Response on public transport

We may have been a bit hasty in rubbishing the National response about more motorways. We need to keep an open mind.

There have been two more articles recently, both espousing road-based concepts for mass transport.

• The first talks about a future with fleets of electric autonomous vehicles on roads.
• The second suggesting better utilising existing roads with widespread use of congestion charging, working from home and staggered working hours.

There is also the potential to modify existing roads to greatly increase capacity, e.g., movable barriers.
All these things are enabled by new technology, which wasn’t available in the era of rail-based mass transit.

And we also need to consider future technology which we don’t even know about yet. There will be an ever- increasing range of options available to increase the utilisation of existing infrastructure.