England, we have a problem .... Our roads are congested - seriously, maybe even dangerously, congested. It's costing us dear in lost time, money, patience, and health. And no one seems to have any credible ideas of what to do about it.

In 2006, the last major Department for Transport study into the future of Britain's transport infrastructure estimated that congestion may cost the economy of England £22 billion a year in lost time by 2025, and concluded that road pricing to encourage drivers to drive less was an "economic no-brainer".

And nothing's changed since. Over four in five adults think that congestion is a serious problem in the country and nine in ten say that it is important for Government to tackle the problem [Office of National Statistics]. But it's always someone else who has to change, of course. So is it time to revisit "deliberate limitation"?

Because when queried on their car use, while 35% of cars users unsurprisingly cited the cost of petrol as a disincentive to car use, a full 28% reported that they limited their car use a great deal or to some extent because of the availability of parking. This surely points to parking provision as one of the big levers that government can pull to help address this growing crisis.

The same length of road that holds perhaps one vehicle parked parallel with the road will hold two or even three when these are at right-angles to the road in a blocked-over front garden. So to coin too awful a pun to pass up, could now be the time to put the block on paving? (Groan.)

Unlike fuel hikes or road-charging levies, a national moratorium on planning permission for new front-garden car parking would be zero inflationary, and would cut off much future congestion at source. It also favours the adoption of smaller, and thus more fuel-economic vehicles.

Making a parking yard of gardens also puts pressure on the parking spaces in front of houses without off-road parking, especially when the blocked-over garden is associated with a dropped kerb: other street residents and visitors are often reluctant to park in front of the blocked-over properties and will often take spaces in front of their unpaved neighbours'.

There's surely another dimension too: we're wrecking the places we live in. So many suburban streets resemble nothing more than rows of sleeping hutches, huddled behind ranks of cars, with trees, grass and shrubs nowhere in sight. Rainwater pours off the paving (even the porous type), heat is re-radiated back at night from blocks heated during the day, birds lose food, habitat and shelter, and the whole feel of a place as somewhere desirable to live can be lost.

OK, even if the inevitable outcry from those who consider it their inalienable right to pave over England could somehow be appeased, there surely remains the sheer logistical problem of policing such a prohibition. But the prizes are very great indeed: the car lobby is also the drive-in-time lobby, the anti-congestion lobby, and - dare I say it - the road-pricing-over-my-dead-body lobby.

This much is clear: we can't just go on muddling through between the rock of public desire to drive wherever and whenever we want, and the hard place of gridlocked roads, a strangled economy and a public space choked by cars. And don't expect fuel prices to do the job for us - car ownership marches upwards unabated. Unless we're prepared to look for solutions, then the dreaded road pricing looks more inevitable each year, and sometimes the easiest answer is the best. A moratorium on new garden-parking for cars could start to deliver the greener, quieter, safer and saner world we all claim to want, and for free.

Could it really be that simple?