I never said everyone has to work different hours. I explicitly only said when it is beneficial for both parties and possible then people should be allowed to work form home or choose different working days and hours. There are many benefits to this (reduced stress, increased productivity, increased employee happiness and motivation), a large reduction in road users, especially at traditional rush hour is just one of the benefits.
Obviously if people work in a store, shop, factory or a warehouse then they have no choice but to travel to work - that is fine.
the point is a majority of workers shouldn't need to leave their own home to work a majority of the time , so even enabling this to a small extent will greatly reduce pressure on roads.
You can't simply "improve the road system" in a lot of the situations. How do you improve the roads in London to allow more throughput? The simple answer is there is no practical way to do so. The effective solution has already been implemented, increased charges for driving in the central area has greatly alleviated road usage facilitating improved public transportation uptake and increased revenue to be spent on improving transportation.
Furthermore, increasing road network capacity does not scale, is still not future proof and is very costly. Reducing the amount of cars on the road is always going to be beneficial and improve the situation at relatively little cost. There are then a load of other benefits such as reduced pollution, reduced GHG emissions that will help us meet international targets and preserve the environment for the future.
By all means if you want to drive in traffic for an hour just to sit in a dull office all day go right ahead. Personally I find it much more effective to work from home, I spend no time commuting and get more done so my boss is happier.
And yes, increasing costs of driving is an important tool. The only reason we have so many drivers on the roads is the cost of driving is incredibly low by historic levels. If you ever want reduce congestion then you need to minimize the amount of road users. People need to think twice about making a trip in to town if they can simply wait a day and combine it with their visit to the hairdresser People need to be asking their work colleagues if they can share a ride, companies should be offering minibus services to pick up workers, families should be weighing up the pros and cons of owning a second car, not buying 1 each for their children on top of his and hers.
The thing is people are pretty short sighted and incredibly selfish - they don't think of the many, often personal, benefits to car sharing or cycling to work. they do think about money though and if car ownership costs increases to levels where people actually start thinking about what trips should be done and how to minimize the amount of driving then that is an easy and effective approach that generates revenue rather than costing billions.
the UK doesn't have a population density issue- it has small localized areas where the density is very high. Going forwards bug efforts need to be made in distributing the work force around the country better.
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or a European American which ever sounds better.
