A friend is reading Bill Bryson’s latest book, “The Road to Little Dribbling,” something of an England travelogue with Bryson’s usual detours into history and other disciplines.
Her eye was caught by this passage about an effort to cope with traffic jams in one British town. She thought it relevant to the times in Little Rock:
Unfortunately, out of all the people in the world to whom the authorities might have turned to solve the problem, they chose highway engineers. In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area.
Blimey, I think he’s got it.