The Government announced yesterday that it intends to spend £170m on over congested roads throughout England. New transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, announced 57 problem points on English roads would be addressed. Funding will be in place to improve roads where areas bottleneck with traffic, and congestion causes delays. Proposed plans include work on the M1, M5 and M62 motorways, and the A1 and A404, in an effort to improve access to areas of enterprise and help boost the economy.
Mr McLoughlin also insisted the Government would press forward with their plan to create a high speed train link between London and Birmingham, despite strong opposition from within the Conservative Party. He said: “We can’t afford not to build it. Our competitors around the world are investing in the best transport and we must too.” Homes and communities who will be affected by the new train line will be properly compensated, he promised. It was also confirmed the Government want to reduce travel time between London and Scotland to under three hours.
In other news this week, it’s gratifying to see that even industry giants like Amazon sometimes get things wrong. Delivery time for their latest Kindle e-book reader has been pushed back to four to six weeks after ordering as stock levels can’t cope with the demand. Units available to purchase per customer have also been restricted to just two in order to help reduce the strain placed on Amazon to meet customer demand.
The new Kindle features some improvements that make the user experience significantly smoother, resulting in the delays for both the non-3G and 3G models now released. Among those improvements is a new lighting system, a higher resolution screen, and a touch interface that’s quicker and more responsive. Amazon review their e-reader every year to ensure that new technologies remain compatible, and is one of the most popular gadgets available on the market for reading e-books. Amazon’s continued exploration in to ways to optimise their flagship reader bodes well for the e-book market and, despite the delay in receiving the new model, customers appear to agree that the device is worth the wait.