A. One suggestion is to encourage people to cycle more.
B. Generally, people dislike the image travelling by bus creates.
C. However, there are a number of steps that can be taken to reduce road congestion.
D. This allows some flexibility for car drivers but reduces city centre congestion.
E. Finally, there are the negative effects that traffic congestion causes to the environment.
F. Also, governments may not want to increase fuel taxation too much if it is unpopular with voters.
The Effects of Traffic Congestion in Cities
Many of the world's big cities have problems with congestion. There is simply far too much traffic, so governments everywhere have to think about how to solve the problem.
Traffic jams have a number of negative effects. They cause stress to drivers, which may lead to health problems or road rage. They can also reduce productivity because products cannot be delivered on time and employees arrive late for work or meetings. Another important issue is that the emergency services can become caught in traffic. Traffic congestion wastes fuel, which in turn produces more carbon dioxide through the car exhausts and contributes to the greenhouse effect.
The most obvious solutions involve engineering. This means building more roads with wider lanes so that more cars can travel at the same time. However, the problems with these kind of solutions are the construction costs and that more roads may actually encourage more traffic.
Other more creative solutions to the congestion problem are to increase tax on fuel so that it is more expensive, or make people pay to travel on certain roads such as in the centre of a city or on a motorway. However, taxing fuel and roads may mean that some people cannot afford to drive their cars and may have to give up their jobs.
A more popular solution, therefore, would be to encourage other forms of transport which will lead to fewer cars on the road. Although this mode of transport has obvious health benefits and reduces air pollution, it is not very practical in every climate and can prove dangerous in heavy traffic.
Overall, although there are a number of good ways to tackle this problem, some of these also have negative effects. It would seem that encouraging alternative forms of transport is probably the best solution as this solves the congestion problems and reduces the amount of traffic at the same time, which will also have a positive effect on the environment.
