I HOPE I AM not breaking too many state secrets in telling you that today is the launch of Alistair Darling’s “strategy on access to motorways”. That’s Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, and the announcement that the strategy on access to motorways is going to happen was made by 10 Downing Street on Monday. The Prime Minister’s press secretary laughed and said that he didn’t know what it meant.

I do. Well, I sort of do. I’m not allowed to tell you the whole thing because as I write, it isn’t yet today, if you see what I mean, and the strategy is under embargo for today, Wednesday. The chap at the Highways Agency who explained all this to me was able to tell me what the strategy on access to motorways will be about, even if he couldn’t tell me what it will be — because of the embargo, you understand.

“The issue we are trying to tackle is congestion,” this official explained. “One of the aspects is to try to ease traffic off local roads and onto motorways in a smooth and safe way.” So today “a series of schemes” are being announced “which will smooth the passage of traffic off local roads onto slip roads and onto motorways.”

At this point, one might ask whether No 10 and the Department for Transport, the Prime Minister’s office and the Secretary of State for Transport need to be involved. One might ask, indeed, whether there needs to be a strategy on access to motorways at all. That would be to underestimate the people who beaver away in obscure branches of Her Majesty’s Government, and the scale of the challenge that confronts them. Let me, or rather let my man in the Highways Agency, explain.

“When you are moving off the slip road in congested conditions, by edging out into the flow of traffic you make people brake . . . that has a ripple effect onto the motorway. So we are introducing this new, safer way of bringing people on.”

I wish I could tell you what it is, but I cannot; the embargo, you see. By the time you read this, perhaps we shall know what it is. Until then let us call it the Drivers On Safe Slip Roads Strategy; dossers for short.

Because this stuff ticks me off. And you, the car owner, with your own strategy for smoothing your passage onto the motorway, with the Transport Secretary’s hand on the steering wheel and the Prime Minister’s foot on the pedal, you tick me off. And I say that as a fellow motorist. I sometimes tick me off too.

I am a motorist and a cyclist and a train user. And that qualifies me to state without a doubt that drivers in Britain have it miles easier than other travellers — car driving is cheaper, more convenient and usually faster — and still motorists get incessantly pandered to by the Government. A special strategy to ease our way onto and off a slip road and onto a motorway? It would be funny if it weren’t so infuriating.

For those of us who take trains, who stand up all the way to work, who pay through the nose for a ticket and again to park at the station, who see cyclists turfed off because they dare to bring a bicycle with them, whose ticket office is at the end of an hour-long queue, who get flummoxed by the excessively complex machines, then penalised with a £200 fare for a two-hour journey, and whose trains are cancelled altogether at weekends and during holiday periods — for those millions of us who use the railways, that strategy on access to motorways is an insult. And, I emphasise, I say that as a driver too.

What has Mr Darling done for the rail user recently? Fares went up by 4.5 per cent at the new year; up by 9 per cent on some tickets. “Strip search” X-ray machines are being installed at mainline stations to humiliate passengers and disrupt journeys further. And Sir Rod Eddington has been appointed to “assess the long-term transport needs of the economy” — without taking environmental considerations into account. (Shame on you, Gordon Brown, who set up the terms of the inquiry.) I wonder which form of transport the former head of British Airways is going to favour.

Commuters by rail get it bad enough, with extra penalties for needing to take a train that gets them to work before 10.30am. But it is the non-business traveller who is treated with the utmost contempt.

Why is it OK automatically to choose Sundays for mending track or other engineering work, when people want to visit friends and familes? Why, when the motorways were cleared of roadworks over Christmas and new year, to help those travelling by car, was much of the rail network suspended or disrupted over the same period? And why is it OK to charge £202 to travel from London to Manchester and back because, unlike a business traveller whose company will pay, or a commuter who has a season ticket, you, the “leisure” traveller, perhaps going to visit a relative taken ill in hospital, couldn’t or didn’t know that you had to book weeks in advance?

It’s just not OK, and it’s made less OK by the responsiveness of ministers to the demands of drivers. Protest about petrol prices and the Government mobilises. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor make speeches and promise tax freezes. Complain about high rail fares and they just keep going higher. It costs four times as much to commute between West Sussex and London by train as it does by car.

Yet still ministers pander to motorists, whether by scrapping speed cameras or failing to introduce road pricing, despite the far higher environmental damage that driving does. And don’t even get me started on the dossers.

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