Alistair Darling: The regular driver with a £13bn annual budget to get Britain moving smoothly

The Monday Interview: The Secretary of State for Transport

One of the political acts Alistair Darling was proudest of before he became an MP was when, as transport convener of Lothian Council some 15 years ago, he scrapped plans for a motorway to be built into the centre of Edinburgh.

It's hardly surprising that as soon as he was made Transport Secretary in the May reshuffle, some of his old Tory opponents from those days queued up to recall the fact. But Mr Darling points out that not only did his decision save between £20m and £30m, it was also vindicated by history: no one now calls for the motorway to be built.

Considering he also gives short shrift to proposals by Lord Birt, Tony Blair's "blue skies" thinker on transport, for a new network of super-motorways paid for by tolls, one can easily deduce that Mr Darling is anti-car.

The truth about the new Transport Secretary, a regular driver, is a little more complex than that. Even back then in Edinburgh, he was also responsible for building the city's bypass, a crowded road today. As then, so now, Mr Darling oozes a reassuringly unflashy pragmatism. He's not against road improvement schemes and bypasses, such as the recently announced upgrading of the A1 in Yorkshire.

"It's got to be a mixed and balanced approach. I'm a pragmatic politician," he says. "I drive cars. Cars are necessary for many people; they're neces-sary for the economic well being of this country. But everybody recognises there is a limit to how many cars you can put on the roads or in city centres." Which still leaves Mr Darling anxious to relieve road congestion and improve public transport. The costs of the Birt plan are daunting, he says.

"My view is that there is a limit to how much more road building is necessary, affordable and desirable. There is a limit to how much concrete you can put on to what is a very small country. Unless you build up public transport alternatives then you will simply grind some towns and cities to a halt." People wanted a balanced policy but "above all they want to see us get on with it. We've lost too much time already."

He appears warm towards road pricing, which will come in anyway for lorries from 2006 (to ensure continental lorries pay their fair share), saying that it would be "foolish not to have a debate on whether you should extend that to cars". But the 25 million cars on British roads cause huge technical difficulties, which might not be overcome for a decade.

While recognising that most local authorities will now wait to see how Ken Livingstone's pioneering congestion charging scheme works in London from next spring, he believes the idea may well have a future. "People will have to make choices. It's not something you can't pretend isn't an issue. Simply letting nature take its course will mean that things will be gummed up," he says.

His impatience "to get on with it" and produce some visible results is nowhere more apparent than when he is discussing Mr Livingstone's continued opposition to the public-private partnership for the London Underground. As a former Treasury minister, Mr Darling was never going to rethink the scheme.

"The Tube needs massive investment. There is £16bn there waiting. For goodness sake, let's start putting it into the system." The former solicitor adds: "If all we are doing is pouring money into lawyers' pockets to argue the toss in the latest judicial review, that is not serving the interests of the people of London."

While his predecessor, Stephen Byers, was accused of veering between ultra-Blairite and playing to the old-Labour gallery, Mr Darling is distinctly comfortable in his non- ideological skin. He will produce an updated version of the Government's 10-year transport plan in the autumn. (Mr Byers had promised one for this month). But given that the plan already provides a 4.7 per cent year-on-year increase in transport spending, Mr Darling does not feel the need to strike a public posture ahead of next week's comprehensive spending review. Of course, he would like extra money, though as a long- time ally of Gordon Brown and front-runner to be Chancellor in a Brown government, he quips: "Gordon's prudence extends to his friends."

The big question, he insists, is how to spend the £13bn annual budget he will enjoy from next year. And here Mr Darling is, characteristically, less entranced by huge flagship projects than by practical, locally based schemes to improve road and rail that can "make a big difference" for a comparatively small amount of money.

Although the TGV is justifiably a French source of pride, he says, take a train in parts of rural France and "you could be forgiven for saying the British railway system is quite good".

Mr Darling's main preoccupation in recent days was rail safety in response to the Health and Safety Executive report on the Potters Bar crash. On the most vexed issue, maintenance, he insists that the problem is not the use of outside contractors but the need to allocate to a single body clear responsibility for checking the work has been done properly.

He rejects calls for maintenance work to be a task for Railtrack or its successor, Network Rail. "I cannot believe that people are seriously saying after the last eight years that the answer to Britain's problems is to give it all to Railtrack. Secondly, there is not the expertise within Railtrack now."

The Transport Secretary insists: "I do not want to spend another three or four years reorganising the railway industry when what we are crying out for is getting on with it and getting some progress."

Instead of automatically blaming privatisation, Mr Darling urges a sense of proportion. "Safety on the railway is paramount. But about 10 people are killed on British roads every day. There have been some horrific accidents but the safety record is improving. Rail is a safe form of transport."

But as Network Rail will, in effect, be back in the public sector, isn't the taxpayer being wholly misled by keeping it off the books as though it wasn't making a sizeable dent in the public finances? "The classification is one for the enthusiasts. Railtrack was a private company but reached the stage when it could not carry on; we were not in a position to let it run out of money."

One reason for Mr Darling insisting as one of the terms of his appointment that he should bring his trusted permanent secretary, Rachel Lomax, from the Department of Work and Pensions was a need to inject a new spirit into a department dreadfully battered by the civil war sparked by Jo Moore's notorious e-mail on 11 September.

Despite the internal battles, and three big reorganisations since Labour came to power, he insists morale at the Department of Transport is good. Few if the staff even knew Ms Moore. "They want to get things done and get on with the job. They want a sense of clear direction," he says.

Mr Darling, who has always eschewed the spin that brought down his immediate predecessor, is happy to be judged "on whether we deliver year-on-year improvements to the transport system".

Although seen as grey and bland, he is passionate when we describe our personal nightmares on the Tube. "I know bloody well what it's like," he says, insisting that things are getting better. But he has an uphill task and, perhaps ominously, our two-stop Underground journey from Victoria to Westminster after the interview takes 25 minutes.