England’s first motorway celebrates 60th birthday with ITS upgrade

Sixty years today, 2,300 drivers drove along an eight-mile section of road in England – the first motorway in the country. Opened in 1958, the Preston bypass – now part of the M6 - only had two lanes in each direction, with no safety barrier in the central reservation. There was also no technology – not even simple electronic signs. Highways England is pledging to celebrate the birthday by completing four upgrades on the M6 by spring 2022. The £900m project will add extra lanes and better technolog
December 5, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
Sixty years today, 2,300 drivers drove along an eight-mile section of road in England – the first motorway in the country.


Opened in 1958, the Preston bypass – now part of the M6 - only had two lanes in each direction, with no safety barrier in the central reservation.

There was also no technology – not even simple electronic signs.

8101 Highways England is pledging to celebrate the birthday by completing four upgrades on the M6 by spring 2022. The £900m project will add extra lanes and better technology to 60 miles of the motorway between Coventry and Wigan, the organisation says.

The first upgrade, a 20-mile stretch between Crewe and Knutsford in Cheshire, is due to be finished by spring 2019, and will have 258 electronic signs, 104 traffic sensors and 70 CCTV cameras.

The upgrades will involve converting the hard shoulder to a permanent extra lane to increase capacity by a third.

“Our motorways have changed massively over the past six decades and smart motorways could be just a glimpse of the technology transformation still to come,” says Andrew Jinks, smart motorway director at Highways England. “In 60 years’ time, driverless vehicles could be as commonplace as a car radio.”

The amount of traffic using England’s motorways has increased by almost two-thirds in the past 25 years alone, including more than double the number of vans, Highways England says.

Air Quality & Weather Systems

Related Content

  • December 3, 2018
    Panasonic in Colorado: Rocky mountain way
    Panasonic is at the heart of a C-V2X project which began last year in Colorado. The company’s smart mobility boss Chris Armstrong tells Adam Hill how it is working out Colorado needs traffic and transport solutions – and fast. The US state’s population has grown 50% in the last 20 years and another 50% hike is predicted in the next 20. It also spends more than $13 billion in roadway crash costs each year. In 2015, 546 people died in traffic-related crashes, and more than 3,000 were seriously injured.
    Read More
  • November 5, 2021
    Calls for smart motorway halt grow louder
    UK transport select committee says hard shoulder motorways “apparently confuse” drivers
    Read More
  • June 14, 2018
    Keeping people on track is RATP’s raison d’etre
    In Paris, RATP Group’s autonomous Metro Line 1 is carrying 750,000 people a day across the city. Ben Spencer is invited into the control room to take a look at how the system works Paris is visited by millions of tourists each year, keen to see for themselves stunning attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame, the Louvre, the Seine and all the rest. But while the best-known sites of the City of Light tend to be on the surface, there is a lot going on below those iconic grand boule
    Read More
  • September 25, 2019
    New York to pump $51.5bn into transit
    New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has proposed investing $51.5 billion in the city’s subways, buses and railroads over the next five years. Janno Lieber, MTA chief development officer, says: “The proposed capital programme will be truly transformational – more trains, more buses, more service, more accessibility and more reliability.” The 2020-2024 Capital Plan would put $40bn into the city’s subways and buses and $6.1bn for 1,900 new subway cars to help mitigate delays. MTA also wa
    Read More

Highlighted Content