BYPASS Shipton now. The message is loud and clear on placards in the A19 village in North Yorkshire.

Feelings about the incessant traffic run just as high in Thormanby a few miles up the road, where villagers have paraded with a makeshift coffin.

But will they get the relief they deserve through the Government's newly-announced road-building programme? There's no sign of it. And the absence of action to free these villages from noisy, dirty and destructive traffic signals that what critics have presented as a straightforward Government U-turn on roads contains something far worse.

Yes, Britain needs more roads. But it is now largely futile to build any with the aim of moving traffic. Up to now this has been the overwhelmingly dominant motive for road building.

Why is it that every community through which the A19 once ran north of Teesside is now bypassed while Shipton and Thormanby still suffer? The reason is simple. New roads are built on a calulation of the economic benefits of speeding up the traffic. The scale of the commercial and industrial traffic between Tyne and Tees, coupled with the large number of communities straddling the old A19, thereby slowing the traffic, dictated that a virtually new road would be built.

Sadly for the people of Shipton and Thormanby, the cost benefits of bypassing their villages have never stacked up. So they continue to endure non-stop pounding traffic.

Rejoicing though they are, the one or two communities named for bypasses in the new road-building programme are getting their roads not because the Government has heeded their plight, but because it has decided traffic needs easing at these points - to improve links between other places.

But in the decade or so it will take to complete even this tinkering, increasing traffic will leave congestion much as it was before. That is why, short of widening all motorways and trunk routes to, say six lanes each way, destroying much of rural Britain in the process, attempts to accommodate more traffic by building more roads are doomed to fail.

Traffic congestion needs the bold action that New Labour promised but hasn't delivered. Of course, better public transport. Also, much heavier taxes on larger cars. And policies to discourage commuting and try and reduce the transport of goods from one end of the country to the other. Put all that together and there might be a glimmer of hope.

A year or two back, villagers in a West Country traffic blackspot, Dobwalls in Cornwall, held up placards to the crawling motorists, which read: "You're putting up with this for five minutes. We've put up with it for 50 years.''

Now, they're getting their bypass. But not because the Government recognises their plight, but because tourists must get quicker to the Eden Project. This is a measure of New Labour's abject insensitivity to the "environment".