Gridlock Nation

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Despite high levels of congestion, investment in new road capacity has collapsed over the last twenty years. Now that we are show­ing signs of mov­ing to­wards a more open, lib­er­al and hu­mane so­ci­ety, I too want to come out. Using an app on our smart phone, we’ll choose the vehicle we want: a large car to transport the whole family, a small one person transporter or even a bicycle on a sunny day.

If you make it easier to transport wine, you also makes it easier and cheaper to transport mineral water from Evian. If we break away from the planners' control, we can have roads that run freely and trains that arrive on time. The best they can do is to point out that ‘demand for using roads clearly isn’t infinite everywhere’, which is nothing more than a truism, and does not confront the reality of ever greater traffic flow on widened or new roads where demand, while not infinite, keeps up with supply. Opening up the roads to private investors and creating a road pricing system are two sides of the same coin. I was considering summarising points where I think you are wrong and Kwarteng and Dupont are right, but I think because of the extent of your poor views it’s more appropriate to generalise.

He has co-written multiple books on public policy, including A Time for Choosing for Palgrave Macmillan and Gridlock Nation for Biteback Publishing. The Great Society Congress under Lyndon Johnson, for example, enacted landmark health care, environment, civil rights, transportation, and education statutes (to name a few).

Would these undeniable improvements to our urban areas have happened if private corporations were in control of our road network? It comes up with some interesting, not to say futuristic, answers to the problems likely to cause gridlock. Every serious accident treated as something that could, and should, have been avoided, not just “something that happens”.For all our attention to the minutiae of Congress, we know little about the dimensions and causes of gridlock. Many futurists are now designing a variety of smaller, lightweight vehicles – bigger than a bicycle, but smaller than a car – that can effectively transport one or two people across urban areas. James Madison bequeathed us a political system designed not to work, a government of sharply limited powers.