Melbourne and Sydney have built a lot of big roads and are building more. Tens of billions of dollars just for the latest, the West Gate Tunnel and North East Link in Melbourne and Westconnex and Northconnex in Sydney.

It's said our transport infrastructure hasn't been keeping up with population growth, yet we've splurged on roads in the first decade of this century: Melbourne alone gained a Hallam Bypass, a Pakenham Bypass, an Eastlink, a Dingley Arterial road, a Deer Park Bypass and a Peninsula Link in this time. We've also added more lanes to the big roads that already exist. The Monash and Tullamarine freeways have each been widened on two separate occasions.

The Tullamarine Freeway has been widened on two separate occasions. Credit:Joe Armao

Robert Nicholson cheered on this effort on this site, saying our cities are just “playing catch-up”. Politicians, road planners and economists likewise go along with the habitual case for spending billions on roads: that it's to ease congestion. It's more often dressed up with vogue words like "connectivity", but ultimately it's about getting from A to B faster. Melbourne's not building a West Gate Tunnel just to get trucks off residential streets: a few off-ramps on the West Gate and some short arterial links would have done that, much as Dan Andrews promised in 2014. Instead, he's building a bigger pipe to speed up traffic into the city centre because, as Margaret Thatcher would have said, "there is no alternative".

What's really crazy is the planners and other experts also know their elaborately constructed, impressively tabulated case for congestion relief is a mirage.