Don new roads just fill up with traffic?
When a new road is opened, it will almost always start to fill up with traffic. This is by design, since if there was no traffic wanting to use the route, the road would not have been built. This traffic does not appear from nowhere; rather, it will have been drawn off other routes, relieving congestion on them. If a town bypass did not fill up with traffic, it would be a complete failure since that would mean that traffic was still clogging up the town centre. At a first glance, it may seem like a new road has generated extra traffic, but you often need to look further afield to see where the traffic has come from. Take the M6 Toll as an example. On first sight, it has “generated” extra traffic, since after it opened the number of vehicles using the M6 at each end of the toll road increased by 10%. However, look further away and you find that traffic on the A446 fell by 10%, the A5190 fell by 24%, and the A50 fell by 18%. Many roads – such as the M50, the M69, the M180 and the A74(M)
