22 October

The ‘Fundamental Law of Road Traffic’ is one of the most studied and accepted outcomes of transport economics. In simple words the law says “building roads creates traffic”. We get stuck in this loop, pouring more and more money into roads to try to ease congestion, not realising that’s what’s creating the traffic in the first place. Another way to look at this is the (wrong) idea that the point of a road is to get from point A to point B. The expression ‘all roads lead to Rome’ captures it. The purpose of roads isn’t to make it easier for people to travel to different places. It’s to collapse all places, into a single central place. A large city. Roads empty countrysides, wherever they’re built, they’re like a vacuum cleaner cities use to suck people out of the countryside. Ancient Rome built nearly half a million kilometres of roads not to allow Romans to have easy ‘transport’ between parts of the empire. But to consolidate power in the capital Rome itself, using the countryside as ‘resources’ for that city, with goods and people transported on the roads back to the capital. Roads today still have that function. Wherever we build them we empty the wider landscape of people, look at Australia and you’ll see that obvious truth. Nearly the entire nation huddled into major urban centres, on the coasts. Many of the towns in regional areas only exist because of the roads, they’re hubs of earlier resource extraction, for the cities.