In December 2003, something quite strange happened in the Midlands. A person pulled up to a booth, paid, and drove out onto a motorway. The M6 Toll – Britain’s first pay-as-you-go road, costing £900m and 27 miles long – was open.
It had been a long time coming. People living in the Midlands, or travelling through, had a shared experience for many years – sitting stationary on the M6. The oft-quoted statistic is that the raised section of the M6 is the busiest stretch of road in Europe.
True or not, most wouldn’t dispute it was the most gridlocked. Far back in 1980, when it was known as the Birmingham Northern Relief Road, the toll road was conceived as the answer to traffic jams in the region. Few realised that it would be 23 years before it finally opened. In between was interminable political wrangling, governments with different transport agendas, planning rows and even great-crested newts (whose habitat was threatened).
Building finally started and, to everyone’s surprise, went virtually without a hitch, even finishing ahead of schedule. Naturally, environmental protestors got in on the act, setting up camp in woodland on the route and pledging to lie down in front of the bulldozers.
One of their number known as ‘Sorted Dave’ sadly died in the tumbledown cottage they had occupied, and in a famous ‘dirty tricks’ incident, the police cordoned off the area as a potential crime scene. As it turned out Dave had died from natural causes, but it gave the authorities access to the cottage with its network of tunnels in which protestors had planned to hide. Then they knocked it down.
In the end the toll road opened, billed as ‘the free-flowing alternative to the M6’. Initial figures were not encouraging – the Macquarie Infrastructure Group, which is the parent of M6 Toll operator Midlands Expressway Ltd (MEL), had projected a daily traffic of 45,000 to 75,000 vehicles, yet it started with a less-than-impressive 34,500 in the first month.
The figures left many confused – the curiosity factor alone should have accounted for a healthy take-up. And then there was the introductory discount: £1 off for the first 10 million vehicles. For cars this represented an acceptable charge of £2. For lorries, even with the discount, it meant £10 including VAT – a cost that was branded unacceptable, and led to a boycott of the route.
Conspiracy theorists had a field day, branding the charge “a deliberate policy by MEL to price HGVs off the road”. Others invoked the simple economic argument that lorries cause more road damage, and MEL was thus applying free market logic.
Whatever the reasons, the high lorry charges proved uneconomic for haulage firms, most of which operate on slim margins. Drivers at some were told that if they used the M6 Toll, they did so at their own expense.
It was last summer when the M6 Toll was set to come into its own. In a triple whammy for motorists the Highways Agency and Birmingham City Council scheduled three sets of major road works at the same time, on the M6 and the Aston Expressway. Traffic levels cracked 55,000 vehicles per day during August, amid traffic chaos in Birmingham. It was manna from heaven for MEL – not so much for motorists.
But by January, once the road works were out of the way, traffic levels dropped once again by more than 10,000 per day to just over 43,000 – sparking calls for the charges to be scrapped from the National Alliance Against Tolls. Billed as a free-flowing alternative, it certainly proved to be fast-flowing, according to a survey by Auto Express magazine.
Setting up a speed gun over both the M6 and M6 Toll, it found the average speed on the toll road was 79mph during the day and 88mph at midnight – the fastest was 117 mph, and one in seven cars were clocking over 100mph. On the M6, the average was 75mph at midnight with 32 per cent exceeding 80mph.
But of course the real test of whether the M6 Toll has been a success really lies on the good old M6. In short – have the traffic levels gone down? In January this year the first real study into the issue was released in a parliamentary written answer by roads minister David Jamieson. It didn’t make pleasant reading for toll road apologists.
Instead of drastically cutting traffic, the Highways Agency study revealed that more traffic was being attracted to the M6 throughout the West Midlands. Junctions to the south of the road showed a rise of 10,000 vehicles per day, and to the north 5,000 per day.
Comparing daily averages in November 2003 – the last full month before the M6 Toll opened – and March 2004, the report found that there were three per cent (just over 1,000) extra HGVs on the M6 between junctions 3 and 11 after the toll road opened. On weekdays between 4pm and 6pm, there was also three per cent more general traffic counted between junctions 9 and 10, and no reduction in vehicle numbers between junctions 10 and 10a.
Environmentalists had a field day – they argue that building more roads actually increases the traffic – and the figures appeared to back this up. In spite of this, the future seems to hold more pay-as-you-go motoring. Transport secretary Alistair Darling insisted at the House of Commons investigation into the M6 Toll that it had been a success.
Currently, the Department for Transport is considering the concept of a Birmingham-to-Manchester ‘expressway’, with a decision expected later this year. We have taken the first step into the world of pay-to-drive. Few would argue that it was the last.
