Motorists are using cars more and more despite record fuel prices, higher vehicle taxes, and entreaties by the Government for greater use of public transport. Traffic has risen sharply in the past decade in almost every part of England except Inner London, despite the Government’s pledge for a greener transport system, figures today reveal.

In many areas the country’s roads are at saturation point, with drivers now overloading rural routes as they attempt to escape jams.

In 1997, John Prescott, then the Deputy Prime Minister, said: “I will have failed if in five years’ time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it.”

But Department for Transport figures show a huge increase in road use and will put pressure on the Government to explain the lack of progress in a key area of transport policy. The greatest rises have been in rural counties where drivers have taken advantage of spare road capacity. In London and some Home Counties the increases have been more modest, but only because the roads are already full for most of the day.

While rail travel has grown by 40 per cent in the past decade, this has done little to ease the pressure on roads. The figures, published in a written parliamentary answer yesterday, show that across England road traffic rose by 12 per cent between 1997 and 2006.

Northamptonshire, which has a county town dominated by major roads and has one of the busiest stretches of the M1, recorded the largest rise, with traffic growing by a fifth. Cornwall, Durham, Gloucester-shire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Somerset all recorded increases of 17 per cent.

Traffic has grown much more slowly in counties containing London suburbs, where congestion is often so severe that it provides its own solution, dissuading people from making car journeys. In Hertfordshire, traffic rose by only 6 per cent and in Surrey by 8 per cent.

The only part of England where traffic was lower in 2006 than ten years earlier was Central London. But this cannot be attributed to the congestion charge because traffic was even lower in 2002, the year before the charge was introduced.

The figures come as the AA said that petrol prices had reached a new high. The average price of unleaded is 104.28p a litre, with diesel, at 109.24p per litre, just 3.5p short of the long-feared £5 gallon. A family with two cars were now paying £35.99 more a month than a year ago to keep them fuelled, the motoring organisation said.

Paul Watters, head of roads policy at the AA, said: “People appear to be cutting back on other spending, such as car servicing, rather than driving less.”

Motor manufacturers are reporting a shift to smaller, more efficient cars, but people do not seem to be adapting their lifestyles to drive less.

The number of licensed cars in Britain has grown by 5.5 million to 26.5 million since 1997. In 2006, 60 per cent of cars on the road had only one occupant – its driver. A quarter of all car trips were less than two miles long.

The Government is on course to fail to meet its public service agreement target of making journeys more reliable on England’s motorways and trunk roads. Two years ago, it said that the target would have been reached if the average delay on the slowest 10 per cent of journeys were less in the 12 months to March 2008 than in the 12 months to July 2005.

By the end of last August, the average delay had risen from 3.78 to 4.16 minutes per ten miles.

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman who obtained the figures, said: “Here is proof of Labour’s ten years of failed transport policies. They say they are serious about tackling climate change, but everywhere except London traffic levels keep on rising.”

A study last year by the Government’s Commission for Integrated Transport found that Britain had much lower levels of car ownership than other large European countries but that its cars were more intensively used. There were 463 cars for every 1,000 Britons in 2004, compared with 581 cars in Italy, 550 in Germany and 503 in France.

Cars accounted for 89 per cent of the total distance travelled by motorised transport in Britain in 2003.

Traffic growth 1997 – 2007

England 12%
Central London -2%
Inner London excluding Central 1%
Outer London 6%
Avon 15%
Bedfordshire 11%
Berkshire 9%
Buckinghamshire 11%
Cambridgeshire 12%
Cheshire 13%
Cleveland 12%
Cornwall 17%
Cumbria 10%
Derbyshire 10%
Devon 14%
Dorset 13%
Durham 17%
East Sussex 12%
Essex 12%
Gloucestershire 17%
Greater Manchester 12%
Hampshire 14%
Hereford and Worcester 13%
Hertfordshire 6%
Humberside 14%
Isle of Wight 14%
Kent 15%
Lancashire 13%
Leicestershire 13%
Lincolnshire 17%
Merseyside 13%
Norfolk 15%
North Yorkshire 19%
Northamptonshire 20%
Northumberland 17%
Nottinghamshire 14%
Oxfordshire 11%
Shropshire 13%
Somerset 17%
South Yorkshire 16%
Staffordshire 16%
Suffolk 11%
Surrey 8%
Tyne and Wear 10%
Warwickshire 14%
West Midlands 8%
West Sussex 11%
West Yorkshire 12%
Wiltshire 13%

Source: DfT. Based on pre-1997 boundaries