Mike Rutherford's column

	A trusted black cab driver friend insists the coning of our roads is due to professional saboteurs who get off on turning two lanes into one!

Coincidence or what? At the beginning of the month, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said £16billion must be spent on the new Crossrail project for London. On the same day, he raises taxes on petrol and diesel, so they now cost around £1 a litre! After all, he’s got to find the billions for his new train set from somewhere. And who better to nick that money from than from the soft-touch motorists of Britain, most of whom will never see Crossrail, never mind use it?

BBC TV got excited about all this and wanted me live on air at one of its central London studios, about 20 miles from my home. This is a drive I regularly do in 35-40 minutes outside rush hours. But given that the Beeb needed me at 7.50am, I decide to be over cautious and allow myself double for the journey. It took 115 minutes! That’s nearly two hours to do a simple on-peak road trip which is normally little more than half an hour off-peak. Madness.

And the crawl was all the more infuriating because my destiny was in the hands of another. I was sitting in a BBC Mercedes taxi, being driven by one of the corporation’s highly professional drivers. He was no slouch and knew his short cuts, but highly tuned man and machine couldn’t average more than about 14 mph – despite our 6.15am start, plus the fact that between my home and the studio there are two and three-lane dual carriageways most of the way. At least there used to be. Yet the traffic didn’t look particularly heavy and we didn’t see or hear of any delaying shunts.

No, the crawl was mainly due to coned-off areas transforming countless naturally fast two-lane stretches of road into artificially slow one-lane corridors. I didn’t see a single person working behind any of those cones. Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding where these barriers should go, how long they can stay and how much traffic mayhem they’re allowed to generate? I’m reliably informed that project managers, planners, Highways Agency officers and others with fancy job titles are the people we should blame for the cone epidemic.

A trusted black-cab driver friend of mine with his ear very much to the ground goes further by insisting that it’s professional saboteurs who get off on turning two or three lanes into one or, better still, none.

This theory isn’t as daft as it first sounds. There’s evidence that some
car-hating politicians, councils and state agencies have developed a habit of legally banning motorists from streets that once allowed them. And given
that this sort of discrimination is perpetrated on an official basis, the

question has to be asked: what goes on unofficially?

Next time you pass a few cones – especially a small group taking out an entire lane in an urban area – check if there’s any work going on behind them. Then ask yourself if their real purpose might be to ‘reclaim the streets.’ That’s a term which has been touted in the past, but non-car using activists now seem to be expressing it more forcibly than before in their efforts to get motorists off the road network – or at least a big chunk of it.

Never mind that drivers already pay £55billion a year in road user taxes. Never mind that Gordon Brown has taken the price of petrol and diesel to £1 a litre. Never mind that over the past 11 years, Gordon will have made nearly £500billion from us in road user taxation by the time he calls a general election.