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The new stadium, already popular with fans

THE new Cardiff City Stadium is another welcome addition to the capital’s increasingly metropolitan skyline. No doubt many of the commuters that pass by that way of an evening have taken the opportunity to admire its emerging lines and consider its place in Cardiff’s emergence as a young and energetic city.

They will have been given the chance to spend time in contemplation because these will, without doubt, have been caught up on Leckwith Road, which passes by the new structure. It is Cardiff’s newest – and already its worst – road, capable of snarling traffic up way beyond the grand, new roundabout that was remodelled at the same time. The road is not even half a mile long, yet one can easily spend over 30 minutes passing along its out, in and then out again-layout.

Because it switches from four lanes to two, to one and then back to two again, it also make a first class arena for road rage, where weary workers often take it upon themselves to cut one another up, with invariably rancorous results. In the 21st Century, with so much emphasis on traffic movement, you may ask how this road came into being? The answer is that it is just another example of Cardiff City Council’s usually ineffective attempts to socially engineer its citizens out of their cars.

The argument against private vehicles is already well worn and largely won. On the day that Gordon Brown announced the £1 billion electrification of the Swansea to Paddington line (provided he is returned to power to see it through), we all know that cars are bad things while public transport is, well, not so bad.

Yet this doesn’t appear to be enough for the capital’s local authority, which has spent the last year and a small fortune on equipping its roads with particularly hateful little constructions known as build-outs. They effectively widen the pavement and made the road narrower with, presumably, the aim of easing the pedestrian’s passing. All this is fine, yet they began appearing just after Cardiff’s bendy buses. The result, on many occasions, is further chaos, as lines of vehicles snake back on either side of the road away from two of these behemoths as they try and fail to get by one another. At the same time, little or nothing appears to have been spent on resurfacing, so that we have this almost laughable paradox of these shiny new buildouts jutting into roads that would cause the traffic minister of a particularly venal banana republic to blush.

If only it stopped there. There is no doubt that the council has also seen fit to hugely reduce the times that traffic lights remain on green. Cardiffians have consequently become so adept at jumping the lights that if it were made an Olympic sport in time for 2012, the city would be capable of supplying the entire team, with replacements.

Just as we don’t need to rehearse the environmental arguments around cars, nobody needs to be reminded that taking one of them across a junction when its lights are at red can be extremely dangerous. But, having spent up to 15 minutes at a junction on the edge of the city waiting to pass, it is somewhat tempting to squeeze through when only the first three vehicles in front were able to do so while the light was at green.

Cardiff has a comprehensive and decent transport system, but no small businessman or woman could run a successful diary and rely upon it. It is simply impossible, and could add up to three hours a day in travelling – dead time, time that cannot be used for anything else. In such circumstances, only cars will do. But, regardless of whether public transport has been improved alongside increased traffic ‘calming’ measures, those same business people – the ones that pay their rates and taxes properly to fund this nonsense – are finding their days getting longer. As a consequence, the build outs – which rely on co-operation between motorists to allow traffic to pass smoothly – are fundamentally flawed in their conception, because the frustration they have caused puts no one in a charitable mood.

But all of this is just stuff to highways officials who can hide behind environmental arguments as a means of waving away hard questions about why Cardiff is becoming more and more gridlocked. And to say we should use our cars less is not only glib, it is also downright hypocritical. Why? Because Cardiff County Hall possesses one of the biggest single-level car parks in the city, there solely for its employees’ use.

Whether the council likes traffic or not, it is not the job of unelected officials to attempt to socially engineer us out of our cars by putting the public’s arm in a half-Nelson. It should concern itself with matching the intelligence and sophistication of some of our recent landmark buildings with a traffic system that isn’t running the risk of economically disadvantaging the very same people whose money have helped build our new capital.