Motorways

It's 100 years since the opening of the world's first motorway, the Autostrada from Milan to the Lakes.

In 2022, Manchester City Council say they reduced the speed limit on the Mancunian Way to 30mph. But it’s not clear if they did. It’s not even clear if they can.

One of the UK’s strangest little motorways has just been downgraded into oblivion.

Markerposts are meant to start at one end of a road and count the kilometres to the other. But things are never that simple.

Appearing unexpectedly on signs in Lincolnshire last week, a brand new motorway has suddenly come into existence. And it's a weird one.

No tears will be shed in Kent for the end of Operation Brock, the much-hated contraflow that turned the M20 into a semi-permanent lorry park.

Pictures taken as the first section of the M1 was being built in 1958-9, with all its unique architecture still under construction.

Two weeks after it arrived it went away... but not completely.

A £30m plan to keep traffic moving while using 13 miles of motorway as a lorry park has just been implemented - and it might be here for a while.

Today marks the sixtieth birthday of the motorway network, and of one entirely forgotten bridge in Lancashire.

It's been on the cards since the 1920s. Is the Western Orbital Motorway now finally going to happen?

Bristol’s M32 recently gained a new junction for buses only. To mark this strange new addition to the motorway network, here are five places you can’t leave the motorway.

The new A1(M) between Leeming and Barton in North Yorkshire is now, finally, nearing completion. It's been a long wait!

The headlines shout about traffic lights on motorways to ease congestion. How can that work? And is it even news?

England's motorways are littered with the remnants of service areas that were never built. Here's ten of our favourites.

The UK's widest motorway is not where you might expect to find it — in fact, it's on the unassuming M61 near Manchester. This gallery offers an overhead view of one of the UK's most unique and spacious interchanges.

If there's trouble crossing the Channel, you'll see the lorries queuing on the M20. What is Operation Stack? Why does it cause so much trouble? And why, more than twenty years after it started, are we still using it?

During the 1960s the UK developed some of the most sophisticated - and strange - electronic variable message signs anywhere in the world. How? And, just as importantly... why?

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?

Those funny black and yellow symbols are everywhere - and they might just get you back on track one day.