THINGS are moving on our roads. Yesterday the transport minister John Spellar announced that the A1 across North and West Yorkshire was to be upgraded to a motorway. And he confirmed that a flyover would be built on the A64 at Bilbrough Top, closing a dangerous gap in the central reservation.

This double bulletin of good news is enough to make the long-ignored Yorkshire motorist dizzy with anticipation. Yet, fast behind these encouraging headlines, comes another: today we reveal that the dualling of the A64 is firmly back on the agenda.

The biggest of these schemes by some way is the A1 motorway. To say this has been needed for some time is an understatement.

The A1 is a critical road for Yorkshire and has long been inadequate for the scale and speed of the traffic it carries.

This newspaper began campaigning for an A1 upgrade back in the Eighties. An alarming accident rate prompted us to call on the then roads minister Peter Bottomley to come and see the dangers for himself.

He did, and improvements were sanctioned. But these were never enough.

The £263 million plan to turn the A1 into a six-lane motorway finally addresses the problem properly. We applaud the Government for a scheme ambitious enough to make the road both safer and less congested.

Meanwhile, the decision to build a flyover on the A64 is a fantastic victory for our Close The Gaps campaign. The central reservation gaps are a fatal design flaw - literally. Sealing them off will put an end to those heart-stopping moments when a driver edges out of the gap into two lanes of fast-flowing traffic.

Our attention now moves to the compelling case for dualling the A64. It has long been recognised that the congestion on this road is bad for business in Scarborough, Ryedale and York, as well as a cause of accidents.

We hope Mr Spellar is still in receptive mood when he meets with A64 campaigners next month.

Updated: 11:27 Wednesday, June 26, 2002