When we travel and drive, we don’t often take into consideration the vast infrastructure network that allows us to get from A to B with relative ease. Despite this, anyone can pick out the flaws in the system relatively easily. In this article I will attempt to outline and explain the troubled issues and relative luxuries that we experience when travelling.

The first thing to note is that towns are old, very old. When these were constructed and became hubs of business and trade, the idea of constructing our buildings to accommodate for large levels of cars and freight was obviously not in the minds of the city planners. The trouble of having so many of our major cities built without taking into consideration accommodation of future transport infrastructure methods is that we end up with incredibly inefficient traffic management systems within towns and cities.

This problem is abundantly evident when driving home at 5pm where hundreds of cars are bottlenecked in to file down single lane roads to get to their respective residences. The trouble with overhauling this transport infrastructure isn’t just the money that it would cost to build and expand new roads; it’s the fact that there is a huge amount of buildings and historical sites in the hands of private property owners that would have to be flattened to optimize traffic management.

Taking into consideration the fact that these roads are owned and maintained by the state or local authorities means that they are already running on a limited budget, and buying out huge amounts of private property to make room for more roads is most definitely not on the top of their list, so it seems that this will be a problem that we will never see the end of. We see this problem in London massively, with the introduction of the congestion charge, and taking into consideration the new toll road scheme, it’s yet again the working people of the nation that must foot the bill of inconsiderate property moguls.

Despite all this negativity, our motorways are an incredibly modernized approach to transport and freight infrastructure. Often working side by side with our expansive railways, these systems can ensure the prompt delivery of goods to destinations spanning from here to France. As is the nature of capitalism, the level of basic transport infrastructure for commercial purposes is vastly superior to the one available for the everyday man.