Road transport in Peterborough

The City of Peterborough in East Anglia has an extensive and well integrated road network, owing partly to its status as a new town. Since the 1960s, the city has seen considerable expansion and its various suburbs are linked by a system of parkways.

Despite its large-scale growth, Peterborough has the fastest peak and off-peak travel times for a city of its size in the United Kingdom, due to the construction of the parkways. The Local Transport Plan anticipates expenditure totalling around £180 million for the period up to 2010 on major road schemes to accommodate future development.

The A1/A1(M) broadly follows the path of the historic Great North Road from London, through Peterborough (Junction 17), continuing north a further 335 miles (539 km) to central Edinburgh.

Numbered Junctions

Peterborough has so many roundabouts and grade separated junctions within its roads and parkway system that junctions are numbered using the same system as is used to number British motorway and major A road junctions to guide and help drivers. Peterborough is to date the only city within the United Kingdom to use the system in this way and has been using this system since the 1970s.

Parkways and major roads

The parkways were constructed under guidelines from the Peterborough Development Corporation as a system of high speed roads to connect the new townships which housed London's post-war overspill population and were mostly built from the early 1970s to the late 1980s

The majority of Peterborough's parkways are dual carriageways, to accommodate the large quantity of local traffic within the city, and national and regional traffic bypassing it. However, due to their age, many of the parkways do not have hard-shoulders. Most of the parkways that bypass the city have graded roundabout junctions.