“Let’s reduce congestion by building more state of the art roads.”

NO!!

The LAST thing we should be doing is spending many millions of dollars on new roads or major upgrades. Let’s do practically anything but that!

Implement congestion charges. Introduce occupancy charges inversely proportional to the number of people in a vehicle. Maximise incentives to use public transport, bicycles…and feet. Stop national immigration.

Peak oil is just around the corner. Fuel prices are set to rise inexorably, which will force people to become as frugal as they can be with their cars. So instead of building bigger roads, let’s plan for this and have the public transport systems ready to handle massive increases in demand.

It is time to put every red cent that is earmarked for new roads directly into preparations for the peak oil scenario, when the whole transport (and economic) regime is going to be very different.

Put these millions directly into sustainability issues. For goodness sake, don’t waste it on new roads.

'building more/better roads' has been tried. the only benefit was to the road building company, or none.

congestion is easy to fix: legislate cars off the road. replace with bicycles, motor scooters, and buses. (help gw a lot as well)

oh, you don't want to ride a bicycle, motor scooter, or bus? then lie down, kick yer heels, and cry: won't!

Shorbe, I mostly find that it's not the time I spend at 60km/h that slows down my commute so much as the time I spend at 0km/h. I'll certainly keep out of your way if I see you dashing past in the Mack. My car will be the unwashed Camry wagon doing 50km/h in the left lane, with the NIMBY stickers on the tailgate.

Quoting from the article "in the 1980s Houston, Texas had the worst traffic congestion in the United States but reduced it by 45 per cent after building more road capacity." It would appear that these clowns can't even read a table properly, as well as being too lazy to put a proper link in. The correct link is http://www.publicpurpose.com/hwy-tti20011986.pdf and it shows that traffic congestion declined 2.1% between 1986 and 2001 (NOT 45% fellas). The table also shows that in 1986 Houson was a traffic-choked mess and in 2001 it was......a traffic-choked mess. Building roads cured Houston's traffic? Looks more like building more roads created more traffic. just like all those do-gooding latte-loving inner-city greenies predicted. Don't you hate that?

I had a bit of a look at The New City blog http://www.thenewcity.info and found it pretty unpleasant (and that was just the web design). It's not really a blog, as they don't allow comments, which given the level of invective they indulge in is probably just as well. The mixture of 1980s-era Hawke-speak and 1990s cliches (elites, latte, NIMBY etc etc) almost made me nostalgic. The irony of three Labor Party hacks, " a bureaucrat...a lawyer and ....a technician" who live in the inner-city endlessly banging on about inner-city elites is too priceless for words. These guys are beyond parody. If this is the kind of "thinking" going on the Labor Party, then The Rodent is safe for a very long time.

I note that Gilling, Muscat and Smallacombe bill themselves as co-authors of "Labor without class" by Michael Thompson. Pah! With this lot in charge it's more like "Labor without a clue", or maybe "Labor without a hope".

Johnj: Who says I speed? I try to stick as close to dead on the speed limit as I can. I see people getting pulled over by the cops every day, and I can't really afford a ticket. Hence, I try not to speed.

Part of the reason there's so much time spent doing 0km/h is because people drive too slowly (so I catch more red lights than necessary) and they're off with the pixies when the light (or arrow) does turn green, but it doesn't matter to them because they still get through, even if I don't. If people were more aware of what was going on around them, we might have fewer accidents and still get to places faster.

Again, I'm not making out like this would be some panacea, but it's part of the problem and solution.

C'mon Ludwig. Reduce immigration and stop the baby bonus. Less people = less congestion. Nah, that's too simple. We are Australians. We solve problems with complicated, high tech, super duper, billion dollar solutions. Just slowing population growth. That's too easy. It's more fun to do it the hard way.

What? You say it would also help with water, energy and greenhouse. Well that's an even better reason to keep the population growing as fast as possible. Then we can spend even more billions on difficult solutions. Lets get going. Yippeeeeee.

(:>0) !! !! !!