Here's why the London Orbital Motorway - the M25 - is an epic, epic fail

Objectively, scientifically, the M25 is hateful. Anyone who’s spent more than 30 seconds on London’s orbital motorway knows this. 4pm Fridays? Nightmarish. 3am on a Sunday in mid-December? Also nightmarish after three lanes are closed to investigate a suspicious object that turns out to be a Lidl carrier bag and, yes, this is where you live now.

But is it fair to brand the M25 a fail? Isn’t it just... doing an inherently unpleasant job? After all, colonoscopies aren’t a joy to endure – or so Epic Fail is led to believe, having never experienced a colonoscopy on account of being a disembodied voice on a car website – but we’re better off in a world where colonoscopies exist. And, colonoscopies work. The M25 is more like... a bum probing that causes further bum issues.

Here’s why it’s a fail. The M25 was doomed from the drawing board. It hasn’t become unfit for purpose over the 40 years since its 1986 opening. It was obsolete from the get-go.

How so? Spectacular failure to grasp a concept transport planners now call ‘induced demand’. Build a massive new road to ease congestion, and what happens? More people use it. The road doesn’t relieve traffic from existing routes. It creates fresh traffic composed of people who’ve decided that living in Slough and commuting to Southend now makes perfect sense, actually.

Yes, many transport experts warned of this at the time. Yes, they were roundly ignored. Within a year of opening, some sections of the M25 were experiencing more than double the volume of cars predicted. Within half a dozen years, it needed widening.

Should planners have anticipated a massive new motorway would, y’know, attract cars? One might think. Has 40 years of upgrades fixed this fundamental flaw? We all know the answer to that.

With a basic grasp of human behaviour, the M25 could have been so much less catastrophically awful.