There is a particular brand of masochism required to believe that the perpetual excavation of our motorways is a sign of progress. The recent hand-wringing over the 'impact of roadworks'—as if we are discussing a natural disaster rather than a self-inflicted bureaucratic cyst—highlights the terminal stupidity of our era. We are told there is a 'fine balance' between infrastructure benefits and the cost of disruption. This is the kind of lie told by people who have never sat in a stationary hatchback for three hours while a single man in a high-visibility vest stares pensively at a hole that appears to have been dug purely for the sake of aesthetic consistency.

Let us deconstruct the 'balance' that the experts so desperately want us to weigh. On one side, we have the 'benefits': hypothetical, smooth-surfaced futures where commerce flows like wine. On the other, we have the reality: the absolute, grinding stasis of a civilization that has forgotten how to build anything that lasts longer than a quarterly earnings report. The modern road is not a transit route; it is a recurring subscription service for misery. We do not build roads anymore; we merely curate the decay of the ones we inherited from generations who actually understood the chemistry of concrete and the value of time.

From the Right, we hear the predictable braying about 'investment' and 'growth.' To the conservative mind, a roadwork project is simply a conveyor belt for public funds to enter the private pockets of contractors whose primary skill is stretching a three-week job into a fiscal year. They frame this disruption as the price of a booming economy, ignoring the fact that the only thing 'booming' is the blood pressure of the delivery drivers and commuters who pay for this privilege twice—once through their taxes and again through the literal burning of their life force in a five-mile queue. It is the ultimate grift: charging the public for the pleasure of preventing them from going to work.

On the Left, the performative angst is equally nauseating. There is a quiet, smug satisfaction among the urbanist elite whenever traffic grinds to a halt. They view the gridlock as a sort of involuntary penance for the sin of individual mobility. To them, every orange cone is a tiny, plastic monument to environmental preservation. They talk of 'shifting modalities' and 'integrated transport,' while the actual humans stuck in the actual traffic are simply trying to get home to children they barely see. The Left’s solution to the disruption isn’t to fix the road faster; it’s to suggest you should have been riding a unicycle in the rain anyway. Both sides of the aisle view the commuter not as a citizen, but as a resource to be harvested or a nuisance to be corrected.

Why have things 'set to get worse'? Because we have reached the point in our societal decline where the process has become the product. The disruption is not a side effect of the work; the work is an excuse for the disruption. In a world where politicians have no real ideas for the future, they can at least point to a pile of gravel and a 'Work Ahead' sign as proof that they are 'Doing Something.' It is the political equivalent of a toddler throwing sand—messy, pointless, and requiring an adult to clean it up. Except there are no adults left in the room, only consultants with spreadsheets that prove the five billion spent on a lane widening will be offset by the three minutes saved by a driver in 2049.

Consider the historical irony. The Romans built roads that still exist today, likely using nothing more than grit and the fear of a centurion’s lash. We, with our satellite mapping, advanced polymers, and PhD-holding engineers, cannot seem to patch a pothole without triggering a localized economic depression. It is a testament to our intellectual bankruptcy. We have over-engineered the bureaucracy of construction to the point where the actual laying of tarmac is an afterthought to the environmental impact surveys, the diversity and inclusion audits of the gravel suppliers, and the mandatory public consultation periods where everyone gets to voice their opinion on a topic they don't understand.

The result is a country that is perpetually 'under construction' but never actually 'constructed.' We live in a state of permanent transition, a purgatory of orange plastic and flashing arrows. We are told the disruption is temporary, but that is a lie. The disruption is the new permanent. As the infrastructure continues to crumble under the weight of sheer incompetence and the 'costs' continue to outweigh the 'benefits,' we are left with the only honest conclusion: we deserve this. We have tolerated the grifters and the performative activists for so long that we have lost the right to move at more than ten miles per hour. So, the next time you find yourself staring at the back of a stationary lorry, don't get angry. Just accept it as the physical manifestation of our collective stagnation. The road isn't closed; the future is.