Roads and Reality

The Campaign for Better Transport has conducted a poll showing that more than sixty per cent of people want more money spent on public transport, with only thirty per cent in favour of building more roads. Doubtless the CBT has an agenda, which is why they rate the last two paragraphs of the story in Britain's leading liberal newspaper while a study by the charitable wing of the Royal Automobile Club gets the headline. The RAC Foundation is calling for the building of, at a minimum, 372 extra miles of traffic lanes each year between now and 2041, in order "to deal with a 44% increase in the numbers of cars and a 37% rise in traffic" which nothing can stop, apparently. The study, amusingly titled Roads and Reality, also claims that "new roads have little effect on climate change", which may well be true provided that no traffic uses them; and that "public transport alone cannot remove congestion", perhaps because transferring the drivers of sixty five-metre-long cars to a bus ten metres long would cause the bus to be detained by irate members of the Royal Automobile Club manning roadblocks up and down the country. "The RAC Foundation seems to be living on a different planet from the rest of us," said a CBT spokeswoman. Perhaps it's this one.