According to latest reports, drivers on Englandâs motorways and A roads are being held up in traffic for nearly 15 minutes per every 100 miles, equating to an 8.9 second delay per mile.
The Office for Road and Rail produced a report which stated that 89.7 billion miles were driven over the last year on the Strategic Road Network (motorways and A roads), which is an increase of five billion over the last four years.
And even though the Strategic Road Network accounted for only 2% of roads, it carried a third of the countryâs traffic, while average speeds also slowed with cars and trucks now travelling at 59.3mph in comparison to 61.3mph four years ago.
There has been the introduction of a new target to cut delay times, however the report admitted that this would depend on the growth of traffic and would prove difficult to achieve and maintain.
These figures were released as part of the annual report from Highways England, which stated that the group has made a positive start to its management of a £15 billion network investment by 2020-21.
Highways England also broke its targets for the maintenance of network availability, maintenance of road surface quality and the clearing of motorway incidents among others.
Also on the decrease was the number of people seriously injured on the roads, as the figure fell by 4.9% from 2014 to 2015, while the number of people killed or seriously injured fell by 3.6%.
However, if Highways England is to meet its target of a 40% drop in the number of people killed or seriously injured in the next four years, the report claimed that further focus is needed.
One of the main targets Highways England failed to meet was the satisfaction rate of its users, as only 89.3% said they were fairly or very satisfied with the network, which is 0.7% short of the 90% it was aiming for.
