00:00As everybody who uses the motorways in Lancashire knows, we have a real headache with the M6, the amount of congestion, it becomes gridlocked far too often, and the number of complaints that we've been getting just means that we really need to do something about it.
00:21And so we're looking at as many solutions as we can. I've written to Heidi Alexander from the government to see whether we can bring agencies together to look at what may be the options are.
00:37As we know, the section of the motorway between the M61 and the M65 going up to the M55 has just become, in terms of the amount of traffic, it's just overburdened. It's just too much.
00:53Now, this was the original motorway that was first built in Lancashire, going back to the 1950s, the Preston Bypass, and the reason why it was built, because the traffic going through north to south, south to north then, going through Preston, was always gridlocked at that time.
01:14Can you imagine from then to now, the amount of traffic we have on the roads now, if something happens on that motorway, there is no way of getting around, because the same issues still apply.
01:28We need to make sure that the motorway is functional, the motorway works. We have doubled the number of police patrols on the motorway.
01:37We've worked at options around reducing the speed of traffic at peak times, which by the volume of traffic is what happens anyway.
01:48But we need investment. We need to see what else can be done in terms of options around supporting the other roads, supporting new junctions, what maybe we can do to ensure that that traffic flows.
02:08At the end of the day, the impact on our economy and our standard of living in Lancashire is impacted directly by that flow of traffic on the M6.
02:21We need to make sure that it works. We don't want to see accidents. We don't want to see people inconvenienced.
02:28We want to ensure that Lancashire keeps moving.
