Ploughing through all the seasonal cheer in today’s papers (500 jobs to go at Woolies in Sussex, yobs set fire to man on Littlehampton to Brighton train etc etc) I came across the shocking tale that the average business in Sussex faces costs of more than £22,000 a year thanks to traffic jams!

That’s almost £5,000 a year more than the national average, and it’s unforgiveable. In these days of job losses – and knock-on increases in home repossessions and fuel poverty – we should be doing everything we can to help businesses, especially the smaller ones, cut their costs.

The Government – and local councils – must do everything they can to bring us all some seasonal cheer and quickly ease our choked roads.

But Sussex Enterprise, who have collated the figures locally, say the answer lies in speeding up road-building and widening schemes in the county.

I couldn’t agree less, really, with their prescription. It has been shown over and over again that if you increase road capacity you just end up increasing the traffic – before you know it, business and road users are all back to square one. And we’ve all spent a lot of money, lost a fair slice of Sussex countryside – and contributed to an increase in petrol use (with its associated impact on the climate – and our wallets) along the way.

There are much cheaper, environmentally friendlier – and more effective ways to cut congestion, and we should all be pressing for them as a mater of urgency: promoting alternatives to car use, for example, using the planning system and conservation policies to encourage mixed-use and car-free developments, speeding up all necessary road-works by diverting cash from new builds to repairs, and re-opening some of the pan-Sussex train lines (Uckfield to Lewes) for example to increase both capacity and routes available for both rail freight and passengers.

We really need to sort this out. How we get about – and how businesses move both their goods and their people – is fundamental to how many staff they are able to keep on, how much damage we do to our the environment, and how dependent we are on imported and fast-running out oil.

If we are to make the necessary shifts to a (nearly) carbon free economy – we can’t just built more and ever-wider roads to solve the problem.