Leading Article: On a road to nowhere

WHEN THE first 70-mile stretch of the M1 between Watford and Rugby was opened by the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, on 2 November 1959, it was an event of enormous symbolism. No matter that our first motorway was some decades behind the German Autobahnen. No, this was progress and, for Britain, on a grand scale - the first link in a national grid of interconnecting routes that would move freight - not passengers in private cars - from one great manufacturing centre and market to another.

Well, we know what happened to that dream. More perhaps than any other project of the post-war era - nuclear power, say, or system-built tower blocks - the motorways worked. Too well, as we now know.

Looking back at the old footage, of course, we are struck by just how free those pioneering motorists in their Hillman Minxes and Armstrong Siddeley Sapphires seem, by today's standards. We also know that we shall never see those times again. The great car economy has choked itself to death. No more major motorways will be built.

The ideals of 1959 may be bankrupt today; but at least the planners of those years had a vision. There is little evidence that the political leaders of 1999 have a clue as to how to get us moving again.