Everybody is honking horns about roads policy, from the extension of the London congestion charge to road-pricing proposals. Yet one question has been shunted off the political map: whatever happened to big investment in new roads? Maybe we could expend less energy on constructing driving-related debates that go round in circles, and more on building the new roads that society needs to get moving.

One and a half million motorists have signed the e-petition against the pricing proposals in the Eddington report. But Sir Rod Eddington’s basic assumption — that the authorities should drive people off the roads rather than expand capacity to meet demand — remains unchallenged.

Sir Rod suggested that road pricing is a “no-brainer”, because the shock-horror alternative would be to invest in new roads. He told the Government not be seduced by “grand projects” (preaching to the converted there, Rod), and to reject “ambitions and dreams of extensive new networks” in favour of small-scale projects “such as walking and cycling”. The wider needs of a modern, mobile society are discounted, visions of a more free-travelling future dismissed as “dreams”. Welcome to the middle-of-the-road miserabilism of Gordon Brown’s Britain on a bicycle.

Yet there is a pile-up of statistics demonstrating the inadequacies of Britain’s road network. Motorways — barely 1 per cent of our roads — grew by just 150 miles in the decade to 2005. Britain now has half the motorway density of Germany. Even without road pricing the Government already takes about £45 billion a year in taxes from road users, and spends no more than £7 billion of it on roads.

We can be sure, however, that whatever concessions the Government makes to the protests, they will not include the “bold” projects that Old Mother Eddington warned it against. The no-more-roads prejudice is fuelled by the green make-do-and-mend consensus that now extends across every lane of the political highway.

Many of my old friends on the Left have helped to lay the foundations for that consensus since the 1980s. Although I have never driven a car, for me the Left’s embrace of the anti-road/anti-motorist lobby marked its turn up a deadend: abandoning the social — the progressive attempt to transform society through human action — in favour of the natural — the reactionary attempt to defend the environment against humanity.

Now that the old routes to both the Left and the Right have been closed, narrow debates such as this one reveal a political system on the slow road to nowhere. We need a new road map of where society is heading — and a new transport system to help to get there. Perhaps somebody should tell the Government: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. But when you’re in a jam, start digging more motorways.

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