Since Elon Musk’s Boring Company provided automated underground highways to move traffic underground, it’s been wonderful to walk the streets again. The high street has become more like a pedestrian mall, and the occasional, electric, car that passes is quiet and discreet.

Electric cars quickly get swallowed up by the new Tesla Tunnels, or TT, that permeate the city links; the airport and all major hubs and parking garages are connected by automated elevators, that whisk the car, and its passengers down into the labyrinth.

That’s where the problems start. We’ve still got gridlock, but now it’s underground; invisible, unless you happen to be seventh in the stack, waiting to get on the airport loop. Then you can see it on your dash display, in real time; but that doesn’t solve anything.

Just like adding more lanes to a highway just makes more space for cars to fill up those lanes, so the TT has created another highway; more space for more cars, until it’s full. Very full.

Granted, some of the Hyperloop type automated people movers have reduced single-passenger cars, but the added number of stops adds to slowing down the system, which has a typical ripple effect.

Welcome to the new age of gridlock; you can’t see it, but it’s there, underground.