No, to allow easier travel between valleys. Places like Ebbw Vale; Rhymney are quite close, as the crow flies but the topography of the area ensured that they remained quite isolated from ech other.
Which surely kind of disagrees with the point you are making?
Public transport between the heads of the valleys is atrocious, and is likely to always be the case because of the geography of the area. So having a decent road connection is vital (from the top of the valley I am from it is 30 minutes to Merthyr using the heads of the valleys road, or 50 minutes if you go down the valley to pontypridd then up the merthyr valley, or around an hour and ten minutes by public transport).
I live in a rural are where the single carriageway roads follow ancient cart tracks - the logic of that argument is you need dual carriageways everywhere. How do you pay for them? As you can see with the A465 half the Welsh Capital transport budget this decade will go on dualling just 12 miles of it.
Errr I never said that you need dual carriages everywhere. Just that certain parts of single carriage roads should be duelled (the same is the case on the north devon link road for slightly different reasons).
Road Stats
Well the base source its taken from is the DfT website using 1993 = 100 Are you questioning DfT's statistical credibility? CBT and the Economist have just used the stats as DfT presents them. Maybe on your basis that DfT mislead all the positive Cost Benefit Ratios for road schemes are suss too?
I am not questioning the source (well, technically I am because other sources say contradictory things). But that isn't my point here.
What I am saying is that without looking at the numbers, the graphs appear to show quite dramatic changes. But when you then look at the scale they use, the changes are not so dramatic anymore.
Also don't forget that "being green" is something recent governments (and thus government bodies) love to do, and as part of that they have been trying to dissuade car use - so stats that would help them justify certain anti-car policies would be nice for them to have.
Not dualling
Its a huge proportion of a relatively small budget that only delivers some hypothetical time savings to people that need to hop between towns in the Heads of the Valleys - which is the reality of the majority of its use.
Roads aren't unsafe its the behavior of human beings that drive on them.
But again, that link is needed. As I said above, look at the difference in times. Also remember that the main link down the valleys can often be very congested.
And I disagree. Roads can easily be unsafe. To suggest otherwise is a bit naive to say the least. If a particular stretch of road has had quite a few high profile accidents in a short period of time, then there is something wrong there.
Cardiff Problems
Proper nations have integrated interlinking public transport. Agreed the problem of where you go once you get to Cardiff needs to be resolved. A characteristic of the areas/country's of europe with higher GDP is a higher usage of public transport. Poorer country's such as Wales are more heavily road reliant.
Apart from the fact that the geography of the area means that road reliance is just a fact of life. Using my example again, 30 minutes by car or 70 minutes by public transport, what would you choose?
And what exactly do you mean by "proper nations"? Because as far as I can tell, hardly anywhere has a a decent integrated public transport system (certainly the UK does not).
