Gridlocked lives - Plan to live or live in your car

BECAUSE it’s Saturday most of us will be spared the weekday gridlock, that unavoidable waste of time, that daily fraying of manners and — almost worst of all — the stress fest brought on by sitting in traffic like so many battery hens waiting for something unimagined to happen.

Yesterday, the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (ISME) put some figures on this life-sapping failure of infrastructure management, public planning and, in too many cases, personal behaviour. The figures are provocative and another indictment of how we mismanage our lives, our work, our towns and our cities.

ISME tells us that commute times have increased by 74% in five years; a journey that took an hour in 2003 now takes nearly two. So, instead of doing something productive you’re spending close on twice the 2003 amount of time behind the wheel, behind the car in front, just trying to get to where you needed to be half an hour ago. Of course everyone is burning more fuel, thereby creating more pollution.