The next essay provides a general background to all the essays which follow it in the Volumes of this series of the Motorway Archive Trust's publications. It is included because the insights in those essays stand little chance of being understood in depth, and being evaluated accordingly, unless they can be seen in their respective contexts. But that proposition prompts the cry "Physician, heal thyself". Therefore this note records the experience from which the author of this essay derived his insights into the creation of Britain's motorway system.

Sir Peter served in the Civil Service for the first 26 years of the period during which construction of Britain's motorway system proceeded; for a further 11 years in governance of the Automobile Association, 8 of which coincided with chairmanship of a Region of the National Health Service (NHS), and overlapped with the creation of the Kent Air Ambulance Trust which he did with the needs of Kent's motorways in mind; and another 6 years in governance of the Automobile Association Road Safety Research Foundation, in the policy counsels of the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee and the Chartered Institute of Transport, and in a raft of interests in general and medical education and in disability charities. For the last 6 of the first 26 years he was Permanent Secretary of the Department of Transport (DTp), which the then Prime Minister, the Rt Hon James Callaghan, instructed him to set up in 1976; the preceding 20 years had been included in his 20 years in H. M. Treasury and 2 in the Cabinet Office.

The Treasury is a continuing school in identifying situations where opportunity cost needs to be used as a guide to beneficial decision, and in selecting when to accept cost in relation to future benefit or liability, item by item and in aggregate, including in those assessments the interests of the unrepresented parties. However, while expenditure on motorways represented a relatively small element in the two fifths of the national product then classified as the public sector, they were already of great significance for the performance of the national and regional economies, and consequently for the prosperity, and to that extent for the welfare, of British society; and directly for reduction of the rate of accidents on the roads in spite of growth of traffic.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s objectives of policy for the nation's health called for use of this instrument alongside measures such as introduction of compulsory wearing of seat belts or removal of lead from petrol.

Likewise those years saw DTp take initiatives towards ending exclusion of disabled people, who in total represent about 12% of the population, from access to each of the modes of transport, from walkways to skyways; and a revolution in transport's equipment and society's habits has been accomplished accordingly in the ensuing two decades, led from the Department nationally and internationally by a remarkable colleague, Ann Frye OBE. Involvement in the NHS ensured Sir Peter's continuing awareness of such impacts of transport on individuals' lives, particularly their risks of injury, their health and their physical welfare; and this awareness was further focused by his six years from 1986 to 1992 as the first Chairman of the statutory Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee.

In this realm of individuals' concerns he encountered the quality of colleagues involved inside and outside the Department, over the years and day by day, in seeking by comprehension, skill and ingenuity to implement the policy of successive Administrations to superimpose, in the twentieth century's ebb tide of railway economics, a beneficial motorway system on Britain's ancient pattern of roads. These colleagues drew on many aspects of science and technology in their professional roles. They had also to contribute to the task of managing interaction with the environment constructively, while land use has been changing in the aggregate at an average annual rate of around 4 %, and as national and regional economic activity will go on changing even more fundamentally.