[tjts1]

if you want to reduce traffic congestion and improve fuel economy you don't need a 55mph speed limit. You need to reduce the size of the cars and increase the speed of traffic. Its the only way.

Fifteen years ago, I went to Japan, sat in a traffic jam for a fortnight and came home again, a bit worried that this festering, superheated example of unrestrained car ownership would one day spread right round the world, causing everyone to think Ken Livingstone might have had a point.

The traffic did not crawl. It did not move at all. The only way you could garner even half an idea of what it might be like to be stationary for so long is to blow your head off. Tokyo, in 1993, really was twinned with being dead.

So you might imagine that after 15 years of almost continuous global economic growth, things today would be even worse. That I could go back there now, and find the taxi I used for the airport run all those years ago still at the terminal, queueing to get back on the expressway. That there’d be people in jams all over the city with no idea the twin towers had come down.

But in fact, Tokyo now flows like the arterial blood in a newborn baby. There are no fatty deposits, no furred-up tributaries, no clots. Recently, at two in the afternoon, I tore up Tokyo’s equivalent of London’s Marylebone Road at 100mph. And there was not a single car in sight. Not one.

A communist might argue that this has something to do with Japan’s excellent public transport system, which classifies a train as late if it arrives more than 59 seconds behind schedule. But the system was just as good 15 years ago.

A hippie might suggest that in the nation that gave us John Prescott’s Kyoto treaty, the average workaday commuter has hung up his wheels in shame and bought a bicycle instead. ’Fraid not, Mr Hillage. And nor have the city burghers invented a congestion charge that somehow cuts down on congestion, rather than just send a rude and impertinent bill every five minutes.

No. What’s happened is very simple. Elsewhere in the world, cars have been getting larger. The current 3-series BMW is 4in longer than a 5-series from the late Eighties. Today’s Polo is bigger than the original Golf. And the 21st century’s Rolls-Royce Phantom is bigger than an Egyptian’s house.

Whereas in Japan, the law says that you must prove you own a parking space before you can buy a car, unless the car is less than 3.4 metres (11ft 2in) long and powered by an engine no larger than 660cc. And because almost no one owns a parking space, demand for cars that would fit in a budgie’s lunch box has gone berserk. There are currently 58 different models on offer with the bestselling, the Suzuki Wagon R, selling to 250,000 people a year.

Seriously, the cars they sell to us in Britain, which are the size of farms and skyscrapers – you hardly see them at all in Japan. Almost everyone has a car so small, many aren’t actually visible to the naked eye.

The result is very simple. A traffic jam made up of normal cars will be twice as long as one made up of these Japanese “kei” cars. And a kei jam will clear more quickly, because in a car the size of a bacterium you don’t have to drive round and round the block looking for somewhere to park. You just pop it in your pocket and the job’s a good ’un.

And you thought Jeremy Clarkson was all about fast cars and naked women.
http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol...cle4076537.ece