The same old solutions won’t end the crisis afflicting our roads

out of date which few can afford to use and which barely cuts journey times.

Beyond a few disagreements on individual projects such as Heathrow, politicians have treated transport policy as beyond debate, as if there is a single, correct answer to our woes. This is wrong: it is distinctly ideological, and we’ve allowed a socialist, managerialist vision to dominate, with calamitous results.

What is the alternative? The winner of the Wolfson Prize was announced this week. In this year’s competition participants were asked to devise a plan for how to pay for better roads that are fairer for road users. The entries are fascinating, not least for how we could introduce market mechanisms to solve congestion and free up money to fix the roads.

We could scrap car taxes, for example, and instead use in-car technology to charge motorists for distance travelled, with prices varying depending on how busy the roads are, smoothing traffic by incentivising journeys at quieter times. This would be refreshingly individualistic and, if combined with more toll roads for major routes, could result in direct consumer pressure for better roads.

Not all will agree with this, or with other measures that would shift the management of our roads away from the current command-and-control model. Removing many of Britain’s traffic lights, for example, would be controversial, even if trials in places like Poynton in Cheshire have shown that turning them off and introducing shared space instead results in better traffic flow and fewer accidents. But the point is that all this should be up for proper debate. We can all agree, at least, that the current system doesn’t work.