Often there are times when you rise above the early morning mist and get a jaw-dropping view of the rolling South Downs, the sun picking out the distant peaks, all shades of green leaves forming a glittering embracing canopy.

Then you plunge down again into the murk, glimpse the ghostly outlines of the grazing sheep, cross the stone bridge across the Arun, its warm depths causing early morning vapour to rise into the chill air.

Other times you pass the gorgeous English pubs, looking like backdrops in Midsomer Murders, and it’s all you can do to stop pulling up and diving into the ingle nook.

It is only 7.30am so you drive on. I am temporarily residing in Chichester and driving here to Hollingbury.

My industrial estate destination is hardly fitting for what precedes it but there you are.

Yes the A29/B2139/A283 is my twisting, winding route of choice.

OK it doesn’t roll off the tongue like Route 66 but, unless you’re a ticket collector at Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas in Peru, I have the most beautiful commute to work imaginable.

And it is also the road to hell. By 7am it’s already busy and half an hour later traffic snakes back almost its entire 30-mile length.

Commuters mingle with just-going-to-the-shoppers with the dreaded tractors and the thundering Dudman juggernauts. Add in the cyclists – yesterday a club decided to throw a mass time trial into the mix – and you have trouble in paradise.

How can I, a time-pressed, harassed worker ant, find myself snarling at a 20mph Nissan driver who’s popped out for some tea bags while driving through a landscape the Gods sculpted?

Do these drivers, with Back Off stickers in their windows, have a walkie-talkie system that allows them to call ahead to pass me over to another meanderer for the next leg?

It would seem so. The truth is all this goes to prove that we are well beyond the point of saturation here in the south when it comes to travel to work.

Perhaps nothing we don’t already know but when that lovely back road simply gums up for good, will cars be stuck there until the end of time because of some immutable law of physics?

Perhaps we’ll all have to live in the traffic-choked village of Storrington forever.

Like a fool when I first started here I simply travelled along the A27, leaving the house at 7.30am.

Hah! What a buck eejit as they say in Belfast where I’ve just come from. Two hours later I arrived in Brighton. I could have flown to Northern Ireland quicker.

The poor denizens of Worthing are blighted by too many cars, the lack of a bypass and blithering buffoons in the transport department who must have shares in traffic light manufacturers.

It’s not their fault the town has become a by-word for misery among motorists. So much so it’s unlikely many commuters would travel back on a day off to sample what are its undoubted and understated delights.

The truth is successive governments throughout the decades have failed to do anything positive about relieving the over-populated south.

In Belfast, a traffic crisis was a ten-minute delay in the town centre. It almost led the news bulletins.

It was even the same in Edinburgh where I also worked. And way back when I found myself residing in Hull the mighty and newly-built M62 seemed to carry about one car an hour.

To drive on that road was to find yourself in a post Apocalypse landscape with you as the lucky survivor.

Regional assistance to other parts of England has simply been too half-hearted and piecemeal to take the pressure off us.

It was left to the BBC to move to Salford to show what could be done even if some of the London luvvies are still having sleepless nights over it.

I have already met business people who live out east or west and tell me they don’t bother coming here for meetings that start early or finish late as it’s simply too much hassle. That, I would say, must be bad for our economy.

Of course there are no easy answers. If there were we would have found them by now.

Both hating the car and refusing to investigate public transport are extremes that will not help.

Trouble is I’ve not much time to dwell on the problem. If I don’t leave in the next ten minutes I know that farmer will catch me with his combine harvester just outside Washington.