It doesn’t surprise me that, according to a recent survey, Bradford is the fifth-most traffic-congested city in the UK.

I have lived in various parts of the country, including London, and I’ve never had such a stressful commute to and from work as I have here.

I travel into the city centre from the Aire Valley, along one of the district’s most heavily-congested routes. In off-peak times, the car journey takes about 15 minutes. In the morning rush, it can take an hour. In the evenings, it often takes a good 20 minutes to crawl out of the city centre, and that’s before my journey home has barely begun.

Last week, despite rush-hour traffic levels being traditionally lower during half-term, I sat in gridlocked traffic on Canal Road for half-an-hour, losing the will to live.

The traffic survey, by satnav company TomTom, was dismissed by Bradford Council’s principal engineer, Joe Grint, who told the T&A that Department of Transport figures place Bradford 56th out of 152 local authorities.

Whether Bradford is fifth or 56th is of little comfort to motorists enduring the miserable daily slog of driving nose-to-bumper through congestion blackspots.

While improvements are planned for some clogged-up areas, not least the dreadful Saltaire Road roundabout where traffic lights should’ve been installed a long time ago, motorists could be forgiven for thinking they’ve heard it all before.

From the A1-M1 link road to the cross-city monorail, the Shipley Tunnel to park-and-ride, Bradford’s past is littered with traffic proposals that never saw the light of day.

Of course, congestion would ease up a little if more drivers took public transport, but, since it’s hugely over-priced, that’s not likely to happen. I took a bus to work recently and it cost £2.50 each way. Apart from the fact that I need a car for my job, I can’t afford £5 a day for bus fares.

When I landed my first job, before I could drive, I took two buses to work and two home. Since my job involved attending meetings in the evenings, I spent a lot of time hanging around lonely bus stops after 10pm, sometimes for nearly an hour. I’ve also stood on draughty platforms in deserted railway stations late at night, and I’m not doing it again.

In my experience, public transport is always expensive, often unreliable and occasionally unsafe. There’s a stark contrast in other European countries I’ve been to, including France, Belgium and Germany, where trains and buses run like clockwork.

Unless there’s a vast improvement in this country, it looks as though traffic congestion is here to stay.