The demand for investments in roads is never-ceasing. Either the roads are too full of potholes, they are congested or they are not of a high-enough standard. People – myself included, come to think of it – can not get there quickly enough. So, increasingly people vote for politicians that want to spend most of our transport budget on roads – and politicians get seduced by voters into offering up money for expanding the road network.

But in the euphoria of paving the country with asphalt, it is good to be mindful of what Michael Lipsky wrote in his book “Street-Level Bureaucracy” in 1980:

“In the name of relieving congestion during rush ours on this infamous highway [the Long Island Expressway], traffic engineers added additional lanes. But every additional lane, while marginally decreasing driving time to New York City, induced more people to use the road. This additional traffic restored the traffic jam that the new lanes had been designed to correct. Utilization increased to meet the supply of road space until commuting time reached the previous level. A new equilibrium was restored with the same degree of congestion during rush hours, although with a higher volume of traffic.” (p. 33)

The rhetoric of the ever-expanding bureaucracy is convenient for right-wing politicians when they wish to cut welfare services, but it is not very convenient when it comes to road investments. So they shut up about it. Well, given what we know from Lipsky and others, it should be self-evident that it’s better to spend our billions on railroad investments than roads to take some of the traffic increase. That way, we can relieve road congestion and help the environment.