UK transport planning - post Brexit

For the past forty years, Europe’s transport network has evolved on a spoke and hub basis for upgrades, new infrastructure and prioritisation. The hub is somewhere around Frankfurt, with a sort of Zone 1 extending to the Netherlands and Berlin. The rest of us are on the spokes. It’s all part of a huge ‘transport corridor’ masterplan developed by the EU under the ‘Tentec’ badge. The UK has gone from Airstrip One to Euroroute E15.

The plan’s corridors include road, rail and sea routes and it has led, as I have previously posted, to the absurdity of a container from China to Munich taking eleven days longer via Rotterdam or Hamburg than it would need to travel if transshipped at an Adriatic terminal. This is largely due to the route masterplan having been corrupted by the power of national interests rather than being designed on economic, or even ecological, grounds.

Thus the entire HS1 / HS2 concepts are integral parts of an EU transport masterplan, a masterplan that for forty years has set in steel, stone and concrete the EU hub and spoke network. It has less to do with reduced journey times or British economic or business interests than with forced Euro integration. As such, we must welcome the government review, which must now view the UK’s transport planning from a fresh perspective.

AEP in the Telegraph cogently dissects why we must now do the same for ports – the predominance of Dover in truck movements, which have grown from 14% to around 30% of UK-EU trade since the early 1990s, has left us wide open to EU blockade (though AEP politely doesn’t use that term). Saint Greta would deprecate the waste and pollution of (as AEP writes) trucking Scotch Whisky to a ferry at Dover rather than via a container from the Tyne.

Now that we’re no longer under the boot-heel of the EU’s transport planners, we can take pointless freight off the roads by better use of container ports, eliminate Romanian and Polish truckers with their LHD rigs by using ro-ro trailers (hauled by UK rigs on UK roads) and use the Chunnel for what it’s meant – a thrumming artery for containerised freight, not a luxury passenger route for our bloated functionaries to shuttle back and forth from the Chancellery in Brussels.   

To our transport experts – I’m happy to be corrected on any of the above in the comments.