Word: motorways
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...British organization promoting sustainable transport. City planners have long known that building new roads is not a good answer to traffic jams. Even if cities can find the space (and most European cities cannot), new road space usually only leads to new traffic, unleashing latent driving demand. The M25 motorway around London, the classic example, was built to allow for 30 years of traffic growth. It was jammed within six months. Traffic is like water: it oozes across all available surface. Damming the flow requires a brave - or suicidal - politician. For better or worse, "Red Ken" Livingstone fits that description...
...Traffic moves faster on the information highway, and people are using the Web to help reduce congestion on the tarmac too. At www.autobahn.nrw.de, drivers in North-Rhine Westphalia can see a real-time simulation of traffic conditions on its 2,250 km of motorway. The man behind the site, Michael Schreckenberg of Duisburg-Essen University, is now at work on the world's largest traffic-information system, using sensor-gathered data to channel travel advice to TV, radio and motorway screens. If you still can't face the rush hour, try staying home like the 2% of Europeans...
...Motorway...
...which sell steadily through a local gallery. He doesn't mind being called an "urban realist," but doesn't know what he'd call himself: "In a way I'd rather just get on with it and call it something afterwards." In Westway he depicts a scene under a motorway, the curve of the road cutting off a generic blue sky. On the nearest strut is a thick accretion of graffiti, and greenery struggles for life. The harsh contrast of light and dark is reminiscent of art of the 1940s, but Free explains this is the light of early morning...
...agony. Drug gangsters prowl the dusty streets, gunshot blasts mix with the electronic dancebeats, and racism has merely developed more nuance. This is where the author's journalism chops really come into play, and the result is intensely compelling. One can envision the corrugated-iron homes from the motorway, or the brightness of the city making the place seem "dry-cleaned, stripped of all ambiguity." Fear usually brings out the best in writers, and Aitkenhead is no exception...