Action Briefing Feb 2003 - Mar 2004
	The Newsletter of Birmingham Friends of the Earth

Swallowing the M6 Toll?

The West Midlands saw the opening of the UK’s first pay-as-you-go motorway in December 7th 2003 when the Birmingham Northern Relief Road, now the M6 Toll, was declared officially open. This received huge publicity and heralded the next stage in the debate on road user charging.

It marked the end of one of the longest running campaigns with which Birmingham Friends of the Earth, along with several other local groups, has been involved. West Midlands Friends of the Earth will continue to track the road and support the Alliance against the BNRR and associated greenbelt developments (at sites such as Peddimore and Bassets Pole, as well as other sites in Staffordshire and Warwickshire).

Indeed, it has been an exciting time for the M6 Toll since it opened. We have seen it operating in all weathers and over the holiday period. However, things have not really gone as the operators Midland Expressway Limited (MEL) would have liked. The opening was greeted by a flurry of media “races” from one end of the road to the other. The conclusions were that the M6 Toll is quicker, empty, has very few lorries and is carrying a lot of fast cars.

Lambasted
One “race” on a Monday morning rush hour covered by the Birmingham Post revealed the time it saved was a mere nine minutes. There were also criticisms of the operators and their lack of willingness not to charge break-down vehicles. They have also been lambasted for trying to charge off the HGV’s. This they deny but casual observations have reported a distinct lack of HGV’s on the toll road while the trunk roads in the vicinity and the old M6 are still full of HGV’s. This of course has an economic effect in that HGV’s cause a huge amount of damage to the road surface and as such add massively to the maintenance costs of the road infrastructure. It would appear that MEL simply don’t want the lorries and are more than happy for the general taxpayer to keep picking up the tab for the maintenance costs.

MEL then announced that they had built the road on millions of pulped Mils and Boon books, a nice soft news story which backfired horribly when in mid January a section of the road had to be closed owing to the surface been uneven! This caused MEL huge embarrassment as two lanes were coned off and the paying customers grumbling at the sight of the all too familiar cones.

Questions
More serious questions were raised concerning the scheme as a whole. The image of the road was dropping in the eyes of local supporters. On the weekend of 17th January heavy rain failed to clear from a section of the road resulting in dangerous driving conditions and five accidents. Another section of the road had to be coned off resulting in a nightmare of two mile tailbacks on the “free running” toll road, customers demanding refunds and the police expressing unease with the situation.

The operators have revealed that on average 35,000 vehicles are using the road per day. If we assume they are all cars that is an income of £70,000 per day, roughly £22.5 million per year. Will this be enough for then to cover their operating costs? Only time will tell but we will be keeping our eyes on how the road performs. Those of you on the net you can log on at www.m6toll.co.uk/

Chris Crean