Roads: The New Philistinism
BY CHARLES WILSON THERE are two ways of looking at the normal bonhomie of English politics. You can, on the one hand, regard it as superior to the Continental habit of fratricide in Politics. You can, alternatively, regard it as a, conspiracy. of humbug as did Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in that • now-forgotten book The Party System. There the politicians were all in league to put up a sham battle for the benefit of the public. One sometimes wonders whether that wicked book was as far wide of the mark as all good parliamentarians Would like to believe. In matters of planning, for example, Tory Ministers are more clearly committed every day to the doctrine inherited from Lord Silkin that any plan is better than none. Anyone going to a public inquiry would do well to remember that what matters most is neither accuracy nor honesty but salesmanship. You must by a plan that looks like A Plan and which can be seen, by persons who have no time or inclination to follow tedious arguments or digest awkward facts, to be A Plan. The one thing that all politicians are frightened of is that they may be thought backward. reactionary, Victorian, not on the spot. And this, of course. will assuredly be their fate if they confess to any lingering belief in the wisdom of wait and see, or laisser-faire. The twentieth century has few characteristics sillier than this—of grossly exaggerating a problem and then egging on some unfortunate politician to produce a bogus remedy. In the name of this fright, disguised as high principles, both Cambridge and Oxford have now been sold to commercial exploitation and the motor-cars At Cambridge, Mr. Macmillan gave a half-blessing to half the Holford Plan, so that the local planning authority is now able to go ahead with schemes for a relief road through Christ's Pieces and Jesus College, plans for a giant car park in the centre of Cambridge and a much enlarged central shopping area for the multiple stores. At Oxford Mr. Sandys has come down in favour of Dr. Sharp's plan to put a road through Christ Church Meadows. Even while the cheers and boos were dying down and Dr. Sharp could still be heard having difficulty in concealing his satisfaction over his victory (of technical design over ignorant and uninformed opinion') the tide of grumbling began to rise over the closing of Magdalen Bridge. How long will Mr. Sandys or his successor be able to hold the bridge? Two years? It seems doubtful. For does anyone really think that the new road will be 'a solution' of the traffic problem? Does anyone suppose that hereafter traffic will settle down at a convenient level that will be neatly disposed into the new road? If anyone does so think, his attention should be drawn (as the Minister's and his advisers' might well have been drawn) to the new PEP pamphlet.* The evidence of this very intelligently constructed analysis of American experience is overwhelming. It confirms what the evidence of one's eyes would lead one to suppose: that the whole policy of internal relief roads is likely to be a disastrous and extravagant dead-end. Some leading American experts believe that the central shopping area, itself a product of mass transport, is bound to decline as a result of the motor-car. It will die of strangulation. Hence the suburban super-market. Even those who believe that a city must have a central business district do not believe that it can be main- tained except as a traffic-free and largely pedestrian area. Whatever is done to try and relieve traffic congestion in cities, one report says, 'traffic burdens have a way of growing faster than the means to alleviate them can be instituted.' And, as many cities have found, the cost of trying to catch up witl} the volume of traffic every few years is fantastic. Perhaps the most significant comment (by a panel of experts) is this : Our experience has indicated that we can never provide all the space needed for growing automobile traffic down. town. The harder we try, the more we spend—on widening streets originally built for horse-and-buggy traffic, and on demolishing buildings to make way fcir parking, and on constructing expressways and freeways to make it easier for motorists to drive downtown—the worse our traffic con- gestion becomes. These steps serve to attract still more auto- mobiles into the central business district.
In short, as another authority agreed. 'The greater the expenditures have been,, the greater has become the need.'
The lessons? That both extra roads, and even large central car parks will have the effect of 'generating huge volumes of private-car traffic, especially commuter traffic, so that they cease to function at maximum efficiency during peak hours, and may even aggravate the traffic problem in central areas.' That private traffic to central areas must be reduced, not facilitated; if necessary, public transport must be increased.'
This kind of argument has already been advanced many times against the Oxford and Cambridge plans. Those who have advanced it have urged the importance of trying to keep traffic out of central areas, of developing secondary shopping areas, of providing 'car parks on the perimeter of central areas, of outer roads for traffic that can go round cities. But so far the planners have stuck obstinately to their doctrines : and the Ministers have followed obediently behind, piously mumbling phrases about priceless heritages, while preparing to sign on the dotted line.
`Your middle-class man,' wrote Matthew Arnold, 'thinks * SOLVING TRAFFIC PROBLEMS: Lessons from America. (2s. 6d.) it the highest pitch of development of civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell.' By a curious trick of fate, the mantle of the Philistine seems to have fallen in modern times on to the very people who were supposed to cherish and preserve our heritage from vandalism. The Oxford and Cambridge plans are both based on the doctrine that traffic needs are basic to sound planning. That in itself is not objectionable. What is, is the sacrifice of the unique and the irreplaceable to the chimerical. While the planners of Oxford and Cambridge are busy catering for the motorist, an American magazine called Mass Transportation speaks with Arnoldian voice: 'For too many years the automobile has been regarded as some sort of sacred cow and no expenditure has been considered too burdensome to satisfy the desires of its owners.' If nobody is big enough to admit that the present proposals have been misconceived, will the Philistines at any rate remember that the tourists who come to see Oxford and Cambridge bring in more dollars than the British Motor Corporation? And will those newspapers which are never tired of praising as courageous actions which are merely rash, consider praising a Minister who was really courageous enough to pause for thought? For the question is no longer whether error is being committed or not : it is only whether error is to be admitted before, or after, irreparable damage is done.
Previous page
