Winter 2010. Fewer new or widened roads than might have been anticipated a dozen years ago are on the cards. Now recession, one might have thought, would add to the list of shelved schemes. The picture is confusing though. The Regional Funding Allocation (second) submissions to government in February 2009 confirmed commitment on the part of regional decision makers to realise many major new road schemes over the coming 5 years. Meanwhile Chancellor Darling's pre-budget speech on November 24 2008 included the pledge to bring forward £3 billion of spending intended for 2010/11 to that year and the next (2008, 2009/10). The chancellor explained that the money would be used in part to "increase capacity in the motorway network". Rare is the journey that starts and finishes on the motorway.

Here too, though, there are new considerations, since opening hard-shoulders (rather than new-build widening) is the newly favoured approach to increasing motorway capacity, with the Highways Agency's 2009-10 Business Plan confirming the M25, M1, M3 and M4 around and approaching London, and motorways around Manchester, Yorkshire, Birmingham and Bristol will all see such development by 2015. Britain's 2nd hard-shoulder running project opened on the M6 in Birmingham in November 2009, and at its opening a Transport Minister said 340 lanes miles of "schemes like this" would be delivered by 2015.

2009 nonetheless proved to be another year of major investment in both motorway / trunk and local road building, with work starting or plans being progressed for schemes originating from the announcement of £59.1 billion for roads in the 10 years to 2010. The Highways Agency's budget for major schemes for 2009 - 2010 is £1,086 million, slightly up on the previous year, and Darling's fiscal stimulus of November 2008 allowed work on the huge A46 Newark to Widmerpool project to begin in June 2009.

With Labour looking set to bow-out as the party of government in sping 2010, it's a good time to step back to 1997, when they suspended most of the road schemes proposed in the Conservatives' 1989 programme. Their White Paper on integrated transport seemed to confirm a move towards alternative solutions to congestion. It faced, however, a backlash from motoring lobby groups like the AA and the freight industry, and business interests like the CBI and Regional Development Authorities who lobbied more effectively than in the 90s. Afraid also of losing favour with some of the press, who quickly depicted Labour as anti-motorist and mounted an effective support campaign for the fuel protests, they retreated without much of a rearguard action, and in July 2000 announced major road building plans at all levels. While a stage had been set that broadly determined policy for the next 5 years or so, Labour were never quite as gung-ho as the Conservatives had been in the 90s, and detrunking and changes to local and regional planning frameworks probably slowed things down just as new environmental concerns and latterly economic factors were coming to prominence.

The M6 from the Midlands to Manchester sums up the fast-changing landscape. Plans for a new £3.5 billion parallel toll-motorway were dropped in July 2006; subsequent widening plans were put at £2.9 billion. In 2009 it became apparent that there was to be no widening either: capacity increase would be managed entirely through hard-shoulder running. Estimates in early 2009 extrapolate to a cost of £500 million to £1 billion

With public spending likely to be slashed by whatever party runs the country from spring 2010 onwards, the question of how much roads cost has never been more relevant. A written response by Stephen Ladyman in October 2006 (more up-to-date figures don't seem to be available) was that new motorways cost on average £29.9 million per mile, dual carriageways on average £16.2 million and single carriageway £10.6 million. It can vary wildly though. In May 2009 it was decided that PFI financing of £6.2 billion will be paid to a consortium to widen 36 miles of the M25 to 4 lanes, operate and maintain the M25 for a 30 year period and refurbish the Hatfield tunnel. Work began that month and will be complete by 2012. In Scotland the 5 mile stilted M74 extension is expected to cost £89 million a mile [May 2008]. Work began on 28 May 2008. A March 2007 estimate for the planned 115 mile M1 widening project was £5.1 billion, which works out at £44 and a bit millions per mile. On this motorway, as on others, these costs will not be realised, however, since current plans are for a number of hard-shoulder running projects to be built in the years up to 2015 instead. The M1 saw work on the first of these begin in March 2010; at an estimated cost of £504 for a 15 mile stretch it is clear that hard-shoulder running is "cheap-er" rather than cheap. The A14 Ellington to Fen Ditton improvement, the biggest non-motorway scheme in the Highways Agency's programme, is estimated at up to £1,286 million [October 2009], up from a government approved budget of £490 million in 2005, (a public inquiry will probably start in summer 2010): in fact costs are often upwardly adjusted as a project gets further into the approval process as noted by the Nichols Report [March 2007], with frequent further cost overruns when it comes to actual construction. The Campaign for Better Transport found that three-quarters of the 16 roads which opened to the public in the financial year to April 2009 were more expensive than expected [June 2009].

The M6 Expressway (new parallel motorway from Manchester to Birmingham with enormous cost estimates) was dropped on July 20 2006, initially in favour of widening. However such has been the meteoric rise of hard-shoulder running plans that in December 2009 the Highways Agency confirmed that "no sections of M6 Junctions 10a to 19 [Manchester to Birmingham] are proposed for widening", and advance work began to upgrade 40 miles of hard-shoulder between these junctions in September 2009. With long-running plans for a new 14 mile toll motorway south of the existing M4 between Cardiff and Newport abandoned in July 2009 as costs spiralled to £1 billion, further parallel motorway proposals seem unlikely.

In January 2010, the Highways Agency listed 18 Programme of Major Schemes as "current" (under construction), with 24 in planning stage.

One might ask how major projects arise. The schemes discussed so far, with the exception of the M4 in Wales, all fall into the Highways Agency's Programme of Major Schemes. This is the new, post-Nichols Report (March 2007) name for a set of schemes known for several years previously as the Targeted Programme of Improvements (TPI). The Programme of Major Schemes comprises current or planned motorway and trunk road schemes costing over £5 million. Many schemes in the TPI, now in the Programme, entered following recommendations of the 33 government commissioned Multi-Modal and Roads-Based studies which from 1998 looked at and reported back on transport issues along particular strategic corridors. In some cases the corridor was large, for example the south coast from Ramsgate to Southampton, in others quite short, for example the stretch from the M1 to the centre of Nottingham. It's argued the composition of their steering groups created a headstart for roads-based solutions; most of the multimodal studies recommended major road building in their final reports published from late 2001. Further research has made some of these recommendations look questionable: in late 2005, for example, the Department for Transport contradicted the London - South Midlands Study by announcing that widening of the M11 near Stansted would not be needed until 2021 at the earliest.

The government's target as laid down in the 10 year plan in 2000 was 100 bypasses and 130 major local road schemes by 2010. While those targets are not going to be met, many are under construction (picking 1 from each of the English regions: B1115 Stowmarket Relief Road, Sittingbourne Northern Relief Road, Owen Street Relief Road (Tipton), Carlisle Northern Development Route , North Middlesbrough Accessibiliy Improvements (including widening and new link road) , Weymouth Relief Road , A1073 - Spalding to Eye Improvement Scheme and the Cudworth and West Green bypass [all current October 2009]. More air travel, meanwhile, is leading to a flurry of road schemes affecting access to airports such as Manchester (the £290 million SEMMMS relief road; further funding was agreed in May 2009), Bournemouth (new access road across floodplains in the Draft Regional Spatial Strategy [June 2008]), Edinburgh (new road from M8 rejected in 2006 but still backed by influential bodies) [January 2009], Stansted (public inquiry into new access roads deferred until possibly sping 2010)[June 2009] and Doncaster (revised business case to be submitted spring 2010) [September 2009].

Councils and business interests are promoting new road river crossings too. In March 2006 (then Secretary of State for Transport) Alastair Darling confirmed government funding for a new £431 million [May 2009] 1km 6 lane toll bridge between Runcorn and Widnes. The bridge would be a 3-towered cable-stay design (see image below). The proposed bridge reached public inquiry stage in May 2009; the inspector's report is currently [January 2010] with the DfT. Work began in April 2008 on the £185 million 2nd Tyne road tunnel due to open in December 2011. It will be a toll tunnel: as with a toll road, the private operators will have an interest in increasing traffic levels. All the major parties in Scotland have committed to a new road crossing for the Forth; plans to try to dry out the cabling and manage demand for the existing one alone have disappeared after proving unpopular as a byelection issue in Fife in February 2006. The cost of the new bridge is estimated at between £1.7 billion and £2.3 billion should construction start in 2011 [November 2009] . Also with potential for huge public expenditure, in April 2009 a report produced for the DfT recommended a new Thames crossing at Dartford. In July 2008 Programme Entry Status to the Roads Programme of major schemes was also given to a £103 million bridge in Sunderland which could be complete by 2014.

What's changed since the early / mid 90s? For a start, since 1998 hundreds of miles of "non-core" roads, including some motorways, have been detrunked: responsibility for their development passes from central government in the guise of the Highways Agency to the local transport authority: that is, normally, the city or county council (applies to England outside London). In theory, this should provide better opportunities for integration of transport at a local and regional level. In March 2009, the detrunking programme was completed, with over 3,083 kms detrunked.

Detrunking has made it more important to understand the new regional and local planning systems contained in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act which was passed on May 13 2004. The systems are fairly complex.

There are now 9 Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs) drawn up by Regional Planning Boards (RPBs) at (partially unelected) regional assembly level (Note however that there are proposals that could lead to regional assemblies disappearing from 2010, with Regional Development Agencies (even less accountable) becoming responsible for the RSS) (July 2007). (In addition, the Conservative party published a Green Paper in February 2009 which suggested if in power they would abolish regional transport planning altogether.) A Regional Transport Strategy forms part of an RSS. RSSs reflect national and local government's vision for each region over a period of 15 to 20 years: which broad areas should be Business Growth Zones, which housing and so on. Their legal status makes them hard to challenge once they've been adopted: regional government websites detail when this will be and should include the current RSS although in the complexity of a government website they are not always easy to find. The RSS is submitted to a Secretary of State, who can make changes. A public examination may be held following these changes, although who the RPB contacts and invites to this is their own decision.

The RSS acts as a context for a number of documents known collectively as the Local Development Framework. The RSS of necessity also sets the context for the Local Transport Plan (LTP): if the RSS says a bigger airport is needed, the LTP has to consider how it would be accessed. Local authorities have since 1998 been required to produce 5 year Local Transport Plans for submission to the Department of Transport. These detail how the authority will deliver national and regional government's transport objectives and are, among other things, a bidding document for government funds. English authorities will be expected to hand in their final plans for the third Local Transport Plan, "LTP3", by March 31 2011. It's difficult to generalise, although there is no doubt that the LTP2s kept many significant local road schemes on the agenda, for example the Shrewsbury North West Relief Road (the government agreed in July 2009 to fund the road which the county council had pursued through the RFA; see below), the Norwich Northern Bypass, also promoted via the RFA by the county council (with £67.5 of DfT funding announced in February 2010), the Weymouth Relief Road (currently under construction, with completion expected in spring 2011) and the Hastings - Bexhill road.

Of potential relevance to large LTP (and other) schemes is the Planning Act 2008 given Royal Assent in November 2008 which will speed up the planning process for major infrastructure developments such as roads by replacing public inquiries with a decision by a panel of experts. This may include planners, lawyers, environmentalists and community experts, with the public being involved through "open-floor debates". Known as the Infrastructure Planning Commission, it began operating in October 2009 and will start taking applications for its services from March 2010.

The RFA2 prioritisation feedback in July 2009 confirmed funding for Manchester and Birmingham tram extensions. (There was more news on trams in summer 2009 with Nottingham's extensions still on course despite funding issues arising from Nottinghamshire Conservatives success in the local elections on June 4 2009.)

Also coming out of 2004 legislation was the requirement on the 8 regions outside London to bring together major local transport schemes (costing at least £5million) with certain Highways Agency Programme of Major Schemes projects on "Other National Routes" (PDF 1.46MB) (often referred to as routes of regional importance) in a prioritisation process. This was based on a projected sum of money set out in July 2005 known as the Regional Funding Allocation for Transport which was intended to give an idea of regional budgets until 2015/16. These prioritisations were handed in to central Government for the first time in January 2006. The Department for Transport gave feedback on the regions' prioritisations in early July 2006, with Douglas Alexander mainly endorsing the priorities set out: both public transport schemes such as a Manchester tram extension and some new road schemes (such as the East Kent Access Phase 2 (£64 million)). The prioritisation process has perhaps acted as a brake on the progression of road schemes, in that Highways Agency schemes on roads of regional importance that were not prioritised were then placed "On Hold". In the wake of the prioritisation process [November 2006], the Department for Transport reviewed the national / regional importance route split because of a perceived difficulty getting road schemes on the edges of regions into a high priority position as their benefits may apply more to a neighbouring region. The second round of RFA submissions was completed in February 2009; this time some smaller schemes were to be included in the process; the Highways Agency schemes to be included (on "Other National Routes") essentially stayed the same.

It's clear that proponents of new roads have become more sophisticated since the 90s. The New Approach to Appraisal (NATA), introduced by the government in 1998, means trunk and local road schemes have to be appraised against environment, safety, economy, accessibility and integration factors before a government decision on funding is made. This has made councils and the Highways Agency more aware of the need to work mitigating factors into their plans. Route Management Strategies, commissioned by the Highways Agency, are careful to put impact on wildlife and the environment at the top of their intended Route Outcomes. Multi-modal studies are happy to talk about buses, rail, trams, cycling and walking. Councils soften the blow of a new bypass by talking about it being part of a range of transport measures designed to provide solutions. For every road bridge proposal, there will be a plan for a cycle lane or some newt fencing.

Is it still possible to focus protest on damaging schemes, as happened so successfully in the mid 90s? But what chance of protest at for example the revived Hastings-Bexhill Link Road scheme in East Sussex, awaiting key government decisions in spring 2010, when the Weymouth Relief Road is being built without fuss? Or at the massive Aberdeen bypass, approved at public inquiry in December 2009, when the 5 mile M74 extension, a stilted motorway extension into Glasgow city centre, going against the findings of a public inquiry, is well underway (December 2009). This era of Jobseekers Allowance and being pushed off incapacity benefit has ensured that far fewer people are now politically active, not seeking employment. Engaging with the complexities of the planning processes seems to offer the only route to those who disagree with current schemes.