TRAFFIC on Britain's roads is taking longer and longer to get moving again following a snarl-up or accident - and it's costing British businesses millions of pounds. New research carried out for the AA has examined the impact of over 750,000 incidents in the last three years with figures showing that the average time to clear incidents and their impact on traffic is growing by 10% each year.

AA policy director John Dawson said: 'The UK's transport policymakers have failed to grasp both the number and the impact of these unexpected blockages. Each year there are 250,000 and the average time it takes to get traffic moving again is now a whopping one hour 49 minutes - two minutes up year-on-year. Unless there is prompt action, we're on the road to gridlock. Regular traffic delays from sheer weight of traffic are bad enough - and many motorists just grit their teeth and build these delays into their travel schedules.

'But unexpected snarl-ups mean broken appointments and missed deliveries. They mess up our daily lives and have a huge economic cost.' In the first four months of this year, the AA's quarterly traffic report logged 104,496 incidents resulting in congestion, with the M25 accounting for 90% of the top ten worst incidents and the longest taking more than 14 hours to clear.