Gridlock Nation

Product Information

And the problem with ‘personal rapid transport’ -besides it being costly to implement – is that the transport modes it largely seeks to replace are already very efficient at shunting people from A to B in an urban environment – namely the underground, buses and trams, and the bicycle. Kwarteng and Dupont do not dismiss planning entirely, but they argue that as the models employed by planners are a mere guide to what might happen, and that planners are not omniscient, it is unwise to place as much weight on planning as we currently do. 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. We’d all live in small cramped houses, crowded together nearest the railway station to make sure we could easily commute.

So in­stead of writ­ing about book prizes, I wrote about blood drip­ping from the ceil­ing as women's throats were slit, of the be­head­ed man, of the drowned and bru­tal­ly raped boy. Instead I got a series of baseless waffle trying to justify a fantasy transport system that would not work.We can evaluate Congress’s performance only if we have some idea of the size of the underlying policy agenda. This is all very well, but not everything that is transported vast distances makes economic, let alone environmental, sense. As someone with more than 40 years experience in transport planning/engineering, I’d say a major problem is UK politicians not listening to technical advice. Gridlock Nation looks at the timeless problems faced in transport, from traffic jams in Rome to Victorian road rage.

Guardian Media is the premier provider of multimedia solutions and authoritative insight on news, politics, business, finance, sports, and current affairs. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. By the way, if planned transport is so bad, why is that the countries who planned their railway systems – as opposed to the UK – who now generally have the better systems? Nudging Congress back to the center by sending more centrist legislators to Washington would be one way to alleviate gridlock.Back in 1995, he managed to win University Challenge ‘supposedly singlehandedly’ (Private Eye 1282) while a King’s Scholar at Trinity College Cambridge. James Madison bequeathed us a political system designed not to work, a government of sharply limited powers. Sources often appear to be the unsupported opinions of other people with the same views; a sort of circular flow of waffle. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. I got some of that yearn­ing to be amongst peo­ple who love books and ideas out in this col­umn over the last two decades, but what I've al­ways want­ed to be is a nov­el­ist which is al­most the op­po­site of jour­nal­ism.