The government signalled the end of intercity motorway building today as it announced plans for a £30bn high-speed rail network, with the first phase between London and Birmingham opening in 2026.

Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, said the motorway network had reached its limit and the burden of ferrying millions more people between cities would instead be taken by fleets of trains travelling at up to 250mph. Work on the first phase linking the capital and England's second city could begin in 2017 after a formal public consultation, Adonis said.

Having pledged to eliminate demand for domestic air travel with ultra-fast trains, the transport secretary took on motorways in a 152-page "command paper". He said: "I do not envisage building another generation of intercity motorways."

The last new motorway, the M40, opened in 1991 and the government's strategy now is to widen the UK's major road arteries or to make hard shoulders into new lanes. The news was attacked by a motoring thinktank, which warned the government not to sideline roads when they account for more than nine out of 10 UK passenger journeys, against 7% for rail. "It is not enough to deal with growing demand," said Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation. "What is the government going to do instead? If it does nothing, inter-urban congestion will just get worse."

Under the high-speed rail alternative, London and Birmingham will be linked by a route carrying 18 trains an hour in each direction, with every one carrying up to 1,100 passengers. Journeys will be slashed from 84 minutes to 49 on a line originating at London's Euston. At Old Oak Common in west London an interchange with the Crossrail service, due to be completed in 2017, will take passengers to Heathrow.

Controversially, the line will then run through the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire, past picturesque villages such as Wendover, partly following the A413 road and the Chiltern rail line before joining the track-bed of the former Great Central Railway. Before entering central Birmingham there will be a stop near its airport, which will be 31 minutes from Old Oak Common. There will be a new terminal at Curzon Street in Birmingham centre but the main body of the line will sweep through the Trent valley to join existing tracks north of Lichfield, where journeys will continue to Manchester and Scotland at conventional speeds.

Adonis said it would lead to the demolition of just 440 houses, against 700 for the planned third runway at Heathrow.

The transport secretary also unveiled the blueprint for a wider network, with a Y-shaped route splitting off from Birmingham to go westwards to Manchester and eastwards to Sheffield and Leeds. Journey times between London and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would come down from about two hours 10 minutes to 75 minutes. However, the document makes no formal provision for a direct route to Scotland and Newcastle and time savings from London to Scotland's major cities are less impressive, falling from four-and-a-half hours to three-and-a-half hours.

Acknowledging Tory objections over the Heathrow proposal, Adonis said the case for a station at the airport would be examined by the former Tory transport secretary Lord Mawhinney. The Tories have pledged to build a high-speed network instead of a third runway at Heathrow, and to start construction in 2015.

Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said: "In leaving out Heathrow and setting out plans that give no firm guarantees north of the Midlands, Labour's plans are flawed both by lack of ambition and undermined by their inability to grasp the basic truth that high-speed rail should be an alternative to a third runway, not an addition to it."

The London-to-Birmingham phase will cost up to £17.4bn, with the full 335-mile network costing £30bn. Adonis said he expected the financing to be "state-led", costing about £2bn a year. The environmental benefits will be negligible, however, as the Department for Transport admitted that the London-to-Birmingham route will be carbon neutral.

Green groups also warned that the proposals must not squeeze funding from the conventional rail network. Stephen Joseph, executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport, said:"The danger is that a high-speed line will suck money out of the current transport network. The last thing people want is service cuts, higher fares and more potholes, while the executive classes are treated to gleaming new high-speed trains."