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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