BOLTON motorists who find it necessary to travel on the country's motorway system are used to traffic jams.

If you live in Bolton your troubles start a lot sooner. Set off travelling south and you are in trouble almost immediately.

Just as you start to think about lifting your speed from 50 mph on St Peter's Way as you join the M61 you hit the slowing traffic that is the M61/M60 junction. Doesn't matter if you are trying to head south towards the M6 or M56 here, or east along the M60/M62 or west along the M62. Slow down and smell the flowers ... er ... fumes.

Ask around the office and you will be besieged with suggestions: "Go to Westhoughton and join the M61"; "Go to Belmont and join the M65; "Go to the Reebok and ..."

The Highways Agency are not helping a lot.

Since their defeat on the M62 Whitefield Relief Road some years ago they seem to have given up on "our" section of the motorway network.

Since December 1999 the Agency has been carrying out a study which suggests an additional slip road from the A556 going south onto the M6 in the Lymm area -- which local motorists could have told them we needed 30 years ago.

This would also include tolls on an M6, which will have been widened to four lanes for most of its length. And improvements to the railway system running between Birmingham and Manchester which will (they suggest) cut down on some of the journeys by road.

So, will Bolton motorists pay tolls to use the motorways -- or any other roads for that matter?

Roy Salmon, chairman of the Bolton and District branch of the Institute of Advanced Motorists thinks that it depends on: "who is paying for it."

"When I was working and my employer was paying then I would have used the toll roads," he said, "however, I am sure that the general public faced with paying for themselves will seek different routes.

"I would and I am now able to pick my journey times to avoid the worst times."

Mr Salmon has every sympathy with road planners, but says that tolls are not the answer.

"All the A-roads that are presently used as short cuts will clog up and the towns and villages that they pass through will suffer as people avoid the tolls. In the case of the M6 corridor, the A34 and A49 will all become completely clogged up."

Roger Freeman of the AA seems to think we will pay tolls -- although he and his organisation are very much against it.

"Our position is that toll roads should not be necessary, they are simply a case of motorists paying yet again, for something that they have already paid for," he said.

"Very little of the tax that motorists pay out is spent on any form of transport, certainly not on roads and not even on trains. It is just a way for successive governments to raise money.

"However, our research shows that motorists will pay tolls, albeit grudgingly, if they think that they are getting something for it.

"The difference between the tolls we usually have to pay in this country, for bridges and the like, is that without the toll there wouldn't be a bridge. There will still be alternatives to the Birmingham bypass and a tolled M6."

But what are the alternatives?

Certainly most of the people I know who are travelling past Birmingham to the south east have been avoiding Spaghetti Junction for years.

If we are heading for somewhere below the M6/M1 junction, we turn off at Stoke-on-Trent onto the A500 then follow the A50 and join the M1 near to Derby.

If we are heading for other areas south of Birmingham -- Coventry, the NEC etc -- we turn off along the A5, south of Stafford and join the M42 -- also a decent alternative for Heathrow.

Of course the "Birmingham bypass" the private road following the route of the A5 from the M6 to the M42 will be toll only. So will I use it? Not unless I am forced to.

But then, have you driven along the A5 to the M42 recently? It is a crawl as more and more motorists decide that it is better than being stationary on the M6 south of Hilton Park.

Many of us might pay a toll if we could somehow swoop from the end of St Peter's Way onto the relatively free-flowing sections of the M6 or M62.

But that is never going to happen -- where could you put such a road?