Greg Hennessy wrote:
On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 17:33:07 +0100, Dave Arquati wrote:


The same logic would say that not building the Motorway Box or
any other road scheme has "caused" congestion. Congestion has arisen
because too many people want to use too little roadspace,

My, you are a bright one.

which is because the cost of travel is suboptimal.

ROTFL! Oh really. How about, there is 'too little roadspace' (sic).

Ooh, argument through sarcasm, you must be right.

If travellers paid for the cost of congestion they impose upon other
users, then there wouldn't be "too little roadspace", it would be
optimal for the volume of traffic using it. Go and look it up.

Building new roads merely lowers the cost of travel

As does adding capacity to any service, your point ?

I'm sorry, I thought it was quite obvious, but I need to spell it out;
new capacity does not automatically relieve congestion.

and encourages people to travel more,

Gawd, we wouldn't want that now would we.

Well, you're obviously in favour of having people bear the costs of the
things they want; apply your own principles to demand for travel.

They might want cheap flights too.

Yep, apply your principles there too.

and the result in a dense region like the south east is a congested equilibrium
- just as before.

I just lurve how the 'logical' trot out this fallacious article of eco
dogma.

Who said anything about eco dogma? This is simple economics. Try looking
it up on something like Google Scholar; the few thousand articles it
returns on road pricing, written by people who know more about this than
you, might help.

The demand for road space is clearly not infinite.

No, but there's an awful lot of suppressed demand. Really, go and look
it up.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London