Infrastricture

David Cameron is making a speech today about “infrastructure”. When Downing Street put out an operational note about this yesterday, I had a Star Wars moment: “a bad feeling about this”. Infrastructure is an alarming word in politics.

So it proved when a news release followed, embargoed until 0001 hrs today, with some extracts from what “the Prime Minister is expected to say”, including:

We need good roads, too. Again, the problem’s clear: we don’t have enough capacity in places of key demand. There’s nothing green about a traffic jam — and gridlock holds the economy back.

So here’s what we should do. Yes, move passengers and heavy goods onto rail. But also widen pinch points, add lanes to motorways by using the hard shoulder to increase capacity and dual overcrowded A-roads.

Never mind using “dual” as a verb, does he not begin to understand what has been understood in transport economics for decades, that building more roads creates more traffic?

The other extracts from the speech are rubbish too. At one point he describes infrastructure as “the invisible thread that ties our prosperity together”.

I give up.

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• http://juga.myopenid.com/ Julian

  “does he not begin to understand … that building more roads creates more traffic?”

  In that case, we should close roads and start to tackle traffic jams at last.

• Westmorlandia

  Traffic generally increases when roads are built/enlarged. The obvious reason is probably that the roads are currently sufficiently busy to put people off using them – when the capacity increases, more people then use the roads – until they are as clogged as they were before. But this doesn’t mean you are back at square one – while the speed of the journey may have remained the same, a lot more journeys are taking place.

  Whether you see this as a good thing or a bad thing is a separate question, and certainly enlarging roads within cities has very negative consequences due to the exclusion of pedestrians and the slicing of cities into fractions. However, building or enlarging roads does have beneficial effects too, including where the amount of traffic simply increases to fit the new road.

  So don’t “give up” Mr Rentoul – instead, just think through the nuances before posting.

  Totally agree with you on the abominable prose, though.

• john irving

  So what are you actually trying to say?, your column here is telling us nothing pointing out nothing and offers no thought for a solution.
  Are we to take you for a whining hack?.
  I contend that traffic spreads when roads are built, it is already on the road just not ones that have not been built yet yer green pansy!.

• greggf

  john – I think he’s trying to row back on a view he expressed some time ago that ‘Cameron’s strength was his lack of opinions’, or something to that effect.
  Actually it’s become quite clear that call-me-Dave has some pretty insipid opinions which do not justify his leadership of the Tories, although they may do for the Coalition.

• Kugelschreiber

  I cannot possibly take Camero seriously as one who CARES about any aspect of our country whatsoever, when he is in the process of continuing Thatcher’s work by selling it off to FOREIGN CONTROL & OWNERSHIP, including now of course our NHS.

  Plus, the Chinese billionaire Li-Ka-Shing has quite recently, without our govt batting an eyelid, been allowed to PURCHASE a British electrical company which supplies 1/3 of our population.

• andagain

  “does he not begin to understand what has been understood in transport
  economics for decades, that building more roads creates more traffic?”

  I don’t understand why the fact that people would use a road is an argument against building it. Perhaps a transport economist could tell me.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=596444623 Sara Frances Browne

   I seem to remember from my school history lessons that Charles 1st was beheaded for very similar reasons…  isn’t it called treason?

• Kugelschreiber

  ANDAGAIN,

  I think the writer simply means the way that, since an extra lane would reduce traffic jams, then people would be less likely to, say, take the TRAIN in order to AVOID TRAFFIC JAMS.

• Kugelschreiber

  I know what John Rentoul means about “giving up” – this govt seems to have some really daft ideas.

  …………. & on top of that, they even ignore the wishes & opinions of 1000’s of medical professionals, who are some of the cleverest people we have

   (they have to have very high A level results to get into medical school, I knew a very clever girl who didn’t quite make it & decided to go for Forensic Science instead)

• andagain

  Which still amounts to a complaint that if you improve the road network, people will use it more. He would only approve of improving the road network if this did not, in fact, lead to people using it more.

  This is a rather unique approach to a public service. It only makes sense if you start out with a desire to stop people from getting anywhere by road in the first place. If you followed such a desire honestly, you would campaign against road maintanence as well as road construction – after all,if the existing roads fall apart, that too would force people off them.