Immoral behaviour trumps all else and it’s time for us to take a stand

I recently made a return visit to the US. The purpose was a vacation, as the Yanks would call it. I couldn’t quite believe it had been around 14 years since my last trip there. I was genuinely curious, given all that has happened, how different it might feel.

I was visiting friends in an upper middle-class area of Boston, a wealthy city on the east coast, so I realised I was as far as I might possibly get from the now fabled rust belt region.

Twelve years or so after the completion of the ‘Big Dig’, a massive $15bn tunnelling project that ran eight years behind schedule, it turns out the traffic had overtaken the solution before the solution was fully operating. Serious gridlock.Boston is a lovely city to visit. I’d been a few times previously. If you’re to judge on traffic alone, the city is thriving — the problem is that it is just not moving.