For outsiders, their plan looked horribly reckless, but to me it illustrated what I like in a team. Specialists Tori 'Gridlock' Fairous and Max 'Mozzie' Goose caught my attention after the Esperance Bushfire Operation when their daring feat to rescue trapped firefighters earned them a medal. She has been offered lead positions but has repeatedly turned them down.

This unique skill set made her an essential recruit into the SASR Mobility Platoon.įairous was awarded the National Emergency Medal for her part in saving firefighters. After graduating from university she chose the Army branch of the Australian Defense Force, where she honed her mechanical prowess.įairous also has expertise in a range of weapons, intelligence gathering and close protection duties, and has the ability to adapt to unexpected situations and remain calm in dangerous situations. Her mechanic background was heavily influenced by her father, a military aircraft mechanic.įairous joined the Australian Army Reserves to further develop her mechanical engineering skills and to have access to the best equipment. From an early age Fairous worked with engines and competed in robot championships. Ultimately cities have to turn smart for their own survival and an obvious way of doing that is by letting their residents spend less time on the streets and more on their lives.The eldest of five, Fairous has demonstrated leadership potential throughout her life. There is also an urgent need to curb VIP privileges and indeed make politicians suffer the same consequences of traffic congestion as other citizens do. Technology is the other, very obvious solution, though instead of building it into the traffic management system, it needs to be embedded into the vehicles so that the intelligence and the decision-making on the roads is consistent and on not dependent on the moods and vagaries of commuters.

The answer then lies in self-contained neighbourhoods with most places accessible by walking or cycling. The more dispersed these are, the more people will need to drive. Why do people drive? To reach where they live or where they work, or places of entertainment, healthcare or shopping. What will happen to our roads when it reaches China’s rate of 53%? For that to happen we need to look for sustainable and creative ways to achieve urban mobility. But none of them is a permanent answer to the malaise. Each has its merits and will go some way in reducing the mayhem on the roads. The measures suggested to ease this congestion range from dramatic improvements in the public transportation as well as the traffic management systems to imposing prohibitive congestion charges. In fact, there is a transition from public transit-orientated mobility towards private transport one.' In a paper titled Estimation of Congestion Cost in the City of Kolkata-A Case Study, Aparajita Chakrabartty and Sudakshina Gupta of the Centre for Urban Economic Studies, Department of Economics, University of Calcutta, wrote: “Even though public transport offers a competitive service, its market-share is constantly declining. Indeed, the induced demand fresh roads engineer means that people are driving more and driving farther. According to the 2015 Urban Mobility Scorecard, a study by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and traffic monitoring firm Inrix, in the US, delays due to traffic congestion kept travellers stuck in their cars for nearly 7 billion extra hours-42 hours per rush-hour commuter. The massive traffic jams in cities such as London and New York have debunked the myth that building more roads and flyovers automatically lowers congestion on the roads. Wider roads actually incentivize car ownership. Turner ensures that can never happen because building new roads and widening existing ones leads to additional traffic that continues to rise until peak congestion returns to the previous levels.

The theory of congestion postulated by economists Gilles Duranton and Matthew A. The problem is you just can’t build your way out of this congestion. Hitherto, all efforts at traffic management have been focused on easing the passage of cars on roads and successive governments have tried to achieve this by adding road surface. The nub of the problem is vehicle ownership.

Gridlock traffic