Letter to Ottawa Citizen printed 7 Aug

This one got a little mangled in the editing.

Your editorial claims that "widening roads or building new ones is rarely a solution to any traffic problem."

The fact is, according to annual surveys done by the Texas Transportation Institute, the cities in the United States that have built the most roads have seen the slowest increases in congestion. There is no evidence from anywhere in the world of added transit reducing congestion, since the only places where transit is widely used have terrible traffic.

It is simplistic to predict that if enough capacity is built, eventually every man, woman and child will spend every moment of the day on the road, in their own cars. It's an excuse used by governments for their planning failures.

If we want to make more efficient use of the roads we have, the solution is well known -- variable road tolls.