Цитаты из книги Gridlock

'They tried Communism in Russia, Geoffrey, their buses were worse than ours and everybody had to eat cabbage for the rest of their lives.'

Horns serve no practical purpose: they are there to alleviate personal frustration and to insult and annoy other road users. Their only real use, the one defined in the driving test as 'announcing your presence', is rendered completely useless by the fact that they are used so often to say 'fuck off that that is the only message which other people hear.

'What, you mean a tram freak?' asked Bruce, relieved to hear that the condemned man was atl least an evil person. 'One of those guys who wants half the damn freeway reserved for buses?' 'Exactly,' said Sam. 'Can you believe the sickoes God put on the Earth?

A transport policy which is prepared to happily allow a million cars into a city that physically only has room for half that number, despite the general suffering of all concerned, will eventually get round to allowing the owners of fun top jeeps to chuck wheelies in Kew Gardens.

Do cars enable the people who live on main routes and have to listen to traffic all night? Do they enable old people who can't cross roads, or have to walk miles extra to find a crossing? Do they enable the five thousand people killed each year in Britain, or the forty thousand in the US? Above all Deborah, do they enable the hundreds of thousands of people stuck in jams every day? I mean do they really?

He's a public transport nut, he hates private cars, reckons we should all be sat behind each other on stinking buses, picking the chewing gum off our pants.' 'Mother of God ain't people sick?' said Sam in disgust. 'The guy's probably into free love too.'

Most Parisians do in fact speak some English, but out of pure bloody-minded snobbishness they refuse to do so in the company of the British. When accosted by a desperate, sweaty, confused Brit asking, 'Excuse me, but do you speak English?' the immaculately dressed Parisian wjll raise a languid eyebrow and enquire, 'Yes, do you speak French?'. It is a little known historical fact that it was this irritating habit which was the principal cause of the Hundred Years War.

There were computers, printers, swivel chairs, kettles, stuffed Snoopies and amusing stickers proclaiming that you didn't have to be mad to work there but it helped. These stickers were originally developed by psychologists as a test to enable office managers to determine an employee's utter dullness.

'You mean it's really true?' he said. 'A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport?' 'Yes boss,' said the researchers, 'it's true. There's hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded, and hence the entire population is stuck in traffic.'

'You're trying to tell me that they're all going in the same direction, travelling to much the same destinations and yet they're all deliberately impeding the progress of each other by covering six square metres of space with a large, almost completely empty tin box?' That's exactly what we're trying to tell you boss.'