Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Although not explicitly stated, this is the tired old canard that railways are ‘subsidised’, while we ‘invest’ in our roads.

Despite high levels of congestion, investment in new road capacity has collapsed over the last twenty years.The bicycle as a solution to the ‘gridlock’ that forms the title of their book is just not on the Kwarteng and Dupont radar. Would these undeniable improvements to our urban areas have happened if private corporations were in control of our road network? Note: The simulated changes in gridlock are based on statistical estimates from a grouped logit model in which the level of gridlock is the dependent variable. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Kwarteng and Dupont appreciate that the car can be a problem, both with regards to the environment, and congestion, but see its use as unavoidable, and also think that the problems involved with car journeys – pollution and traffic jams – will be sufficiently mitigated against by technological fixes of the kind described above.

It is far more efficient to grow wine in naturally temperate climates and ship it across the world than to try and artificially replace an environment here. The Great Society Congress under Lyndon Johnson, for example, enacted landmark health care, environment, civil rights, transportation, and education statutes (to name a few).The main thesis – and one that informs the kinds of answers that Dupont and Kwarteng reach for – is that planning is bad for transport, and that, by contrast, the market is good. China has already constructed a motorway network ten times the size of the UK’s, and the UK has a shorter road length per person than any other major country. The idea that government plans on road-building have been ‘static’ is a little odd, because the entire post-war history of state road-building – at least until the 1990s, if not until the present day – involved building or expanding roads precisely where the demand existed, indeed even where it hadn’t fully emerged. I bought this book hoping for an informed look at our transportation system and a proposal for a sustainable future.

When Kwarteng and Dupont have their feet back on planet Earth, they are firmly convinced of the needs for more roads.

Economies of scale do, of course, make sense, but that should not be generalized into an argument that products should be sourced from further and further away. Even a bicycle’, indeed – and not just any bike, but a good old-fashioned, Boris bike, apparently the only type of bike that exists for the authors, for whom the idea that someone might actually already own a bike of their own is seemingly inconceivable.

The idea that somehow switching the construction of roads to private contractors, with much greater freedom to lay down tarmac wherever they feel like it, is the solution to our transport problems is thus rather absurd. By contrast, since 1945, Britain’s transport provision has gone from bad to worse, a period that began with ‘the Planners’ rising to prominence.Our transport systems have been fossilised in rigid government plans, their future expansion decided on the predicted demand thirty years in the future.