On the road to nowhere

DEAR Editor, The complaints from the freight lobby regarding road congestion (Congestion costing WM economy £1bn, Post, August 20), indicate that we British haven’t lost our love of irony.

The proffered panacea (“more money needs to be spent on roads”) presumably being suggested in the heart-warming belief that with just one more (final?) road-building push we will transform our ever more populous19th century Midland townscapes into some kind of spacious, Los Angeles-like mega-city.

While I hate to shatter people’s dreams; the reality is that we’re in a transport mess currently not because of ‘inactivity’ of our transport policymakers – the criticism levelled in the article – but precisely because of their decades-long faith in lavishing resources, almost exclusively, on the myopic demands of the roadlobbyists. It is humbling to compare our overcrowded, shambolic transport systems with those of the more efficient European cities with which we compete.

Across Germany, Holland and Scandinavia we can see the benefits of years of long-term serious multimode transport and city planning, with real cash behind it, that has delivered diverse, fast and safe travel choices at all levels from blanket low-speed zoning for school kids and local commuting, to wide, wellconnected bus and light rail networks flitting commuters cheaply across the breadth of their cities; all this in turn reducing dramatically the proportion of private car usage clogging roads and delaying valuable freight movement.

Meanwhile, our own policy-makers have gifted us Midlanders the most car-dependent conurbation within the most car-dependent country in Europe, with the added bonus of