M4 Reading madness by Reading Council

I wonder when or if Reading Council are going to realise that building more roads only facilitates a growth in traffic? There latest barmy plans are to increase the size and throughput of Junction 11 on the M4. Of course what will happen (as has happened everywhere else they have done this) is all about people... people don't drive there because it's busy - we use other routes and other methods of transport. That's a good thing - the less convenient cars are, the less likely we are to use them 'because we can'*.

So, if the bottleneck goes away, people will start to choose to drive there again - because they can, it's easy right? So in a few years time we are right back to where we started... a very busy junction and a reason for Reading to go back to the drawing board and add more and more roads.

Iterestingly the BBC have an article on just this subject. You can find it here.

and you can also find some information on the Reading Council web site here.

*So why is Adrian Hollister so much against the use of cars? Well I'm not. But we do have a problem. Culturally we seem to think that they can be used for any and every trip - we have no environmental conscience about their use.. car's pollute - they produce noise, they produce heat, they produce toxic gases, they take up our space and are often made the center of our lives and social status by marketing people. A car is just a car people - it's just a method of transport - forget the marketing people they are conning you. OK rant over!