On 5 December, 2008 Britain’s motorway network celebrated its 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion the Road Users’ Alliance (RUA) published ‘50 Years of Motorways,’ which claims that from a slow and modest start (over 30 years behind its European neighbours) the UK network has never managed to catch up. According to the publication, in the 1960s and early 1970s motorways were viewed as a route to renewal and prosperity. The network made some headway and grew to 2,500km; it crawled a further 1,000km ov