[LINK] Gridlocked cities to cost more than $53 billion a year by 2031 without action: Infrastructure Australia

[Frank O'Connor]

> On 23 May 2015, at 10:04 am, Marghanita da Cruz <marghanita at ramin.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Gridlock can only be addressed by Mass Transit/Public Transport. 

Very true … but Mass Transit/Public Transport doesn’t seem to sit well with our current government. They are willing (no EAGER!) to waste billions of public monies on what even they admit are temporary solutions to road traffic problems, and scorn any investment in alternatives.

But in their world, the internal combustion engine (invented 150 years ago) is the peak of technology, and all this new fangled stuff will simply go away. They look to the past for their inspiration, in so many many things - and seem incapable of, as you say, ‘doing the maths’, considering the environment, doing a cost-benefit analysis or examining alternatives to the hideously expensive and outdated alternatives proposed by those who give them lots of political donations.

In their world, technology is never going to get more efficient and pervasive, the Internet is a flash-in-the-pan, transport alternatives will not appear, providing infrastructure and support to encourage said alternatives is not their job, virtual travelling via work-from-home and other changes to work practices won’t occur, and everything will go on as it has for the last 100 years. In their world the 1950’s was the Golden Age everyone should aspire to, everyone would respect them and institutions like religion (but only the Christian variants) and the electorate would be subservient and do what it’s told.

These people are technological troglodytes (and I’m sorry if any cave dwellers still on the planet feel insulted by that) incapable of appreciating any of the changes on the horizon, that are bleeding obvious to the rest of us.

But we elect them … so we’ve gotta take some of the blame.

Just my 2 cents worth ...