving through the battle of Somme.

I fail to see the huge saving is a good thing…

If the government can’t afford/won’t fund it themselves, the lower Thames crossing is exactly the sort of thing our pension funds should be investing in. Large capital investment upfront bringing consistent and predictable long term returns.