Roads to Nowhere
By IAN
NAIRN THE Preston motorway closed a week ago after a 47-day open season, with neither a bang nor a whimper but a bubbling. Water got in under the carriageway and froze, and the temporary surface above ground found that these were situa- tions in which Nature was still stronger than man, the absurd expansion which takes place in H2O below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit being one of them. There has followed in the newspapers some kind of witch-hunt or surveyor*hunt on the familiar stern pattern of efficiency and respon- sibility. This is childish, or more accurately school- prefectish. We ought to have been glad that such a human over-eager mistake could have happened —as it certainly happened again and again in the early railway and canal days: surely the worst that could possibly be said is that the road- builders in their eagerness to open the first British motorway used new processes and in using them took a calculated gamble on the weather which did not quite come off. You can't make an omelette, etc.
But just what sort of omelette are we trying to make? Everyone's views differ in detail, but almost all are directed towards the same ideal— the ability of every person in the country to be able to go by road where they like and when they like in oblong boxes with the approximate ground dimensions of small elephants. To protest against this attitude in any way is somehow regarded as revoking from the twentieth century and refusing to look realities in the face. I do so protest, but I think—one always does, of course—that it is the bigger-and-better road builders who are not looking reality in the face. They are facing up to 1959 or maybe 1970, but not 2020: population in- crease and vehicle increase are going to make any conceivable system of roads out-of-date on today's terms of vehicle size and control—and at the same time the sort of road system visualised is going to take the point out of going anywhere, as it has already taken the point out of Los Angeles, whose centre is a tangle of freeways and express- ways put there so that people can shuffle from one end of the consuburbation to the other looking for just those things which ought to have been in the centre to start with. The means of travelling have defeated the end for which one travels—that there should be somewhere at the finish of the journey worth going to. And theorists in Britain must face the fact that on today's terms universal Los Angeles is going to be the inevitable end-product : the boxes are too big, the control systems too fallible, the storage problems too great : there will be, at least on these islands, not enough room to . go round for man, his house, his workplace, the car he uses to go from one to the other and the prodigious' length of roadway and area of storage space needed to support it.
And the odd thing is that all the apostles of progress are in fact doing the one thing that they would repudiate in others : they are trying to plan tomorrow on today's terms, or on a simple extra- polation of today's terms: twice the number of vehicles by 1968, therefore twice as much conges- tion, therefore the need for twice as many roads. Yet the one thing the twentieth century ought to have taught us is that in fifty years' time the whole vocabulary of getting from place to place may have changed radically. Technologically, we are at the point, for the first time in history, where we can produce almost any solution we want to a problem of environment by simply priming the right research team with the right amount of cash. We haven't yet learned how to use this new- found emancipation—at the moment, technology is simply using us—but the potential is there, and could be used to solve the problem of personal transport just as it is now solving the problems of supersonic and interplanetary flight. There is no reason 'why in twenty-five years we should not have—to enter, quite unqualified, into the science- fiction market—a rucksack helicopter with a foolproof braking and parachute system, a waterproof shopping capsule which will do 30 m.p.h. and can be hung up like a mac, a geodetic spherical car with the driver gyroscopically mounted, which could bounce like a billiard ball on impact. At one extreme, if one's transport were as thin as oneself, there would be no traffic prob- lem. These things would need Money—a lot of money, much of which would be expended with- out result. But isn't it a more realistic and pro- gressive policy than spending the same amount of money on a supposed 'cure' which is in fact only a makeshift and one which, at the pace of British administration, is almost bound to be overtaken by events?
Well, with these visionary plans secured, what would l propose for today's roads? A mixture of expediency—on a much larger• and more imme- diate scale than we have at the moment—and good old British laissez-faire (the second part of this should be easy, anyway). What I mean by that, before the British Roads Campaign Council has collective apoplexy, is in fact something much nearer what we are doing now than it sounds. There are some unavoidable bottlenecks which jam predictably and recurrently. Sometimes they are single objects, like Staines Bridge, sometimes a whole town, like the High Wycombe or Med- way bottleneck, sometimes a whole road, like A5 between Dunstable and St. Albans, or much of Al I between Epping and Bishop's Stortford. For these there ought to be immediate and large-scale relief such as one-way systems for a whole town at certain times, followed by rebuilding—by-pass, second carriageway or whatever is needed; the relief ought to start not when it is 'incorporated in the 1961-62 programme,' but now, the very next time there is a traffic block. The police and the County Surveyors must surely know the exact pattern of these recurring blockages by now— how they form, how big they are, how each one can best be improved—one-way working from Strood to Chatham for two periods of four hours each summer Sunday would remove the worst of the Medway towns' trouble, for example.
But apart from these bottlenecks, traffic still gets around, in London or out of it. And it always will, because above a certain level traffic density is an organic thing as well as a statistical one : the biggeSt factor controlling it is human nature which when it finds one route congested will use another; when it finds one time of day congested will work out a new routine; when it finds no place to park will buy a scooter. The unsupport- able situation conies only when there is no longer Ha what arc you going to be when you specialise?'
a choice—I.e. the unavoidable bottleneck again. Otherwise, traffic ticks over, slowly but steadily; more roads would mean only that there would be more traffic which would eventually tick over at exactly the same speed as before : by a sort of Parkinson's Law, traffic expands so as to fill the available road surface. There is no burking this dilemma : city traffic would only be solved in present-day road-builders' terms if every road were a motorway : and if that were so there would • be nothing left of the city after the road-builders had finished. And if this is true of city traffic now it may well be true of the whole surface of these overcrowded islands by the end of the century. I am convinced that there is a basic non sequittn• at the bottom of all our thinking about roads. On today's terms it is simply not possible to keep our towns and cities intact •as entities rather than chopped-up items in a directionless sea of flow and to give everyone a, clear stretch of road all the time. As motor tran_port increases it will become less and less possible. The only long-term thing to do is to change the terms and do the basic research needed to evolve patterns of personal transport which take up no more room than man himself, meanwhile frankly making do with first-aid road making, clearing jams as and when they occur—but clearing them quickly. Man has been around for a few thousand years, the internal combustion engitie for about seventy. Do we try to push man around to fit the vehicle, gathering neuroses while we may, or do we get this technological age to justify itself and evolve vehicles fit for complete men to drive in?
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