Let’s build more roads

According to the BBC, the first car-share lane to be built will happen. This I do not understand.
I DO understand car-sharing, just as I understand public transport and I do know that building roads is by far the wrong answer to the transport problem (Remove road tax, petrol £10 / litre would get close) and this latest wheeze is bollocks. Think about it….. the idea is that by sharing a car you will get there quicker. Okay, seems sensible so far. So they build a road for this car sharing to happen on. Wrong wrong wrong. All that happens is that a few people will share, those few spaces on the main road will be freed up which will allow the existing traffic to move quicker which means others will see less congestion so they’ll start using the road and it’ll get busy again. Then the car-sharing people will whinge that they now have to slow down a bit so can they have another road please? The tarmac-loving ministers are forced to say yes because they set the precedent in the first place.
The problem is NOT these wide motorways – it’s all the thin little roads leading up to them. Leicester City Council has spent a fortune widening all it’s arterial roads from the city centre to the boundaries of it’s powers. Which is great – until you get to the edge going either way. It turns into the tightest of funnels and just shifts the problem.

If the authorities are serious about this reduction of car use – which we all know they are not – then you don’t give the cars more room to play in and hope they like the new rules. You take more space away and tell them to suck it up.