Nearly 50,000 people travel into Bradford city centre every weekday – and more than 70 per cent of them travel by car.

For motorists facing the daily slog of driving nose-to-bumper along the district’s congestion blackspots, getting from A to B has become increasingly stressful. Congestion is more than just misery for motorists; Bradford’s poor road network could threaten its ability to prosper.

Yet, with huge public spending cuts expected, any hope of an improvement to the district’s transport network is on a road to nowhere. Yesterday’s Telegraph & Argus reported that, with experts warning public spending is facing a £36 billion national squeeze, core funding for transport in the region looks likely to be cut. Joe Grint, Bradford Council’s principal engineer for transport planning, told the T&A that, in light of financial pressures, the Council was taking a ‘pragmatic approach’ to tackling traffic problems.

To ease congestion blackspots in the immediate future, the Council is urging motorists to cut car journeys and consider alternatives.

Yesterday, we looked at some of the plans earmarked for traffic congestion blackspots across the district, from a high-vehicle occupancy vehicle lane on Tong Street to widening the bottlenecked Harrogate Road and New Line junction in Greengates.

If funding is slashed, motorists could be forgiven for fearing traffic jam-busting plans could be placed on the backburner. They could also be forgiven for thinking they’d seen it all before.

From the A1-M1 link road to the cross-city monorail, the ‘Shunnel’ to park-and-ride, Bradford’s past is strewn with traffic proposals that never saw the light of day.

Over recent months, hopes still looked high for the proposed Shipley Eastern Link Road, linking Otley Road, Leeds Road and Valley Road, despite an unsuccessful attempt to access funds from an underspend in the regional transport budget. But this week Mr Grint said: “Asking for the Shipley Eastern Link Road at a time when there are a lot of financial pressures may not be the best option.”

One of the more ambitious plans put forward to ease Aire Valley congestion was the Shipley Tunnel, known as the ‘Shunnel’.

In the late 1980s a tunnel under Nab Wood was mooted as a possible extension of the (then-planned) Bingley Relief Road but was axed by the Department of Transport in 1995 after projected costs rocketed to around £170 million.

The tunnel idea later resurfaced. In 2003, two radical schemes to relieve predicted congestion from the relief road – building a road tunnel from Cottingley Bar to Shipley and building a single carriageway through Northcliffe playing fields – were shelved by the Council amid protests from residents.

Instead it was agreed to invest money in minor transport management schemes, including extending a bus route, blocking off rat-runs and improving public transport.

A concept for a £139 million Shipley bypass with two tunnels arose three years ago – with one suggested route starting south of Shipley station before tunnelling under part of a cliff face and under the town centre, surfacing at Saltaire Road before going underground again and resurfacing at Hirst Lane, going through woodland near Nab Wood cemetery before joining the A650. Today, there’s still no light at the end of the tunnel plans.

Then there’s the M606, which stops abruptly at Odsal, despite being built to bring traffic into Bradford’s shiny new city centre 40 years ago.

In the 1960s, Bradford was a modern, bustling city with new glass and concrete buildings, road and rail access, shops, offices and housing. To meet a new dawn, the city centre was rebuilt and plans were under way to revamp Bradford’s transport network with a new motorway, the M606 connecting to the M62 and the planned national network.

Construction began in the 1970s, with a motorway built north from Chain Bar to join the A6177. When it opened, the route to the city centre was temporarily signposted around the ring road, until the next bit of the motorway was built. But this never happened, with the Council putting the scheme on hold.

The result is that today the M606 lies in a somewhat unfinished state. Anyone who has tried to give visitors directions into Bradford from Chain Bar will know it’s a bit of a messy affair involving various sets of traffic lights, roundabouts, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it signposting, traffic cones and barriers.

Where improving cross-city links in Bradford city centre are concerned, the idea of a monorail has surfaced several times over recent years. However, monorail proposals haven’t even made the backburner.

The planned Leeds Supertram would have taken traffic off Pudsey’s roads and may have been extended to Bradford in later years. But in 2005 the Government killed it off, with the-then Transport Secretary Alistair Darling saying that with costs rising to £486 million, it was too expensive.

As far as Bradford’s road network is concerned, that has a familiar ring to it.