TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CITY OF OMNIBUSES.
POLITICS are in abeyance. " Questions" have either been closed, or are as yet but in the bud, so unopened that it would be idle to discuss them. Statesmen are dispersed about the globe, and no one can obtain information as to what they are doing with us. We say that there is " nothing going forward," and the journals are left with so little of their proper and usual pabulum, that they fall from "common things" to the most ordinary objects of our most trivial business in daily life. The anti-climax of this descent has been the great Omnibus discussion. The Leading Journal, and journals which compete for a leading place, have latterly taken up the subject of omnibuses, and have treated it with considerable animation and vigour. The intellectual power of the daily press has turned with all its force upon the omnibus, and it is to be hoped that some good will come out of the move- ment.
The omnibus, indeed, does not stand alone ; it is more or less connected with the cab, the cab with the pavement and the crowded streets, the narrow streets with the houses, and the houses with the structure of this great metropolis. We have so managed it, that practically the town in which we live is further off from itself, in its several parts, than places which we regard as distant in the country. By the clock, it is as far from Whitechapel or Bayswater as it is from London to Brighton ; and you may go by railway, first-class, cheaper to Brighton or Southampton and back, than you can by cab to Whitechapel or Bayswater and back. The very means we take to expedite our passage from one
rto the other assist in closing it up. Six impatient men in ansoms would be more than an effectual nucleus for a dead-lock in Cheapside which would give the pedestrian a start. If you prefer it, you may, by departing from the direct route, take the choice of a boat ; and with the choice of a boat, the chance of be- ing upset by overcrowding, and the certainty of sailing along the surface of a vast sewer. The private carriage is a resource for those who can command it; but while they are comparatively few, even the few find their penalty in the great probability that their property in carriage and horse-flesh will be damaged in a crush.
We have in this country the largest amount of inventive facul- ty, the largest accumulation of capital and means, and the most multitudinous agency for the joint application of faculty and means to mechanical appliances. Our ingenuity, however, has been centrifugal. In the centre we have suffered old makeshift contrivances, and the spontaneous growth of a great town, to get up a vast gordian knot of entanglement which is the opprobrium of our common sense. Living in a town, we have no neighbourly cooperation. A man is as far from his personal friends as if they lived by the sea on the border of the island. The British Associa- tion for the Advancement of Science sits at Cheltenham to explain the perfect facility with which we can master the raw materials of mechanical engines, and we suffer the metropolis thus to im- pede itself to frustrate the advantages of its own concentration by a passive inaptitude. The leading journals have special corre- spondents, telling them the state of every capital in the world, and who make it a matter of pride to point out the particular fault with the remedy,—for no one points out faults now-a-days without " the remedy,"—in Paris, Rome, Berlin, New York, Pekin, San Francisco, and Timbuctoo : but they have only this moment awakened to the state of the British metropolis, which, in proportion to the means that it can command, is a greater re- proach to civilization than auy city in the world. They do not "manage these things" much "better in France,"
but unquestionably we do not manage them well in London ; for here we are ! But we »light have been managed better—that is the grand discovery. Ingenious folks have been telling us so for a long time. Our own correspondent Mr. Bridges Adams has made one suggestion, taken up by the Times this week. Mr. Allem the artist and Sir Frederick Trench long since anticipated plans for drawing the two ends of the metropolis together by the railway and esplanade along the river. Mr. Charles Pearson had a scheme for bringing the railways into the heart of London, now about to be partially adopted. The railways, indeed, are gra- dually extending themselves into a circle around the metropolis ; but we still want the centripetal radii. The streets are narrow, the houses are crowded ; but the two millions and a half might be better lodged, with more house-room, yet not spread over a greater space. The streets might be broader. The casual traffic might have freer scope, and yet the regular traffic distributed over the whole metropolis without confusion, noise, or delay. If there were a portentous fire, sweeping away whole masses of buildings, if our national energies were in that way stirred to reconstruct the metropolis on the plans of a committee of the highest civil engineers, we might probably see a city of palaces, commodious, salubrious, utterly unlike anything that the world has yet known. It would then be worth while to have a plan ; and probably we should depart far from old usages. We can paint the picture. No crowded cottages smothered in smoke ; no subterranean offices. Possibly even those things which we now think it necessary to bury we might manage better above the surface of the ground, since we have materials, impervious, ductile, and inexpensive. We can imagine a city with no ground-floors ; with every house upon an elevated foundation ; the drainage, the gas and the water supply, carried on through ducts, easily constructed, accessible in
every part, and under constant inspection. We can imagine the railway on the same level, noiselessly distributing its hundrs of thousands regularly throughout the day ; the omnibus—lumber- ing makeshift of a half-civilized community—disappeared ; the horse, rude slave of a barbarous unscientific time, preserved only as the slave of the rider for pleasure ; a builded esplanade above the railway, above the aqueduct, the drainage and gas ducts, on a level with the lowest floor of the houses; the whole of the under-ground of life accessible to the inspector and the workman, ventilated, and constructed to assist in maintaining the health of the whole metropolis, instead of being the source of poison. We can imagine trades and callings distributed into classes and dis- tricts ; the penny railway ride being only a customary portion of the rent. The houses of all classes, palaces ; the roofs, emanci- pated from smoke, garden-terraces ; and the view from any ele- vated tower, a picture of health and beauty, of animated movement without crowding.
There is nothing impossible in the existence of such a scene. We have the sciences, the arts, the wealth, the skill, the wish. Only one thing stands in the way of that future,—it is nothing more nor less than London. Two millions and a half cannot go out of town while their house is repaired; they cannot take a tour while the workmen are on the premises. They might muster the means, but they can in no respect leave business for the neces-
perioa.
re have, then, two duties in reference to this great omnibus question and its adjuncts. We have to do the best we can in the interval, more or less protracted, between the London of the pre- sent and that London of the future ; and we have to do the best we can also to prevent the intermediate London from being an obstruction in the way of that ulterior metropolis. This is the duty that we neglect. We should learn a wholesome detestation of our present ways and appliances. The omnibus is a barbarous, lumbering contrivance, and we should 'know it as such ; horses should be got rid of as soon as possible, marked for condemnation. The crowding of the way we might at least get in order, and the simplest contrivances would mend it. One rule, complementary to the common " rule of the road," would alone save much confu- sion in London. You always drive to the left, but the ride of the road makes no provision for the crossing of ways and of traffic. Why not establish the rule that the driver approaching on the " off" side of another, on the whip-side, shall have precedence It would save endless conflict which delays both streams. The tramway laid down in the ordinary streets would at once so economize friction, that one pair of horses could drag the equiva- lent of three omnibuses, and two-thirds of that lumber, dead or Irving, could be removed. Nay, if the tramway thus facilitated omnibus consolidation, horse-power would probably cease to be the cheapest, and some form of steam-power, such as that to be used in the Metropolitan Railway—condensed steam applied from hot-water apparatus—might be available in a miniature form. In short, a species of train would take the place of the omnibus, repaying the enterprisers at a .penny or twopence, where sixpence is now paid ; opening the carriage to every class, while lightening the traffic both of the roadway and of the path. Probably also the rail, which is to penetrate by arcades through our compacted houses, may gradually supersede the open streets, leaving them for the casual traffic. The grand improvement in Westminster will illustrate the idea of widely opening the spaces of our broad city ; new neighbourhoods will imitate that plan ; and by degrees they should, as far as possible, be rendered working models by which we may approach from the present London to the London of the future.
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