The Age of Immobility

The end of transport will be a new frontier

The American developer Trammell Crow, who was the creator of modern Dallas, once said; 'I like congestion. It's better than recession.' It sounds like a flip remark today but Crow was right, congestion isn't a problem, it's the great political opportunity of the 21st century.

Crow wasn't the author of another useful adage -- that it is always easier to tell people what to do than to find out what is happening -- but he might as well have been because inability to find out what is really happening bears powerfully on the future of congestion. A prime example of what is really going on, as opposed to telling people what to do is the way buildings have been taking the rap for the massive amounts of energy squandered on transport.

For years architects have accepted the specious argument that half of global energy consumption is the fault of buildings. Filled with guilt they go home and stuff more mineral wool into the roof space, invite more radon indoors, mortgage the house for a heat pump and learn to talk baloney about wind towers and low-e glass. What they should really do is square up to the so called energy experts with a smart rejoinder like; 'What shall we do about the other half of energy consumption then?'

They are entitled to do this because their field, construction, is essential. It was essential before the industrial revolution and certainly before the invention of modern transport. Go back just 200 years and transport -- in the sense of an industry employing one in every six persons in the European Community -- doesn't exist. How on earth did the world survive without it? By growing up autarchically. In those days they knew that dragging huge stones from Wales to Salisbury Plain to build Stonehenge was not a sustainable activity so they only did it once. Now we have thousands of 40 tonne articulated trucks doing the equivalent trip every day. Something must be done.

The key to ending the transport free for all is not to punitively raise its cost by fuel taxation, as the British government has been doing. That will only prolong its life. Much more effective would be a policy of allowing congestion paralyse transport and thus bring on the new age of immobility -- the answer to the energy crisis, the pollution crisis, the Concorde crisis, the road rage crisis, the immigration crisis and 99 per cent of all other known crises.

Can congestion really do this for the world?

According to the American Highway User's Alliance, a body representing 215 driving and road organisations, it cannot fail. In a recent report the AHUA predicted that short of a massive recession, or the sort of drastic restriction of civilian motoring that was last enforced during World War II, road traffic congestion will continue to increase faster than population, driver numbers and car registrations.

The average American already spends 434 hours (18 full days a year), in a car. Soon the figure will become unsustainable as a vicious circle of population growth, more car registrations, fewer occupants per vehicle, increasing adoption of car travel over other modes of transport, and more car journeys takes over. The report cites the city of Indianapolis as an example. There population increased by only 17 per cent (150,000 persons), between 1982 and 1997, but the number of vehicle miles driven went up by 103 per cent -- creating as much congestion as if the population had increased by a million persons.

Multiply this scenario by the 32 per cent increase in the United States population that took place between 1970 and 1997; the doubling of car registrations and the 65 per cent increase in licenced drivers, and all this amounts to a predictable deadline for national gridlock. Everybody knows this, just as we all know that we will die -- but we don't believe it. It is the best kept secret in the world. Ask the reason for the limitless finance available for corporate globalisation, Internet banking, e-wholesaling and retailing; supermarket deliveries, soaring urban land values, falling car prices, £50 billion bids for mobile phone licences, booming media groups, coming video phones and even telefactor gloves.

The end of transport. It won't be a disaster, it will be a new frontier. Trammell Crow was right, congestion is the answer.