To understand the North West’s traffic problems, you don’t start in Manchester. Or on the M60 around the city. Or anywhere else in the region. Instead, head south to an anonymous modern corporate headquarters building on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. Plenty of glass and steel, acres of parking. This is the home of Trafficmaster, the company that sells information on traffic jams and congestion to hard pressed road users. Because Trafficmaster deals in traffic jams, it collects plenty of information about where the problems are and where there are growing traffic congestion issues. They regularly publish a league table of the top ten congestion blackspots outside London.

For anyone in the North West, it makes uncomfortable reading. Well up the list is the M60 (it used to be the M62) around North Manchester. The M62 in West Yorkshire also features. Many of the remainder are along the length of the M6 and M25.

Seen on a map, you begin to get a feeling that the region is being slowly throttled. But, back in 1989, the very opposite was true. The face of the North West was to be changed by the biggest road-building programme since Roman Times. A new motorway system, shaped almost like a question mark, would run from around the North edge of Manchester around the Western side and down to the South West linking into the M6. Another tranche of roadbuilding and widening would affect regional centres such as Preston and Lancaster, where a comprehensive system of bypasses was planned.

Across the rest of the region motorways would be widened to eight, or even 10 lanes. The M62 around Whitefield would become a 14 lane superhighway as an additional six lanes of M62 were created to separate long distance traffic across the Pennines from short distance commuters. There would be a rash of new bypasses with upgraded junctions and new stretches of road. But somehow, it all went badly wrong.

Within a couple of years it became obvious that costs were going through the roof. We might want new roads but as a nation we were not going to be able to pay for them. And it became clear that the British public’s appetite for road building was also waning fast: we wanted new roads, but not near where we live, thanks all the same.

Perhaps more significantly it also became obvious that, however much we might want to, we could never build our way out of congestion: more people would drive more often and demand would soon outstrip supply once again. New roads generate more traffic simply because they do this, making the existing public transport alternatives less attractive. Even today, fewer than half the people who have a full driving licence have daily access to a car. If they all chose to drive tomorrow, traffic levels would more than double. These strands of thinking had a huge impact on roads policy and the Highways Agency, set up by the Government to manage the motorway and trunk road system. Instead of rolling out new tarmac, its officials would find ways of squeezing more traffic onto the network we already have.

Jonathan Reade of the Highways Agency sums it up: “The present policy is making the best use of what we have. That does not mean building no new roads, because there are places where this will be the only realistic option, but it does mean looking at all the other options as well.”

The M62 (including the M60 around North Manchester) is currently one of his biggest challenges. A major study - M62 Junction Eighteen To Twelve Study (it quickly became known as JETTS) - has identified the problems and potential solutions, some of which will be radical. The starting point is that 1989 plan for a total of 14 lanes of motorway around Whitefield and Worsley. With that idea gone, what can be done? Traffic is still growing and it is now far from unusual to see eight lanes of crawling or standing traffic.More