We all hate roads. They pollute our lungs, destroy our hearing, degrade the environment and are a blight on the countryside. Driving on them can be a fraught experience, and it is a given that living next to a busy road is highly undesirable. Yet somehow, despite all these obvious negatives, governments – both Labour and Conservative – always seem to successfully justify huge road-building programmes that are all too willingly paid for by the Treasury.

The Labour government must swiftly resolve this contradiction. It has inherited a massive road-building programme estimated to be worth up to £27bn, enough at least to fill a good proportion of the famous £22bn black hole. Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, is a minister in a hurry; indeed, her motto is “move fast and fix things”. However, the very ambiguity of that phrase highlights the dilemma. Building roads is presented by its powerful supporters as the best way to move fast.

But does it fix anything? Conventional economic thinking is that roads are the lifeblood of the economy, essential for boosting efficiency. Yet the evidence of 100 years of transport policy based on this notion is that road building is a pointless, Sisyphean task. A generation ago, a report by an obscure government committee, Sactra (Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment), found that adding capacity to the road network simply encourages more people to jump into their cars, thereby quickly filling up the new lanes and ensuring that........

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