The Highways Agency is preparing to widen three miles of the M60 between junctions 12 and 15 near Manchester for a cool £43m. That works out at about £8,000 a yard.
Perhaps in recognition of the vast expense to the public purse, the agency has found a new meaning for an old word. According to its website, that particular stretch of the M60 is the most heavily "trafficked" section of motorway in the north-west.
That must be "trafficked" as in the Oxford dictionary definition, "obtained by crime".
• Eco Soundings is our regular bite-sized blog series. It appears every Wednesday in the Guardian newspaper
