Lancashire-Yorkshire Motorway
Liverpool to North Cave
For most of the north of England, the M62 is a lifeline. It is the nearest that Britain has to a coast-to-coast motorway, linking Liverpool with Hull, more or less, and it is the motorway that has evolved and shifted its route more than any other.
The headlines shout about traffic lights on motorways to ease congestion. How can that work? And is it even news?
Motorways used to be really simple. Now they have electronic signals, variable speed limits, emergency lay-bys, part-time hard shoulders... Just what is so smart about Smart Motorways?
If you've ever been on the M62 across the Pennines, you'll know the one. It's the huge arched bridge 120ft above the road. And this is what it's like when you're standing on top of it!
Those last few miles of the M1 east of Leeds were completed in 1999. It looks for the most part like a fairly average piece of road, but one of the project's engineers describes some of the challenges that were faced.
There's almost no evidence of Liverpool's 1960's plans for an inner ring road on the ground - but the motorway that never materialised would have been astonishing. The full details on the route, and the missing part the M62, are here.
An introduction to what I write, and why I write it, and where my strange new road sign simulator fits in to all this.
It was specially designed never to be noticed. And now it's disappearing, nobody has noticed its absence. It's London's own bespoke street light.
The wait is over! The full map of the Ringways, London’s unbuilt urban motorway network, is now online. Not even the system's planners had anything like this.
The humble West Yorkshire town of Halifax may well be the creator of the most adventurous urban road scheme in the country. It's astonishing, but what was built isn't even the half of it.
