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Ten years later, Jack was a shadow of his former self. He no longer looked young. He no longer acted young. He no longer felt young. He looked wretched, he felt wretched, he was a persecuted wreck of a man. He sought his mother's advice again.
"The traffic problems in Oxford are terrible." he bemoaned.
"Everybody complains more than they ever did before. There is nowhere to cycle or walk that's free from the cars. Huge snorting European sized lorries lumber through the narrow streets, stinking of diesel fumes. Even bigger buses queue in endless lines to get up the High Street. Every side street is blocked by badly parked vehicles. The noise is awful. The air is awful. The journey times are twice as long as ten years ago. And everybody has a car. And they use them for tiny journeys. They're unfit, off work sick all the time. Their children have asthma and the fumes are eating away the Colleges' walls. And they all blame me. I'm a failure. It is terrible, terrible." He moaned and wept copiously.
His mother (who was, as you now know, a wise, fairy godmother in disguise) patted his arm.
"Jack lad. Don't take on so. You have done very well. What you must do now is this. Open the bus service to free competition. Let the free markets rage through Oxford. Make the shops in Cornmarket a pedestrian zone - but let in the buses. Hire merciless traffic wardens to levy crippling fines on parked vehicles. Say you will create bicycle lanes - but on no account do that. Create bewildering one-way systems in the city centre; mazes to confuse the Minotaur. Build a multilane ring road round the city, linked to the motorway network. Build out-of-town stores on the ring road. Fit all official vehicles with nerve shattering sirens so they can beat their way rapidly though the densest traffic. Ignore the railway and the canal and their routes straight into the heart of the city. Now go and get on with it Jack."
Another ten years passed. Jack was now into middle age. He still had his job as Oxford's Traffic Engineer and there was no reason for life not to be good. But, as he dragged himself wearily and heavily into his mother's (or the wise fairy who for reasons never made clear masqueraded as his dear, departed mother) - Jack looked spectacularly and truly awful.
"Mother" he wondered politely but doggedly, "you know all the advice you've been giving me over the last twenty years about traffic and transport here in Oxford. It occurs to me to ask, prompted by a few problems which have arisen; apart from being my own dear mother (she kept mum at this point), is there any good reason why I should take your advice on Traffic Engineering and the associated socio-economic policies for the City of Oxford?".
"Perhaps" she said acidly "it is the execution of my advice that is causing the difficulties." She had not spent years in business consultancy for nothing.
With a flourish, she produced two framed documents. The first, startling in it's multi-coloured heraldic design, with giant red seals and silk ribbons attached, was Jack's first class honours degree in Engineering from Aston University, Birmingham. The second was her own degree, which Jack had been unaware of until that moment. It was a simple black and white third class honours degree in PPE, Philosophy, Politics and Economics from New College Oxford, complete with automatic upgrade to Doctorate. Jack knelt in humble submission at his mother's superior feet and never questioned her again.
Jack wept as he unburdened himself for the third time. "Every road is full of traffic all day long. The motorways bring thousands of heavy trucks an hour thundering round our ring road. The noise is intolerable, they wander into the City for a detour and sightseeing. They shake the foundations of the old colleges and the fumes have eaten away Magdelen College. Criminals drive in and are a hundred miles away before their crimes are discovered. The privatised buses vie with each other for passengers in the pedestrianised shopping areas. There are so many and they leave their engines running - last year a child in a buggy chair died from exhaust fumes. They have only the driver, so as they manoeuvre they cannot see what's around them. Old people, too slow to jump aside, are being knocked down daily. While the drivers take fares, all following traffic waits. It takes three times longer to enter or leave Oxford than when I started the job. Parking is impossible. Cyclists are slaughtered - accidents have soared and many of them are deliberate, through Road Rage. Children must wear smog masks. This is all my fault as traffic engineer"
"The bursar at St. Johns (the fairy god-motherly mock-widow knew that you could walk to London on land owned by the fabulously wealthy St. Johns College - if you could cross the raging ring road - so the bursar was an important man in the scheme of things), the bursar says the exhaust fumes are eating away the eight hundred year old stone work - eight hundred years it lasted for before I got this job - and I destroy it in twenty" Jack sobbed and hid his face.
The good fairy leaned forward. "Jack my boy. This is what you must do".
"You must ban all the cars and buses to the edge of the ring road. You must make protected space for the cyclists and the pedestrians. Let the University people cycle and walk, let the tourists cycle and walk and let the City people cycle and walk - in exhaust gas free streets without fear of being crushed by angry vehicles. The cyclists and pedestrians can mix freely in the centre. They will sometimes fall over each other - but they will do so thankful it was not a Mack Truck that hit them, they will embrace each other. You will build moving walkways, people conveyers on the seven roads in and out of the City. Provide electric City cars. Build electric river-buses. Use the railway. Fit dry goods vacuum tubes to carry goods in capsules to supermarkets - like water and oil flows through pipelines, so must dry goods. Your guiding principles are to reduce the weight being moved around, particularly vehicles and fuel, and reduce energy consumed. And immoblise all power sources so their exhausts can be cleaned - nobody needs to cart one and a half tonnes of car and one hundred and fifty pounds of fuel when they travel five miles to the library - kill the weight Jack; that's the job."
Jack did as his mother told him. Everybody was soon walking and cycling just as they had thirty years before. The streets were free of poisonous gas, huge trucks, stinking buses and maddened car drivers. When a cyclist rode over a pedestrian or a pedestrian accidentally bent a cylist's front wheel, they both laughed.
A year later Jack looked young again. He was awarded an honourary degree in Peace Studies from the University of Oxford and carried in triumph round the Bodleian Library, by a grateful, healthy and jolly populace.
Tourists came in millions to wonder at a city with clean air and quiet streets.
And they all lived happily ever-after.
The End