INFRASTRUCTURE & TRANSPORT

Infrastructure outside of London has been disgracefully neglected and has turned London into a black hole that sucks up all the investment and development. Everyone living outside it deserves to have their communities upgraded, and investment and business sent to them too. We therefore propose the following developments:

• Expand the A1 to a full motorway.

• Build an M4 relief road.

• M30 built in the south-west in the A303/A30 corridor joining up with the end of the M5 and going down into Cornwall.

• Expand the A9 to a dual carriageway along its entire length to connect northern Scotland and the Highlands.

• Build an underground metro system in Manchester with the aim to expand it to merge with Liverpool.

• Upgrade the TransPennine Railway to modern high-speed standards along the Chester-Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds-Hull route to connect these northern cities as a Crossrail of the North.

• Expand railway electrification across the entire UK.

• Review the Lower Thames Crossing to ease the congestion at the Dartford Tunnel. The current plan will be retrofitted to include the 2010 plan which would extend the LTC with a freight-only dual carriageway running parallel to the M25 and connecting directly with the M11. This would take all cross-Channel freight from the Sheerness and London Thames Ports off the M25 and immediately adjacent motorways, delivering goods to the rest of the UK faster and cheaper and easing congestion for car users.

• Introduce width and weight purchase taxes on vehicles to discourage manufacture and use of modern heavier cars and account for fourth-power-law axle weight damage to road surfaces.

• Stricter front-end design regulations for cars to prevent blunt-nose designs which are more dangerous for pedestrians if hit, and mandatory size limits on parking spaces.

• A national road repair programme to fix potholes and other degradation.

• Recap bus fares at £2 and day passes at £5.

• Build new water reservoirs.

• Build new blast furnaces for steel production.

• Upgrade rural public transport links, modernise them where possible, and investigate reversing the Beeching cuts and bringing disused railways lines back into service again.

• Require all traffic lights to have cameras on them to catch red-light runners.

• Make new criminal offences for drivers to not let vehicles in a merge-in-turn lane move into theirs at the convergence point, and for drivers who straddle lanes in an attempt to block vehicles from using the empty lane.