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For many, transport is the chief modern crisis. A lorry driver blocks the Blackwall Tunnel and 250,000 vehicles are jammed across 16 square miles of London. Police won't release the driver's name, fearing for his safety. We can't speed up the flow of urban traffic - more roads produce more cars, and congestion soon becomes as bad as it was before. Ian Parker describes in Autopia how a signal engineer got vehicles flowing again at the Hanger Lane gyratory system in London by finding seven 'spare' seconds in a nearby set of traffic lights. When this time was redistributed between other lights, the traffic in the system - around eight thousand vehicles an hour - flowed better, but only for a while. Relentlessly, extra traffic arrived to fill the gaps. The most obvious alternative - restricting vehicle access to city centres - means that the remaining traffic will move more quickly, but in doing so will kill more people (95 per cent of pedestrians survive 20 mph impacts; only 15 per cent survive those at 40 mph). So, it's far better to go with the flow, or rather the crawl. Sandy McCreery argues in Autopia that traffic congestion, far from being a symptom of urban disease and social meltdown, is a mark of robust urban health: congestion promotes contemplation of our surroundings and takes us out of the race; it provides a 'shared experience', and thereby fulfils the essential task of the city.

Those who blame governments for not sorting out the transport problem assume it's a correctible error of advanced capitalism. But perhaps it isn't. Capitalism's capacity for movement, expansion and creation is seemingly as inexhaustible as its tendency to destroy, damage and pollute. Yet the spiral of creation and destruction must have a limit, if only because resources and space are finite: not long ago the London rush hour lasted from about 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.; now it lasts from 3.30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Ken Livingstone's political future depends on the success of congestion charging in Central London: and at the next election the fate of the Government will be decided, at least in part, by its perceived failure to sort out transport. The recent decision to embark on a huge road-building programme, a reversal of earlier Labour policy, seems unlikely to make much difference to journey times. It's a real problem for governments: so far even the rich haven't been able to buy their way out of a traffic jam. This may change - we might yet see bus lanes redesignated as toll lanes.

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