Congestion is responsible for 100 billion liters of wasted fuel or 250 billion tonnes of CO2 in the United States alone!
The globalisation process, together with the enormous differences between all the liberalised economies, has lead to a dramatic increase in trade and transport and consequently to an increase in fuel use and therefore CO2 emissions.
This increase in CO2 emissions is exacerbated by traffic congestion due to inadequate infrastructure. According to EU figures, half of the fuel used today is wasted in traffic jams caused by inadequate infrastructure and bottlenecks. Figures for the United States show a similar picture. The congestion bill for the US in 2004 came to 100 billion liters of wasted fuel.
Yet, the most common excuse for not building new infrastructure is that there is no more space. But, on average, road infrastructure occupies less than 0,5% of most state's territories !
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To address the congestion bill in the US, the American Trucking Associations (ATA) advocates initiatives to improve highway infrastructure and ATA therefore recommends a 20-year infrastructure programme, focused initially on fixing critical bottlenecks.
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