M60 Junction 14 to Junction 15

The M60’s busiest stretch for freight. One vehicle in eight here is a lorry — about three times the share on the quieter Stockport side of the ring. Live news for this stretch is below, followed by the official traffic counts.

How busy is the M60 between Junction 14 and Junction 15?

The Department for Transport counts traffic on this stretch, a length of 0.9 miles. These are the 2025 figures — an annual average of vehicles per day, in both directions combined.

What those numbers mean for this stretch

The M60 is measured at 40 separate count points, of which 19 run between identifiable junctions. Against those 19, Junction 14 to 15 is:

• 3rd busiest overall — behind only J13–12 and J15–16.
• 1st for lorries, on both the raw count and the share of traffic. No other measured stretch of the M60 carries more.
• 36% busier than the M60 average, which runs at 124,808 vehicles a day per count point.

The freight figure is the one that stands out. Across the M60 as a whole, lorries are 6.0% of traffic. On this stretch they are 12.0% — exactly double the road’s own average, and around seven times the share on the M60’s quietest measured stretch for freight (J2 to the A560, at 1.7%).

For a driver that has a practical meaning. A lane closure here removes capacity from the stretch of the M60 least able to absorb it, on a carriageway where one vehicle in eight is long, heavy and slow to change lanes. It is also why overnight closures on this section are worth checking before an early start — see M60 closures tonight.

How the M60 has changed since 2001

The Department for Transport has counted this motorway every year since 2000. Comparing the whole road against itself over time shows something the daily traffic reports never do.

Basis: figures below are the mean annual average daily flow across the M60’s count points. 2001 is used as the baseline rather than 2000, because the M60 was measured at 30 points in 2000 and at 40 from 2001 onwards — so 2001 and 2025 are a like-for-like comparison and 2000 is not.

Traffic on the M60 is 28.9% higher than it was in 2001. It fell 15.8% in 2020, and it is now 6.1% above where it stood in 2019 — so whatever changed in 2020, M60 traffic has more than recovered.

The change nobody talks about: vans replaced lorries

The more interesting shift is in what is using the road, not how much of it there is.

Vans have gone from roughly one vehicle in eight on the M60 to one in six, while lorries have fallen by about a third of their share. Buses and coaches have almost disappeared from the count. Cars are very slightly down as a proportion, even though there are far more of them.

That makes this stretch doubly unusual: while the M60 as a whole has been getting less lorry-heavy for twenty years, Junction 14 to 15 remains the road’s freight route by a clear margin.

The M60 and the M25 compared

Britain has very few complete orbital motorways round a city, and the M60 and the M25 are the two best known. We publish traffic news for both, so it is worth setting them side by side. These are 2025 figures, road-wide.

The two roads are closer than most people expect. The M60 carries within 6% of the M25’s traffic per measured point — but it does it around a much shorter ring, so the same volume of traffic is packed into far less road.

The clearest difference is freight. The M25 carries nearly double the M60’s share of lorries, at 11.5% against 6.0% — which is what a ring road serving the Channel ports and the country’s largest distribution belt looks like in the data. And yet this single stretch of the M60, at 12.0%, carries a higher lorry share than the M25 average.

Traffic count figures on this page are from the Department for Transport road traffic statistics, 2025 (with earlier years from the same source, 2001–2025). Annual average daily flow, both directions combined.