The trouble is that that way of looking at things merely allows for increased road building. We're lucky in ED that there isn't any room to do so and thus the traffic can only reach a finite number but elsewhere in this green and pleasant land (Bexley, say) where commuting is a way of life the increase in traffic is oft followed by calls for wider roads, by-passes and driver-friendly town planning. IMHO this is a fatalistically flawed way of thinking. It merely results in a vicious circle of increased car use. Something, for a variety of reasons I don't have time to list here, we should seek to discourage. I once worked in a transport planning consultancy, for a short period, on a team that specialised in looking at cycling. It was often a difficult balance to maintain between cyclist, pedestrian and driver and one that never leaves every party happy. Whislt I wouldn't be so brazen as to openly question your cycle lane = increased congestion argument I wonder whether the number of car users of that particular stretch of road may have also increased at the same time. I also wonder whether you are on the road at the right time to see the numbers of cyclists who do use it. Trust me when I tell you that endless surveys will have been conducted to test whether the cycle lane was warranted. In the meantime, however, enough of this seriousness....