DOZENS of towns and villages will be blighted indefinitely by rising traffic because the Government has quietly abandoned its promise to build 70 bypasses by the end of the decade, a campaign group says.

However, organisations opposed to further road building say that alternative solutions to bypasses need to be found, citing the example of Newbury, Berkshire, where peak-time congestion has returned to its pre-bypass levels in less than ten years.

Only 20 bypasses have been built in the past six years from a list of several hundred proposed by local authorities. Another ten to 15 are due to be completed by 2010, meaning that the Government will have completed only half the schemes it promised in its ten-year transport plan in 2000.

Traffic has risen by 20 per cent since 1996 but the length of the road network has grown by only 1.6 per cent, or 3,800 miles. By contrast, in the ten years ending in 1995, the road network grew by 24,000 miles.

A scheme to relieve Marcham, a picturesque 1,000- year-old village in Oxfordshire, was first proposed 70 years ago but has just been delayed again, despite county council support.

More than 20,000 vehicles a day, including hundreds of articulated lorries, negotiate three tight bends through the village on a five-metre wide road designed for horses and carts. Marcham is at the top of a list of long-awaited bypasses drawn up by the Road Users’ Alliance, a coalition that includes the RAC Foundation, the British Chambers of Commerce and the British Horse Society.

The schemes were selected not just for the length of time that they have been waiting for final approval, but also for their importance in relieving communities and removing bottlenecks. The list includes the Weymouth relief road, which would remove the daily three-mile queues of traffic on residential roads approaching the seaside town in Dorset. Various routes have been proposed since the 1950s, with the latest winning preliminary approval in 2003. But the cost has more than doubled to £77 million and it is now unlikely to be ready in time for the Olympic Games in 2012, when tens of thousands of spectators will pass through Weymouth en route to the sailing events in Portland Harbour.

Cost increases were usually cited as the main reason for so few bypasses being built.

The highest increase was at Stonehenge, where the cost of the scheme to bury the A303 in a tunnel as it passes the monument has trebled to £500 million. The plans have been placed on hold while cheaper options are considered.

The alliance studied the progress of 19 bypasses and road improvements approved by the Government in 2001. Of these two have been completed and two are being built.

Tim Green, the alliance director, said: “Roads carry 93 per cent of our passenger travel and 89 per cent of freight. They are the vital arteries of our regional economies and increasing traffic is a sign of prosperity. Yet our roads are not viewed as a funding priority.”

He supported the introduction of tolls on all congested roads, but said that this was not a substitute for road-building.

The Federation of Small Businesses, another member of the alliance, said that the Government had neglected small schemes, such as at Marcham, and chosen to focus on projects that made headlines, such as widening the M1 and M25 motorways. “Many of the most urgently needed roads are not big enough for ministers to be able to show off at photo opportunities,” it said.

Transport 2000, which campaigns to reduce the environmental impact of transport, said that bypasses were an outdated solution to the problem of rising traffic. Stephen Joseph, the group director, said: “We need to get communities thinking about alternatives to the bypass they have been fixated on for decades. The solution may be a lorry ban or reducing the speed limit to 20mph.”

The campaigners Road Block said that new roads encouraged motorists to make longer and more frequent trips. It quoted a report on the impact of the Newbury bypass, which said that traffic growth had far exceeded predictions.

• Dangerous drivers who kill people on the roads should receive tougher sentences, says Ken MacDonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions. Less than one in ten motorists involved in road deaths is convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. The offence, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years, is seen as difficult to prove. Mr MacDonald said that prosecutors should stop opting for the charge of careless driving instead.

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