Motorists and cyclists are set to benefit from the government’s record £6 billion spending spree to fix potholes across England over the next six years.

The £1 billion-a-year investment will be enough to fill in 18 million potholes, according to the department for transport, as well as improving other local road infrastructure.

The southwest will benefit the most, with £850 million going to the region, while the northeast will receive the least with £270 million.

It is the first time councils have been given locked-in funding over this length in time, which the government says will help local authorities plan ahead and save money for the taxpayer. Patrick McLoughlin, the transport secretary, said potholes were a menace and that long-term planning would put an end to short-term fixes.

Labour reacted angrily, suggesting the government’s poor record on road maintenance was the reason such a large investment was needed. The party pointed to the department for transport’s 2013 road conditions report that showed spending on minor roads had fallen by 20 per cent since the coalition came to power in 2010. According to the report, 17 per cent of local roads — more than 19,000 miles — should be considered for maintenance work.

“You can’t believe a single word ministers say,” Michael Dugher,Labour’s shadow transport secretary, said. “Local roads are in a desperate state under David Cameron. Over 2,220 miles more of our local roads now need maintenance work compared to 2010.

“Hard-pressed motorists and businesses are justifiably sick and tired of having their vehicles damaged because of Britain’s pothole crises. This Tory government is all talk. Motorists have had enough of their failure and broken promises.”

More than £4.7 billion will be shared between 115 English councils, while £575 million will be set aside to help repair and maintain highway infrastructure such as junctions, bridges and street lighting. The remaining money will go into an incentive fund scheme to reward councils that deliver cost effective improvements.

Local authorities welcomed the investment, but said £6 billion fell far short of the amount needed to repair Britain’s “poor quality” roads. The Local Government Association (LGA) criticised the decision to hold back more than £1 billion, insisting all the funds should go to town halls.

An LGA spokesman said: “Previous LGA analysis of the £6 billion funding over five years found it equated to an extra £300 million a year on top of the £700 million councils were expecting, but was still £800 million short of what was needed to repair the poor quality of roads in one year alone. So while helpful, this new money does not bridge the overall funding gap which is increasing year on year.

“It would be more useful if the whole £6 billion was given to councils to get on with the important job of fixing roads, rather than £1 billion of it being tied up in Whitehall bureaucracy.

“Recent harsh winters and decades of underfunding by successive governments have created a national backlog of road repairs that would take £12 billion and a decade for councils to fix.”

Mr McLoughlin said: “Poorly maintained local roads, blighted by potholes, are a menace to all road users, particularly during the festive period as people travel to see family and friends.”

You wouldn’t want to say it out loud on the concourse of King’s Cross at 8am on a Monday morning, but the British commuter is profoundly lucky. Bothered by the invasion of your personal space? In Tokyo 70 per cent of schoolgirls told one survey that they had been abused on the city’s preposterously overstuffed subways by chikan, suited fetishists who spray teenagers with mayonnaise and worse. The vice has bred its own genre of pornography, norimono poruno.

Fed up with exorbitant fares? One of the first season tickets issued in mid-Victorian Britain cost £50, a year’s wages for the average worker of the day. It sold out anyway. Bored of plasticky food? Victorian commuters endured famously awful railway sandwiches — “the real disgrace of England”, according to Anthony Trollope — and what Charles Dickens called “a class of soup which enfeebles the mind, distends the stomach, forces itself into the complexion, and tries to ooze out at the eyes”.

We are safe, too. Travelling by train in the early days of steam was often dangerous. In 1865 ten people died when a train racing to London from Folkestone ran downhill at 50mph into a viaduct that had been closed for repairs. Six carriages fell into the riverbed below and the seventh, in which Dickens was a passenger, was left balanced over the precipice. He climbed out and passed his hip flask of brandy to other survivors. Today ten people still die each day on the commuter railways of Mumbai.

The history of the journey to work is in large part the history of modern society. With the frantic spread of railways, trams and omnibuses in the 19th century, as the working class began to enjoy the same mobility as City stockbrokers, it became hard to ignore their political will. In 1867, the year of the Second Reform Act, the political journalist Walter Bagehot suggested that there was no better place to take the pulse “of the ordinary mass of educated, but still commonplace, mankind” than “the opinion of the bald-headed man on the back of the omnibus”. This insight later found its way into cliché as “the man on the Clapham omnibus”.

Rush Hour, an entertaining study by the corporate lawyer turned historian Iain Gately, falls into three parts. The first and longest is a lively account of the stress, overcrowding and social awkwardness that have dogged travellers since the first railway lines opened. Then comes a survey of the shape of things today, tapering into a not entirely convincing argument that commuting generally makes people happier and healthier.

The book is best in the last section, where Gately indulges in some futurology. Telecommuting, HS2 and maglev lines that could take travellers from Dover to Aberdeen in an hour are studied and discarded before he settles tentatively on driverless cars as the likeliest next widely adopted technology.

Rush Hour is never less than interesting, pacey and rattling with trivia. The only big disappointment, apart from Gately’s reliance on secondary sources, is the lack of attention dedicated to cycling as a solution to clogged motorways and crowded trains and buses. In 1939 twice as many British commuters cycled to work as drove a car. Three quarters of a century on, getting back to that ratio would be something almost like progress.

Rush Hour: How 500m commuters survive the daily journey to work by Iain Gately. To order for £14.99 including postage visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call The Times Bookshop on 0845 2712134

Potholes plugged with a self-healing concrete and roads that warn cyclists of icy conditions may become the norm by 2050, scientists have suggested.

The Future of Highways, a report by Arup, the international design consultancy, considers how trends in urbanisation, climate change, resource depletion and changes in human behaviour will affect our roads.

Arup raises the prospect of pavements that use kinetic energy from pedestrians to power street lamps, tyres that deploy retractable studs for increased grip when ordered to by the car, and drones that monitor and carry deliveries. The report comes after George Osborne this week announced the the biggest road-building programme for a generation, pledging £15 billion for improvements.

Tony Marshall, of Arup, said: “It’s interesting that the government strategy included significant investment in funding innovation. The aim of [our] report is to look at trends and predict how they will develop.

“By thinking across modes we can move towards a connected, low-carbon future.”

The world’s vehicle count is expected to grow by 3 per cent each year until 2030 and the proportion of people living in cities is predicted to reach 75 per cent by 2050. The report created a series of fictional case studies to deal with greater urbanisation and analysed global innovation in vehicles, materials and technology.

Researchers from the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Cambridge are developing a self-healing concrete that uses bacteria to seal cracks. Giken, a Japanese construction company, developed an automated underground bicycle park that can retrieve b

However, Ian Pearson, a futurologist, dismissed the significance of the report’s low-carbon focus. “It will be a historical issue. By then we will have more nuclear and solar energy, so we really don’t need to worry about using oil. It’s basically a hit list of what you can do in 2050,” Dr Pearson said.

Google has programmed its driverless cars to break speed limits by up to 10mph because it believes that allowing them to do so will improve road safety.

Dmitri Dolgov, the lead software engineer on Google’s driverless cars project, said research had shown that keeping to a speed limit when nearby cars were going faster was more dangerous than speeding up.

Google is testing its cars on the streets of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley town that is home to Google’s headquarters. The cars have not yet been tested in the UK, but Vince Cable, the business secretary, announced last month that companies will be able to test driverless cars in certain cities from the start of next year.

The Highway Code states that vehicles cannot travel faster than the national speed limit in any circumstance. The government has promised to review road rules in advance of the introduction of driverless car testing.

Some research has suggested that a car moving slowly amid faster-moving traffic is likely to cause other vehicles to bunch up behind it, which could lead to an accident. “Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year,” Mr Dolgov said. Allowing driverless cars to speed “could change that”.

J Christian Gerdes, faculty director of the REVS Institute for Automotive Research at Stanford University, said that the Google car’s ability to recognise unusual objects and to react in abnormal situations were significant hurdles that had yet to be overcome.

There were also ethical issues with driverless cars, he said. “Should a car try to protect its occupants at the expense of hitting pedestrians? And will we accept it when machines make mistakes, even if they make far fewer mistakes than humans?”

There are also unresolved issues around legal liability when a driverless car is involved in a crash.

Google’s driverless car project, which began in 2009, is being run by its Google X experimental technology division. The same unit developed Google Glass, the “smart” eyewear that was released earlier this year.

* Britain is a nation of middle-lane hoggers even though motorists facing a fine of £100 for breaking the law. A study by ICM Research found that almost six drivers in ten say they hog the middle lane of the motorway and almost one in ten admit that they always or regularly do so.

Driverless cars will be permitted to take to the roads in four locations around Britain next month, it was confirmed yesterday, as George Osborne announced a boost in research funding.

People in Bristol, Milton Keynes, Coventry and Greenwich, southeast London, can expect to see them being tested from January 1.

Funding for three trial projects — Gateway, Venturer and UK Autodrive — was announced by the chancellor yesterday. The government has provided another £9 million for the trials, which will take between 18 and 36 months to complete, increasing the overall budget to £19 million.

Experts at Innovate UK, the government agency charged with accelerating economic growth, hope the research will increase understanding of the technology. The departments for transport and business, innovation and skills have each committed £2.75 million of fresh spending for the project, with the Treasury putting up a further £3.5 million for its budget.

Nick Jones, Innovate UK’s lead technologist, said driverless cars would trigger “the most significant transformation in road travel since the introduction of the internal combustion engine”.

Britain has a head start over some of its European competitors in the field, who are restricted from road testing the technology for the next three years by the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. It is estimated that the autonomous transport industry will be worth £900 billion before 2025.