Allowing 650,000 net new people into the country each year has an effect on traffic numbers (and other things like schools, housing, the NHS etc). They evidently planned for this but didn't think it through properly and haven't invested in the infrastructure needed to support this level of growth in the population.

That number (if correct - I'm rather dubious) is about 1% of the whole population. As traffic will be roughly proportional, I suggest it is physically impossible to add 1% annually to the road mileage in this country. Certainly in the parts where congestion is worst.

The only cure might be for some of the travellers not to take their 10-cubic-metre metal boxes with them. Much easier said than done, but as long as people see their cars as their preferred means of transport things won't improve.

Even if it is a 1% increase each year, it is certainly not evenly spread about - immigrants go where the jobs and housing are, making congestion far worse (e.g. in the SE on England).

And don't forget, a 1% increase each year is a 16% increase after 15 years, not a small number, and that almost all immigrants are a) of working age, so require the full range of infrastructure everyone else does and b) onece established, will bring their immiediate families over, and its a known fact that most have larger families than UK ones - all those extra children need looking after at school and by the NHS, even worse if granny and grandad come over, who almost certainly have no money to pay for care and have never contributed to the UK exchequer.

Most infrastructure projects take a minimum of a decade to plan and implement, and probably decades to pay for. If huge numbers of people just suddenly 'turn up', never having previously contributed anything to this country, we wouldn't have the extra funds available (which we don't) to pay for all the extra infrastructure and services they will need in order to live.

That's why NuLab borrowed so much (paid for by the next generation) to pretend to the voting public that they were doing so much for the country, only it was spent so poorly that a lot was very poor value (PFI hospital and school buildings being the prime example, but not the only ones), as was the huge increase in staffing levels, much of which was poor quality middle and upper management and bureaucrats, and now the financial piper is having to be paid, meaning there's very little money left.

Allowing 650,000 net new people into the country each year has an effect on traffic numbers (and other things like schools, housing, the NHS etc).

Net migration to the UK was 327,000 from March 2015 to March 2016, and 246,000 to March 2017, according to ONS stats.

And you believe those figures?

I'd rather have traffic lights on a busy roundabout than sit for 5 minutes giving way to 3 lanes of continuous rush-hour traffic coming from the right.

We all need to use our cars some of the time but if more of us used public transport or walked more often, or cycled if there's a safe cycling environment to do so, there'd be a bit less traffic. And if more freight went by rail, there would be fewer lorries although not all rail routes have much spare capacity.

Another thing, particularly in cities, is if more people had smaller cars, there'd be less congestion.

Public transport round here is every hour and takes 1 hour (round teh houses job) to travel 10 miles into town. It's very hilly so cycling is virtaully impossible except for the superfit..

As for fright on trains, the rail system is already overcrowded...

I'd rather have traffic lights on a busy roundabout than sit for 5 minutes giving way to 3 lanes of continuous rush-hour traffic coming from the right.

We all need to use our cars some of the time but if more of us used public transport or walked more often, or cycled if there's a safe cycling environment to do so, there'd be a bit less traffic. And if more freight went by rail, there would be fewer lorries although not all rail routes have much spare capacity.

Another thing, particularly in cities, is if more people had smaller cars, there'd be less congestion.

As I posted, peak-time lights can be useful - but at 5am on a Sunday morning, being stopped for 2 minutes at the entry and each set of lights on the roundabout, when no other traffic is around, is time-wasting and creates un-necessary emissions.

<< An Oxford educated arts graduate. What the h*ll does he know now about roads or road transport and current problems, that he didn't know then and failed to act on when he was a minister? >>

Sounds like a bit of inverted snobbery creeping in here ? Being 'educated', it is just possible that he may have educated himself since ?

Not really - being a minister isn't the same as being a day-to-day manager in a business. And besides, the person 'learning on the job' has to have some kind of talent in the area they are trying to learn, which most MPs don't. The same goes for lawyers (in my opinion), who can 'master' a brief but actually have no real skills in that area - they just know inside out about the very specific things they are working on on that case.

Ministers may think they know a lot, but really they only concern themselves about high level policies and not their implementation - they are 'ideas people', and often come up with very poor ones, mostly 'helped' by civil servants more concerned with keeping their empires than doing a good job for the nation. I worked on the Tube (as an engineer for one of the PPP firms) for two years, and found the ineptness of supposedly senior people of long standing across the board (including at TfL) amazing. Most never listen to the people on the ground who actually carry out the work, and same goes for most, if not all government departments. In such circles, people get high-powered jobs because who they know rather than how good they are at their jobs.

<< An Oxford educated arts graduate. What the h*ll does he know now about roads or road transport and current problems, that he didn't know then and failed to act on when he was a minister? >>

Sounds like a bit of inverted snobbery creeping in here ? Being 'educated', it is just possible that he may have educated himself since ?

Just how does a degree in history qualify him to be a Minister of Transport?

Just about anybody who posts on this forum knows more about transport, the problems, and possible solutions than Adonis.

Another professional politician that just slithers from one well-paid post to the next, pass go, collect a big bung, onto the next earner, leaving chaos in his wake - is my take on him and he's not the only one as we know only too well.

Edited by focussed on 14/10/2017 at 20:34