I'm starting this piece at 37,000 feet, on my way back from a quick trip to the South of France. Nice one, Brian, you say. Nice job too.

Sure it is, like anybody's job is if they're doing what they love to do. But every time, these trips - which ARE work, by the way - make me sick.

Because I find myself driving on real roads. Because instead of blaming the car for all ills, other countries accept that they are with us, embedded in our lives, and have benefits which probably outweigh their downsides.

And I find myself in traffic that actually moves. Sometimes at speeds beyond the legal limit, maybe because that's part of how it happens. But it moves.

As I said to a colleague after I'd sped us along the A8 from Cannes to Nice in significantly less minutes than it was miles: 'if we were in Dublin, we'd still be in Cannes'.

Think about it.

I'm on my way home to a country where those who decide on our lives have a love-hate relationship with the car. They love the car and they hate the owners.

They love the income the car provides to state coffers. They love being driven in expensive versions of it, often at speeds well beyond what they decree the rest of us should be limited to.

They punish those of us who have to buy our own cars, with penal taxes and unprovided adequate road infrastructures.

They run, through those they appoint as traffic czars, anti-car campaigns to keep us out of our cities and towns (there's going to be a lot more of this, believe me).

They allow, even encourage, revenue-collecting through speed-checking on our safest roads by the Garda, while letting them ignore sheer bad driving and failing to deal with real fatal black spots on our back roads, where most RTA victims die.

And we keep on electing them in. We probably deserve everything we get.

Let's consider a couple of other examples of how we motorists allow ourselves to be walked on by our political 'servants' (remember, WE elect THEM, and they profess to be in the business of Public Service).

I'm on my way back from driving a new small Ford car, one which will sell no more than 100 copies a year in Ireland. It's a fun car, evolved from the Ford mini Ka. The StreetKa.

In Britain, we were told last night, it will sell for the equivalent of less than E18,000, or the price of the Nissan Micra automatic which I recently bought. In Ireland, it will cost around E26,000, or more than a new Toyota Avensis.

At that, Ford of Ireland will be taking a smaller profit than their counterparts in Britain will get on the StreetKa. Because more than the difference in price is made up of VRT and VAT, the former which is still the subject of an EU case against Ireland.

OK, so those who want fun should pay for it? Maybe, except that roughly the same rate of taxation exists for every car bought in this country, whether it be a the most diminutive city commuter tinny or a big swish luxury model (a little less on anything under 1400cc, rather more on everything over 1900cc).

And, once again, I remind you that anything up to 18 per cent of the total tax take in this country comes from motor-related taxes, again more than double the ratio of our nearest European neighbour.

I don't go into Dublin any more. Only to the edges, and there only because this work means I have to. I've never seen the Spire, not even in its construction phase. I don't expect to see it in the near future, unless some emergency forces me to go through the hell-on-tarmacadam that is driving in modern Dublin.

It is the stated objective of the city's hype-styled 'traffic supremo' that cars should be discouraged from going into Dublin. He and his band of highwaymen are doing a good job of this, day by day making it ever more difficult and more expensive to do so, painting ever more lines of prohibition on our road.

In a way I agree with him. The city can't take the number of cars that crowd its streets. But the vast bulk of those same carborne commuters have little choice. The public transport system can't cope with them if they abandon their own personal transport. Those from the outlying areas such as Drogheda or Greystones are OK because they can get the train seats, and those on a couple of subsequent stations the standing room that doesn't involve them living very dangerously in the gaps between the carriages, or making do in the guard's carriage.

LUAS will maybe cope with 6 per cent of city commuting requirements, if it ever gets running.

I would gladly use public transport if it was easily available, clean, and regular. With time-limited reasonably priced ticketing that allowed flexible use of different routes and types of transport. Like in many continental cities I visit.

And if I had somewhere to leave my car on the outskirts of the city.

I drove past Oxford the other day, a city which has its own traffic problems, and which has a ring of 'park and ride' areas where the car can be left and a shuttle bus taken.

I saw the same around Gloucester a little later. And I saw a similar system many years ago around Boston. Even in Pisa, Italy, recently, I came across their version, which links the motorist from his large car park to the city centre on a series on electric buses. And Pisa isn't much larger than Newbridge.

It is a system that works, and anyone with half a brain will realise that the first thing that any city 'traffic supremo' should provide is such a facility. Several of them. Particularly as a major percentage of all those who work in Dublin are living in what were once country towns like Naas, Newbridge, Trim, Navan, and Drogheda.

In an expensive consultants study produced in 1999, such facilities were detailed as a primary requirement before anything like congestion charging would be introduced.

But I land in Dublin to find that the only known 'park and ride' plan on my side of the city - that being built at the Red Cow station for the LUAS - will only be accessible by swinging around the Mad Cow Roundabout itself, one of the biggest holdups (and civil service-engineered cockups) on the way into town.

There was a flyover bridge planned to bring city-bound traffic across into the LUAS car park without having to do this, but while I was away they scuppered it on the grounds that it is too expensive.

Probably because the LUAS has already run way over budget and well behind time! Or maybe it was related to the massive salary increases our public representatives voted themselves before they put the shutters down on the rest of us.

That was the same reason why we originally got roundabouts instead of the planned cloverleaf junctions that would have made traversing the M50 no more difficult than it is to cross motorways in any other city I know.

We're soft, you know. We allow ourselves to be oppressed, in a rather different way than did the Iraquis under Saddam. Except we have more choices.

We don't take them. And we grouse about our lot, but we don't get together to do something about it.

There are something like 1.4 million car owners in this country. And another 300,000 or so who operate other vehicles, from dumpers to artics.

We should ALL drive to Dublin some day. On the same day. The Mother of all Gridlocks would start somewhere beyond Portlaoise and Mullingar and Dundalk.

Bertie would have to walk home to Drumcondra. Charlie McC would never get home to Sallins. A whole posse of TDs wouldn't make it into the Dail to collect their attendance allowances.

As for the rest of us, we could take an unofficial public holiday, or a week's one because that's the length of time it would take to unsnarl the mess. We could set up barbecue and camping points, enjoy the situation. Make a BIG point.

We'd only have to do it once. Because the threat of it being recurred would be enough to ensure that we finally got the roads we need and deserve and pay for, the park and ride points, and a public transport system that would at last get close to what the majority of our European mainland brethren enjoy.

Or we could all suspend paying our car tax, in civil disobedience, until we get a (non-political) guarantee that we'll be treated properly. Can you imagine what would happen to the justice system, or even the garda system, with 1.4 million defaulters to be given their day in court?

Pie in the sky? Maybe, but these are the things I think of at 37,000 feet. Then I have to come down to earth.

And Purgatory starts all over again in Dublin Airport. But at least I've had a dream ...